Whiskey Neat, Boy Sweeter

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The first thing I did on my twenty first birthday was get thrown out of a bar I had been drinking in illegally for a year. My friends thought this was hilarious. They stood on the pavement outside with me, singing, and then one by one they went home, because it was a Wednesday and because a birthday is only other people's fun until about midnight.

I was twenty one years and four hours old, with eleven thousand pesos and a paper crown from a burger place. That is the whole inventory. The man at the end of the bar bought hours from boys for cash, and I did not know that yet, and it would not have stopped me.

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The man at the end of the bar had been watching the whole thing without laughing, which I noticed, and when I came back in to apologise to the barman he moved his glass and said, "Sit. You are not thrown out anymore. I have spoken to him."

He is called Angel. The barman calls him the angel of Bogota and does not say it loudly, and I did not ask why. He was in his late thirties and built like a man who loads trucks, with a gold ring and a black case by his foot, and when I sat down the smell of him arrived before he did: cardamom, and cheap rum. He ordered whiskey, neat, and pushed it in front of me.

"I do not like whiskey," I said.

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"Then you are honest and you have no taste. Both are useful." He signalled the barman for a second. "Happy birthday. How old."

"Twenty one."

"Ah." He looked at me differently then, and I did not understand it until much later. "So tonight is the first night you are allowed to be in here. That is a good night to be bought a drink by a stranger. It is a tradition."

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We talked for an hour. He asked questions like a man taking a statement: where I studied, what my father did, how much I paid for my room, whether I had ever been in love. I answered all of it. It is a strange thing, being questioned by someone who is genuinely interested, when you are twenty one and everyone your own age is only waiting for their turn to talk.

"Now the gift," he said, when the bar was nearly empty, and put a small box on the counter. It was the kind of box a watch comes in. I opened it and inside there were notes, folded, banded, laid in a neat brick with a ribbon round it from the bar's own drawer.

"Two hundred thousand," he said. "That is a lot for a birthday."

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I said I could not take it. He said, "You can. But you should know what it is." He turned the box round with one finger. "I do not give presents. I buy hours, from boys who need money and are old enough to decide. Tonight the price is two hundred thousand and a film. If you say no, I will finish my whiskey and you will keep the box anyway, and I will not be offended, and I will not come looking for you."

"And if I say yes?"

"Then we walk to my building, which is four streets from here, and you are home before it is light." He drank. "Cash is already in your hand. That is the only rule I care about. The rest are mine: the door locked, my face never in the film, and I leave first."

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I want to say I thought about it for a long time. I thought about it for about nine seconds. There was a bruise on my ribs from where a friend had hugged me too hard and eleven thousand pesos in my pocket, and I had spent the whole year being told I was young, and here was a man who was not telling me that.

"Yes," I said.

He lives in Chapinero Alto, in a flat with a lift that smells of someone else's cooking. The flat is not what I expected. It is clean and almost empty, one good chair, a table, a bed, no photographs. He put the case down and took the phone off the gimbal and set it on the dresser and turned it towards the bed, and then he took off his jacket and hung it up, and came back to me and undid the top button of my shirt with the care of a man opening something expensive.

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The gift

He undressed me slowly and then stood back and looked at me for a while with his hands at his sides, which was worse than being touched. "You are very young," he said, almost to himself. Then he took my face in both hands and kissed me, and it went on so long that I had to put a hand on his chest to stay upright.

He has a body like a wall and he uses it like one. He put me on the bed on my front and got on top of me and kissed the back of my neck and then my shoulders and then, without any warning at all, he pulled my hips up and put his mouth there, and I put my face in the pillow and made a sound I am glad nobody heard.

He is not in a hurry, ever. By the time he turned me over I was so far gone that I reached for him and he let me pull him down, and he kissed me with his own mouth still wet, which I have thought about since more than I should.

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"Look at me," he said, and I did, and he pushed into me slowly with one hand under my hip to tilt me, and the curve of him went in at an angle that made my whole body clench. He waited. Then he moved, and he kept his eyes on mine the entire time, and I have never in my life felt so looked at.

He said things in Spanish that were not instructions, low things, and I understood maybe half of them. When I came it was with his hand around me and his forehead against mine, and he followed a minute later, pulling out and finishing across my stomach with a long shaking breath and one hand braced on the headboard.

Afterwards he brought me a glass of water, which was somehow the strangest thing that happened all night. I lay there with the money in its box on the dresser and the film still running and he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to me and did not speak for a while.

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"Twenty one," he said at last. "Do not spend it all in one place."

Then he got up and put his shirt on, and I understood that the night was over, and that I was the one who would have to leave, and that this was the arrangement, and that I had agreed to it.

I still have the box. I have not spent any of the money. I have taken it out twice and put it back, and the second time I noticed that in the whole flat there had not been one thing that belonged to another person, and I have been wondering ever since what a man like that does with a birthday. The angel of Bogota does not have birthdays. He buys them, and he keeps the receipt.

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