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Old June 29th, 2007 #1
dogman
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Default A local bar draws Mexican men and the white girls who love them

.Thirsty for Company
A local bar draws Mexican men and the white girls (and boys) who love them

June 28, 2007




P.J. Tobia




.Thirsty for Company
A local bar draws Mexican men and the white girls (and boys) who love them

by P.J. Tobia


Photos by Eric England
Murfreesboro Road—especially the strip just south of I-24—is a rough place to spend Friday night. It’s what pimps and police call a trap, or stroll. It’s where junkies smoke crack and meth behind Dumpsters in darkened lots. It’s where hookers appear like wraiths at parked cars outside the Gold Star Market convenience store—thin, nervous, with scratches on their arms and pale dark-circled eyes.

The women lean into passenger-side windows and negotiate. Every now and then, one throws a wary glance over a bare, wan shoulder. There’s a trash-strewn pit of a wooded area down the street, behind a vacant lot. Men without cars will sometimes take a woman back there: it’s secluded, and you can smoke a rock and get a $30 blowjob. People have been stabbed there. Locals call it “the jungle.”

Nearby, Mexican day laborers stand huddled in the shadow of a Jack in the Box, getting blitzed on malt liquor. They will be waiting here for hours, stoking themselves for the next shit job. Then they’ll stand at the corner of Murfreesboro and Harding, where a truck will pull up and take them away to a job site in the pre-dawn light.

Amid this unhappy neighborhood is a bar like no other in the city of Nashville. El Dos de Oros—its name a reference to a lucky draw in the Spanish card game el uno—is little more than a cement bungalow not far from the I-24 on-ramp.

But on Friday—payday—the place is jammed with men from Central America, the majority from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala. Most of them live in nearby apartment complexes, sometimes eight to a single room. A night at El Dos de Oros is their only respite from a life of drudgery and low pay, spent far, far from home.

Here they can drink and dance to blaring norteño or conjunto music, the kind with whomping bass lines, screeching harmonicas and weepy accordions. Here there are buckets of Coronas, cans of El Tecate and pool tables in the cement-floored, brick-walled basement. But these men don’t come to El Dos de Oros for the music or the beer. They could get that at Uno Billiard’s down the street or even Fandango over on Nolensville Road.


Cultural Exchange Couples mix it up on the dance floor.
They come here for the girls.

The vast majority of laborers who come to the U.S. from places like Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala are men. These laborers live with men, work with men and drink with men. Walk into any Mexican restaurant in South Nashville, and you’ll see tables of six, eight, even 12 men dining together on a Saturday night. While it is true that many foreign-born Latina women live in Nashville, most have come with their children to join men who were already here. In short, there is a shortage of female companionship for Nashville’s immigrant labor pool.


Except at El Dos de Oros. Crystal and her two sisters come because the men will give them money just to flirt with them. Rita and Carla, two large middle-aged women, come because they say Mexican men know how to treat a woman and haven’t been softened by middle-class living. Gracia and Ashley, who visit El Dos de Oros with friends every weekend, keep coming back because the hard-drinking patrons don’t seem to realize—or care—that they, too, are men.

These women are of varied ages and fit many descriptions. Yet the most surprising thing about them, perhaps, is the one thing that they have in common. Of the dozens of women who come to El Dos de Oros each weekend, aside from the transvestites, almost every one is white and American-born. What’s more, they speak virtually zero Spanish. What everybody looks for, at El Dos de Oros, can be found with few words.

Nashville may be a city wrestling with the impact of its immigrant population on myriad issues—on language, on laws, on education and social services. In the coming election year, the debate will get even louder and more divisive. But a kind of integration, if not assimilation, is happening on the down-low in the glaring disco light of a Murfreesboro Road dive. Age, race, gender, fuck it: in its peculiar way, El Dos de Oros may be the least segregated place in town.

Walking into El Dos de Oros is like stepping into another country. A very loud, dark and crowded country.

Mexican cowboy music blares from overdriven speakers much too big for the boxy, wood-paneled room. Onstage, a band clad in matching white Stetsons plays guitars upholstered in a kind of tan leather embroidery. Behind them, a young boy hammers a torrid beat on a large floor tom. Occasionally he picks up a giant pair of cymbals, the kind you might see in a marching band, and brings them together with a tinny clangg!

The decor is dingy. Bud Light posters line the wall and a carpet of indeterminate color lies underneath.


Rockin’ in the Free World Los Tapas de Mexico at El Dos de Oros
It doesn’t take much to upstage the interior, but the men clearly spend much of their paychecks on eye-catching threads. One young caballero wears a blousy silk shirt with rows of gold buttons running down his chest. On his back, two huge painted gamecocks collide in midair, claws enmeshed, feathers ruffled in fury. His belt buckle, grapefruit-sized and gold, is embossed with an intricate and unreadable logo.

Another man sports a pair of bright red cowboy boots with a lizard embroidered in 3-D atop each foot. Beside him stands a young dude with a row of platinum-colored fronts on his teeth and a medallion the size of a salad plate around his neck. The medallion is decorated with a rhinestone scorpion, stinger poised to strike.

Downstairs in the basement, a man whose bright-yellow polo shirt offsets his mocha-colored skin holds out his hand. In his palm sits a matchbook, slid open to reveal a thin, thumbnail-sized Ziploc baggie lying in a bed of strike-anywhere matchsticks. Inside the bag is less than a gram of white powder. Another man—this one wearing an enormous tan leather cowboy hat and black suit with matching leather trim on the lapels—reaches for it with a grin.

“Excellente,” he murmurs slowly, disappearing behind the bathroom’s lone stall door.

The night is just getting started at El Dos de Oros. Upstairs, Crystal stands with her sister Shelena at the bar, unimpressed. They come here for fun and to make money.

“Buy me a beer!” Crystal demands. She is short, dirty-blond and pouty. She wears heavy blue eye shadow and a tight sleeveless suit jacket with a neckline that plunges into her cleavage. She is in her early 20s but looks younger because of the bright-blue braces on her teeth. To buy a drink for Crystal or many other girls at El Dos de Oros—including the transvestites—costs $10. With that money they will buy themselves a 4-ounce $1 can of beer. The remaining 9 bucks goes straight into their respective pockets.

What that $9 buys is companionship. The girls whisper in the men’s ears, play with their hair, put their arms around them. Sometimes, if the girls are drunk enough, they might let some of the men put hands up their skirts or feel their breasts. Though Crystal will soon be so drunk she can barely stand up, she and her sister are earning. On a good night, the girls can take home $300 each.

“I’m happy to talk and flirt with ’em,” Crystal says. “I can say whatever, it’s not like they can understand me. It’s real relaxin’.” She chugs the last of a small Bud Light and throws her arm around a man with a bushy beard and cowboy hat.

She and her sisters have always primarily dated Mexicans, she says. Although their father was white, their mother also liked Mexican men.

When Crystal was small, one of her mother’s boyfriends molested her—although she is quick to point out that her father also molested one of her older sisters. She left her mother’s home after that and moved in with a friend whose father let them “drink, smoke, snort coke, whatever.”

They grew up living in and out of cars, foster homes and under bridges. By the time she was 16 she’d had one baby, and before long another. Now she lives in a three-bedroom condo in Antioch, “by the lake.”

More businesslike is Crystal’s sister Shelena, who has three children and lives in East Nashville. El Dos de Oros is less fun for her. She raises her waxed, thin eyebrows whenever men approach to buy her drinks, assessing them.

“I’m not just going to let any guy in here grab my tits,” Shelena says, her straight hair spilling down a white terry-cloth Phat Fharm sweatsuit with sequins down the side. She’s looking forward to later, when she can meet up with what she calls her “real friends.” They hang out at a place on Nolensville Road that she says is like El Dos de Oros, but without the white girls.

“Those are the guys I really have love for,” she says. “The ones I kick it with all night. They’re so close to me it’s hard to describe.”

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a folded brown bandana. “This is what my real friends are about,” she says. The bandana is a symbol of Brown Pride, a local Mexican gang that’s been implicated in drug dealing and violent crime.


Odd Man Out One of these is not like the others.
“If anyone were to touch me here, or anywhere, they would fuck him up,” she says, showing a measure of her own pride as she spoke. Shelena claims that she never got involved romantically with any of her “real friends,” meaning Brown Pride members, except once. “It was a mistake,” she now admits. After the relationship ended, he became jealous and threatened violence.

“He said that if he ever sees me with another guy,” she says, “he’s gonna hunt me down and have sex with me in front of him.” She added that she didn’t know what would happen if she broke off her friendship with these men.

“I’m scared to find out,” she says.

El Dos de Oros doesn’t offer the wild-side action of Shelena’s other hangout: she says Brown Pride members won’t even come in here. That just makes it even more of an odd little oasis in the midst of so much strife and squalor.

“These folks are real quiet,” says the bouncer, Sam, maybe the friendliest peacekeeper in the city. “They just want to have some fun, drink a few beers and flirt with the ladies.” There might have been a scuffle once, the young man recalls, scratching his clean-shaven head. “It couldn’t have been that bad, though.”

The clientele at El Dos de Oros are lovers, not fighters. The bar’s dance floor is a 20-by-20 square of hardwood ringed by a wide-topped railing and some stools. Atop the stools, on any weekend night, sits a group of middle-aged white women eyeing the young men who stand or sit together in groups. Some of the women dress casually—Brooks & Dunn T-shirts with acid-washed jeans, hair in a scrunchy—while others get a bit more dolled up.


Hispanophiles Rita and a friend
Rita (not her real name), who appears to be in her mid-40s, is one of these. On a recent Friday night, she wore a backless, silver-sequined top in a snakeskin pattern. It revealed full thighs and short legs. On her face are oval, rimless glasses, the kind that your aunt or school nurse might wear. It’s not hard to imagine Rita in a sweatshirt adorned with kittens and balls of yarn. If she seems somewhat out of place, the same goes double for her mother, who sits next to her wearing a black blouse and eyeliner that isn’t so much penciled as Magic Markered. The pair sit drinking Coronas and watching the dance floor, which, on this night, is empty.

“A lot of our clientele works in the construction and remodeling field,” says one of the bouncers—this one a lean, bald black man with a shirt that says AGENT on the back. “And it rained for most of this week, so…” He held a gloved hand out and smiled as if to say, “There you have it.”

But if the pickings are slim, no one told Rita. Before long, she’s clutching a young Hispanic man on the dance floor. He’s a round, deeply tanned guy in his early 20s with a spiky, uneven haircut and a bright-red shirt. They don’t dance so much as shuffle in a circle, arms wound tightly about each other. Soon, oblivious to everything else, they’re kissing intently in the slivered purple light of a lone disco lamp.









Her mother and a friend look on from the small round table where they sit drinking. Her mother laughs.

“She loves to dance with these Mexican men,” Rita’s mother says. “She likes it more than anything else.”

Rita’s not the only one.

Ben is a white man in his mid-50s. He wears a short-sleeved, button-down white shirt tucked into light-blue jeans, over white sneakers that look brand-new. Ben claims he owns a 20-acre spread outside of Nashville, a condo downtown and a home in Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood. So what’s he doing on Murfreesboro Road?

He’s here with his houseboy/lover, a lithe, handsome young Mexican in his 20s.

“I don’t come here often, but he loves to dance,” Ben says, nodding at his lover, a hottie in a powder-blue turtleneck who has curly, closely trimmed black hair. “I like it, though,” he continues. “It’s one of the few places we can—you know, dance and relax.”

They get up to shake it to the driving rhythm of Los Tapos de Mexico, a leather-clad norteño band playing so loud that icy buckets of Corona and Tecate jiggle on the wobbly cocktail tables. The band plays a corrido—the genre’s equivalent of gangsta rap—singing the praises of a long-dead drug smuggler who made and lost a fortune to the lonesome whine of a red-white-and-green accordion.

Ben and his partner are soon joined by Gracia, a 23-year-old transvestite from Mexico City. Gracia dresses well, if somewhat conservatively for El Dos de Oros. On a recent Friday night he wears brown pinstriped slacks and a dark, sleeveless blouse. His straight brown hair is swept back and held in place by a large rhinestone beret. At about 5-foot-8 in heels, he’s a looker.


Men at Work Transvestites Gracia and Ashley
Gracia’s been in the United States for a year, and it isn’t what he expected. In Mexico, he attended some college and pursued his dream of becoming a stylist by going to beauty school. He had to drop out when money got tight and he came north looking for work.

Here, Gracia says, he works at a clothing press. It’s hot, backbreaking work, and he hates it.

“My only real fun,” he says through a translator, “is here.”

He has a long, angular nose and a wide, pointy grin that flashes when he talks about himself. “I can dance here, I can drink here, I can forget a little here,” he says.

He can also make some money here.

“These men like me,” Gracia says, “and I like to dance, have a beer, so it’s nice.” He says that he does pretty well if he wants to, taking home over $100 on a busy weekend night.

He might do better, but there’s quite a bit of competition.

Gracia’s friend Ashley can usually be found perched atop a stool, sipping a beer and trying to catch the eye of men on the El Dos de Oros dance floor. Originally from Honduras, Ashley now manages a Jack in the Box restaurant in South Nashville. He actually likes his job, but he admits that it would be awkward if fellow employees knew how he spent his weekends.

“I’m not sure they would understand at all,” he says laughing. “Here though, they do.”

As for why Latino men come to El Dos de Oros, many of them are married and simply looking for a little excitement. “Of course I have a wife in Mexico,” says one man at the bar. “But I can’t be expected to be like a nun!” His friends rock with laughter. Yet not every husband in the room is so cavalier.

Fernando sits at a table in the corner with Melanie (not her real name), a cute, brown-haired white girl in her early 20s with a retainer on her bottom teeth and a soft, dimpled smile.

Fernando comes from Chiapas—“a Mexican backwater, really,” he says through a translator. As he shells out cash for round after round of drinks for Melanie, his hands tremble a little and his eyes dart around the room. He adjusts the collar of his blue-and-white-checked button-down shirt and laughs nervously, if at all. Though Fernando is over 1,000 miles from his wife and two children, he is terrified that she will find out that he is at this bar, flirting with this girl.

“I’ve been in the United States for over a year,” Fernando says, “and I get lonely. What would you do?”

He says that he lays bricks for a living and has no trouble finding work. Other matters are harder to negotiate.

“Getting a place to live, keeping my [immigration] papers in order, crime, police,” he shakes his gaunt face and looks across the dance floor. “Being in the United States is a fucking bitch.”

It’s getting late at El Dos de Oros. Back at the bar, Crystal is wasted. She’s near tears talking about “my fucking child-molesting father,” and how she’s drinking too much beer.

“I used to look good!” she shouts, as a man with silver spurs on his cowboy boots paws at her hair from behind. She ignores him. “Now look at me,” she cries. “This goddamn beer is making me fat!”

The man tries again to get her attention, this time by grabbing for her waist, but Crystal ignores him.


Pan American Melanie with a cavalier caballero
“I was driving to the liquor store the other day,” she says, “and I passed by a church and I knew I should go in there and pray. It was the same kinda church that my family always went to—a Seventh Day Adventist, I think—but then I thought about my father and how that was his church, and I thought, ‘I ain’t going to no child molester’s church.’ So I just kept on driving.”

The man with the spurs comes back with a beer, sticks it in her hand and puts his arm around her. She smiles at him. Before long, the beer is gone, and all is right again with the world.

Further down the bar, Crystal and Shelena’s older sister Stephanie sits drinking and smoking alone. She’s just here to get out of the house for a bit—she has an 18-month-old at home—and she also thought it might be a good idea to keep an eye on her little sister.



“Yeah, Crystal’s a wild one alright,” she notes wryly.

Stephanie says that she hates Mexican men “not as people, just for dating,” though her baby’s father is Mexican. “He ran out on me as soon as the baby came,” she says. He’s now living in Texas.

“Mexicans don’t know nothing about love,” Stephanie says, curling her lip. “I don’t think they know what love is.”

Crystal is now dancing close with the man with the spurs on his boots. He slips his leg between hers, and she grinds her hips against it. The music reaches a blaring crescendo of frenzied accordion. Stephanie is sneering, shouting to be heard above the din.

“They could have the nicest, prettiest woman at home,” she says, eyeing her sister, “and they come here and fuck the nastiest bag of piss in the place.”

But if that’s true—that the men who come to El Dos de Oros have left behind their families for menial jobs in a country that can’t decide whether to acknowledge their existence—they do not look devastated that their lives have come to this: $1 beers plus 9 bucks of company. Instead, for many patrons, these hours are the bright spot of the week. And when the music’s bumping, the floor’s crowded, and the purple disco light shines down on lonely people connecting for the length of a drink and a song, the transaction works out for everyone involved. In America, you could do a lot worse.



http://www.nashvillescene.com/Storie...y_for_Company/