Island Sojourn
In two hours, you can meet someone and fuck, abruptly ending a conversation of limited utility. You met up after the sex show finished with a confusingly uncomfortable spectacle, a mixed race girl being held in place by two important hooded gang officials with nazi tattoos. She masturbated with more and more force, honey brown ringlets bobbing before eventually showering the front row with a mixture of sweat and mythical female ejaculate.
You turned around and realized you were left in the convention center with three minor porn stars, and the hungry audience of the sex show, a mix of bikers, salarymen out for a roll and tattoo artists. You are the only woman who wasn’t in the show. The grumble of Harleys punctuates the background, and glancing at your phone you realize its nearly 2 in the morning. Your pumpkin is in danger of putrefaction, so you amble down the sidewalk along the highway back to the center as fast as you can, walking fast and then faster as you hear the tuning cars slow and nearly stop as they pass by. Some go as far as to roll down their windows.
…
Up ahead you hear the click clack of suitcase wheels and see a group of artists; you strain to catch up. You reach them only to realize it’s the group of Brazilians whom you had been taking pictures of, and you present yourself. Polite miscommunication ensues. They are thrilled to find themselves with a lonely girl in these hours and invite you up to their room for a beer.
As soon as you enter the room the tone changes and what seemed to be a cohesive group fractures. Turning around you realize that the others have left and you are left alone with one, making small talk some minutes more you wonder whether it might be the moment to start moving along. After all, he speaks one language and you another. He is not the best-looking nor the most articulate. Yet the action unfolds as if scripted: after 10 minutes of constant repetition and misunderstanding, the most logical action is a round of show and tell. He undoes his pants and shows you his dick. It has been adorned with a row of little balls under the skin of the shaft. The first image that pops into your head is a small plastic dinosaur, the type children play with. You ask him if it hurt (no, local anesthesia) and why (for you, for all women with whom I cross paths). He lunges for a kiss. You succumb. His tongue is probing, he inhales your neck, you are cornered next to the open window, he presses against you with all the force of the unsaid as he reaches into your silence.
…
Your bra is off, then your stockings, he enters you, the window frame is a ballast, silence reins in the courtyard, to the bed, he looks you over legs splayed, appreciatively, for just a second before pushing back into you, still holding on as if to trap. And you keep; you come simultaneously, heaving, screaming and without even taking off all your clothes. As you reach for your shirt his friends enter the hotel room with beer and chips, a few hits of marijuana, giggles, your face tells everything. You enter the bathroom and when you come out, he’s gone. Suddenly you are left alone in the hotel room with his friends, the ones who had disapeared so conveniently 25 minutes before. “And Marcos?” you ask the one who understands the most Spanish, he looks at you with a smile and says “Marcos es muy loco, no? Se fue!” and he offers you a swig of water dosed with MDMA. You take a gulp of the bitter water, then another, and say goodbye.
…
It’s four in the morning, the first Sunday in August, and the island is still deserted. The air is warm and humid, new moon darkness shrouding the streetlights. You’re dressed like a hooker on her way home, who has already slipped on her sandals, platforms safely stored in her bag. Your cunt is still wet and obliging. The cars pull up slowly and some even ask how much. Not a taxi in sight.
Your flight off the island leaves in 4 hours, and it’s an hour ride back to your hotel, another hour to the airport and when a taxi finally pulls up, it is crowned in a halo of lights like Mary, or maybe it’s just the drugs, and you get in.
…
This is what you tell the taxi driver, fighting the desire to stroke your legs, your waist, to slide out of your clothes and erupt in ecstasy haze: You tell him everything, the whole weekend, you excuse yourself beforehand mentioning you’re stoned out of your mind, you just took some E and it’s beginning to crest. You tell him how you got on the plane after a terrible fight with your boyfriend, how you arrived to the island with an old friend of your boss’s, your boss, Malvado, who’s fucking your 18 year old housemate and has his eye on you and looked to pay your share of the trip with an imagined sexual compliance. As soon as you arrived to the hotel room, a package tour dive with 4 twin beds yet barely enough space to breathe, drunken englishmen who opened their doors to say boo as you passed through the hall, you climbed in the shower and when you got out, boss’s friend was naked except for a towel, calmly stroking himself.
As you reached into the closet for clothes he got up, dropped the towel and inelegantly pressed himself against you. Everything is slow motion, you send him back to his bed, continue looking for socks or panties, and he is back again, towel dropped, pressed against you looking for a socket. You sternly scolded him, saying you would take refuge in the rocks below and went to do yoga looking at the blue-green sea.
…
When you came back up he was still naked except for the towel, and quickly got back to stroking himself, pleading, haggling. Like the wolf he said, sit closer, you say, fine but stop touching yourself, what makes you think?…
Thing is nothing makes him think, nothing really makes you think either. Something about the island makes thoughts instantly musky and grasping, the heat, the salt in the air, the reigning deccadence. The phone rings, the devil is on the other end of the line, begging to know where the stash of valium is, he’s loosing it, he’s says he’ll replace it as soon as he can, he can replace it with speed tomorrow but if you want valium it might be longer, he just can’t anymore: the rock life, the unemployment, the divorce, you, mind-bending witch, he already looked through all your boxes and didn’t find it, where the fuck is it and once again you say calm down, it’s in the underwear drawer with all the other secrets.
…
You tell him, fine, take it, but please feel better by the time I get back, no more screaming, no more vacillation or violence, no more disappearing, take it and sleep for god’s sake, just take it and sleep, my love.
…
Towel boy has gotten back to masturbating. He’s not going to snap out of it. He spews forth fantasies, asks how you can just leave him like that, raging with desire. You try bargaining and you loose. You don’t want to fuck me, I’m not your type. And you’re not attractive to me at all. Even so, you start fucking him, or he starts fucking you, you’re not even really sure, he fucks like an adolescent who has seen too much porn, like its easy as slipping a coin in the mechanical bull and riding the wave of time provided. You start to criticize his technique, coming as you excoriate his style, his paunch, his sleazy approach. By the time you start talking about what a bastard he is, what would he do to the man who approached his sister or his girlfriend or his mother like that, he’s gone limp.
…
Pyrrhic victory to the letter: whatever had been said about the expenses evidences a terrible confusion about the price for your ass. Malvado was late paying you, and you don’t even have the cash to pay your share out of your own pocket. Malvado tries to convice you on the phone that the trip is your payment and that he will only pay you on the condition that you pay for the trip. He doesn’t answer Towel boy’s call; the promised consort was less than obliging, Malvado hangs up as you ask him for the money one last time and ask him how the hell he sent you off with this frotteur who thought you were collateral for the loan.
The next morning Towel Boy awakes and apologizes half-heartedly, asking when your boss is going to pay back your share of the ticket, showing you his morning erection just to see if you’ve changed your mind.
…
The convention is a bust, barely advertised, before the start of high season, and almost no one is working. During the course of the day, you take pictures of everyone, they will be some of the best you take while working for the magazine. You talk to everyone, a flor de piel; despite the lack of customers, people are relaxed.
Perhaps because of the lack of customers, people are relaxed and don’t mind taking the time to talk or have a beer. One beer turns into several, and you meet quite a few people: V, an American artist who has been living in Spain for a few years, he hardly speaks a word of Spanish but his crazy stories make you nostalgic for the America you never knew. His client Zombie Jesus makes eyes at you that send shivers, as he taciturnly splays forth his arm to be decorated with a ghoulish scene. P draws your attention from across the hall because in the macho wild west of the tattoo world, he is wearing eyeliner.
And what eyes more deserving of eyeliner! Obsidian black and piercing, they attract your attention from a distance, and the diffidence which goes with them makes you almost giddy. He introduces you to Bibi and Kiko, a couple that seem straight out of a movie, laid back, ambitious and in love, so complementary and exuberant. The Gilded one, who once worked with Malvado, proudly introduces his gilded wife and children, seconds after inviting you to escape somewhere quiet.
Later you go out for drinks with P, Bibi and Kiko, and within ten minutes it turns into a double date as P slip his hand across your skin. Everyone is bawdy from the alcohol. In P’s hostel guests are not allowed up and you wonder where to go back to. Towel-boy had supposedly gone drinking as well and you bring your new lover back to the room, after all there are 4 beds. As you enter, he mumbles in his half sleep, who’s there, Me, you answer sweetly, and who else, he shoots back, me, says P, just coming to sleep. From the accent towel boy knows, he tells you and your friend to get the fuck out, and you do, walking along the beach highway until you find a cheap hotel where you begin to drift into the uneven ocean of each other’s bodies, finally, as the sun rises.
In the brief apex of insanity, borderless in the artificial darkness and cold rush of air-conditioning, you feel you could fall in love with this elegant and impulsive lover but push the thought away.
…
The air on the island is pregnant with decline, a sexually tinged beginning of the end, a smoky postcoital fading into a fevered sleep. The island is over, it was ruined years ago, when the Brits began to arrive with handy variety stores and metal framed pubs serving fried eggs and fish. You and P walk back to the center followed by a piercing sunlight, looking out at a shallow coast edged by a mosaic of baking bodies, beige, pink, cinnamon and sand. A slick layer of suncreen glimmers out to high sea.
…
Over pasta on the pier, the Gilded one tells you he’s getting out, things are terrible with his wife, the island is no place to raise a family, the island is for club kids and ghosts, filled with Succubi, filled with trash. He skirts the subject of Malvado, it’s not his style to get involved, and proceeds to outline his dreams, we are almost there, he says, the clan is mobile and winters in Southeast Asia, the life of constant distractions, color and beauty. Not like the island, with barely enough land to share and all the best clubs shuttered, the bland din of chill-out classics playing in even the most traditional cafes. The island isn’t what it used to be; it’s turned plastic, the summer traffic is unbearable and the new crowd isn’t looking for the mystic undercurrent which first put the island on the map.
…
The taxi driver agrees, he’s lived on the island his whole life, and knows every road, new and old. He tells you of the girl he once picked up completely naked, alone on the highway outside one of the mega discoteques, the countless times passengers have vomited, others who try and seduce him sloppily with drugs or need a ride direct to the hospital. He sees himself as something of a saviour; working later than the others and on off-days, he often manages to pluck someone out of the deepest reaches of the night, and deliver them safely to their destination. You too also feel compelled to express your gratitude, his appearance saved you from an uncertain end. He gives you his private number, just in case you are ever on the island again and need a taxi. You feel honored.
…
Boarding the plane you barely feel the effects of MDMA; you dream is over and yet the dream continues; you know what you saw, and who you met. A swirl of doors open.
…
If this were a work of fiction about the evolution of the uber-slut, our protagonist would conveniently fuck all of the characters she meets in that dream-like weekend of sin, deccadence and taxi cab redemption. In fiction, the line between dreams and reality is only as blurry as the author’s intention. In fiction, everything falls into place and the story unfolds just-so.
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Let’s assume, then, that this is a fiction. Some things are based in truth, as seamless fiction is rooted in reality. However truth is as slippery as any representational goal. Truth is in the middle, a consensual agreement between various participants in an act. In this case, there is no one here to give their consent or perspective, meaning that the truth of the matter is unknown. Truth, stranger than fiction, is the verdict of a jury. Truth is never the work of one, though it can’t be the sacrifice of many.
Three blind men coming upon an elephant find a bear, a magic wand and the maternal womb writ large. Truth exists in a vacuum and withers on contact with air. Truth is not to be confused with aperture, confidence or intimacy although we use it as shorthand for these concepts.
Memory, in similar fashion, is not to be read for truth. Memory is a series of drawers that open and close at will; within them, objects are misplaced, dust grows, termites open holes and channels. Some drawers are painted to stand out, others still are painted shut. In memory the mind simplifies and invents to make the remembered narrative conform to a larger truth; memory is constantly being reorganized to serve the present.
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The turn of phrase, “if memory serves,” strictly speaking, is a fiction; memory doesn’t serve. Memory forgets, it edits, it assuages, it hardens, it assumes, it colors. In the act of retelling, we almost always reinvent the missing details to give the illusion of truth. Memory is not an adequate exponent of truth; rather, memory is the base of fiction. Any similarities to real events or people within this work is purely coincidental and underscores the author’s lack of creativity. Because this is a fiction.
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Perhaps what is most mysterious about memory is what is forgotten: the vast plane of our experience which is unaccessible and does not consciously inform our day to day experience. Why do we remember some details and not others? Why are some memories so much more vivid than others? What determines the complex set of associations that returns us, by force, to certain moments and visions of the past?
Memory is not a choice. You can ask any student who has stayed up late studying for a test
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All life is a constantly evolving fiction unto death, which is the one truth no one can deny. Truth does not evolve, because truth is. Truth is the present. The past is a fiction which bears more or less resemblance to truth based on the memory of the witness.
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