It was the next day I when I wandered home from a morning jaunt into town for a breakfast from Estelle’s that my mother told me Ramona had called from Kitty’s house and was looking for me...of course it had been almost a month of broken and time-running-out on the phone card calls from her, in between her excuses for being holed up (no money, dependent on Lionel for food, housing, and pocket cash)-- she was plaintively missing me and trying to figure out when she was flying back to Ecuador, where we had formulated I would rendezvous as soon as she could debrief her mother and figure out a place for me to rent...she kept telling me there was a problem with her boleta (ticket), that the aeroplane was full, (lleno), and I couldn’t get what exactly she was trying to say but felt certain that she wasn’t doing everything she could to make her escape...and then did it dawn on me that I was dealing with A BEAUTIFUL AND VAIN TWENTY YEAR OLD? Wasn’t I no more than an astringent string-instrumented troubadour roaming downtown San Pedro high on his image of visiting geisha houses and soporifical extras... always marveling at the way she brought all heads to attention, my Ramona, who had arrived unannounced and with surprise and was sweetly trying to find me, ostensibly to “get naked” and finish the dream of horses and consummation that had eluded us packed as we were in our malfunctioning demimonde, coming on the heels of bisexuality and immaturity good bad or middling sardine can days we had in late December
I ran out of the house as fast I could going in the direction of Kitty’s front street 200 square foot store at the end of the block not far from the Victorian Blue library of donated used and worn books from travelogues and departing tourists...I knew that Ramona would be there because Kitty spent almost all her days in that store selling trinks and wares from mainland Guatemala and Honduras, pots, rungs, hammocks, idols, beads, paintings, coffee, raiments, fissure glue, rain sticks, meat-stags, fan enjoyments and lampshades or sashes...Kitty had a little business that I suspected was funded by her mother who had been quite successful in her field—herbs and traditional healing & medicines—but no matter cause Kitty spoke fluent Creole, the combo native tongue—having gone to school in Belize since she was small…I often watched when unsuspecting hitters-on-her watched dumfounded as she conversed with a local in what amounted to jive hip spanglish...From a short haired bleach blonde Angel face came the tough sound of a vato language catching the big chief—man it was cool—
Ramona would go there because the two of them had met during the Hurricane that was Keith, Ramona vacationing with Lionel and forced to stay put while he traveled back to the mainland and her and Kitty meet and become instant friends, and made fellowship not chaos, out of chaos really to make something lovely out of flying wind and rain and some degree of terror, six feet of rising waters holed up with Hassan’s family’s condo, actually the first meeting really of Al and Kitty and their ensuing silly romance of bad communication and jealous minds...I laugh thinking of Ramona trapped inside a natural disaster, unable to take in her dosage of sun--water she would not want to take in more than a pint in two days, instead would drink various juices, coffee, and cocktails paired with twenty two cigarettes per 3 hours...TV on constantly but not on the news but MTV where she could keep abreast not of the hurricane’s approach but of the newest clothes in the Lenny K video...I keep saying to myself, “Do you have defensible space?” and thinking not only of natural disaster but of my own mental space of dreams beauty, this very thing I was running towards down my good beach, surrounded by useful desperation for even a lean bull has it in him to rage around...and I was thinking of Ramona in a hurricane and inside that condo she lived in a world of common presence, one of mundane survival replete with suffering and fear...what we were in now was a world of expedient release, where gateway Amor and everything but the sense of smell was sweet and promised detonators, ready to discharge the tropic unguents of female presents...and I knew that we would not make it to the queer world of true reward, where it would simply work for us to live, work, and copulate freely, grow old, and die with a bliss unknown to sell-out mankind...A new, attractive idea if I’d ever had one...
Two doors away I sensed her presence and it was then that her tan self was half-angled out the door looking the opposite direction towards the library and I accelerated my already unreachable reach and made the ten feet in no time at all, and she turned east into my southern ambling and the enfilado was complete, Ramona and I were back wrapped in arms and sweet lippy locked in a thirty foot valley of ether recognition and breaking days....At that moment I was aware of Auturo Bandini’s proclamation “Tonight, the women die. This is the hour of decision. The time has come. My destiny is clear before me. It is death, death, death for the women tonight. I have spoken.”
What I was thinking was tonight we copulate, tonight we bury the chainsaw, tonight with my working organs & her working organs and some kind of willing suspension of the corporate model for regaining one’s camels, for quietly Ramona and I would regain our camels and sleep, sleep in the world of silent light...
-Michael Price
