Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll. Todd Robinson
walking to the bar with these incredibly bouncy unconfined tits. Unreal, miniskirted ass. Unbelievable. So I was sitting there putting the shading around the tits to give them some erect nipples…well, you know I can’t resist improving on reality. They call it artistic license.
But a voice woke me up out of the place where I go when I’m drawing. It’s that place where I can see the hands on the clock just spinning by in fast-forward and my insides get quiet and painful. Like I’m bleeding directly onto the page. Doesn’t matter if I’m putting together my portfolio for art school or drawing a picture of a chick with huge knockers, it’s there.
I looked up and saw this guy sitting next to me, ogling the drawing.
He started asking me questions about the drawing, asking me if I could always draw shit like this. What, tits? Yeah, I can almost always draw tits. In between the broken bits of language overlap between us, I figured out that his cousin worked at this place where they needed artists to draw shit like this. He called them las historias, told me he was gonna bring his primo by the bar tomorrow. He was gonna give me some trabajo—drawing titties.
I got up to leave and put some American dinero on the bar in front of me (See? My Spanish is gettin’ better already) and walked out the door. I left the napkin with the naked chick on it on the bar. By the time my conversation with the guy was over, she was sporting a sombrero and leading a burro on a rope. Just your everyday naked vaquera. Big ten-gallon titties and sombrero.
By la semana proxima I was working in this little office, making pesos.
The first letter I received was directly after I had this huge argument with my boss. That beaner’s got no sense of humor whatsoever, or imagination. How the fuck’s he expect me not to go crazy without a little variety? He checks over all the finished art boards for the books before they go to the writers, who, incidentally, have gotta be even more bored than me…. I mean, Christ, how many times can you write “devora me otra vez,” really?
So I happened to draw a few of the girls in my drawings with smaller tits than normal. I just wanted to inject a little variety, a little realism in with everything else. Shit, maybe some of the guys buying these things don’t like enormous titties? Right? Maybe? No. They all like enormous titties…and for some reason every guy in the audience likes to see a huge cock too. Someday someone is going to, how you say, ’splain this to me. Why the fuck does it matter to a bunch of straight, male porn freaks how big the guys’ cocks are?
So I got hauled into my boss’s office where he spent the better part of a half hour ripping me a new asshole about how he wanted huge tits and huge cocks—no kidding—he actually said the people want huge cocks…Mi gente quiere culo grande y la carne aun mas grande.
Oye, Jefe? Tu gente, maricon son. Serio…Buncha faggots.
I was at my desk afterwards, fuming about the exchange and redrawing the art boards so that they could get to the writers and then to the press because they were due today. I was giving every girl a rack so big that you could nickname her cleavage Silicon Valley and every man a schlong large enough that they’s gonna have to register it with the local police department, when this envelope landed on my desk and Eduardo’s words drifted over the divide between the desks like some kind of ugly-voiced whorish siren.
“Oye, Buddy-Love, there’s some mail for you.”
I don’t know why he calls me that.
It was addressed to the name I use down here, for bills, payroll, rent, yadda, etc. What’s that? No, I’m not gonna fucking tell you. Anyway, there was this, I guess, fan letter in there, it was all in Spanish, and there were these awful drawings all over the letter, in the margins and along the top, breaking the text up. It was these stick figures with these huge circles, which I guess were supposed to be tits…somewhere underneath the little lines that were supposed to be arms. All I could think of was Juan at the local bar, telling me when “I find the pendejos who draw all that shit on the bathroom walls, I’m gonna matalo, cut off their huevos and whatnot.”
Hey, Juan, I think I found their art teacher.
So the text was a little hard to read, looked like a third grader did it. It was so badly misspelled and there were these creepy little misshapen hearts all over the place, dotting the Is and replacing some of the Os. Like some kind of perverted, malevolent and prepubescent lesbian-retard wrote me a letter. I checked the front for the return address and saw it was from La Penitenciaria de la Ciudad de Mexico. What the fuck?
I managed to pass the next several weeks without pissing off El Gusano Grande, my boss. Eduardo and I passed the time talking about art in these oddly hushed tones…we might have been the only actual educated people in the place. Discussing actual art in here was like discussing multiplication tables at a George Bush address.
While we sat there, I got the next letter. So far, it had been six weeks since the first, and six letters. One a week. Each had gotten weirder. I asked Eduardo to look at them and tell me what this person could possibly be talking about. I found out the following things.
Thing number won: The letters espoused their love to the recipient. Me. Eww.
Thing number tu: The sender was obsessed with me—he somehow figured out which comics were mine and read every one.
Thing number fwee: “My” little porno comics made los noches solidades y tristes—those lonely nights—so much easier to bear.
Thing number kwatro: La Pencitenciaria de la Ciudad de Mexico was a men’s prison.
The following week was memorable for three reasons. The first was that my boss was on vacation in Caracas with his wife. I’m sure he had no earthly idea why his wife insisted on hiring a personal valet assistant for the trip. I just hoped Manuel was smarter than the guy who was signing his paychecks. The second reason was that because my boss was gone, I got to fuck off all I wanted. I drew small titties all week. The third reason was that I got another letter that really crossed the line. It’s not that I was ignoring the letters, it’s just that I decided to drop them into a drawer under some unfinished sketches under some crap, and then not think about them at all.
But when this week’s installment of Male Prison Pen Pals in Love arrived, I got a truly fucked-up little nugget. The mystery and revulsion was delivered in two parts.
Eduardo was sitting right there when I opened the letter. It was oddly colored, and once more written on paper that looked like it had been torn from a marble notebook. You know, one of those composition books? But the color was off and it smelled funny. Some of the paper was normal looking, but huge portions of it looked like something had been spilled on it. Like the guy who wrote it was eating or drinking something at the time. Eduardo’s theory was that it was tea or beer or something….
“Carnal, that shit looks like beer,” Eduardo espoused with certainty.
“How could this possibly be beer? He’s in fucking jail!”
“Oye, homes, don’t get all fuckin’ aggro with me.”
“Eduardo, please, cut the shit for five seconds…this is freaking me out.”
“All right, relax, let me think for a minute. So it’s no beer? Could be tea.”
The image of a hardened criminal sitting in his cell drinking tea, one pinkie finger extended and writing me love letters, was pretty terrifying.
“What about coffee?”
“Too dark.”
“Soda?”
“Same thing…and it doesn’t explain the smell.”
“Shit, I don’t know. Anyway, who fucking cares? He’s in jail.”
“Yeah,” I said, not comforted by the fact much. “Sure.”
“Just hope he doesn’t get out. You seem to have one hardcore faggot after you.”
“What makes you think he’s hardcore?”