Now I was fucked good. I figured I’d fly by the seat of my pants and wait, meanwhile ask the I Ching about it, which I had become very established in doing of late…and I didn’t get a whole lot of time to think about it because in fact the very next morning the phone rang and I jumped at it hoping like ten Dharma conducts that it was her, Ramona, saying “Hola Amor, Como estas ninito?” And as it always is when you got two irons in the fire the black telephone hell was true and it was her saying “Hola Amor, Como estas ninito?”, coming on pure and deleterious and flirting like hell…I really NEEDED her to tell me she had fixed her ticket or was coming to the island soon…I needed to get out from under the madre load, and be single, international, improvising, and most of all, recordable. I needed meat for ink and pulp…I needed world for guts, for audible singular conspiracy theory, for final act magic show…
Instead, she asked the question “So, who’s new girl in San Pedro?”
“Eh?” I said, trying to stall out, not quite believing how fast Krystal had got word to her…”Que me preguntas?” I could feel the truth knot in my throat, my secret already halfway to the open air of discovery…”you have a new girlfren, no?” She was asking in the same Isis voice she flirted with and in a flash I thought maybe she was a woman who knew the score, that a dalliance every once or twice was ok, that all men had mistresses, as long as I was dedicated to her well-being and could match her in odorless love and bed friction…she was knowing and letting me know it was ok? Could she be in possession of that carnal knowledge so soon? She asked that question again, then again, and all my courage for a vapor escape was gone…to this day I believe that I finally said yes, I was with an island girl last night, blood from my earlier whipping at the hands of San Francisco, blood now in my steeple cock, in this twisting twirling and gut-rot romance triangle, yes, Ramona, estuvo con un amiga negra, yes we fucked, yes, Ramona, this is what happened…
Her young, pistol-whipped venom, the coils of rattle rage that slid through that bad telephone connection from her mainland to my archipelago, as she blasted one after another spanglish stingers…she spent five minutes in telecommunicative invective, letting me only answer the one question repeatedly: YES. I fucked the black (as she quite quaintly put it). Yes I did it. It’s done.
“No, now we are no longer…I never want to speak you again! How could you be with La Negra? Dirty Black Girl! Disgusting! You are fucking Asshole!”
“Ramona,” I was failing fast, I was pleading of sorts, “Ramona, it doesn’t matter, you sleep with your boyfriend every damn night, I sleep with one woman and it’s not ok?” I want to be with you, in Ecuador, you see, can’t we just get our plane tickets and go? Why are you stalling?
She had stopped yelling a minute to hear me…I had gotten through with the mention of her own infidelity, which I had swallowed…every time she went mainland she was fucking that boyfriend…and that is no small thing…there was a pause and I figured telling her the truth was still better than telling her nothing…
-Michael Price
