Hooker Row

Down the road from our hotel, on a charming residential street, the doors to a number of unassuming, humble houses lay open at all times of day.

Inside, down the short hall, the rooms of the houses open up, revealing plastic deck furniture and lounge chairs. Women, in various states of dress, sit smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing with eachother, casting strange glances out to the street.

The women vary greatly in age. Some are older, in their forties and fifties, and the lines on their faces and their perpetual grimaces reveal a life of hardship, a life of late nights, of drugs, alcohol, and dangerous pursuits. The younger women bear similar faces, though they are often African, and they are young and fresher-faced.

Their faces are as yet untouched by age, though they grimace just the same, looking haughtily out at the hot streets, at the houses on the other side of the road, just a few feet ahead.

I walk this street every day, passing these houses with their interior rooms and strange women, gazing inside, disgusted and pitying and interested in what lay inside. My interest is in no way related to a desire to partake in the wares they offer, but rather one of simple humanity and curiosity. "Who are these women?" I wonder, "and where do they come from?"

I think of how these places work, if they are run by penny-pinching madams or angry, twisted pimps. I wonder who enters these houses, these obvious brothels. At all times of day, the women seem to sit around, bored and tired.

Perhaps, as stands to reason, their busiest time of the day is the night.

Today, as I walked down the street, as I had so many times, I heard a quiet, old voice behind me.

"Hey!" said the voice, and I turned around.
"Come here," the voice continued, and I noted that the speaker was an old woman in a housedress. She looked like so many other women I see here, though perhaps a bit less well-kept and a bit far into the street to be still wearing her housedress.

I followed her instructions and she motioned me into the open doorway, pulling aside the curtain of plastic, multi-colored beads. The hallway was short, perhaps only three or four feet long, and like the other houses, ended in an open room. The room was mostly bare, save for a plastic table and two chairs. At one chair sat a woman in her forties. Her hair was dyed and brittle, her makeup thick and garish. She wore a revealing outfit, and I could see much of her breasts and legs.

"Where are you going?" she asked, smiling widely.
"I am going home," I told her.

And then she asked me, using a very Spanish expression, if I wouldn't like to have some sex on the way home.

"Y no quieres echar un polvete en el camino?" she said, to which I firmly responded in the negative, though without any rudeness or anger. "But thank you," I added politely.

She wished me a good day, and I left the place to walk home, where I arrived a mere minute or two after.