So it was...down middle street from Boca del Rio—the address of every house along the beach was Boca del Rio—past La Popular Bakery where you could get all kind of latin pastry, and some of the strangest pizza this side of Italy--triangulated crossiant embedded ham and cheese with sugar sprinkled on top--that was pizza in Belize...past the junkyard houses, a lone rooster, short heavy set Mayan women, screaming happy children of all ages, past golf carts cherryed out like low-riders, past giant ancient American dump and work trucks, past the dug-up ditches of the telephone company sunk in ground water, where shirtless and steeled young Belezians dug mercifully in mud knee deep and smelling of sulfur...
I was the north American optic nerve, taking in vast amounts of information which I had hereto never assimilated...poverty without anguish, sorrow without shame, burning zones of the mauritius palm tree and hours whiled away in the dirt streets...how it reminded me of my own dirt streets of Sugarloaf Mountain enclave just west of Boulder where play had no mission statements, schemata, nor supporting documentation...These streets were alive only in ways I imagine Harlem was alive or Watts is alive now with jive mind thrums add sincerity...I could walk and smile and all I passed walked and smiled back... for where was one to get to in a hurry? And around and down middle street I went with my mother, the trade wind blowing steady, the sun eating jujubes, the clocks disappearing, oxygen forming, everything rotting every hour...The hurricane had moved all manner of debris, trash, & detritus, and deposited all of it randomly throughout the palmy hood...at one point, I was told, the water rose up to six feet around the town making it impossible to move about save by boat or watercraft and people were piling into second story apartments, sometimes 30 strong, to wait it out...and getting along beautifully, bound by aponeuroses of mirth and brotherhood...I was beginning to see the beauty of simple existence, just before the winds of America blew in and ravaged the little town with material cancer...
One must remember that I was running on momentum and auto-pilot each minute I was there because I had no idea how to behave in the tropics and at 31 I still needed a mother...but now this woman was more my friend--our bond was coming of age and striking out at the grey surrounding it--becoming a hollow muscular organ capable of laughter and understanding, able to credit smut and forgive transgression of any ilk...like this new town, I was seeing my mother for the first time as a lead kindly light...
We were headed to the internet café, one of two on Beach street, this one owned by an irascible and tunny Brit with a nasty upper lip and a filthy set of English teeth...
The internet café...new world-over traditional cafe replacement of null and void interaction and electronica cum robotic human future...where robots logged on to the emerging tiny universe of broadband lust and sound bite musings, a land of liquid skin, liquid rubber, & nano-impulses. Inside were lichens of monitorlight and the mucus of hazy green glow off their faces, and in this particular cafe, eternally were the beatles playing over the stereo system, making a deep and nauseous hey jude like tremor in my innards...but there was sunlight that came through off Beach street, and there was Marni who worked there, a young Belizian with American doll eyes and the face of her elders...an old face, older than a brown shepardess yet strangely alluring, an invite you in and come, let me help you with that, yes, take it out and here, let me stroke it for you...you like that?...then let me put it in my mouth kind of way...that's what Marni had over all men in this place, so that even when Ramona was present she could make them turn...diminutive women have that power over their taller sisters, an ability to convey SEX to the males..women under five feet tall rely on their privates, their red pearls, everything created and destroyed out of lust...so Marni lent a special slippery hue to the room, banked with a dozen Dells meant for mediate articulation between the supreme unit and its many satellites...of which I was one...Marni took a fancy to me immediately and I had to admit I could have...I could have...I wanted to...
In I walked and, lo & behold, there was Ramona & her awesome beauty seated one two in the front foyer...I had the distinct feeling that the powerful black magic medieval system of fourfold causes was at work...I sat myself down next to her and passed on a hello so succinct as to be its own wonder, a hello the cherubs might package in white lace and paper and hand over to some lusty angel on her way to the cloudy halls of Holy Grail class...and Ramona, my mons veneris, keeper of the glands of Bartholin, said hello in a burst of muted lightening and immediately went back to her chatter typing and important letters and Emails...So I hammered into mine, hacked through the U.S. Border into the silver sphere of important notes written expressedly for me...I had notes from poets all over the west coast, if my memory serves me, and notes from my Ex, and my father and my sister...I had notes, notes, and more notes...I had copious notes on how to live a tender life, how to make lame, how to get ahead in a corporate executioner in a burbury suit, notes for giving up hope with 827 illustrations, a viaticum of digestives for holding off consumer-fed malaria, ways to spend money you haven’t got, oh I had notes...
-Michael Price
