It’s 8pm and my phone is nudged in the top bunkbed again. I hope this time sleep does not get the best of me again. Today I was self-absorbed during the walk, resentment simmering from painful memories emerging. We walked just 10km to the next town, as we have to divide the stage in two because of the difficulty it entails to my mother, despite me carrying both backpacks, mine on my back and my mother’s on my chest.
When we sat down for lunch, my mother spoke about her cousin, the one who became my father’s business associate. He lost his mind to Alzheimers, and his son has severe anxiety and agoraphobia, among other mental illnesses, severe enough to render him incapable of living independently or having a normal life. My brother’s daughter suffers from the same, albeit to a lesser degree, allowing for some socialization, and she remarked that perhaps they could make company to each other by becoming a couple. I was raw from ruminating on the deeply unwise prescriptions my mother comes up from her useless worries. I said “Mom, you always worry about the wrong things, and worse yet, your solutions often end up being worse than doing nothing, like the time I found my Dungeons and Dragons group and you prevented me from attending. I didn’t have any friends as a kid, and I greatly enjoyed playing D&D and hanging out with a group. You took that away from me”. My mother looked down and muttered she was sorry.
The consequences run deeper than that.
The guys I played with were older than me, by two and four years. I was 12 and they were 14 and 16, friends of my brother. Their names were Rafael and Leonardo, named after the renaissance artists, though we joked they were named after the ninja turtles. I admired them a lot, Rafael looked and dressed like John Lennon, Leonardo like the lead singer of The Cure. I think it was deliberate.
When my brother left to study a year in Canada, I would continue playing with them. One day my parents came to pick me up to their house in the middle of the game. I asked what was wrong. My father said they were nerds and it wasn’t good that I hung out with older boys, my mother said that game wasn’t good for me and didn’t like me playing it. Other than studying apparently useless lore—I’d argue it introduced my into a deeper understanding of mythology and storytelling as an adult, there was nothing concerning about my behaviour and I was not obsessive about it.
There were very little rules in my home, so I chalked it off to one of mom’s usual bouts of useless worrying. Next time there was a session I showed up again and the brothers told me they were sorry, but my parents had spoken to their parents and I could no longer belong to the group.
It’s here where I feel my early adolescence takes a dark turn. In lieu of having a D&D group I used to stay over with my cousins almost every weekend. My parents were busy attending spiritual and personal development workshops, so my siblings and myself would disperse with friends or family. This was mostly for company rather than care, as we were reared free (or neglected, it's difficult to tell).
One day, walking through my cousins' neighbourhood, I encountered two brothers with whom I had played ball before. They were in attending a hot dog stand. I asked them if it was theirs. No, they said, a man hired us. Do you think he needs more help? Probably, he will come in 45 minutes, why don't you wait?
So I paid attention at how they prepared the burgers and the hot dogs and asked a couple of questions before the man came. He arrived on a big (1000cc) Honda motorcycle, a rugged man in his mid-forties, dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. I introduced myself and said I wanted to work for him. He said that he didn't more help at the hot-dog stand except for a certain day when he needed a shift covered, but he would look for something else for me to do. He said he had many business ventures. I worked the day he needed at the hot dog stand, and then he made an appointment with me to talk about what I was going to do next.
The man spent four days per week as the boss at a toll booth. It was in Chalco—near Mexico City—an hour and a half by car, but his responsibility demanded that he stay overnight while he was working. He wanted me around to do some chores related to his business while he attended the toll booth responsibilities. He also wanted me to stay overnight the four days. Each one of us would have a separate bed in a room housed in a building next to the toll booth.
I told him I would seek my parents' permission. He warned me not to tell them we would travel by motorcycle or they wouldn't give me permission, to which I agreed. I don't remember the conversation with my parents, I guess because it didn't cause any fuss. I assume they were happy that I had found a job because my dad would always groan when we asked for money, and remind us that at our age he was already making his own money.
The first two weeks were unremarkable. He was nice to me and asked questions about my life. I helped him paint a large sign announcing mixiotes (a Mexican lamb curry of sorts) for one of his food trucks. I wrapped some cords for his small hardware store. I counted cars passing through the toll booth one night in which we didn't have electricity. That sort of thing. He told me about another teenager who used to help him with whom he had been good friends, and he wanted a working relationship with me similar to that other one.
Then, one night I woke up with my bum wet. I thought I had diarrhea and I had shit myself while sleeping. The man was sleeping next to me. I went to the bathroom and wiped my ass. It was clear and viscous. I smelled it and I knew it was semen. I started crying. I thought I had been raped in my sleep (I was 13 and knew nothing about sex).
The man heard me cry and came to ask if everything was OK. I said no, you did something to me, I don't want to be here anymore, I want to go back home. He calmed me down and said that we should sleep now, I said I don't want to sleep with you. He said he would sleep outside the room and would let me lock myself inside if that made me feel better, and that he would take me back home the next day.
The next day he explained that he was prone to sleepwalking, and that what had happened was an accident. He told me that from now on, he would sleep outside and let me lock myself in the room if I agreed to continue working for him. By now I considered him a friend, and I believed him. I continued working for him, and the next few weeks he stood up to our agreement.
He was extremely cautious making his next moves. While he "respected" our agreement, he would sneak in cards in his favor. He introduced me to booze and cigarettes. He would also tell me stories. The other kid moved on was because he was now more interested in fucking girls than working, when it was him who had shown him how to fuck. He had explained how to pleasure women and took him to strip clubs and brought women for him to practice, or so he said. The man could do the same for me, teach me and introduce me to women willing to have sex. Wouldn't you like that? Yeah sure I would. Well, we will have to work towards it.
One night he got me drunk (he was probably drunk too) and asked to see me masturbate to see if I was doing it correctly. He said that if I did it often, my dick would grow huge and women would love it. I masturbated while he watched, and when I orgasmed he sucked me off, unprompted. I pushed him away. "Oh it's the elixir of life" he laughed. I didn't give it much importance and we both dozed off. We were in my room, the one he was supposed to be locked out from. The agreement had been broken and my boundaries erased.
He never went too far without my consent, with one exception: one day he wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug in such a way that I couldn't move. He lifted me off the floor and he kissed me, I clenched my jaw and pressed my lips together, yet he slid his tongue between my lips and explored my gums. I squirmed trying to escape his embrace, afraid he would rape me then and there. When he let me go, I spit a blob of phlem on his chest and called him gay, which he laughed off. I was angry at him for several days.
Even though this event is etched in my mind, the most difficult part was to accept was the things I consented to. He would sell me stories about how I would fuck so many women by doing the things we were doing, but the reality of why it went on was because I didn't want to lose his friendship. At the time nobody treated me decently. My cousins welcomed me to their house, but they would have fun leaving me tied to a tree after having pulled down my pants. My "best friend" at school deliberately tried his brand new knife on my arm, leaving a scar visible to this day. And my parents chasing spiritual non-sense. I've always experienced relationships as subjugation into acceptance, which is probably the reason why I'm a grown up loner (with excellent friends).
When the summer ended and I went back to school, I told my best friend that I had worked during the summer for a man who had taught me how to smoke, and that I missed smoking. My friend wanted to try it too. We were both 13.
We went to the store and bought a pack without a single question from the dependant (this was Mexico in the early 90s). Then we went to my friend's home and smoked a cigarette on the roof of his house. It made us both dizzy and lightheaded. This would eventually get us both hooked.
I remember having very mixed feelings for the man at this time, I hated him for what he was doing to me, and I missed him because I considered him my friend. I guess the nicotine addiction also played a role into feeling his absence.
To my best friend, I was his sidekick at best and his pet at worst. The man was interested in me. Nobody else was interested in me. Not my parents, not my siblings, not my teachers, not my cousins, not even my best friend.
The next summer he asked me to come work for him again, but not at the toll booth. He said there had been a change of government and he was let go, but I suspect he had been caught cheating the car counting system. I said I would work for him but I wouldn't tolerate what he was doing to me, I didn't like it and I would leave if it happened again.
He assured me it wouldn't happen, he didn't want it either and there was no place for it to happen. I would just come with him to his business ventures and help him at home, where his family lived. He had spoken to me (always badly) about his wife, but he had barely mentioned his children.
He had a daughter about a year older than me, a son who was a year younger, and another boy who was around eight. The children seemed to like me, the daughter especially. I overheard her sibling teasing her about me, and she was obviously embarrassed. I liked her too. The wife, however, was very reserved with me. I think she knew what was going on.
What most struck me from this encounter was the difference with which he treated his own children with how he treated me. He had no patience with his children, the slightest mistake would be met with severe scolding, and sometimes with a slap on the back of the head. This confused me, he should be less patient with me (his worker) than his own offspring.
At some point he broke his promise. He locked us into the master bedroom with his family outside and he started fondling me. I wanted to call for help but his wife frightened me. I yielded into disassociation, coming into a world of fantasy, where the person sucking me off wasn't him, it was his daughter. After I orgasmed I experienced a tremendous amount sadness, I had been tricked once again, I believed him and I fell for it. I started crying. He told me to hush. I said I couldn't. We scurried out of the house unto the streets for me to calm down.
I recriminated him breaking his promise. He answered with apologies, assurances that it wouldn't happen again, the same story all over. I said that I had already heard that a thousand times, that we always ended up here. I wanted to be his friend, not his lover. Then I said "you surely do the same things to your own children" and I saw his face contort with pain, he said "I would never do this to my own children", and then I saw him cry for the first time. Years later I understood: I was there so that he could prevent himself from abusing his own children, possibly with the consent of his wife.
I told him I no longer wanted to work for him, and I went back home. But I missed him. I missed him terribly and I hated him at the same time. Nobody else gave me attention or consideration. Parents absent, friends abusive, lonely as fuck. Some weeks later he called and said he deeply regretted what had happened, to mend ways he invited me on a camping trip. "But you will do as you always do" I countered "No, I will demonstrate to you that we can be friends, I promise". I desperately needed a friend like him, without the sexual abuse, so I said I would ask permission from my parents.
When I told my mother my former boss had invited me to a camping trip, she thought about it for a moment and then said, "yes, but you have to take your older brother". My older brother was just two years older than me, 15 years of age.
The man took us in his truck to a dam in Oaxaca. In the middle of the dam was a small island, 200 square meters at most. We took a boat and asked the boatman to pick us up three days later. We fished, made bonfires, swam, had a great time in general. The man's behaviour was exemplary, except in the morning of the last day, when I woke up to the man sucking me off, my brother sleeping next to me.
I pushed him away, and not wanting to wake up my brother, I didn't make a fuzz. This time I didn't experience sadness, it was anger, anger at him for lying and anger at myself for believing he could change. I was glad he broke his promise early, otherwise it would drag on as it always did. Now I was absolutely certain he was not capable of keeping his promise. I couldn't have his friendship and also not expect him to be his sexual gratification.
I played it cool until he dropped us back home. My brother left the truck and we had a few words. I said he had broken his promise and that I wouldn't see him again. He protested that it was just a little slip-up. I said I didn't care, I didn't want to see him again. I don't think he believed me, why would he if I was always willing to give him a chance.
But that was indeed the last time we met on friendly terms. Months later I would only see him twice to charge him the money he owed me, on unfriendly terms. By now I understood his manipulation, and no longer yearned his friendship. He tried to drag the debt longer, I guess to see me more, but I caught drift of this and gave up on getting my money.
I feel sad. I’ve written enough for today.