Watch It Crash
I like typing up stories from my youth, but this is one is uncomfortable and a little sad, so in the parlance of today - trigger warning.
In my mid-20's, I became good friends with a gang member named José. I didn't believe any of his claims at the time about being up there in the Latin Kings, about the attempts that had been made on his life, about the things he had done to other people. It sounded like self-aggrandizing bullshit. Later on, I had good cause to believe all of it.
Most of the time we spent together, we spent shooting pool at an illegal Dominican social club in Brooklyn. It was located behind a garage and you had to know the secret knock or whatever; I don't remember. But it was kind of exciting. We would hang out, shoot pool and drink Presidentes, which is a Dominican beer that I quickly developed a taste for. One time an old man wandered in, so drunk he could barely stand up. I was never fluent in Spanish, but I was conversational, and I couldn't even understand his slurred speech. Eventually, I understood that he wanted to play a game of pool against the best person in the club, for money. A couple of people there pointed at me, and he approached me and made his wager. I told him that I didn't gamble, which is true - I lost 5 cents on the 1979 World Series to my Dad and I felt awful about it, and have not gambled since. I still think the Orioles were the better team. But I told the man that I didn't gamble, and he countered with a friendly game of 8-ball, the loser to buy the winner a beer. This I was okay with, and we racked 'em up. He broke, sank the first ball, and proceeded to sink every ball in succession, followed by the 8. I had never seen anything like it. And he could barely stand up. I bought him his beer and wished him good health. He took it and fell down in the corner, the beer spilling on the floor.
One night, the two of us were out cruising around Queens in José’s Camaro. He drove like a maniac, I frequently had to close my eyes as he swerved between cars at 95 MPH on the BQE and passed people on the shoulder, his hand constantly laying on the horn. I don't remember the neighborhood where we ended up precisely but I could probably find it on Google Maps if I really put some effort into it - It may well have been Jackson Heights. It was not a good neighborhood. He pulled us up to a curb and sat there idling for a few minutes. Eventually a man approached the passenger side of the car, reached in, and gave me a business card for no apparent reason. I looked at it, and handed it over. It was a business card for a florist. He handed it back to me and told me to read the address. I had long suspected that José couldn't read, so I told him the address. We parked and walked to the address that I had read aloud to him. I didn't ask questions.
It was, of course, not a flower shop. It was a brothel. We went through makeshift metal detectors, were patted down, and allowed to enter. We eventually came to a room where a dozen or so scantily clad women were sitting on plastic chairs, looking bored. If this had happened today, they’d all be on their phones, but this was 1995, and so of course they weren’t. Some were old, and some were very old. Some were young, and some were very young. José quickly picked one out and took her to a back room. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, so I took a seat next to a woman a few years younger than me and asked in Spanish what her name was. She just stared at me, letting my obvious faux pas hang in the air. There were no names here. A few minutes passed, and I asked her how long she had been in this country. She told me “tres semanas” - three weeks. Then I asked her why she was doing this. If that seems like an odd question, it was partially because I was pretty squiffed, and partially because it’s easier to say things in a foreign language that one would feel uncomfortable saying in their primary language - there's a strange sort of buffer that works when you are clearly not a native speaker; I think people give you a lot more leeway as to your intent. She told me that she had a young daughter back in Colombia and she was doing this to send money back home.
We chatted for maybe 15 minutes. No, she was not here against her will in a literal sense. The word "trafficked" wasn't really in common parlance in the mid-nineties, but she wasn't being physically forced to do this. But economically speaking - yes, this was against her will. José came out from one of the back rooms, a few ounces lighter, but I was still talking to this young woman. I asked her how much this place charged for sex. She told me 25 dollars. I asked how much she got to keep. She smiled sadly and didn't answer. I asked if I could pay her for our conversation, and she said yes, and I gave her most of what I had in my wallet.
I don't remember the rest of the night, but I know I eventually made it home, got into bed and cried.
Then one day José was gone. Just disappeared. Maybe dead. Maybe on the run. I heard rumors, but I never saw him again.
