I met Ruiz at a gym in El Paso, back where they keep the free weights. Most people stayed up front with the exercise bikes and the ellipticals, but I was more comfortable with the sound of iron and steel, the smell of honest sweat and lifting chalk.
He was a huge Mexican, a pelirrojo, around six-six, maybe two-twenty. I was a good half-foot shorter, at least forty pounds lighter, a bodybuilder more than a weightlifter. The first time we met I was struggling to bench press two-twenty—my arms quivering like I might lose it—when suddenly somebody was helping me guide the bar back into the uprights.
I sat up like a dog at the dinner table.
“Thank you, my man,” I said. “Much appreciated.”
In the locker room he asked me what kind of work I did. I told him I’d been in the Army, a tour in Afghanistan, the shittiest days of my life. After that I was hired by this residential sanitation company that laid me off after two months. Right now I was living on benefits and the only real skill I had was picking heavy things off the ground.
Ruiz told me about this opening where he was. A gentlemen’s club.
“I ain’t much on bar fights,” I said.
“Very little of that,” he said. “Most customers leave peacefully. Last thing any of us want is cops showing up and pictures in the paper.”
I told him thanks, but I was good sitting at home.
“Just check it out,” Ruiz said. “Come by tonight and shadow me.”
I had nothing. I figured, hey. Why not?
I was staying at my brother’s, not really someplace I wanted to be. Eddie got divorced a year ago and decided to go nuts ever since. One day it was flying saucers, the next it was “aroma therapy.” He worked nights as a hospital custodian, which gave him all day to haunt the apartment. Stood in the doorway of the bathroom while I tried to shave.
“Guess what I heard this morning on the news?” he said.
I told him I had no idea.
“It was about the weather,” he said. “The reason we’re in December but outside it feels like July.”
I concentrated on my electric razor. It was a cheapy I’d picked at Dollar Tree. The brand name—and this is no lie—was “Shave-All.” No floating heads, no rechargeable battery, nothing.
“Guess what’s to blame?” Eddie said. “Those forest fires in California last summer.”
“How’s that?” I made the mistake of saying.
“It’s called The Butterfly Effect,” Eddie said. “Every little thing affects something bigger. The wind blows in Miami and the Canadian sun doesn’t come up for a week.”
My shaver began to act up like it had the shakes, and I smacked it against the palm of my hand.
“Applies to people, too,” Eddie said. “Some kid coming home slams the front door and that changes the course of history.”
There was this pop, then a flash followed by the smell of burning plastic. I yanked the plug from the socket over the bathroom counter and dropped it on the wood floor. It was still smoking when I picked it up by its electric cord and dropped it in the sink. I looked down and saw the burn it left, black and round, the size of a thumb touching an index finger.
“Well that’s not good,” Eddie said.
The name of the club was El Jugueteo and it was in that section of Borderland where few outsiders liked to go. I got there twenty minutes before opening, and already the front lot was full. Regulars, anxious for action, sat in their cars and milled around on the sidewalk. I parked in the gravel overflow on the side, and when I walked around I saw Ruiz waiting under a pink and white neon sign—the silhouette of some nude chick on all fours—blinking on and off over the front door. I’d dressed the way Ruiz had told me: short-sleeve dress shirt, tie, pants with a crease.
“Roll up the sleeves,” Ruiz said before we went inside. “Let the man see the gun show.”
The man was named Garcia and he sat behind his messy metal desk looking like a fat, perspiring baby. From what I could see he shopped at Goodwill, a white shirt yellow around his armpits, a tie that looked pre-stained. Ruiz introduced me as “the one I told you about,” and I knew immediately this wasn’t the kind of man you stuck your hand out for.
“You twenty-one?” he said.
I told him I was twenty-three. He asked to see my license.
“Live with the folks, do ya?”
“Not since I was seventeen.”
“¿Habla español?”
“Perfectamente.”
He asked if I liked to drink, and I admitted to a beer every once in a while.
“You like pussy?”
I smiled. “Who don’t?”
Garcia stared, then handed my license back.
“In here, you’re as dry as a desert and as pure as a priest.” He looked over at Ruiz. “Give him the lowdown. I’ll decide by the end of the night.”
Ruiz showed me around and explained what I’d have to do. The club had two stages, a bar area in the middle, some VIP lounges where customers could spend private time, and an upstairs “Champagne Room” for people who had money to shovel. There were signs posted all around the place: ABSOLUTELY NO PHOTOGRAPHY, and for those not schooled in the English language, a circled camera with a red slash through it. Women were beginning to file into the backstage dressing room, most looking about as excited as workers on an automobile assembly line.
“We’re eyes and ears,” Ruiz told me. “In here guys get drunk and try to handle the merchandise. Outside, they wait around after closing thinking they can pick up the girls when they leave. We favor regulars. People invested in a place they can always go. They’re lonely but they don’t cause trouble. Plus they tip.”
I nodded.
“Keep in mind,” Ruiz said. “You got every right to defend yourself. But not to kick it off. ¿Está claro?”
“I never knew being a bouncer had so many rules,” I said, and Ruiz stopped me in mid-step.
“Hosts,” he said. “Not bouncers.”
Garcia didn’t like the dancers leaving the club during their shift. I guess too many of them didn’t come back, or if they did, they were in no shape to perform. So I ran their errands. The pharmacy and the deli mostly, picking up prescriptions and pregnancy tests, salads and protein drinks. Back at El Jugueteo, Ruiz showed me how to work the door.
“Things get crazy,” he told me, “you lock up and handle the situation. Just remember. The key is diplomacy.”
I nodded even though I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Then, a couple minutes later, Garcia brought me back inside and pointed out a cocktail waitress going into one of the VIP lounges.
“Know what she’s doing?” he said.
“Serving drinks?”
“She’s checking to make sure the customers don’t get too handsy and the talent isn’t subcontracting.”
Garcia put a hand on my shoulder and led me toward the bar.
“You got a philosophy on life?” he asked.
“Don’t rock the boat unless you like being seasick.”
That made the fat man laugh and he ordered us a couple of Diet Cokes.
Around one, we had our first disturbance. I was outside working the front door with Ruiz when a dancer called Whipped Cream came outside wrapped in a silky black robe. I’d caught a few minutes of her act earlier. Her skin was the color of an oatmeal cookie, and her hair was teased up and died white. She moved to some old new-jack number by Bobby Brown and did this kind of no-touch lesbian thing with a black woman called Hot Chocolate.
“Some gabacho in a white t-shirt and blue blockers is taking pictures on his phone,” she said.
She couldn’t have picked a worse time. We were getting near closing when around a dozen homies pulled in, a bachelor party or some such shit. They were laughing and climbing over each other, most of them drunk, a few looking underage.
“I got this,” Ruiz said. “You go inside and tell numbnuts to delete the pictures and then escort him out.”
I found the guy seated with his boy right in front of Stage B. Two real grinks. On stage Hot Chocolate had stopped performing and was just leaning, arms folded, against the pole. She nodded to me when I stopped in front of Blue Blockers.
“Dude. I need you to delete the pictures you took and then be on your way.”
“Me?”
“I don’t want no trouble.”
“Then don’t get in my face, bro.”
“C’mon, Ronnie,” his more sober friend said.
Some customers, sensing a new show starting, closed in.
“Stand up,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, let’s go,” I told him. I put a hand under his upper arm and lifted. That flipped his switch. He jumped to his feet and lurched toward me, tried this little sucker move probably meant to be a headbutt. Ronnie was small, maybe five-six, so he wound up just mashing his head into my chest. But hey, contact is contact.
I went into a half-squat, wrapped my arms around his puny body, and picked him off the floor.
“Fuck you, motherfucker!” he said and went on like that the whole time I carried him out the side door and into the overflow lot. His boy followed us, all the time telling me to take it easy, insisting he could control the situation. Our audience continued to grow.
That’s when the bastard bit me, his rotten teeth sinking into the flesh maybe an inch below my eye. The move pissed me off huge and when I put him down on the gravel, I used a leg sweep that landed him like an ice cream cake dropped off a roof. The blue blockers flew, the spectators hooted and clapped. I even saw a high five go around. I fast kneeled on his shoulders while he struggled like a mouse under a combat boot.
More people came out, phones in hand, cameras pointed as soon as they cleared the building. I felt blood dripping down my face and saw it spotting the ground and staining the dude’s white T.
“Pig!”
It was Whipped Cream. She’d pushed her way through and now squatted down close to the guy and spat in his face.
“Let him up,” I heard Garcia say.
“He was taking pictures.”
“I know what he was doing. Let him up.”
I got to my feet. Garcia and Ruiz were close enough to touch. They picked up Ronnie as easy as you’d lift a baby.
“Joderlo,” Garcia said, and Ruiz gave a quick nod and led the dude away from the crowd and around the back of the building where no lights shined. His boy acted as if he was going to follow, thought better of it, hung back.
“Meet me inside,” Garcia told me. He turned and started back inside and the crowd, like Jesus’s followers, trailed him.
In Garcia’s office, my cheek was cleaned and bandaged by a dancer called Nightingale whose act was stripping off a nurse’s uniform while R. Kelly sang, “Ignition.”
“It’s good,” she told me as she wiped my face with alcohol. “I’m only eleven credits short of being a dental technician.” She made me promise to see a doctor, something I knew I wouldn’t do, then left.
“You got a thing or two to learn,” Garcia said.
He was sitting behind his desk writing something on a small white pad.
“Most important, you don’t enforce policy when you got the world watching.”
I shrugged.
“That said, I like the way you work. I think I can find a spot for you.”
“Cool,” I said.
I wanted to act excited, like I’d just been given the key to the city, but the fact was I didn’t enjoy this any more than I liked patrolling the streets of Arghandab.
“First order of business,” Garcia said. He tore off the top sheet and handed it to me. “Call Nita in the morning and tell her she’s done.”
“Nita?”
“Whipped Cream. Broad who spit in that maricon’s face.”
“Want me to just go in and tell her?”
“I think we’ve had enough drama for one night,” he said. “You think you can handle the door ‘till Ruiz gets back?”
Ruiz came out front maybe twenty minutes later, not long before the place started emptying out.
“I hear you’re permanent party,” he said.
“That’s the rumor.”
We hit a fist bump and Ruiz handed me a set of keys.
“Bring Garcia’s car up front. Black Lincoln. Tags say L JEFE 57.”
The neon nude over the front door flickered, then went dark. I found Garcia’s car in the overflow, parked as far away from the building as you can get. There was another car parked next to it, an old Chevy beater, window down and engine running. I worried for a minute that it might be Ronnie coming for payback, but no. It was Whipped Cream. Nita. Wearing a dark hoodie that covered everything but the oval of her face.
“You don’t remember me,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nita Guzman,” she said. “Jefferson High. We had general science together.”
“No way,” I said. The Nita Guzman I knew was skinny and kind of nervous. Had a full head of brown, curly hair. Smart. Honor roll material.
“I dated Daniel Marino. Remember him?”
I did. He was an asshole, a matón. But I let it go and asked what she’d been up to.
“I got pregnant,” she said. “Married Daniel and didn’t even finish senior year.”
“So how’s he doing?”
“You tell me,”
I smiled, shook my head.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“I asked you out one time.”
“No,” she said. “You had your friend ask for you.”
“Damn,” I said. “That’s right. And you gunned me down.”
Nita shrugged. “I wanted a man who could speak for himself,” she said.
Two headlights swept past and headed out. Ruiz waved as he went by.
“You know what’s weird?” Nita said. “How things might have been totally different if you’d have asked yourself. I might have said yes and maybe we wouldn’t even be out here tonight.”
“El Efecto Mariposa,” I said. “The Butterfly Effect.”
Nita had no idea, but she smiled anyway. Told me goodnight, rolled up her window and was gone. I pictured her going home to some shitbox, paying a babysitter, pouring a shot, maybe rolling a number. I watched her pull away, then brought Garcia’s car around. The fat man was just coming out, a canvas bank bag under his arm, a suit jacket covering what I guessed was his heat. He met me on the driver’s side.
“Come in a little early tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll fill out some paperwork.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Something happen?” he asked.
“I just don’t think I’m cut out for this.”
“Listen,” he said. “None of us are cut out for this. The shit rolls downhill and we look for higher ground.” Garcia got into his car. “Let me know if you change your mind,” he said.
I closed the car door, then put my hand in my pants pocket and felt for Nita’s phone number. I watched Garcia back out, then headed for my own car. I guess my blood was still on the ground somewhere, but it was dark and I was tired and the last thing I wanted to do was look for it.
