casi completamente ficción (ix)

It felt good to be sitting on the other side of customs at the airport and even though he was still in Cuba, sitting with a pocketful of money all changed from CUC back into US dollars and seeing the planes on the runway made him feel like he was already back in the States. Getting to the airport was hard that morning because nobody at the travel agency or the hotel seemed to know anything about the arrangements that were made for him and everyone kept giving him different information and he was getting pretty sore and anxious about the whole damned thing. But eventually a taxi showed up and drove him fast to the airport and he left the window open all the way there which felt good despite the smell of the exhaust from all the old cars. He looked out at the cars and the buildings and the billboards full of Communist slogans and he looked at the beautiful Cuban women even though by now his eyes were almost tired from all the looking at them. Even some of the airport security staff were long-legged and sexy and he was damned if he could ever remember ever seeing a sexy airport security worker back home even once.

He sat in the airport lounge and looked around at the old men traveling alone, and wondered how many of them had just come to Cuba just for the prostitutes and he made a sort of game for himself of trying to guess which ones. Then he wondered what made him any different from those old men if that was true, other than the fact that he wasn’t yet what anyone would call old. He decided that the difference was that it wasn’t his idea to come to this goddamned place and that he didn’t even know anything about the girls until he got there. Traveling to some poor country just for the prostitutes was a far damned cry from finding yourself alone in a place you have no business being and finding yourself surrounded by chicas and not being able to resist doing the only thing that made any sense. There was a big goddamned difference, he told himself.

Fin