Welcome To San Jose Part II: Poking Around Town

Read San Jose Part I here.

(If you are easily offended by descriptions of debauchery and misplaced misogyny, please stop reading now. For the rest of you…)

While sipping my beer distractedly at the hotel bar, I slowly became aware of a tall Colombian girl rubbing the inside of my left leg. This was probably about the fourth incidence of reverse sexual harassment I had been subjected to in the last hour alone, each time from a different young woman. What made this one unusual was that she was using her thighs to do the rubbing, putting her hands on my knee for leverage and working my left quadriceps like her own personal Sybian.  Molestation – usually in the form of pushing, poking, or pinching – was how the working girls at San Jose’s Hotel Del Rey said hello, which they inevitably followed up with from a hackneyed script with a single variation: “What’s your name? Where are you from? Do you like to party/get nasty/fool around/have sex?” But the Colombian’s approach certainly broke me out of my distraction with its animalistic boldness.

And although slightly startled, I chose to play along, as there really wasn’t much to do in the rest of this dead city. Most of the locals of the Costa Rican capitol had left for the Pacific and Caribbean beach towns, shuttering the doors of their places of business and taking their nubile daughters with them, much to my chagrin. The only game left in town were the brothels, bordellos, and boudoirs, where the range of options ran from a $40 cathouse quickie to $200 for a night’s worth of ‘hide the salami’ with a top-end pro.

The Colombian was, I could tell, angling toward the latter end of the spectrum.

“My name is Ginger, what’s jor name?” she delivered in a sultry, heavily accented voice as she extricated herself from my appendage and pivoted her torso towards me at the bar. Her skin was as dark as her hair was light – both effects probably aided by modern chemistry – and she probably weighed as much as I did. More, if you included the pair of globes she was dangling in my general direction, a hypnotizing provocation aided by a combination push-up/scoop cut ensemble that her father almost certainly wouldn’t have approved of.

I answered her question with a question while staring at her chest, on the verge of succumbing to her black magic: “Are those things real??!!”

“Chure, honey,” she smirked. “Real expensive!”

Well, I don’t get no bone for the silicone, and so for probably about the fourth time in the last hour I was mentally looking for the exit. I suddenly felt a familiar hand on my shoulder, turned away from Ginger and encountered the face of a dude with the self-satisfied smile of the recently ejaculated.

Tom was a 50-something Renaissance man who was also staying at the infamous Hemingway Inn, whom I’d met the night before and was proving to be my spirit guide to the skin trade – a silver-maned lion in winter roaming the cage that was San Jose during Holy Week. He wasn’t happy unless he had killed two birds a night, so to speak, though not necessarily with the same toss of his stone.

Tom was an anomaly: an hombre from one of those southern Bush-governed states who had lived to eventually flee the US for a developing country, rather than the other way around. He openly carried a stun-gun which he got away with because it looked exactly like a cell phone, but as much as I longed for the opportunity to see him put it to use in an altercation on some dark street, even the petty criminals of the city had hopped the first bus to the beach.

“How was Candy?” I asked Tom about the woman whom he had whisked away 60 minutes ago, even though it was pretty much a rhetorical question after seeing his maniacal grin.

“Best $100 I’ve spent in the last three days,” he mused, which by the tone of his voice and the aforementioned grin would make her a solid first-round pick if there was a prostitute draft.

By this time Ginger had moved on. All the girls at the Del Rey, it seemed, had named that were geared to trigger the food-sex connection. Ladies named Ginger, Candy, Cocoa, Almond….and that was in just one grope-filled hour alone. I hadn’t spotted a single pro – and there were literally dozens milling around the room in spite of the holiday – to whom I would have been willing to fork out the C-note for the hour – much less two bills for the night – and $40 for the quickie room rental. Maybe I was too picky, or maybe I was just a cheap bastard.  Oh hell, I was both, and told Tom as much.

He was unfazed by my inertia. “There’s plenty more tail in town, amigo. Tonight, we’ll hit Beaver Lodge, Cuba Libre… maybe even take a tour of the New Fantasy massage parlor…now that’s an interesting joint…”

I acquiesced, and we started to make our way back to the hotel for a “strategy” session of cheap local weed and expensive imported beer, the better to plan the rest of our depraved evening…

(To be continued…)