death a waits

It was cold that Christmas day as we ambled across a vast, rubbly lot. The sky was a crisp Texan blue and the solitary sound being the biting wind whistling through snagged, discolored plastic bags caught on dead yellow brush. He stated earlier he was horny, so we were searching for a private place to give a blow job.

We met at the Rescue Mission a week or so prior. Tall and lanky, he associated with several of the derelicts, entertaining them with corny card tricks in exchange for cigarettes. One dusky evening, I was passing through the sagging fence of the mission when he popped up from out behind a crumbling factory warehouse. Long, grey trench coat fanning out like a demon who recently escaped from Hades and brandishing a grin across his thin face flashing a row of white teeth like a predator. He casually asked for a smoke, introducing himself as Jessie – not Jesus, but Jessie, understand. He loathed that name. I inquired what he was up too and his face rumpled into that maniacal grin again, “No good, man. Always up to no good.”

The days that followed, we casually chatted and I even invited him for coffee at a local downtown café wherein I dropped the fag bomb. He asserted he had a wife and two baby children in J-Town, but was not homophobic. He constructed a rose from a napkin as a homo/hetro peace offering. Educated and well read, we spent hours discussing literature, film, politics…and I appreciated his dry sense of humor.

Jessie and I would haunt the seedy dive bars in centro El Paso on occasion and get ripped. The beer would take its toll and he would make sexual advances toward me at the bar right in front of the row of unaffected boozers roosting along the decaying counter like brooding vultures. When he laughed at a remark I quiped, he roughly grabbed me by the face and with a drunken glare, “Gowdammit, you’re cool as fuck!” He would then kiss me. No one cared. Except for the bitter fat bitch tending the bar. Fuck her, mind your own bussiness or no tip.

On Christmas morning, we both get the blues, that unbearable cold lonesome which undoubtedly effects every hobo in every shelter across this nation that magical time of the year. Jessie and I decided to tromp down town for coffee just to relieve the holiday boredom.

As we casually ambled past silent and foreboding shops dangling with tinsel and dusty garlands, I lit a cigarette. “Whatcha want for Christmas, Jessie?” I asked jokingly because I was broke and in no condition to buy him shit.

“I want my dick sucked.” He smiles that shark-like smile.

“What?”

“Did I stutter? I haven’t bust a nut in like two months.”

I agreed to the request, I mean, come on – it was Christmas. The problem being no place to do the deed without the prying eyes of the authorities or some quivering old fuck stomping around sniffing for trade. After about an hour of searching down alleys and other such lurid locales, we settle for behind the closed central library in an alcoved exit. No cameras. No one around. Nothing but the faint echo of Christmas carols broadcasted from an adjacent park.

Pants unzipped, I kneel in front and Jessie offers a long, circumcised nine plus inch cock. It must have been a while since he came, because within a few short minutes of me swirling my tongue hungrily across the head of his penis coupled with long, wet strokes of the shaft with my mouth, his cock suddenly jumps, he issues a raspy ooooohhhhh fuuuuck and lets loose a thick cascade of jissom down my anticipating gullet.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

Our friendship at the mission remained stable enough and we enjoy a few more kicks until the eventual time of me moving on and continuing with life. Actually, the day I relocate into a new apartment, Jessie calls and reveals he had been tossed out from the shelter in lieu of drunken misconduct. He pleas to room with me in which I state a flat out 'no'. I was in a dire frame of mind and simply wished to be alone for a while. We lose contact after that.

Months pass. Jessie and I become reacquainted on the street. He is awfully thin and looks like a terminal junkie. A bloody bandage is swathed around the right wrist and he has scabs on the other. Hair unkempt and in need of a shave days ago. It was obvious he had not bathed in quite some time. After casual patter of what we have been up to, he asks if I could help him recalibrate a laptop which he claimed he found.

“Where did you steal it?” I ask dryly.

“It’s not stolen. It was a gift.” He states.

I agree to help for old times’ sake and as we are sitting in the public library waiting for the programs to update, several police enter and approach us.

One office asks, “Are you Jesus Barraza?”

“I am.” He says.

One points at me, “Who’s this?”

“He’s a friend helping me with my computer.”

“Come with us, Mr. Barraza.”

They escort him out. When I am exiting the library, I notice Jessie sitting on the curb handcuffed and surrounded by a multitude of police.

I looked at him and mouthed, “What did you do now?” He silently looked away.

I soon found out…

Jesus Barraza; 34, Jerry McGavitt; 22, Thomas McNair; 19, Marcus Adkins; 28 and Brittney Stewart; 18 were arrested in connection to the slaying of a person who was found beaten, gagged, bound and burned inside the basement of a downtown El Paso building. The victim has not been identified. Police at this time say the body is of a male. Stewart is in police custody in San Angelo, Texas and is expected to be back in El Paso. Reports of a body found inside a building in downtown El Paso had streets blocked off near Mesa Street and Texas Avenue Friday morning. Police said a burned body was found in the basement of a building at 101 Mesa St. and was discovered by an employee with El Paso Electric. Several sources including witnesses told KFOX14 the body was not only burned but bound, gagged and dismembered. Detectives were at the scene all day canvassing the area and talking to those who live and work nearby. - El Paso Times

alejandro

I met him sitting on a bent metal folding chair in the Opportunity Center surrounded by shabby, foul smelling derelicts and thugs. As with myself, he futilely attempted to drown out the over-bearing orchestra of manic cries issued from the insane and angry. He displayed an expression on his youthful Mayan face of deep sadness and paranoid regrets. I introduced myself, he said his name was Alex. We chatted. The stilted discussion casual and non-intrusive. Being soft spoken, he chose each word and thought carefully. Not letting his guard down. Certainly not with some unknown gringo whose obvious leering glances were of a lurid nature.

The weeks passed and we hung out occasionally. During the evenings, as three hundred or so transients lay on their filthy mats lounging in self-doubt, urine, and garbage, he would set up a make shift stand on the previously mentioned chair next to his tattered mat and vend cheap dehydrated soups, candies, and sundries he purchased with his food stamp card to earn money for real food. I didn’t blame him, the center’s food was foul-smelling, unappetizing slop.

If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything.

The money, unfortunately, rarely went to nourishing food and instead alcohol was purchased. He would saunter and sway inebriated, timidly laughing and scratching at the multitude of bedbug bites along his brown arms and neck. The center was indeed infested, but no one cared.
"What can you do?" He smiles and shrugs.
I hand him a dollar for a pack of crushed donuts. He looks at me with sad, crimson eyes and sincerely slurs thank you.

Being the only homosexual in the joint who didn’t constantly bother him with overt sexual advances, consequently we became friends of sorts. He would smile and laugh off the blatant chatter from the Chorus of Queens: “You need that cock sucked, hunty!” or “I’ll pay you forty dollars to cum down my throat, baby.” Usually blurted over tables during dinner or hollered right in the middle of the main dorm from some deranged, pot-bellied monster who gave up life decades ago. He casually shrugged the advances off. Alex looked like a seasoned hustler, a veteran of dark alleys, public restroom glory holes, damp truck stop urinals, back rooms of dive bars, the decayed reek of cheap hotels - but he wasn’t. And was not in the situation obviously to bend to any of their faggoty shit.

Be that as it may, through fate and the assistance of alcohol, I entertained the chance to masturbate him in the showers of the Center. Amid mildew streaked white tiled walls hidden behind a discolored shower curtain, he stood stoic and unmoving, water cascading down his dark and lithe form - legs separated, hands clenched behind his back, eyes closed with head tilted slightly back - the steam enveloped us as I stood to one side, slightly hunched, my eyes luridly scrutinizing his delicate facial movements as my hand worked furiously on his thick, short cock. Eventually, his chest heaved, he rose slightly onto his toes as he squirted globs of milky semen onto the tiled wall and floor.

Oh shit! splat! splat! damn, that was a lot...

One morning as we sat on a concrete bench in a park sipping cheap coffee - dead trees whispered in the chilled wind, yellowed grass crunching under our scuffed shoes - I asked why he seemed always so sad. He confided in stilted tones he was struggling with a problem concerning the authorities. The problem being accusations of sexually molesting an eight year old boy.

“Did you?” I asked earnestly.

“No.” He stated, staring at the five or six flattened cigarette butts at his feet.

“Then, there is nothing to worry about, right?”

Two nights later, an entire squad of SWAT barged into the center inquiring the where abouts of one Alejandro Montelongo. (I had known him only as Alex Esparza). Dirty fingers of all the Center's rats pointed toward the twenty-five year old who sat forlorn on the bent metal folding chair. Surrounded, thrown onto the floor, searched, and hand-cuffed, he was lead out, head hung low in shame and guilt under disdainful accusational glances and gasps of disbelief from the Chorus of Queens.

I stood emotionless near the entrance and watched as he was brutally shoved into the back of a van. Sex with an eight year old boy? I cannot wrap my mind around that concept. How does one choose to steal the innocence of a child like that? I seriously loathe pedophiles.

The following day, I sat in a cafe and sipped coffee as I read the local paper:

A man sought on child sex charges was arrested Wednesday afternoon at an El Paso homeless shelter, an El Paso County sheriff's spokesman said. The U.S. Marshal's Lone Star Fugitive Task Force arrested Alex Montelongo, 25, on warrants for aggravated sexual assault of a child and burglary of habitation, a sheriff's spokesman said. The task force includes members of the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, El Paso Police Department and other law enforcement agencies. The charges are out of El Paso and Montelongo was jailed under a total bond of $102,000. - El Paso Times