And the night bounced onward and the blind around us talked into it...I reached the point when a man needs no first aid, when his charm streams forth and moments remain indelibly present so that all he says and however he says it the Universe is behind him...I blazed on in this zone, on with my jokes and slights to other innocents, and allthewhile kept putting down the beer--Belikan beer, the only beer to come from there...a monopoly beer, and not a bad bottle either...there wasn’t a single “micro brew” in all of Belize and it made me quite content to know that one rich man gave us our lager and none of it came with the automatic Deep Hell hangover that was standard issue with the craft beers...all drinking the same piss...
It was contemplating my avoidance of a hangover that I saw what would be my entry into the ancestral female, “for miguel seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the inward and miguel looketh on what he sees...” I was gazing down at Romana’s hips, for they were wide open, her top stopping somewhere around the rib and her sarong so low on those hips and -blink blink- there was the panty jumping up from below, right along the left hip and the lace so thin and my eyes and my smile and my onryness and my folly at once wiped out any Christian virtue I never had and my hand moved to the lace and my mouth said, “que es este” and looking down she, not knowing her hero--and to this point pure and tranquil he was--realized that her drawers were out and in an instant was flush like a vicar and cooling to the tick...I had embarrassed her...
I kept after it...”show me what’s there...” I said, as I wanted to see what she held back from me, how I could push the mask covering the master...In this one callous instant I had lost for the night what I had gained by plenty of blue eyes and smiles, patience and charm...she wouldn’t look at me straight and the music died and the night was suddenly short and trite...She excused herself in that Female-seldom-laughs-but-when-she-does-it’s-cathartic kind of way and headed for the bathroom leaving me to stare into the eyes of Heavo, the Hungarian muscle barkeep, ...and I had no one to blame but myself, for the mind was already buried... and looking at him for anything but a fresh cerveza was to look at your own empty reflection in a dirty mudpuddle...
And so it was that I sat and figured there was a very subtle sexual calculus that I had to figure in her absence between the textbook and the lavatory...if my past was to figure my present then it was retreat if I had the heart, but my usual modus operandi would be to dig in, get hopelessly drunk, and then alienate the actor and the exhibitionist...but for the love of my mother who came by at this moment of my turgid need, the moment of my coming of age into Jesus H. Christ, for she was leaving the scene in a very few moments and like a command to sleep in HYPNOSIS she willed me to abandon the sight of Ramona...I was a enuch in a harem of seconds and I realized my desire to see was a desire to see the genital! Thus to show the royal lingam was my intoxicating wish...but I see myself rise, from the stool slowly in the early hurricane night and gently announce in A-list Spanish my intentions to leave much against the alcohol drives and pituitary hardness behind the nipples of common sense...I had just finished telling Ramona that I was going home in the strains of Act II, and that this was the way it was going to be...if it was error then it was truth and against every banquet of sense pleasure in the mind I quietly said my goodbyes and left with the woman who so carefully brought me into my being and who had with merry and gutteral love brought me this place, this part of the world of mendicants, priests, bodies adorned head to foot with emblematic signs, scholars, scientists, doctors, thunderbolt bearers, dieties, harlots, mayas, la negra, goyims, visions of eating and being eaten, wine and Luther, oh mother you have delivered me unto myself as a shaft of light in a fallen world! Ramona do you see my mother lead me to safety and away from entanglement wrought with breakage? Do you see what a fine ass I have as I’m lead away? I say now "The true body is a body broken..."
-Michael Price
