flights offer ample time to “dig”

Kerouac’s starting to get to me. Reading about his ragged bums running around getting blitzed and “digging” everything makes me want to dig everything too. I try digging the ride to the airport.

I dig the takeoff, that sensation of your ass being planted into your seat because the plane is suddenly in the air. I read and then look out the window and there’s Catalina Island. Can you imagine how I dig it?

Time to get off the plane. I’m in no mood to battle off, so I sit and watch everyone jump to their feet and rush past each other and to hell with that seatbelt ding the pilots make.

Two hours to kill before the flight I’ll probably miss. I stroll up and down this puny terminal and decide to waste time usefully by taking a crap. It feels a little urgent even. I waltz into the handicapped cubicle and feel bad about it, guilty like for wanting the luxurious space. I can see a vet in a wheelchair punching on the door and saying (drunkenly) I defended your freedom and got my legs blasted off NOT for you to shit in my stall you lazy greedy bastard, all furious and me left with no choice but to laugh because what the hell this is the penthouse of the bathroom and the chances of some cripple hounding me are slim to none and if it comes down to fisticuffs I can probably just push him over.

On the shitter I read about Kerouac throwing a drunken blast of a party including a beach bonfire near his cabin in Big Sur and how Cody is digging everything to death and I want to dig too. So I put down the book and watch three successive pairs of loafers shuffle into the stall next to mine for a spell. The same suit pants, the same rich leather loafers. Business bastards, polite restroomers. None of them grunted or farted much even. Still, the sight of the same shoes replacing one another in a bathroom in the middle of an airport boggles my mind, and at last I have the feeling that I’m digging something. It makes me feel lost, amazed, lonely, giddy. Taking shits three feet apart from another in this chemically polished sanctuary. A roll of single-ply toilet paper about the size of four hundred rolls rolled into one, for everyone’s use, what a collection of asses this thing sees before its day is done.

Also, the toilets have minds. When I get up the thing flushes itself, and I hurry to look if my effort will give it at least a little trouble going down, in truth I hope to flood the joint, but this toilet knows better than to dick with plungers, it flushes with the crazy enthusiasm of an airplane, suction so powerful if I was unfortunate enough to be wearing a tie I’d tuck it back.

On to Starbucks, a good place to dig people. Everybody on their cell phones. Calling as if to say What did I just catch you at you bastards, see, even if I’m not there I’ll still catch you because I’m there in spirit. That’s the problem I’m digging. Everyone is everywhere except where they are. Nobody digs anything. But I am.

This black guy next to me has the biggest bottom lip I’ve ever seen. Like a bee stung him. He can barely eat his bigass  salad around his lip. He starts talking to me. He never looks even vaguely in my direction, and I only know he’s talking to me because nobody else is around. I ask him Hey where’d you get that bigass salad? He says Right here, he works at Starbucks, and to prove it he eyeballs this cute Latina and says Maria, when are we gonna go out? Ya know, night on the town and all? He says it suave-like but his lip is in the way, and she responds Shut up. About then I decide to dig back into Kerouac. I want to be left alone, to repel people, but maybe even dullards can tell instinctually from the look of me that I’m digging life, maybe they want to learn how to dig it too.

That would be cool, exuding some sort of bizarre Dhali Lama allure.

evicted because "it she island"

This cay is where the marine iguanas hang out according to Captain Ryan. In particular by the black log. Two young boys stand atop this log. One twirls a weighted fishing line like a lasso and whips it about thirty feet into the sea. While he fists it back the other boy screams encouragement. There will be no marine iguanas here today.

My sister asks the older boy where we might be able to find an iguana. “Ovah deya,” he says, pointing up beach.

Ovah deya we go. Around the bend a young lady hangs laundry to dry by the sea. A titanic woman whirls out of a creaking hammock from the house on stilts behind us and bellows “Off de beach! You doan follow de rules!”

What rules? We don’t need no stinking rules! We don’t know whether to say something belligerent, like the previous, or run for it.

“Is RUDE come heya and no say hello to me fahst.”

“Hello, then!” Pops says cheerfully.

“OFF DE BEACH!”

We begin to depart like whipped dogs. “We didn’t know,” I holler.

“Nobody tell you?” The matron crosses her arms—twin slabs of ham.

I shake my head.

She snorts like a water buffalo pondering a charge and my good will evaporates. Good luck catching me! I think. I envision her descending the stairs and waddling toward me at her greatest speed whilst I rub driftwood together to make a fire and then collect wild herbs and boil them into tea and sip it until, refreshed, I swim around the cay, after which, wearied, I take a nap, awaking to split a coconut and drink its water, whereupon I stroll off at the precise moment she reaches out to strangle me—oops, just missed.

Captain Ryan is perturbed by our eviction. He’s new to the Belize base and nobody told him anything about Lime Cay etiquette and now he looks bad.

We sail to nearby Hunting Cay. I accompany Ryan to pay our Sapodilla Cays Marine Park entrance fees.

In front of the office two large men play basketball on a half court. They seem loath to stop on our account and so do not. The bigger of the two pushes for the net, his Rasta cap swinging about like a sack of roots, and performs a clownish pirouette, tossing an air ball about three feet off mark. He leads us into the office panting.

Ryan says, “What’s the deal on Lime Cay? Some lady just kicked my tourists off.”

“Yeah. Daht Sally.”

“She says we have to say ‘hello’ first?”

The big man shrugs his shoulders unsympathetically. “It she island.”

I realize suddenly that I want to be Sally. I want her to evaporate and me to materialize in her place. Pasty tourists from all over the globe email me, eager to fund my laziness. Years pass. I settle into the inertia of my dictatorship and also my hammock, AKA my throne. For I am king on this island, answerable only to the queen, and even then not always. Our word is law simply because It we island.

“Ingrates!” I shout whenever tourists round the bend. “You’ve failed to lay flowers at my feet and sing hello in falsetto whilst weeping copiously.”

“Hello!” they sing. Some weep, others scramble for flowers.

“Too late! Those who can do impressive bird calls or twenty cartwheels in a row can stay.” And to those who refuse I bellow “OFF DE BEACH!”

ever want to eat a boat? i have

in the distance: shitball cay

Whenever I loafed in the wharf hammock and looked east, into the Caribbean Sea, that long, lonely mangrove island was all I saw. I knew that a kayak lay beside the rental house, and it seemed to me that the one was an invitation to the other.

Still, noticing how the wind kicked up every afternoon fit to whip a kayaker way the hell to Placencia, I shook my head. I’m too old, I thought, to be daring myself to do things I don’t want to do. But one morning I woke up and thought I’m doing it.

cays can be delicious

Hugh and I set out in the double kayak plying our paddles so hard it rocked us back and forth. It was like we had something to prove to each other, and we did.

It was a warm day and nice to be kayaking in the Caribbean. Sure the clouds were whorling into the sky like gray cotton candy onto a blue stick, but these were just omens—things to be ignored.

No beach. At least not on this side. Dead brown coral only inches submerged and so we had to painstakingly grind our way around the point. I pictured the kayak bottom peeling back like a sardine can lid, stranding me here on Shitball Cay and Hugh having to swim for shore and good luck.

Finally we spotted a three-foot stretch that with a vivid imagination might be dubbed “beach.” I climbed from the scummy shattered shells into the mangrove tangle to explore and recalled something Steinbeck wrote:

It is the combination of foul odor and the impenetrable quality of the mangrove roots which gives one a feeling of dislike for these salt-water-eating bushes. No one likes the mangroves.

I squatted in the pretzel limbs above the rot-muck and looked at all the trash dangling like ornaments. Beneath me plastic confetti, floated in from parties the likes of which this godforsaken geek cay wasn’t invited to and never would be.

 “Let’s get out of here,” Hugh said. “This island is shit.”

Our arms were still burning from the half-hour paddle over but even drifting out to sea with torn rotator cuffs would be better than this. Turning the kayak about in the muck Hugh jumped out of the water. Said he felt a million needles in his feet. I considered him a crybaby until, grinding once again over the reef, I suddenly felt like I’d jogged a mile in fiberglass socks.

Chubby clouds now complete with wind whistling out of nowhere. Forty-five hard minutes paddling back. En route I turned around and pictured a bomb hitting the cay and jerking it into the sky in a flaming muddy mushroom. The explosion produces a peeling wave which Hugh and I surf expertly back to the rental house and crash through the windows into the kitchen, where beer awaits.

Finally Shitball Cay made me smile.

before (and after) the journey

Dear Yllithia,

This is a time capsule. These words will remain in a digital vacuum tube, neither rotting away nor accumulating dust until the day that you should come along to dig them up. I don’t know yet, of course, if you ever will.

If you are reading this we’re together. I have no idea how that happened because it hasn’t happened yet. We were certainly nothing on the day you see written above. No, on that day, today, you went snowboarding with your boyfriend and I sat here in my condo, drawing pictures, writing emails, swimming, jogging, working out, packing clothes for a New Year’s Party in San Diego. Today we are strangers.

Last night we got to know each other a little. I’m glad for it. I met you at the airport to drop off a sign, a crudely drawn plea for roommates. In case you’ve forgotten what happened by whatever date you’re reading this, this was our reunion: We power-walked toward one another, heads down. You commented on how you liked my sign, the fact that I colored it, and I replied that it was cheesy. A few steps later you warned me they wouldn’t let me in the crew lounge, and I said I know, my truck was this way anyway. Just to spite the awkwardness and to send the silence to hell I asked what you were doing that night at the last possible moment. Showering, you said. Thank you for helping me, I replied. It was a twenty-second catastrophe, after which I ran for my truck in the crazed sprint of a refugee.

I sat there a few minutes surprised that I couldn’t remember your face because during our lousy reunion I never even had time to look you in the eye. I was astounded at the awkwardness of it all. I expected something warmer. Maybe not a hug, but a hello or handshake at least.

I concluded that our airport meeting wasn’t worth the trip, so I went downtown instead of going home. I was perusing a bookstore, but really I was lingering to see if you’d call. I had no reason to expect that you would.

Of course I’d meet you in Barnes and Noble.

The first hour there was the sequel to our first meeting. Loafing around the Moleskines, going on my “favorite author” hunt, pretending to look at books while thinking of what to say, etc, ours was a story without a plot. When we could fake it no longer and would have to part ways (another wasteful drive, I thought, this time yours) as a last effort I suggested looking for a hiking book. I was stalling, waiting for the ice caps to melt. Only with those chairs did it happen. At last Patrick and Chris and Keith became of some use to me.

By the end it was all laughter between us. Eye contact without bashfulness. What a beautiful thing it was, what a blessing, I tell you I carried the full weight of satisfaction even to sleep with me that night. It was like the toga party all over again.

At the toga party we had the advantage of being incoherent. Our tongues were already loose cannons by the time we sat down together.

That conversation was epic. I was frenzied to have a fraternal twin. Sports, hiking, fitness, eating, traveling, Marquez, the music in your car, a shared dream of sailing the world, your laughter, et cetera.

When everyone had gone that night Heidy said, “You two looked good together.” She said it venomously but I was in agreement.

After we broke up I moved back to the desert and, bored, asked Heidy for your number. She said hell no. Understandably. She also guarded her phone so well I never had a chance to sneak a peak. Thanks be to that nerd who invented MySpace.

I need to click the temperature down a notch, because it begins to sound like I had designs on you from the beginning. Not so…even now I have none.

This is a prophecy. I started off by saying my prediction is in a time capsule because it’ll be more interesting that way should it all come true. I’ll have something more legitimate than “I knew from the beginning.” See the difference between predicting we’ll be together someday versus professing something now? It’s colossal, I can assure you

Interrupted…

January 5, 2008

I’m laughing thinking about this time capsule being interpreted as a “love letter.” I don’t even know you. What I see in us and what makes me write this prediction is POTENTIAL. Sheer and unbridled, whenever I talk to you I get giddy inhaling it. This is how a palm reader feels when staring at creases that could have no other meaning, how the Wall Street tycoon feels looking at a stock that will face limitless elephantine growth, how the astrologer feels looking at someone’s charts and envisions the future inevitable. Our potential is this to me.

If this were a professional prediction, Nostradamosesque, I’d be more cautious and say simply that I see in us potential to become great…whatever. Friends. Tennis partners. Hikers. Back scratchers. Book readers. Porch sweepers. Bar top wipers. Merry go round enthusiasts. It doesn’t matter, so long as the bond is profound. I bravely assume our potential will turn romantic because nobody will read this if it doesn’t and I therefore I have nothing to lose. There are other reasons, too, which I keep to myself.

Let it be no secret: I think you’re beautiful. The first time I saw you I half expected your name would be Aphrodite, an irresistible choice for someone sporting a toga and looking like the goddess herself. But Yllithia…more than anything it was your exotic name that cemented my immediate affection for you. Beauty is more common than uniqueness, unless we speak of inner beauty, which is the uniquest of all. Yet in the simplest chat with you I saw that your beauty radiated outward from your core.

I don’t predict how it’ll happen that we come together or when. Nor would I want to know. It’ll be slow, I predict, especially since my only plan is to be a perfect friend—my own signature blend of gentleman and swine. All I seek right now—genuinely—is friendship. Your boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) has nothing to worry about any time soon, since you’re clearly enamored with him.

Now the tantalizing question: how did it come to pass that you chose me over him, with whom you are currently gah gah? I have predictions. One day, after we’ve gotten to know each other as well as our potential demands, I predict you’ll find yourself at a crossroads. You’ll weigh me in one palm and he in the other. Who knows what he has on his side…besides you, that is. On my side you might feel this: I laugh more than anyone else because I’m genuinely happy, funny, have imperturbable self esteem and am confident, loyal, talented, genuine, plus any possible applicable physical attributes, of which there are a potpourri to choose from. Hahahahaha. In short, I have plenty of things a girl wants (not wealth, but at least I make poverty charming) and you happen to be a girl. Granted, you’re no average girl. Closer to a goddess. But even Aphrodite came to earth for mortal Anchises.

Happiness is contagious, and when people are around me they feel mine upon them. Ray-like. An energy to be absorbed photosynthetically, churned into sugar. And why not? Everyone knows happiness is the meaning of life. One can do no better that to find happiness and cling to it. For each of us, I predict, happiness will in some significant way include the other.

I do have a rule concerning dating girl-friends: DON’T. I honor this strictly because I love each girl-friend as friends, which is how I appreciate you now. This decision is made easy also by the fact that there is a huge risk in becoming a couple; the wages being the permanent destruction of friendship. So far nobody has been worth the risk.

So far broke its back upon your charming ass. With you I’d risk it, I’ve known that since the toga party. Actually, if you’re reading this, I did risk it.

I wonder…at the time of this writing do you feel our potential too? Was potential why you called me back that night to meet at the Barnes and Noble? Do you really want to learn tennis? Is all you really want out of me a buddy to kick up the dust on trails with? If so, Yllithia, you’ll have him. You won’t read these words but you’ll have something far greater: my friendship.

But in the end this is a prophecy; no room for if’s. Therefore I predict it’s inevitable you read this. When we met at the toga party meteors of potential impacted whether we knew it or not; the craters are permanent. All that remains is for the dust to settle.

In the meantime I’ll be looking forward to being your friend while watching you approach the crossroads. God help your boyfriend.

If you’re reading this, Yllithia, we’re in a place I can just come out and say it instead of goodbye, although it feels hilarious saying it tonight: I love you.

Ryan

breakfast is the most important

No breakfast awaited me on the lobby desk, but three cheerful brown sacks awaited members of some flight crew. I considered robbing them blind.

Soon I was to meet them. A boisterous black woman: flight attendant. A bald man with Caribbean accent: captain. A pasty whiteboy up too early in the morning for his own good: first officer.

At first it was only the black folks. They were flirty with one another, her touching a point in his back where issued some story from the day before.

The black woman peeled a long banana and ate it while she talked. To watch her eat that banana was an  argument for our decendence from apes–I don’t give a damn how you take that sentence so long as you take it to be true. I think the same thing every time I catch a glimpse of myself eating sunflower seeds. Anyway, it was ungodly early. I was jealous and hungry, sipping bitterly at some black water. Coffee? Hardly; it left no satisfaction in its wake.

In the van I commanded the back seat, from which I had a lordly overview of shuttle culture. Pilots in the bucket seats. Flight attendant in the front, but craned around to wail at her fellows.

“Feel my hand,” she demanded, proffering it like the Queen of England. Although plenty touchy in the lobby, with his mate present the black man seemed reluctant.

“FEEL IT!” she bellowed.

He reached out, gave an exploratory massage.

“FEEL IT!” she bellowed to the white man. He gave a pinch, retreated. “Yall feel that bump? It hurts!” She felt it herself.

“Maybe you got bit by a spider.”

“Aint no spider. I’m hurt I says, not bit.”

“Fill out a complaint,” said the black man.

“Yall don’t understand. FEEL IT!” she bellowed.

“You want me to hold your hand again? At five uh clock in the morning. Have you no shame, woman?”

The males laughed, myself included, and she laughed along like a siren wailing. It ricocheted haphazardly all over the van. I was genuinely alarmed for the safety of my inner ear.

“When you fill out the OJI,” the white man said, “just say you got hurt removing his bag from overhead. Tell em it was 75 pounds on account of the inflatable emergency raft.”

The men chuckled. The black woman craned her neck like an owl.

The white man added, “You heard about that raft they found in that pilot’s bag right? Going through security in Chicago?”

The black man nodded.

Satisfied, the white man turned back to the woman. “So just tell them you got hurt pulling down his bag because of the inflatable emergency raft in it.”

“Yall talking about a blow up doll right?”

The men sniggered.

“IT’S TOO EARLY FOR THIS SHIT!”

They guffawed and I did too, taken by surprise as I was by the image of a blow up doll being claimed as an emergency raft, but they ignored me. Throughout the shuttle to the airport this flight crew ignored me perfectly, efficiently, with measured practice and malice. I only resented them a little for it, understanding that as a member of the public I’m assumed to be an idiot.

Before the laughter had even died down the black woman bellowed “Feel my hand though I’m serious!”

“You already owe me for touching it before,” said the black man. “Just stick to making your coffee. Make me a cup and we’ll be even.”

“Caint,” she said. “Pot’s broke.”

“This is how it always goes. First three days they love you. On the fourth they kick you to the curb.”

“Yeah,” the white man agreed. “What’s up with the mood swing?”

“Aw haell no! It’s too early for this shit!”

The males chuckled together, probably contemplating the merits of a high-five. The privacy of this testosterone moment proved too much for the woman to stomach.

“YALL CRAZY!” she exploded. “Yall wives signed up for this shit, not me!” Each syllable she bellowed banged forcefully on my whimpering eardrums. The woman was trying to swat her mates for good measure but couldn’t reach them, and so just twirled her arms about in pinwheel fashion.

Meanwhile the driver flirted with the gas pedal more persuasively. Damn near screeching around corners we entered the airport lot. The men tried to regain some semblance of professionalism.

“Is this the hotel we’ll always stay at from now on?” The black man said, darting his head about. “Because we stood in the wrong spot last night.”

He was clearly talking to his mate, but the woman twisted her neck like an owl in case. The white man had a solution. Addressing the driver: “Drop us off where you’d pick us up.” And he patted the seat twice like a gavel clacking.

PRICK, I thought. Not only did he demand what he did in a belligerent and lordly tone, but he also managed to inconvenience me without the slightest consideration.

We pulled over a good distance beyond where I needed to be. I got out last and floated through them like a ghost to give the driver a tip administered mainly out of sympathy for his pain and suffering.

“Where my bag at?” the black woman screamed. I turned to see if there’d be drama. “Where my bag’s at!”

“It’s in your hand.”

“No, my food bag!”

She’d left it in the hotel lobby. The men shrugged their shoulders and moved on, rollerboards in tow. I moved on too, and found sincere cause for regret in not robbing them all blind when I had the chance.

rowing to neighboring reed islands

In fourth grade a teacher had the nerve to introduce Lake Titicaca during a geography lesson. After a round of laughter that lasted long enough to deserve punishment, none of us could get the name off our minds.

The geography of it, however, was quickly forgotten. So much so that I was recently about to leave Peru when I glanced at a map somebody left on a bus and was shocked by the mini-ocean on the border, a blue expanse so big I almost drowned just looking at it. Lake Titicaca.

Nobody would fly into filthy, crumbling Juliaca and take a crowded combi or expensive taxi to Puno if it wasn’t for the beautiful lake that graces its shoreline. As a fresh arrival I bargained for a Titicaca tour package with a sleepy lady closing her tourism booth. That is to say, I flattered her, laughed at her, begged for mercy and blubbered in exasperation until I got her down to 45 soles.

The next day a bunch of us met at the dock. Our captain, who never told us his name but responded to El Capitán, seemed to have ample experience both as a captain and as a mechanic, which was fortunate. We’d puttered from the dock about five feet when the engine gagged. El Capitán had to tinker ten minutes to get her sputtering again. My first appreciation of Lake Titicaca came in the peaceful time we spent drifting brokenly in it.

Our boat wasn’t in bad shape, but here and there it showed its age: rust spots, cracks in the floorboards, holes in the carpet, and of course the engine, coughing up blood under a painted crate in the middle of it all.

The Uros Islands appeared. They looked like floating welcome mats.

The Uros are a functional reenactment of history. Peaceful pre-Inca people first constructed these isolated islands as sanctuary from the perpetually warring tribes. Physically, the islands are nothing but piles of chopped tortora reeds anchored to the lake bottom by stakes.

As such they smelled like freshly mowed grass. Also campfire smoke. Reed shacks lay scattered about, and the people offered us simple crafts and fire-baked foods. Nobody wore shoes because the ground was soft and spongy and dry. I took my shoes off too, and kept them off until my toes turned yellow.

Riding on the bolsamaran (a catamaran made of bound reeds) was memorable. Four Uros men took up oars to paddle us to some neighboring islands, and I offered to help. I might not have had I known they’d let me help across the whole channel.

After touring other Uros islands we puttered toward Amantani. About an hour into the journey great puffs of smoke filled the cabin. We passengers were calm—some of us even laughed. El Capitán slapped a bucket into the lake and refueled the radiator while sucking something out of greasy tubes and spitting it overboard.

Amantani is a half-drowned mountain, dull reds and yellows sharply contrasted by the shocking blue of the lake. A group of women dressed in bright Peruvian colors awaited us with shy eyes. Each took a pair of tourists to her house, some of which were high in the hills. Many sucked at the thin sky desperately in search of air.

My hostess was Benita; Benita who flew over the rugged island earth and avoided scattered stones without seeming to look at them, talked to me and knitted a child’s sweater at the same time. Benita who had one of the largest homes on the island and one of the largest hearts. I may or may not have been a little in love with her.

Immediately Benita cooked us lunch. Her kitchen was a cavern of adobe bricks and whitewash blackened by smoke. A fire pit lay open and orange in one corner.

First came the soup, tasty in a raw earthy way. Then the main dish, all its ingredients grown on ancient island terraces, with herbal tea afterward.

After getting settled our guide rounded us up for a group hike. Most of us slumped from asphyxiation on the slopes. For sunset we ended up at the fertility temple, a circular ruin atop a pinnacle.

Lake Titicaca turned gold and the stars began to sink through as space descended on Amantani. I ditched the slow-moving tour group on our retreat to visit the other ruin, laying crumbled in full view on a mountain peak not too far distant. I got there just in time to see that this ruin looked exactly like the other.

The last thing our guide told me when I took off running was not to get lost. I yelled back, in Spanish, Impossible, we’re on an island, which turned out to be false because I meandered onto one of the endless goat trails and got lost. Dusk captured me near a giant rock pile. This was a distinct feature of the island, like Stonehenge toppled over. I’d seen it from the boat, and I could see the boat from here. Thanks to this bearing I knew the general angle the village ought to lay, and sat there waiting for the moon to extinguish the half-light. There was no panic. I looked at the black lake and let my imagination compose its symphonies.

When the moon had established supremacy I hiked through ancient terraces still being used to grow someone’s potatoes. A group of women marching through the night pointed me in the exact direction. Everybody knew Benita. Everybody knew everybody.

Dinner was ready by the time I returned. A sequel to lunch. We all met up afterward for a party thrown in our honor. It was next to the soccer field in the center of the craggy red mountains, purple now. We drank Cusqueña beers by the liter and danced simple steps with the same Peruvian women that were housing and feeding us.

Late in the night we returned to our private residences to sleep. I had a big upstairs room that boasted a priceless view, which was the only sort of view I’d ever been able to afford.

Comfortable as it was, I couldn’t find sleep. My eyes refused to close on the reflection of the moon in the lake and of the neon-blue landscape that rose from its depths. I’d never seen a beauty so haunting.

The next morning we returned to the frigid turquoise bay where our boat bobbed like a dead fish. We made slow progress toward Taquile.

Tequile smelled like Amantani—like dried flowers and ozone—but there were more plants and the uproar of the birds was a pleasing contrast to the hypnotic silence of before.

After hours of hiking and lounging ashore, the boat made for Puno. Four hours it took to get there, and in that time I achieved a cancerous sunburn. The sun felt like a burning whip and at the same time the wind lashed ice, but I couldn’t bear to go inside. Nobody else could either.

A row of taxis awaited our return. On the ride back to the hotel I thought of all the tours I’d done throughout Africa and Europe and South America and the Caribbean, some of which had cost hundreds of dollars and none of which made it as easy to touch a place with my soul.

I became curious how much exactly 45 soles was. I asked my driver the exchange rate, but disbelieved his answer. He insisted; it was his job to know.

Thirty-six hours on Lake Titicaca, including transportation to the dock, the Uros, Amantani, three meals, a hike, a party, a good bed, Taquile for lunch and this taxi back to the hotel, all for $13.

It cost more than that to get the pictures developed.

Coconut Downy Jr. after a binge on Coiba

Panamanian Proverb: Never put faith in commitments made by surfers, because even a decent wave is a deal-breaker. This is what Yllithia and I learned sailing Panama’s Coiba archipelago aboard Sammy’s boat, which will remain nameless on account of its having no name.

Sammy was introduced to us as an idea. I’d been whimpering to the owner of La Buena Vida, Michelle, about how Isla Coiba rivaled Mars for easy access. No plane comes close. No train. No ferry. One must pound pavement to Santa Catalina, where one is obliged to haggle with lancha captains whose expressions say I’d Rather Be Surfing. When negotiations fail with surfers it’s not because they’re ignorant of economics. Surfers simply have a unique outlook on supply and demand: when waves are in supply, they demand to be ridden. 

“Sammy’s a laid-back surfer with a sailboat,” Michelle said. “Every time he comes in I ask him if he wants anything and he always says ‘Solo chillin.’”

Sammy, 34, looks 20, is not unlike the Dali Llama in that he oozes tranquility. Haggling shames Sammy. To avoid it with us he suggested a daily price to which the only appropriate response was a horse’s grin.

Our four-day itinerary read “See Penal Colony.” That was it. Anything else that happened was cool with us.

“Be sure to bring a surfboard.” Sammy said.

“Really? I’ll have to rent it and Yllithia doesn’t—”

“Definitely bring a board.”

Omens, like pollen particles, often drift by unnoticed until the big sneeze.

As we sailed into our first sunset I noted that our party could be counted on a thumbless hand. The only newcomer was Victor, a young surfer we considered socially incompetent until later learning he was hard of hearing. Then we tried yelling at him and discovered that he was a gentleman.

I pumped myself up by pondering Coiba’s penal history. Unspeakable tortures. Gruesome murders. The feeding of corpses to crocodiles and sharks. For nearly a century dictators like Torrijos and Noriega had packed political prisoners into this human landfill. By the time of abandonment (in 2004) an estimated 3,000 souls had been lost.

But it’s precisely because Coiba served as hell’s dormitory for so long that 85% of it remains virginal today. On an island bigger than Barbados, that’s muchisimo virginity.

Another fact: the roar of a howler monkey makes for a foolproof alarm clock. To verify this for oneself simply anchor off Jicaron, northern neighbor to Coiba. Sammy chose this place as our introduction to the archipelago.

And as breaking news to Biblical scholars, Jicaron is the wedge of Eden that broke free  and escaped God’s wrath. How else to explain why the wildlife remains innocent of sin and unafraid? All day monkeys paralleled our explorations with arboreal acrobatics. Birds alighted on nearby twigs. Fish kissed our toes. We felt…forgiven.

This forgiveness transcended time—it went nearly back to original innocence. For even God, peeking down at our unabashed nudity set against Jicaron, must have smiled nostalgically for the lost dynasty of Adam and Eve.

Sammy was restless, however. He squinted across the channel toward Coiba’s shapely silhouette, eyes aquiver.

“If we go now we can still surf today,” he murmured.

Here was a nice glassy bay, Victor protested. Over there nothing protected us from the swell.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said.

“No,” Sammy replied. “It’s always bad.” Whereupon sails were hoisted.

Around dusk we dropped anchor so distant from the break I couldn’t even see it. This was no big paddle to Sammy, however, because his windmilling arms produce thrust roughly equivalent to a 9.9 horsepower engine.

The waves were warm and meaty and they peeled all the way onto the beach. I’ve surfed long enough to tackle swell like this fearlessly, but I was terrified of the sharp volcanic tombstones lingering beneath. Straddling my board I managed to kick two of them. Blood curled into the water.

We paddled back in the dark to discover that Victor and Yllithia had been pitching like pebbles in a polisher for over an hour and were in none too flowery a mood. Victor mentioned that surfing Coiba was insanity. There were too many sharks, especially at dusk. This might’ve been nice to know when I was out there bleeding all over hell, I reflected.

Morning’s offshore winds blew the waves into cylinders of glass. While we paddled out Victor and Yllithia boarded the dinghy and, crossing themselves, rowed headlong into the shorebreak. The dinghy flipped and steamrolled Yllithia in the end, but she was so happy to have her feet planted on shore to care.

And what a shore! With its three-story waterfall plunging from jungle to beach, crocodiles slithering in and out of their caramel lagoon, sunbeams bursting through ancient forest and ocean mist in thick pillars of gold…

Still, by noon three of us thought it was time to make wake. The hourglass spewed sand and the penal colony remained distant. But Sammy had only just begun.

“I’ve known him to surf from sunrise to sunset,” Victor said. “No food, no water. He can go for twelve hours straight.”

In the interest of shielding Yllithia from flashbacks, I’m not at liberty to discuss what a sailboat pitching 45 degrees on either side of vertical while waiting for Sammy to finish surfing is like.

When Sammy finally paddled back he was met with mutinous eyes. But did he even notice? No, he was too busy oozing tranquility everywhere.

“We can’t leave until the wind picks up anyway,” he said.

This most logical of notions hadn’t occurred to us, but we forced Sammy to raise anchor anyway. The rest of the day we motored in the direction of the penal colony. We fell stupendously short.

Night happened to find us in a bay that was “coincidentally” the last stop for surf this side of Coiba. But our fourth and final morning brought no surf. Nor wind. Nor sufficient time to see the penal colony, whose mysterious peek into hell we were doomed to go without.

How had we failed to accomplish the only thing we set out to do?

There’d be plenty of time to ponder this and other conundrums during the 14-hour sail back to Santa Catalina, for certain. Proverbs arose. We convinced ourselves that missing the penal colony was a blessing in the form of an excuse to return someday. We realized that Sammy was innocent; so long as waves couldn’t be blamed for being waves Sammy oughtn’t be blamed for being a surfer. In the end we would become nostalgic for islands that weren’t even out of sight yet. We were filled with wonder.

I, for instance, wondered why this sailboat had no name. Wasn’t that bad luck?

Sammy shrugged.

“What about SOLO CHILLIN?” I said.

Sammy smiled at me then—almost as brightly as he did for a wave—and tranquility oozed from his being.

disclaimer: spa not shown actual size

They told me the pool by the sales center was heated. As I walked there through a damp night, the dampness swirling under the street lamps and settling into my lungs, I looked forward to swimming laps. I craved exercise. I’d worked all day, true, but it was an easy day and a big greasy lunch. We are prone to big greasy lunches.

Swimming laps would be fun and I looked forward to the warm water. But as I jumped the fence I looked hard for any trace of steam rising and saw none. I dipped my toe in an edge and it turned black and fell off, a frostbitten sausage lying on the bottom of the pool.

I went to the spa. At least I could still have a hot soak, to hell with the exercise. But it was a kiddie pool, a slab of ice.

I went to another pool down the road of this concrete complex. Right and left shitty apartments, leftovers from the sixties, the condensation streaming down their shitty windows. Now I just wanted to be in a spa.

This pool was large and lit up, and despite its turquoise appeal the smell of piss and decay lingered. It, too, is freezing. I go to the spa, where a man and a woman talk loudly.

I say hello as I pass and their heads incline my way: no response. This was entertaining, like I was a ghost that had breathed a cold whisper against their shoulders but was invisible when turned upon. Either that or they were rude. Certainly they were loathe to be interrupted, for it was clear they were getting to know each other.

The woman won’t shut up. The jets are bubbling, confusing the water so completely it’s impossible to see below the surface. So I can’t see what she looks like. Not really. She is only a decapitated head floating in boiling soup.

The man’s head is decapitated too. He has carefully trimmed hair that would look respectable if not for the hopeless balding that already commands the pinnacle of his skull, shiny even in this dull light. He is pale, bland. Like flour. His head and hers bob near to each other occasionally, as if to sniff if the other is done cooking yet. Then they bob apart again. Her head is not unpleasant, and this is what he is thinking. To him, she must have been beautiful. Her nose a little long and her chin too, but her skin clear and young, her eyes blue, her hair curly and blonde and put up so as to avoid the bubbling cocktail of chlorine. Her hair would turn green in it.

The most unpleasant thing about her face is the hideous wails issuing from her mouth. She won’t shut up. Still ignoring the ghost at the other end of the spa, who is staring at them as blatantly as he is blatantly being ignored, she spews the story of how “Bo is out of prison now and I don’t want him talking to the kids. But I can’t stop him like when he was in jail. Then I’d just tear up the letters. Now he emails them and I can’t do shit.”

Her kids, she explains, are reprobates. “One more slip up and Jake goes to Juvy. It’s great. It keeps him in line. Used to be I couldn’t even leave him and Randy alone. I went out with a guy one time and when I came back they weren’t there but they’d spray painted a huge fucking swastika on the back porch.” She laughs. “I’m a renter, I can’t have that shit. I must have used a hundred goddam products trying to scrub that thing off. Finally got it off.”

The man listens, nodding. What he wants to get scrubbed off is Milimeter Peter, you can tell.

“Kids won’t have nothing to do with me now. Sometimes they come back from school sometimes they don’t. They disappear on the weekends. If I want em to hang out with me I have to do something really big. Like a few months ago, I took em both to the skate parks in Venice, took em to all the fuckin places in that Dogtown movie. But I can’t get em to do nothing else, you see what I mean?”

I start wondering how old her children are when there’s a clang at the back fence, and I turn to see what the hell is going on. A young kid has pushed through the bushes and is hanging onto the black iron fence. He’s maybe 13, and toting a skateboard. He stares at us with a little smirk, not really acknowledging any of us, and I turn around. The couple who are not a couple but are sniffing each other’s assholes like dogs have already ignored the intrusion. There is a crash, and I turn back around. The kid has jumped the fence, clumsily. Like somebody who doesn’t give a damn what noise he makes or who looks at him crooked.

He walks over to the couple and squats on his hams behind them. Strikes a real pose. Symmetrical. Spreads his legs around his skateboard, one end of which is on the concrete and the other tucked under his chin, his hands wrapped around either side. He ignores me who is staring at him. They ignore him who is staring at them. He is a ghost too, and I am a ghost even to him. When it was painfully obvious he would not be acknowledged, he skates off along the lap pool, through the gate and into the drooling night.

No wonder. Your mom in a spa with some lardass, neither of whom have the balls to face you. The man awkward, the woman intent on ignoring you until you go away. Which you did.

“Their father was a mean fuckin drunk. I’ve been sober now for three years.” She pauses and nods like perhaps she will receive applause. “Three years now. I been too long getting them everything they want, so I got me my bike. Best thing I ever did for myself. I go on the sober retreats. Got sober poker runs we do once a year.

“This one year this biker guy won’t leave me alone man. He follows me all over, even to my tent. So we go out dancing and I can tell he wants to just screw me, man all the guys want to screw on these retreats because how many biker chicks do you know? and so we dance all night and get all messed up and his friends are pissed so they come up and tell him it’s time to get back to the fuckin wife and kids. Can you believe that? I was like, awwwwwww maaaan.”

The man nods. It must be unpleasant, hearing the disappointment in her voice. She wanted to screw that dumbass. Was disappointed to find out that he was married, that he wouldn’t be able to screw her now. Not now. But next year she saw him again, this time with his wife and kids. “Man, he beat feet. Can you believe that fucking bastard?”

The man nods. Shakes his head. Confused, probably not listening, but this is the price sometimes to get Milimeter Peter a little time in the spotlight. You must aim low, listen to stories that roll like trash in the gutter. But it is crucial to act like he is listening, so after this gigantic story he rubs his bald spot and says, “Well, it sounds like you’re doing good.”

She seems confused by the response so she cackles. Then she says, “I’ve spilled all my beans, now how about you?”

He paws his neck, says, “My ex-wife fucked me. We’re still fighting over it all, but the divorce is through. She took $200,000 from me clean.” The woman’s eyes light up in disbelief. She just spent a half hour going on about how broke she is, about how she almost got fired for throwing a chair across the office and locking herself in a bathroom, and this fatass with his story about more money than she can fathom.

“She wouldn’t let me sell my restaurant when we had the offer, soooo. And she wouldn’t let me reduce karaoke to one night a week. She wanted it every night and it broke us. Costs about $1,500 a night to run the whole thing, and it just wasn’t bringing that in. But she thought it was fun.”

The previous number astounds the wench. Her lips part, moist, wanting to unzip the pants of this mystery and get a bit more intimate with the numbers. “What about karaoke could cost fitteen hundred dollars a night?”

“We had to rent the machine and a guy came with it. Anyway, she run the business into the ground, and we just sold it for what it was worth, plus stock. Didn’t lose money on the property, but lost everything we put into it. About $150,000.”

Her lips are parted, she leans in closer and backs off, her decapitated head swirling this way and that on currents of dreamy numbers. “Wow, that’s a lot.”

He nods, wiping the sweat from his big forehead. God knows how long they were sharing stories before I got there, laboring through a damp night to forge a relationship based on bonds of depression and failure. If there were bodies under that frothing cancerous water they must have been decaying.

Still they have not acknowledged me. I’ve stared at them an hour or more point blank. I’ve enjoyed my existence as a ghost. Invisible to them, I was able to smile at the funny parts, frown at the pathetic, and leave my eyes to flicker from face to face. I was never a part of the conversation and yet I feel as if I could not have been a bigger part had I been speaking along with them. That’s why I was unable to bend or break my ludicrous silence, and sat there listening to the obscene chatter and its idiotic synonym: the bubbles.

Here were the lonely. The losers of the world. The failures. Without wanting to I multiplied their existence throughout the spas of the world; to the extremes of the earth; I felt the burden of the lonely uneducated wasted lives of despair as it floated in this damp evening air. I was overwhelmed by it.

Near to the end I wanted to protest, to rebel against it all like the reprobate childen, and then I realized how. And while they were sitting there, he wanting to screw and her teasing him, torturing him, perhaps deciding whether to go for it or not, what she might get out of it and so forth, I pissed into the water. It wasn’t an urgent calling, but the pressure of my disgust made me realize that I could piss if I wanted to. It was a conscious decision. I squeezed it out. I’d been working that day, and it had been hot, so I knew my piss would be yellow and strong and meaty, like lemonade concentrate.

I couldn’t help but smile. They were jabbering on and I was baptizing us all. I could see piss streaming into the water, the jets dispersing and diluting it, making an even broth of it, and these two sat there marinating in it and me too, but I have no fear of my own filth. I actually laughed out loud. It was the only time I broke the sacred silence, but it didn’t matter.

Nobody can hear the laughter of a ghost.

disclaimer: actual spa in story was less cool

The next day at work I told the guys about the spa losers. Regurgitated to them in detail their trailer-trash stories. But the finish is what astounded them. It had astounded me too.

When they were sufficiently rotted and could no longer sustain the ruse of soaking in a spa to see whether or not they would screw, they stood up and struggled out of the churning waters. They were not decapitated after all.

The man’s body had been betrayed by his head. Medium height, sloppy fat, a swath of unseemly hair spreading like a bad weave from the center of his round gut, his tits separate entities of directionless lard, poor choice in swimwear, crushed knees, feet pointed like a duck with broken feet. But she was the surprise.

Although I’d pegged her in her late thirties, her body was that of a girl in her mid-twenties. In shape, tight skin, the contour of her wet stomach nice. If I hadn’t been subjected to her foulmouthed life history, I would’ve considered her pretty. The man quickly covered her in a large shirt and stood in a line between her and me while he stretched a beach towel around his gut.

Perhaps I hadn’t been a ghost after all.

After work today I went to a different spa in a different town. In this one you’d expect to find more upscale citizens, less piss and ejaculate in the water, but you never knew. It wasn’t the condo owners that frequented the spa but their renters, who were a roll of the dice at the craps table.

I was in the company of family who left me alone when they saw the three teenagers walk up. I stayed to see what the teenagers were up to.

They were degenerates. A blonde boy with a curly fro, his body scrawny and reeking of cigarette smoke, a foul smell that you tasted more than smelled. He was the last to get in the spa because he’d smoked his cigarette at a polite distance, shivering and wrapping his bones around his bones for heat. A fairly pretty girl around his same age, 17 maybe, who could’ve been his sister. She was scrawny and had big tattoos and a dark little mouth that sometimes looked bloody blue, like she had just gnawed on some Smurfs. She wore long boy shorts that looked ridiculous on her. Then the life of the party, a chubby kid that was half white and half something other than white, a good looking face and an earring and his eyes rolled back because his synapses were being lulled to sleep by some narcotic lullaby.

It was obvious that these kids were harmless potheads, and I liked them instantly. They were all at least as giggly as the spa was bubbly. They were blitzed. The Spanglish kid thumped into the spa and flopped his head against the concrete lip and said, “This feels fucking goood, man. Awwwwwww…” and then he drifted off to the moon and came back. He looked at me, kind of. “We just smoked our last blunt. Brought a pound from NorCal and smoked it up all week. That was our last. Fuuuuuuck.”

I pictured them pinching the crumbs out of the bottom of a bag and nodded, smiling.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” he went on, “looks like it’s back to NorCal.” The girl came and joined us in the spa. The skeletal boy was still courting cancer.

They started talking, kind of. Spanglish said he was taking the train to Arizona tomorrow, and then he’d meet them in NorCal. She said What train are you talking about? and they all laughed, because he really meant the bus. His plans were confusing and they were confused. Plus, there were out of weed.

Spanglish said his mom would be wiring him money in the girl’s name so he could catch the train to Arizona. But then they were confused on when and where they would meet up, and the girl told Spanglish he wouldn’t have enough to get back to NorCal and he’d be doomed.

When it could not be established what Spanglish was doing after all he said, “No trubs, no trubs, I’ll just put my boogie board in the water here and swim the fuck back to NorCal, that’s what I’ll do.”

By now the skeleton had joined us, and they were all three laughing at what Spanglish had said. Laughing like high people laugh. Like they were pieces of plank being carried downstream on a laughter flood.

“Ya right he’ll just hella hop on a boogie board and hella…” she trailed off, and they all laughed again. The girl said hella every other word all night, like someone had made a Mad Libs Idiot Edition in her everyday language with a blank space after every other word but the only word she could ever think to fill it with was hella. Noun adjective verb adverb plural adjective: hella.

Spanglish got bored and flopped out of the hot tub like a walrus flops out of the arctic waters onto the ice shelf. As he sat there moaning happily I noticed that he was steaming. I said, “Somebody throw some water on this guy, he’s baked.” And we all lost it. The skeleton even went so far as to take it literally and shoveled a huge column of water onto Spanglish, who sat up and said, “We’re enemies until the end and you just signed the papers to a declaration of war, son.”

Then Spanglish ran and did an inspired dive into the pool. This pool was heated but by no measure hot. One probably wouldn’t die from exposure after a whole night in it, but it wasn’t a treat, either, and Spanglish came and sunk back into the spa.

The girl had started laughing a while ago and hadn’t stopped. When finally she calmed down enough to speak, she said “You made two hella splashes. One with your stomach, and the other with the rest of you. It was hella big, too.”

“That’s because I’m fucking fat,” Spanglish replied.

Ilaughed hard.

The kids had been here for a week because the aunt of the girl left on vacation. She needed someone to feed her furballs. The kids volunteered, as they were on Thanksgiving break. The two drove down together and Spanglish took the “train.” The aunt had left them money and a car, but the party was over now. For me too.

Before I left I told them if they had munchies they’d better run into the main office. The bitches there were stuck up and would be cranky about the puddle they’d leave on the floor, but there were cookies on a silver platter that I would kill people for. They agreed and I left happy.

But there was something else, too. Like I’d eaten a good peach but accidentally chewed up the pit. These kids were fun, but they were fuck ups. I approved of the reason they were fucked up, but fundamentally it wasn’t the weed that made them fuck ups, but the fact that they were fuck ups that made them smoke the weed. The movie of their lives in fast-forward began to depress me, but I couldn’t shut it off. Suddenly I hit pause, and there it was: the girl was the girl in the spa from yesterday, and the guy was one of these guys or a combination of both. Devastated, I hit play and the movie ended. Credits rolled and everybody listed was a fuck up.

This led to introspection, whereupon I realized that I was a fuck up too.