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I met Maria on the wrong side...she was brown and lovely from the beach when I saw her and there was hesitation as I ran my daily run, ran for my life, running to some teacher...I saw that the beach was scattered with various jewels, studded with lapis lazuli and inlaid with jewel flowers of wicked scent...I know now that this was the detritus of Maria’s destructive path, the jewels of her torn lovers, her stilted menfolk…it would be later that night I would find my friends at the Holiday hotel, the first of San Pedro town where Reuel was a night bartender and at 19 one of the quickest and learned Belizean woman cat hustlers...a beautiful tall smooth-talker with a heart of multitude made of May winds and golden beers in the sun...He loved the American women of which I could not favor, not having found a single one of understanding and character that wasn’t completely confused about the means to possess the FEMININE...god that dirty foul word, that smell, that taste...how American women have learned to despise it and how American men have reached new lows of cowardice in not demanding it, in letting the concentration called sphere of the unobstructed eye of vision of all romantics and lunatics, fade into a callous mirth of material pleasure, a digital acceptance of manicured activity all designed to tear the soul from its ten pure directions...Reuel liked to say that the one saving grace of American knits was their knack for the cock suck, agreeing that for the arts of horizontal, they fell somewhere between fish and sloth...and I had to wholeheartedly meet him half way and agree...I could not find the guts of wisdom amongst their tittery talk and pursuit of hair products and purses…the really remarkable thing about Reuel was that he was only 19...the Kid had a behavior range of 18 to 27, depending on what the age called for, what sweet friday night fever love of rum and ginger pursuits he was demanding...
Said was a different story...his eyes were illumined by the lightning of Saudi Arabia, a deep brown manifestation of essential middle world wisdom...Muslim wisdom both quiet & cool and sure of its uncertainty, this being twenty years old and full of American University mischief...a handsome strapping most suredly unusual middle eastern with a soft demeanor like that of Ramses the Great...He had small bumps around his eyes, not quite acne, but some condition that added to his character...landscape...the grit of honesty and humility surging up through the skin with chemical, toxic urgency, releasing the dark intuitive secrets of thousands of years...the first time I saw him was at the warehouse disco Barefoot Iguana’s...I was with the stunning Ramona, a 20 yr old Ecuadorian princess with ONE BODY like I had never seen before and the face of angular crime, crime against beauty, somehow stolen more than its share from nature...and long-braided hair which piled around the back of her head, shoulder to neck, neck to head...And to mention the clothes she would don...original and tight, a mixture producing a separate abstract heterogeneous force...curves understood by all who saw her...Every man turned his head in perfect primal obedience, opened his mouth, and whether he was finally able to utter words or no, what came out always paled, always fell somewhere at her feet, short, which I then promptly stepped over with a smile permeated and dissolved by spirit...for somehow she had become mine...I was on top of the heap DESIRE and I reeked of shit and aires...and I put up boundaries, false fronts and frontiers, between my ego and her delicate cunt... they battled constantly for my attention, with projection and introjection, subterranean currents of air and gyration as only a Latin woman and an American Character-armor could produce...Not to forget the lovely Maria, whom I will renounce later...I met the Ramona princess a few nights earlier at Fido’s, the beginning and end of San Pedro town, the hold-out for ex-patriot American and British washouts from all walks: cons, drunks, tourists, dive-masters--all of them cunt-struck and wretched, holding each other fast with rum tongues, bad Caribbean music, and hundreds of cigarettes an hour...I felt deep sorrow amongst these, a mad truth of sorts, a hate born of worn-out glory and sentimentality...a deeply western malaise manifested in over-acting, over-emphasizing, and over-reaching any action...there was nothing more agonizing than watching schizophrenics pass beyond insanity into the grey ordinary of ignorance...God to have Dionysus’ mad company, his raging paraphernalia of the wise lust and libation, for it is Bacchus who breaks down the boundaries, releases the prisoners, gives the idle a grace, a primordial light of unity in folly...breakdown to breakthru...
-Michael Price
