PUERTO VALLARTA

 

The seaside village of Puerto Vallarta sits on what is little more then a wide beach just where the mountains drop into Banderas Bay.   Anyone my age first heard of Puerto Vallarta when Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Ava Gardner went there with John Huston to film “Night of The Iguana” sometime in the sixties.  Tennessee Williams lived and wrote in Mexico off and on for many years as well, he may have been through the little village in his travels, in any case it was Huston who set William’s story in Puerto Vallarta.   Even today you can catch the bus from ‘PV’ down the highway to the village of Mismaloya and walk along the beach to the stairs that lead up to the location of Ava Gardner’s little hotel in the film.  The foundations of the hotel are still there, a little below the actual crest of the bluff, no longer recognizable. 

Poking around the ruins of the film set I wondered where the location of the beach was where Ava Gardner cavorted with coital intent with her two handsome Mexican beach boys.   According to the legends of the time, Ava Gardner cavorted with real life Mexican beach boys much as she did in the film!  Today a nice restaurant that offers beer at cost twice as in the rest of Mexico sits on the top of the bluff and looks down on the remains of Ava’s hotel and the beach below and a wonderful view of the Southern part of Banderas Bay. 

The publicity surrounding the making of the film was intense.  Burton and Taylor, who had just completed making “Cleopatra” in Egypt where they had began their world famous affair, had come to Mexico to make “Night of the Iguana” so that Burton would not have to go home to his wife.  They bought a house on the mountain side overlooking what is now the Malecon – today a section of Puerto Vallarta - but then an empty stretch of sea coast.  

The contemporary world press, breathlessly following the lurid goings-on described the village of Puerto Vallarta as an Eden of tropical splendor, undiscovered by the outside world.  Of course, after the film was released, Puerto Vallarta became the vacation destination of Choice, surpassed only by Acapulco.  

Because the original village was hemmed in so closely between the mountains and the bay the new  tourist city could not expand around it, and gradually destroy it, as other Mexican beach towns have been destroyed.  Instead, the  development moved toward the north leaving the Village, intact. The newly famous village gradually become a small city and spread north up the beach from where the original village, called Olas Altas stood, spread across the Rio Ameca and up the coast.  .  The first part of the new development, just across the Ameca river from Olas Altas, is called the “Malecon” above which the Burton- Taylor house still stands. 

The Malecon area has no good sandy beaches so a sea wall was built with a broad walkway at its top and a street full of shops across the street from the sea wall. 

The tourists that the now famous little city began to attract were housed in large hotels that were quickly built further up the beach to the north of the Malicone, but still along the inner curve of the clam shell shaped Banderas Bay. 

The houses in which the Mexican people would live and from whence they would come everyday to work in the shops along the Malecone, and the big new hotels on the Northern beach, were built across the main highway and inland, to the east. 

Several months after my first visit to PV on my way North I would rent one of these little houses for two long happy months.

 I arrived in Puerto Vallarta on the bus from San Blas, a coastal village north of Puerto Vallarta where development had made no inroad and where the bus station remained across the street from the Zocalo.  I had been in San Blas some time, became used to its slow way of living, and finally bored with its Mexican beach life I decided to move on south to Puerto Vallarta. 

As had become used to the sleepy Mexican villages of the Baja Peninsula and along the coast of the Galfo de California  it was a surprise to find the large new bus station of Puerto Vallarta, newer even then the airport and further out to the North of the town.  Unlike most Mexican towns it was necessary to take a bus form the bus station to the old part of the town.  On the phone from the bus station I had trouble getting a hotel room, the first such trouble I had traveling in Mexico.  After calling several hotels from my “Lets Go” guide, I settled on a hotel that was recommended by the "Spartacus Guide" to gay venues around the world.  The hotel that the Spartacus Guide recommended, the Vallarta Cora Hotel, was the hotel that I had been most attracted to when I first started to read about Puerto Vallarta in my guide books.  In San Blas I had rejected it as to expensive.  The Vallarta Cora, according to the guide, was exclusively gay.  I wasn’t sure what that meant but one of the hotels attractions was identified by the “R” symbol, which means, in Spartacus, “Rent Boys”.  Spartacus also listed rooms with separate bedrooms and a kitchen.  I decided that I would afford the price of over three hundred pesos, and looked forward to cooking for myself.   

 

          The Vallarta Cora Hotel is located up a steep hill on the Main Street of the old town, a street also called Olas Altas, at the extreme Southern end of the old village.  Now the hotel is looked down on by houses and even smaller hotels that have been built on narrow winding roads that lace the mountain slopes overlooking the beach. But when I arrived it was still the last building up the hill where the main street ended. 

The Vallarta Cora is a small hotel with four floors built around an interior court yard containing a miniature swimming pool, which, the Spartacus guide told me was “clothing optional” from sunset to sunrise (after the Mexican maids are gone for the day).

There was no one in the hotel office when I arrived.  I wondered deeper into the complex, around the pool and into what appeared to be a restaurant where a French woman fed me breakfast and coffee while I waited for Mario, the owner, to return and get me settled in one of the apartments.

  

           In the afternoon I set out to discover what I had read was the “gayest town in Mexico”.  I saw nothing that confirmed that description until I found “Porque No?” a gay bar noted in Spartacus just north of the river. 

         The Porque No? was quiet in the late afternoon.  I talked to the bar tender, a tall, sweet, skinny, kid named Carlos as I drank a beer.  I bought a second beer and climbed the stairs to the top floor roof bar to drink it in the late afternoon sun.  It was as I was crossing the roof toward a table overlooking the street that I first noticed Jose Luis sitting at the point of the outer curve of the empty U shaped bar. 

 

          Jose Luis was to become, for the rest of my year long trip in Mexico the man against whom all others would be measured. 

 

I sat down at my table overlooking the street and watched him.  He sat on the bar stool with his elbows on the bar. He apparently had not noticed me although we were alone on the roof as the roof bar had not yet opened.  He was tall and full bodied, his frame was not light as most young Mexicans are, his shoulders were broad in his work shirt and his chest was thick and muscular.  His hair was not shinny black but more a soft black-brown.  He looked more European or American then Mexican.  He sat leaning on the bar, slowly drinking a beer, seemingly lost in thought.  I watched him wondering if any purpose could be served by trying to break in on his silent consideration of the bottles on the back bar.  At last,  Unable to resist,  I walked over to the bar and sat across around the nose of the curved bar from Jose Luis.

          He was so concentrated on the back bar that I was able to study him with little attempt to conceal my interest. 

He wore glasses, rather heavy glasses with wire rims that made his eyes look enlarged looking at them through the thick lenses.  This, slightly owlish, somewhat intellectual look was a fascinating contrast to his broad shoulders and workman close and posture.  His face was rather more round than usually suggests great handsomeness to me in a man or a woman.  But there was something about Jose Luis!   He was handsome in only a certain way, but, to me, he was much more then handsome, much more!  To me he was stunning, fascinating! 

Perhaps it was his grin, for when I first sat down at the bar he shyly looked up and grinned at me. I smiled back and he returned to his reverie. 

After a while I asked him what time the bar opened and learned that he spoke almost no English.  When the bar tender finally did show up and opened the roof bar I introduced myself and bought Jose Louis a beer.  I felt shy with him as he was shy with me. I knew I was risking making a fool of myself trying to get him to pay attention to me.  But gradually we became comfortable and joked and teased one another as we made light work of communicating in Spanish and English, relying more on my Spanish then his English. 

Jose Louis was bright and he knew how to engage, to charm, in the sense that a beautiful child charms, and teaches the skill to the man or woman they will become.

He was from the coastal town of Cardenas, a town down the coast a little more then half way to Acapulco, he told me.   He was working in Puerto Vallarta temporarily.  I tried to get him to talk about his work but he refused to be descriptive.  I was left to assume he did manual labor as his close did not suggest any other kind of work. He told me he had just stopped in for a drink after work.  Possibly he thought of himself as an intellectual, or in some other way, better then a common laborer, and did not want to admit to me that he did manual work. He talked to me, and he smiled at me, and he was shy with me.  I would almost describe him as ‘sweet’, or kind, or sensitive but in such an energetic, masculine way that those words fall short!  I knew it would be easy to fall in love with this young man!  I knew at that moment that Jose Louis was why I was traveling - he was what it was that I needed!  As we talked I forgot about wanting his big handsome body!  Forgot any thing that might take me away from this moment at the roof bar, a moment that I had every reason to expect was all I would ever know of him.  I was happy just looking through his distorting glasses into his big brown eyes  while he glanced over across the corner of bar at me, I was happy watching as a thoughtful grin spread down his face.  First his eyes would catch it, then the lift of his ample cheeks pull up the corners of his big full mouth and finally his mouth opened.  When he was amused, even his big white teeth would part and a laugh would roll up out of his deep muscular chest.  I had no need for more of him.  I could have sat talking to him, looking at him, getting him to look directly into my eyes, getting him to laugh, then to go shy of our growing intimacy and look away from me. I could have sat there for the rest of my life!

   

          We drank a lot of beer, sitting there at the roof while evening fell slowly over the Olas Altas.  We were unnoticed by the men coming up to the bar, so it seemed to me.  Nor did Jose Louis look around or seem to notice who was coming in or leaving.  Other men must have admired Jose Luis, but he paid attention only to me.  His eyes strayed no further from mine then his glass of beer – even when I ordered another round he did not look up at the bar tender but waited for my attention to turn back to him.  Then he would look over at me and speak of what he had been thinking while I ordered.  We let the roof bar slowly fill up around us without noticing. 

Jouse Luis never lost his focus as we talked.  His magic grin was never shared with passers by.  We were like this for the late afternoon and the evening, intensely together, letting the elixir of beer help us merge deeper into each other.  I must have asked him about his life, perhaps I asked him if he was gay or bisexual, weather he liked older men, I sometimes do ask those questions.  I probably asked him about his family, his mother, brothers and sisters, his father, I usually do.  But if I did ask about all of that I don’t remember what he said after he told me he was from Cardenas. 

Language problems, if there had been any slipped away.

When it was late and we were quite on the way to drunk I invited him down two floors to the disco to dance.   As we danced and drank I was able to feel his body, my hand on large muscles of the small of his back, my hands holding his, his hands on my shoulders holding me at arms length, looking at me!  He knew the affect he was having on me and I have never been more full of desire for a man, and only one women!  I wanted the feel of his flesh in my hands and now even hoped for the look of his naked body under my eyes.

          We were resting under the fan, at the edge of the dance floor, leaning together, the sweat cooling our bodies as we talked, when the woman that I met in the hotel, the French woman from the hotel, came by with a friend. I saw her recognize me and then look at Jose Louis!  She saw in him what I saw, she saw a woman’s man!  I could tell.  She introduced herself looking at Jose Louis then grinned at me and drifted on, I hardly noticed.

          I told him that the woman worked at my hotel and I asked Jose Louis to go there with me.  He hardly said anything; maybe he just looked at me and smiled.  It was as though it were perfectly obvious, as though I had invited him for yet another beer, or for yet another dance. 

I could not tell if his obvious, relaxed manner suggested great experience or simple denial of my intent. This strange uncertainty was one I was to feel often that year full of Mexican men. 

At the hotel I persuaded him with some difficulty that the pool permitted naked swimming after dark and he undressed, slowly and with some care!  We dove into the pool and splashed for several moments before he came toward me through the black water and I put my hands out and slid them around his ribs, under his arms. I put my hands onto his flesh, seen now only as a gray shadow against the water and the dark of the interior of the courtyard.  I let my hand settle down his sides and over his buttocks (it was round and solid) and then down and slowly up between his legs to fill my hand with great pendent testicals!   Then onto the magnificent roundness of his cock, already thick with the flow of blood, it hardened in my hand!  

I was mad for it! 

I settled him against the edge of the pool and lifted his legs so that the front of his body, supported on my hands, floated up out of the water and I lowered my mouth onto his cock, cold and tasteless from the water, but soon the warmth of it spread over my tounge.  He lay back, his elbows drawn back on the edge of the pool and closed his eyes.

In the room I laid him out on the bed on his back, with me on the floor on my knees between his legs.  I continued the sucking!  Sucking his cock and his balls, I used my teeth on the hard roots of his cock under his balls and then, pushing his knees up I explored with my tongue between the cheeks of his ass, settling his legs gradually over my shoulders.  The tip of my tongue reaching for his culjo!   Suddenly his head jerked up off the pillow I had put down for him.  “No!” he said.  “Si!” I answered and licked and tickled the tight muscles of his ass, looking up over his balls, and his cock hard and standing at an angle over his belly.  A frown fluttered softly over his face and he let his head back down on the pillow, and he must have closed his eyes.  Never had my mouth produced such juices, never have I wet a man so that my whole face slid effortlessly up, out of his ass to his testicals to capture his cock.  Now his own hands held his knees high and his ass open for me. 

I have often enjoyed a man body, open and wanting and loving my mouth, but I have never seen the absolute beauty of open cheeks and upraised legs as I did with Jose Louis.

He had put one hand on my head and directed where I would lick, and when to suck, moving my mouth from hole to cock to balls, then, when he could take no more, he pulled his cock out of my mouth with a wrench of his body and pulled me onto the bed while he himself got to its edge and stood.  He pushed me down onto the bed on my belly!  But I lay over onto my back and pulled my own legs up as his had been.  He came over me, hooking my ankles on his shoulders and hardly having to guide himself he pushed onto me without hesitation!  If he took care pushing up inside me I do not remember it, nor any pain.  I remember only the look on his face when he did it, the sensation of his big body undulating from knee to neck, thrusting, hotly, his head back his eyes shut, his mouth open, sounds of his pleasure dripping down into my consciousness. 

His orgasm seemed to start with a sudden opening of his eyes, a sharp looking down at me, a bulging, muscular, tension in his shoulders!  Then a shudder that convulsed his back and shocked his rhythm.   Then, hard inside me and deep as he could push, he stopped, absolute!  His frame shook and his sounds became guttural as though some scorching pain was tearing and convulsing his body and his face!  His belly and shoulders writhed and shuddered as his loins pressed hard down, into my ass!  

Stunned, and in love, lost to his overwhelming rhythms and the power and the force of his need, I wanted desperately for him to lie down on me and let my arms and hands and my wet kisses tell him what he had been for me, but he pushed up on his arms over me and slowly recovered himself, with his hands behind my knees he pushed himself back and out of me and stood upright.  I lay looking up at him!  I remember he shook his head and snorted in an odd way, like a stallion! He grinned down at me a grin that spoke of some embarrassment and some satisfaction, but mostly of a recovery of himself, and a withdrawal from me.  He laughed, almost derisively, and pointed toward my ass and said:  “Condom!”  I realized that he had used a condom and that it was still in my ass!

 

He began looking for his close.  I asked him to stay but knew it was of no use.  At the door I gave him a hundred pesos.  “por el taxi,” I said, “no por el sexo!”  He grinned and accepted it as though it were to trivial to speak of. I walked him to the front gate and unlocked it, asking him to come back - I would have pleaded but it was no use.  He agreed that he would come back but I knew he would not!  He had already told me he would be returning to Cardenas within a day or two.  He grinned at me in a new, distant, way and said, “Adios”.   I watched him walk down the hill toward the Olas Altas and turn the corner into the village and away.