SERVICE FOR EXCLUSIVE USE BY CUSTOMERS (1)

At the door of Mauri’s, as in almost all bars, a sign warned that if you didn’t buy anything, you didn’t piss there. The place was L-shaped and, from the entrance, the part beyond the corner couldn’t be seen. At the end of that area were the bathrooms and the storeroom.

The clientele was almost entirely male: mechanics from the workshops next door, the unloaders and drivers from the warehouse across the street, and neighborhood residents with their games of mus. It wasn’t a place for women and children.

One morning Mauri noticed the sign, “Restroom for customers’ use only,” on the door, which was hidden when he lowered the metal shutter. Someone had written by hand above “restroom” and in parentheses “blowjobs.”

“Blowjob service exclusively for...” Mauri read, and laughed ironically. “What bastards...”

“Fuck, Mauri, you don’t know what I save on whores now that I leave here relieved,” came to mind the wisecrack from Suso, a poor devil from the neighborhood.

For six months, the clientele had grown, along with the tips and the owner’s finances. What could have been a scandal was nowhere near one, starting with the customers’ interest: those from nearby businesses or some neighbor, married or not.

On match days, the beers, some generously shared line of coke and, especially if Real Madrid was winning, had their effect. Some would disappear for a while into the bathroom; the women’s bathroom ended up being occupied too, and later the activity moved to the adjoining storeroom.

There was no shortage of someone who ended up having to adjust his package to hide an untimely erection when someone else came out of there, zipping up or adjusting the waistband of his tracksuit, having unloaded what his wife no longer unloaded for him at home.

And it had already been six months since Mauri had taken in and put to work with him his nephew Miki, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

Miki was nearing twenty-one, raised only by Mauri’s sister and, after her death, with nowhere to live and no known trade, taken in grudgingly by his uncle.

He was thin, with curly hair, white teeth, thick lips, almost beardless. He didn’t seem very good at waiting tables. Later Mauri kept him behind the bar and assigned him all the cleaning and taking the glass and all the trash out to the containers.

But Miki soon showed a special skill. It was hardly to be expected that Mauri’s—a rather shabby bar in an outlying neighborhood, full of workers in work clothes and often dubious characters—would turn out to be an ideal place to put that very special skill into practice.

(to be continued)