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Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls
An excerpt from a novel
Not everyone’s story ignites or even begins to smolder in
their college years. Lena’s didn’t. From her family’s
wood-and-cardboard shack and her childhood employment foraging in
the Tijuana dump, to her immigration north on hands and knees—not
with her family but her pimp—and her new workplace in a field
behind a plywood barrier or a cleared space in the weeds, bending
over for agricultural workers … college doesn’t play any
role in her tale. To my chagrin, it does in mine, although I do
not intend to write an exposé of my, symbolic or not, loss
of virginity.
I did at one time think I was going to do an in-depth feature on
the girls who are held as sex-slaves in the canyons of Southern
California. Now I’m beginning to write a different document,
not the one I’d first intended. Why did I once think Lena’s
story should be mine to tell, that I was the right one to render
it? And which one of Hester Smith’s broken parts would be the
one to do it: the failed journalist, failed high school teacher,
failed wife, failed lover, or the girl I previously was, who, for
however fleeting a period, at one time seemed to be attractive to
men? Or a man. And why? To prove I did eventually discover something
else of value in myself, once “that” was, apparently,
and so suddenly, gone? Should any of these have made any difference
in the delivery of the bigger story?
There are selfish schemas behind every noble cause, some more blatant
than others. The rescue of Kuwait, the Million Man March, the invasion
of Iraq, the deliverance of Lena. Invariably, because of the cause,
someone becomes more famous, more rich, more credible. But if renown
and authority were to be my reward, if that’s what had motivated
me when the idea germinated, then why would I have allowed myself
to be so often delayed, deferred or enter into complete inertia?
I don’t know, but this I can claim: When I first saw Lena—when
the idea to write her story changed to a plan to get her out first,
then write about that—I wasn’t aware of how my own trifling-by-comparison
story would become entwined, how 25-year-old incidents would paradoxically
become more urgent than the daily atrocities out in the fields,
and ultimately would help thwart my presumably gallant endeavor.
But even to my own accusation, I can counter, Yes, these stories
can be allied: Abducted girls are held as sex slaves in the fields
of North County and no one does anything, but one 16-year-old consents
to sex with her English teacher, almost thirty years ago, and the
public disgust in his undisputed wickedness is corporeal.
Earlier this year—long after I’d begun my research and
even after I’d actually spoken to Lena in her open air workplace—a
couple of interns from the landscape program at the community college
were in my office at the nursery while I was finishing the newsletter.
They were talking about one of the designers—his name doesn’t
matter, he won’t appear again—a man in his 60’s,
who, they said, was a “major sexual harasser.” They laughed
and shared stories about his flirtations and come-ons. He’d
told one of them they could be married because they already almost
had the same last name. The other he’d asked if he could look
at the contents of her purse, and he did, extracting them one by
one, handling each item reverently. Both reported his questions
about their boyfriends’ shoe sizes, his hammy hand on the small
of their backs, his offers of rides in his pickup to show them root-trimming
in the spruce fields. Meanwhile I found myself thinking, Hey, he’s
never sexually harassed me—what’s wrong with me?
The answer may have been obvious. And enough to make me look back,
perhaps hopefully. Had I once been a member of that particular coalition
of allure? Courts hadn’t yet defined the variations of sexual
harassment—quid pro quo and sexually hostile environment—in
1979. I know because I researched it, that day, or the next.
And it hadn’t been quid pro quo for me in 1979. Nothing offered
in return for anything. And least nothing that could be reasonably
assessed. Nor would I have called it hostile. Just as the girls—young
women—laughing in my office at the nursery obviously didn’t
think the environment was hostile. (It would’ve been hostile
for the man if he’d heard them mocking his gestures of enticement.)
But now, how can anyone even entertain the word hostile for any
of this, after knowing about Lena, and the function she performed
daily, 30, 40, maybe 50 times.
In the midst of a dense white coastal mist, they shift like fading
shadows at dawn. Single file through dew-drenched chaparral of buckwheat,
wild oats, sage, and the descendants of mustard left by Father Junipero
Serra, they step carefully so as to not catch their sandals or heels
in rocks, to not snag their hose on briers. Some wear long men’s
shirts over their miniskirts and tubetops, to protect their stomachs
and backs from being scratched by the thorns on green tumbleweeds.
When they arrive at the fields where they work, they will have to
remove any protective layers. As the fog shifts and stirs, we can
see now that they are not women but girls, 14, 15, 16, some perhaps
as young as 11 or 12. Even through binoculars, it’s difficult
to tell because they are so quiet, because their movements so lost
in the stratum of vapor which still blends with the reeds and grasses,
down to the roots. And because their lips are painted red, their
eyes outlined with black, their dark hair not braided nor tied back,
but long and loose. While we are clad, safari style, in hiking boots,
long pants and light shirts, they don’t seem dressed or prepared
to work in the produce fields at the edges of San Diego County’s
suburban neighborhoods, but that is what they are here to do. To
work. For 8, 10, even 12 hours a day.
In the 90’s their predecessors worked indoors, in rented houses—older
structures surrounded by seedy business districts or even ringed
by the tended lawns of a small neighborhood. But interference from
law enforcement required the house locations to be frequently changed,
and because locating then renting a new establishment might cut
into business hours, work was moved to the outdoors, to more remote
locations that are nearer to those they serve.
Despite the fog, the Southern California day will be warm, will
become hot. The strawberries, the tomatoes and peppers grow sweet,
plump and juicy. But the smell rising from the uncultivated fields
beyond will be rank with every sort of foul human stench. Surrounding
the produce fields, either in the brush of chaparral or in meadows
of native reeds tall as a man’s head, the enterprise has made
a honeycomb of “rooms” by flattening 6-foot-square areas.
These are the “Reed Beds,” the “Fields of Love,”
the “Love Nests” where girls are sent daily to work. Each
one will service 30, 40, 50 men a day, $20 for ten minutes with
a condom, $30 for ten minutes without. The briefest of moments between
clients to throw the condom into a plastic bag tied to the reeds,
to wipe herself with toilet paper. The ground grows dark with spilled
semen, with sweat, with beer, with urine—there are no bathroom
breaks. Each girl in her cave of reeds can hear the grunts and moans
of men all around her, but unless another girl is struck and cries
out, she hears nothing from her co-workers, the girls she lives
with, 8 or 10 in a one-room apartment in nearby Oceanside or Vista,
only there long enough to eat, to sleep, to cry into a dirty bedroll
for a baby that’s been taken away, who she’s been told
will be killed if she tries to leave.
This is a billion-dollar cartel, as clandestine, complex and networked
as a major drug smuggling operation. But instead of foreign-grown
drugs, the traffickers are supplying girls. It’s a highly organized
system consisting of three basic groups of male personnel: the procurers,
the smugglers, and the pimps. At one end of the structure, hundreds
of young women, mostly from Mexico, are either kidnapped, handed
over by their parents, or duped into believing they’re being
taken north for jobs in hotels and restaurants. There are reports
that some methods of manipulation include seducing or raping the
girls while still in Mexico, until they become pregnant, then taking
their babies and threatening death to the infant unless the girl
complies with what is asked of her.
After hired coyotes smuggle the girls across the border, they are
handed over to the third group: the pimps or “big daddies.”
They oversee maintaining groups of girls in apartments spread around
the region, transporting them to the migrant camps and produce fields,
collecting the money for services, and transporting the girls back
again, sometimes long after dark. The pimps are also responsible
for special orders; for example, if certain clients—usually
not the farm workers, but anyone else, from military personnel to
local businessmen, the whole array just referred to as “gringos”—request
a “cherry girl.” The pimp would have to be able to find
such a girl among new arrivals. Some of the prettier, or younger,
girls might also be favorites and receive special requests; the
pimp must keep track of where they are at all times. The pimps are
also responsible for discipline and punishment. One girl was reportedly
beaten with a metal hook until flesh was gouged from her arms, legs
and back. Others frequently arrive at or return from their work
with swollen eyes and lips.
The farm laborers themselves, the bulk of the clientele, are the
ones who create the caves or rooms within reeds or chaparral. If
certain produce fields or large wholesale nurseries are not close
enough to hillsides or ravines of dense coverage, they use a single
sheet of plywood propped upright to block the girl and her client
from being spotted from a road; otherwise there is no thought of
privacy, for either the girl nor her clients. One after another
they step forward and she lifts her skirt. “Vaginal masturbation”
is the method used by the most experienced girls, the girls who
have been in the system at least six months, who can never again
be a “cherry girl,” and have already been rotated to every
camp, to every set of “Love Nests” around every produce
field. She may be this “experienced,” this spiritually
and emotionally devastated, by the time she is 15-years-old.
There are rumors of girls as young as 8 or 9, but any reporter who
sees a girl younger than 14 and doesn’t testify to authorities
is committing a crime, so instead of blowing their cover, reporters
for these stories simply claim to see girls and young women from
14 to 22 years old. I’m not concerned with maintaining a journalistic
reputation, so will reveal all when the information is available.
That is because this “reporter” will no longer be skulking
into the fields merely to observe, to take note of horrors, to describe
them in lurid details. What I will be reporting is the rescue and
deliverance of one of the girls I saw, who burst and flew from me
like startled quail into the sagebrush and dry grasses.
What were the manipulation methods used by the procurers in Mexico
to get the girls to trust them, to get the girls to follow them
anywhere? It’s easy to imagine her, a huge-eyed, dark-haired
7-year-old, clinging to her mother’s multi-hued skirt, sitting
together in the dust of a Tijuana street of shops, the sleeping
baby sister in her mother’s arm appearing to be dead when her
mother raises her tray to offer her wares of chewing gum to passersby.
Lena’s there to complete the picture for American tourists,
just like the bright red, green and blue striped skirt, the kind
that might be worn at a festival of traditional dance, but which
wasn’t anyone’s traditional attire on the muddy, oil-stained
alley where they sleep in a plywood shack, mended with cardboard
and pieces of fences scrounged from numerous slag heaps, here and
there, or even smoldering constantly, between rusted-out cars. He
might have spotted her during the day, between the leather goods
kiosk and Panaderia, and daily, at least weekly, stopped to buy
a Wrigley’s Juicyfruit from the box her mother holds, paying
while he smiles and looks into the eyes of the child, nearly hidden
behind the mother’s shawl, weekly, monthly, yearly, and somewhere
along the line the child has begun to smile back, and the man knows
her name. It’s part of his job, besides wooing, even courting
the older ones, the 12, 13, 14-year-olds, he also makes the rounds
of those he has his eye on for later, remembers their names, begins
to touch their cheeks, gives them chocolate.
If he didn’t find Lena there, perhaps it was at the dump, another
place her family could’ve lived, in the nearby unofficial village
that has developed on the outskirts of the city’s refuse pile.
She and her sisters and brothers and their mother, spend the morning
gleaning the newest piles of garbage. Some is edible, if they find
a cache from a restaurant or grocery store: limp heads of lettuce,
withered potatoes, out-dated dented cans with peaches or stewed
tomatoes inside that haven’t made actual contact with the diapers
and shoes and slimy unidentifiable rotten stuff falling from the
newest torn plastic bags. Some is usable: jars and discarded broken
bowls, wood for cooking, rags for lining shoes and plugging holes
in the walls. Some can be fixed and sold: rusted bicycles, broken
chairs. That would be their father’s job, if he weren’t
picking strawberries or bell peppers up in California.
The procurer would visit the dump daily, at least weekly, looking
for girls—the ones with the smallest features, without scars
on their faces, without cleft pallets or deformed limbs (or maybe
these would be useful, with a certain clientele, but not the men
in the fields), of course the slim ones, but they’d all be
skinny. He can offer her a better job than picking through the dump.
She can work as a hotel maid and send money back to her mother.
As soon as she pays off their debt to him and the other people who
help her start her new career.
I can hear the ashamed middle-class Liberal protests now: so tell
that story, tell Lena’s story. Yours is so irrelevant. The
same people who are overcome with helplessness over what they can’t
do about what they can’t stop themselves from wanting to know?
The ones who go out of their way to learn about it, go out of their
way to brood over global problems that barely make it into the media
and seem unsolvable. People tortured by their remoteness and inability
to generate change. So they want to hear more, and know more, and
they think reading about it makes them better people, makes them
people who didn’t, after reading what they thought they wanted,
go check their e-mail, or go take dinner out of the oven, or go
turn on the end of a ballgame.
I saw her several more times, over several seasons, and it ended
up more than a year later before I began background research, by
that time with more than just intuitive perception of what it was
I’d been seeing, and, I thought, an opportune idea that it
might be a story. But quickly began to discover how journalistically
un-instinctive and, frankly, inert I’d actually been. Not that
I was wrong about what it was I had intermittently been observing,
but hadn’t even imagined any kind of thing could be possible
until I saw it with my own eyes, and, after doing some cursory research
and even fleshing out my opening with some background treatment,
realized I wasn’t going to break this story. It had already
been broken, while I, like most of the rest of the hundreds of thousands
of suburban middle-class populace of Southern California, was completely
and blissfully oblivious to what was happening while my strawberries
and tomatoes, palm trees, poinsettias and chrysanthemums were being
weeded, watered and harvested. I had to actually see it to begin
to be troubled by it, and even then had let it float in the background
of my consciousness too long. By that time, nothing I wrote based
on chance observation, and by summarizing the other exposés
that had already been written, was going to change or add anything.
Everyone could continue to blithely live in their neighborhoods,
even buy enormous strawberries from roadside farm stands, without
knowing about the service industry at the edges of the fields. If
I was going to do something it had to be more than just write a
report about what I saw and explain it based on someone else’s
in-the-trenches research. The only way I could finish what I’d
started was to break new ground, go on from where I was.
So, yes, I decided that before I could produce a meaningful, consciousness-raising
story about the girls in the growing fields, I had to rescue one
first. When I eventually failed, the feature story—Lena’s
story—died. I can only hope she didn’t, likewise, have
to die, because of me, my debacle.
The marine layer still swathes the coastal hills at night, sometimes
only pulling back for a few hours of sunshine in mid afternoon.
As afternoon wears on, clouds reappear over the western horizon
of the ocean, then billow inland again. In heavy damp evenings—like
debris caught in a river current, catching on dangling tree branches
and accumulating—the fog amasses. White mist settles into canyons
and ravines where, if a road snakes through lowland, a driver may
not be able to see the front of his car’s hood. Those on foot
may be similarly blinded in white-out. Even their own feet, as they
walk single file on a path through the chaparral, swimming through
white vapor, may be somewhat obscured to their own eyes. Their shoes
and clothing are drenched long before they arrive at their station.
The twenty dollar bill in my fist is similarly wet, but not due
to the persistent mist. It is ten a.m. I have decided to come early
to the growing fields. It is more difficult for a worker to be idle
at this hour, which is probably why I’ve never observed the
girls here any earlier. Perhaps a more busy time would make more
sense, make my arrival at the bed of grasses less conspicuous. I
have waited in my blind on several different occasions, in late
afternoon, and watched the men, one after another. Silent and unhurried,
one advanced, then disappeared as seamlessly as a coyote slipping
between tumbleweeds where I knew the girl is waiting. In less than
ten minutes he appeared again, leaving, seldom passing close enough
to acknowledge the next man whose approach was likewise measured,
almost docile.
The stratum has barely shifted in half an hour. It is no warmer,
but it is not the damp chill that causes me to both quiver and sweat
under my light flannel shirt. Every morning I’ve stashed the
shirt in the backseat of a co-worker’s car, because she smokes,
and I wanted the shirt to saturate the odor. On the afternoons I’ve
planned to come here to wait, I’ve worn no deodorant and found
an excuse to work somewhere in the sun for an hour or two. The second
hand jeans have not been washed since I bought them. No make-up,
no perfume, no hair conditioner or even shampoo, no hand lotion.
I can pull my used straw Stetson low over my face. Sweatpants, also
not washed, under the jeans and a sweatshirt under the flannel to
create more bulk. But even if she can’t see or smell anything
amiss, will she hear my heartbeat?
Finally they arrive just before 10:45. I can hear light whispers,
the rustling of bushes, but no giggling. I do not hear a male voice,
but that does not mean they are alone. In fact, I don’t even
know yet if there are two girls, or only one. If I go now, there
would be no risk of passing or seeing another of their clientele,
someone who may recognize me from the nursery. But going now also
means her supervisor, Big Daddy or whoever he has sent to this location
to oversee, might still be too close nearby.
I’ve waited too long now. Two men are already approaching,
only visible from their waists up as they come single-file on a
path out of the brush, from the opposite direction than that of
the girl’s arrival moments earlier. The mist looks as though
there is a fire nearby and smoke engulfs us all, but it feels just
the opposite, as though rain is falling, but there are no raindrops.
In eight minutes, by my watch, I step out of my thicket of potted
trees. Keeping my eyes lowered, my hat brim pointed straight down,
I see my boots crunch pebbles and sticks, and I don’t look
up until I’ve taken the memorized number of steps, and I feel
her there behind the partition of sage and wild mustard.
There’s also the wall of plywood, propped up with 2x4s, barely
chin high when she is standing, and I should have realized that
I would not be able to stand here with her, stammering the questions
I’ve translated into Spanish on a language-conversion website,
practiced and memorized.
And yet, I am here, I am really here now, and I have barely looked
at her. At some point I have taken both her wrists, and now I drop
to my knees, trying to pull her startled body with me. She is leaning
backwards, tugging to get free. Before she screams I whisper, “Yo
no le doleré. Por favor no grite.” I won’t hurt
you. Please don’t yell.
And, remarkably, miraculously, she doesn’t cry out. She is
breathing hard, but in a moment her body settles onto folded legs,
her arms go limp in my hands, but I don’t let go. I can, however,
raise my eyes and look at her. She is not crying, nor looking at
me in fear or even curiosity. She’s not looking at me at all.
I can see only her lowered eyelids, crusted with mascara, the foundation
make-up caked on her forehead and nose, her cheeks highlighted with
rouge, the whole mask as lifeless as dried mud, and lighter than
her skin. Her shoulders are bare except the two string straps of
her camisole top. Her legs beneath a filmy red miniskirt likewise
bare, now curled under herself on the ground, the rocks and sticks
I can barely feel through my double layer of pants must be stabbing
into her skin. Her feet in pointed high heels with straps around
her ankles, the shoes already scuffed, rubber ends of the heels
missing. Her hair either damp or gleaming with oil, clasped loosely
in some kind of clip but coming undone already, falling around her
shoulders and face, flecked with foxtails and little burrs.
The odor of her heavy perfume is somewhat dampened by the prevailing
foggy mist. Likely, by afternoon, any tint of it will be gone, replaced
by the funk, the stench of her work. For now it is able to mute
the fact that I am not the first this morning. And in ten minutes,
there will likely be another. I don’t have much time.
Gently, I twist my wrist, rotating her limp arm so her half-curled
palm is up, then release her other arm and push the twenty-dollar
bill into her hand. Her nails are painted glittery red, a tiny piece
of plastic decoration pressed into the polish on each one. Her fingers
close on the money, but she is still breathing hard, and she mutters,
or whimpers something I can’t understand. Perhaps a curse.
Perhaps a prayer.
“Soy una mujer. Yo sólo quiero discurso. Me puede entender
usted?” I’m a woman. I just want to talk. Can you understand
me?
She nods.
“Quántos años tiene?”
She whispers without a voice, just her red lips moving and air escaping,
“No sé.”
I am unsure which of my memorized questions to try next. Where are
your parents? Where did you live? How can she give answers if she
doesn’t even know how old she is? Or if she refuses to say?
I try, “Usted es jamás hambriento o frío?—are
you ever hungry or cold?—and only receive another barely whispered,
“No.”
“Quiere usted ir a casa?”
She looks up, but not at me, quickly back and forth, to the left
and right over my shoulders. I strain to listen but hear nothing
more than the distant hiss of a freeway and small airplane droning.
Again she doesn’t know, can’t say if she wants to go home,
“No sé.” But adds, “Puedo no.” I can’t.
Still looking around, panting through her mouth.
Suddenly we are in reverse: she is grasping MY arms, urging me to
rise, whispering something almost fiercely, her saliva hits my face,
and so I follow her tacit, but urgent, instructions. Without leaving
her position on the ground, she tugs on me until I get up, first
upright on my knees, but she persists, whispering “no, no,”
now holding my belt loops and jerking upward. Believing she is insisting
that I get up and leave, I do stand, but she does not release her
hold on my pants. Her painted fingernails dig into the loose material
on both hips of my jeans, and she scrapes her bare legs along the
ground a few inches closer to me, then whispers, “blowjob,
blowjob,” and presses her face against my zipper. At the same
time, I feel her hand between my legs, fingers probing, checking
to see if I am, in fact, of the gender I claimed. I try not to flinch,
and when she is convinced, her hand withdraws.
The way she is holding herself up against me, or pulling me up against
herself, I find myself putting my hands on her head to keep my balance.
“This is wrong,” I say, in English because I did not think
to translate the simple statement beforehand.
“Por favor, váyase,” her voice mutters against
the front of my jeans, her breath warm there, but I am shivering,
and still holding on. So I try to stroke her hair, her head, what
else can I do? Except I somehow know what to do: use both hands
to move her face away from my body, hold her dainty cheeks in my
palms and say, “Regresaré.” I’ll be back.
It was difficult to learn to say, so I repeat it. “Regresaré.”
And leave her there, on her knees, part the bushes and slip away,
walking, then running, not remembering to cough or sneeze—not
to lure another customer but so my visit won’t be marked as
bogus—but it’s too late to fix the error. I am still running,
past my copse of trees, back down the road toward the nursery, down
the hill into deeper, still lingering vapor.
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