Meter Runs on Tongue-Time

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Eight hundred and forty thousand pesos in notes, mostly small ones, and a bruise on my shin the shape of a heel. That was a Tuesday. I counted the money twice on the floor of the dressing room with the door propped open because it gets hot in there, and I was still twenty three and still able to be surprised by a good night.

Three years on the pole at a club in Chapinero, and the thing nobody tells you is that the money is not the hard part. The hard part is the conversation after, when the last song is over and the men who have been watching you all night want to be interesting in the car park. The man I was waiting for that night was a different kind of customer. He pays for hours, in cash, up front, and he brings a camera, and everybody at the club knows his name and nobody uses it in front of him.

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He had been at the end of the bar since eleven with a glass of something brown and no interest in the stage at all, which is unusual, and he had put a folded note in my hand at the door with a number on it and a time, and I had said yes because it was more than a dance and less than a night's work.

He was waiting outside in a car that was too good for the neighbourhood. Late thirties, broad, gold ring, cardamom and cheap rum coming off him when he leaned over and opened the door for me.

"I drive you home," he said. "I do not like the streets at this hour."

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I said I could take a taxi.

"I am a taxi." He smiled at his own joke and pulled out. "Tonight I am a taxi."

He is the man they call the angel of Bogota, and I had heard the name from other boys at the club, always with the same careful voice people use for a landlord who is also a policeman. He did not ask me anything for the first ten minutes. He drove well and slowly and he had the window down, and somewhere near the park he said, "You are quiet for a man who talks to strangers for a living."

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"I am off the clock."

"Then I will put you back on it." He reached over and opened the glove box without looking and took out a band of notes and put them on my thigh. "Forty thousand, for the conversation. I would like to hear you tell me what you do not say on stage."

So I talked. I do not know why. I told him about my sister in Pereira and the money I send her and the fact that I have been lying to my mother for two years about what I do, and he listened the way a man listens when he has already decided something about you and is only confirming it. When I stopped he nodded once.

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"Now the rest," he said, and put his hand on the back of my neck, and I turned my head and kissed him, and he pulled the car into a side street and stopped.

The fare

He has a way of doing things in order, like a man following a list. He unbuttoned my shirt and pushed it off my shoulders and put his mouth on my chest, and then on my throat, and then he reached down and undid my jeans and got his hand inside them and held me through my underwear until I was pushing into his palm. Then he took his own out, and I looked, because you look. Thick, uncut, and curved up like it is pointing at something above him. I have seen a lot of men naked in a bad light. I have not seen one like that.

"Show me what forty thousand does not buy," he said.

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I got down in the footwell, which is not comfortable and I did not care, and took him in my mouth. He kept one hand in my hair and the other on the wheel, and every so often he would say something in that low voice, not instructions, just, "That is it," and "Slow down, we have time." The car smelled of him now, cardamom and rum and the leather. When I came up for air he wiped my mouth with his thumb and then reached past me and took a phone off a small mount on the briefcase in the back and set it against the dashboard.

"The camera adds forty more," he said. "Eighty in total. Face or no face is your choice. I am not in it."

Eighty thousand. I did the arithmetic with my mouth still wet. "And if I say no?"

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"Then it stays forty and I take you home and you keep the note I gave you at the door." He said it pleasantly. "I do not argue with boys about money. It is a bad habit and it makes them hate me."

I said yes to the camera. I turned my face into the light on purpose, which I have never done since and would not do now.

He had me sit on him in the driver's seat, which is a stupid place to do it and there is nowhere to put your knees, and he reached into the briefcase for a condom and a bottle before he would let me near him. He put it on himself, unhurried, while I watched, and then he pulled me down onto him by the hips and I felt the whole shape of that curve go into me and I stopped breathing for a second.

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"Move," he said. "The meter is running."

I moved. The steering wheel was at my back and his hands were on my waist and the phone was a red dot three feet away, and I rode him in a parked car on a street I could not name with my shirt somewhere on the floor. He watched my face the whole time. That is the part that undid me, more than the size of him: that he never once looked away from my face, like the film was already forgotten and I was the only thing in the car.

He came first, with his head back against the rest and both hands hard on my hips, and then he put me on my back across the front seats and finished me with his mouth, which took about a minute and left me staring at the roof lining with my hand over my eyes.

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He drove me home after. At my corner he counted eighty thousand into my hand, and then he took a card out of the case and wrote a number on the back and gave it to me.

"For the nights you do not want to work," he said. "Do not give it to anyone else. It is not a business card, it is a favour, and I only do one of those a year."

I still have the card. I have not called it. I have put it in the frame of my mirror where I can see it when I am doing my face, and some nights I take it out and look at the number and think about the three words he said that I have not been able to get out of my head since: we have time. That is the trouble with the angel of Bogota. He leaves you with the small change and takes the rest.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+