Let there be doom and rain and recon, I thought, as I climbed into the junior high needle spray of the shower feeling a thousand tiny pricks of clean hitting the back...I could hear Dean talking but only making out few words I had no idea what leaps he was making...I feared for my life, my new randy and ribald life...now to describe here how many phone calls he made in an hour’s time would be terrific and strange but I can’t do that because it was many, in fact, it was at least 7 to one hotel and then the next, transferring to dining rooms and talking to Belizian waiters who had no idea what Dean’s hack spanglish was meaning......I made myself choke down a Belikan while he just kept working the phone, and I felt that old feeling of a big night on high, a party with loads of girls, cruising amongst all the freaks of a Friday eve in a small town when suddenly the night breaks down and the key figures vanish, the libations run out, the drug wears off and you sink into a trembly swoon of letdown when the best cure is immediate and lengthy sleep...”Price it’s not looking good...they said they’d be at Capt. Morgans eating with the parents but that we should meet up with them after that...but the bobbysoxers are hiding...No one can find ‘em...I’ve called all my contacts and no one’s seen ‘em...let me try the hotel and then we’ll see if we can mess up some party favors.”
I had heard that we could get some from the dealers who hung in the shadows near Fido’s...because we would need some kind of chemical booster to make us explode from the center...we were weak, stupid bastards writing our classic work for all of night draggers, those who want something, anything bad enough to deny the sense of the body which asked to bet let down gently after the sun/beer/wind and wave of today...be kind to the vessel for it takes you places...cherry...apple...death.
Dean had reached the females at some resort restaurant by describing them to the waiter, and to my growing fascination, had arranged to get his water taxi connection out of bed and in his boat to pick them up and deliver them to Fido’s dock......so we tripped our way down the beach moaning and laughing at our miserable possibility...Things are as bad as we think! I was particularly bent, dragging tired authority and simple manners along with my weary legs and red scalp from old tropic helios and somehow it was beautiful, that Dean and I, two miscreants on different paths, found ourselves in Central America in the year of the mother up to our old tricks of chasing drugs and cunt...It was warm as any healing bath and I was starting to feel home and the guises of a wonderful project, the study of my very freedom... I was on overdrive test burn mode, docking near Fido’s to try out my burgeoning drug theory, eager to feel that whore rush of X and be awake and alert and not have a mind that agrees and disagrees but one that deals in raw pain and cooked pleasure… Sharpe, with his cormorant distensible sense, found the connection lurking behind a tree just down from Fido's...
“only drug I got is coke man” No coke for us.
We both retreated from pharmaceutical dreams and resolved simply to get boracho and let the fermented anthropogenic hearts of our women dictate style, geographic location, temperature, background noise, and ferocity of said previous copulation visions...So we went straight to the dock and watched the single blue lighted skim feather darkly into the dock and off-load candy and the gymnast in a two drink minimum stumble.....and if the girls seemed down (because they were) then our fatigue did nothing constructive to change that condition and we started, as it were, on the wrong foot by asking them where they wanted to go, showing our lack of planning and ingenuity and furthering the burgeoning opinion that we were not mighty senses put upon sensuous bodies but numbskulls as narrow, bigoted, conditioned, anxious and tawdry as the men who made us...
Taken by all this misery, I suggested Shark’s bar two docks down, where we could avoid the noise and skullduggery of clubs and start in on our demise to get it over as quickly as to become vital, make merry…with ideas failing to materialize for anything else, my offer was accepted and we made it there just slightly looser than the previous minute...”Four Shots of Tequila and four Belikans” I said to the sweet woman barkeep who recognized the inescapable glow of vision in my request... “Price you remind me of James Caan…but for now let’s concentrate on turning this cold engine over, huh girls?”
“Whatever you say is fine with us”
“Right, and here’s lime and salt and bottoms Up you navy seals...” Four shots went down gullets and gasps of fire breath concluding along with Sharpe’s whoop and gurgle, girls swallowed the poison down better’n us, I a red-faced resolute man with just enough fire to cease yawning, ditching at that very moment any remnants of obscure dread and instead firing up the intense desire for something deep with candied candy...Dean was thinking the replica and we all had about enough gas for a few more shots and a beer or two, which were administered in relative obscurity while behind music drove fast with boom boom and everyone’s hands touched unabashedly each others’ bodies...it reminded me of singing melancholy ballads on a snow eve in Boulder drinking red and missing city friends for no reason at all...We had gotten past the prelims, all of us, and now it was time to do what was wanted epistemologically—that is, fuck.
-Michael Price
