Needless to say, we became intimately acquainted with human nature in its varied expressions, what some call “the ways of the world,” and the outlandish behavior of humans blowing off steam in exotic locales. We clung to the prows of Venetian gondolas littered with beer cans and nearly suffocated in stretch limousines packed with stag parties trolling the streets of Manhattan (Jay Gatsby would have paled!). We disappeared in cocaine drifts in Ibizan dance clubs and got trampled in discos in Rio de Janeiro. We passed out in cheap hostels in Dublin and four-star hotels in Dubai. We found ourselves dumfounded by unspeakable doings in the back alleys of Bangkok.
Some of us returned to St. Anne as citizens of the world, bearing stories of wondrous things and the terrible weight of hard-earned wisdom. With little difficulty, we recognized the signs of moral depravity that marked the Ambassador’s typical guests: discount travelers, individuals with undiscerning palates, and the unfortunates expelled from the drunk tanks and infirmaries of cruise ships. Any goodwill on the part of these anti-socialites rarely extended to our kind, so we studied them from a distance. We huddled in air ducts and observed their awkward movements, odd grooming habits and unsightly mating rituals. Once they departed, we’d sample the remnants of partially digested delicacies and the residue clinging to plastic cups (“What happens in St. Anne stays in St. Anne,” guests used to say, and how true, for they always left their trash behind!). We lived off their garbage, and by their garbage, we knew them. We knew what they disregarded and most desperately treasured. We knew of their inexplicable anxieties and aversions. We often wondered whether the splendorous Earth described by Geoffrey Morrow could, in fact, sustain “infinite varieties of tree and flower and beast.” Would Morrow, had he imagined the sorts expelled from the Celeste, have retained his precious faith?
CHAPTER THREE
THE TWO AMERICANS EXPELLED from the Celeste that November afternoon were more subdued than most. The man went to the Ambassador’s lounge without bothering to book a room. With a cigarette burning between two fingers, he sat alone at the end of the bar, quietly contemplating the harbor through a glass door covered with dust and fingerprints. He ordered a beer and a rum chaser to mark the Celeste’s slow passage from the harbor, reveling in his release from its narrow service stairwells and the windowless rooms beneath its waterline. Who could blame him? The Celeste was a real shitshow for cockroaches, not to mention its crew members and more depressive passengers. Those of us who’d crawled off the ship earlier that day, sugar-addled and shattered, shared his relief.
He recalled his first moments on land and the sensation he’d experienced, struck by the vivid contrast between the sky’s postcard blue and the patchwork of green and gold covering a rise of hills. He’d let his eyes wander down cobblestone streets and over the glistening skin of men loading crates onto flatbed trucks. He’d inhaled the scent of overripe bananas and exulted in his unexpected dismissal, an opportunity, he’d told himself, imagining unmeasured hours and unaccounted days unfolding before him. He’d turned to the Celeste and watched the last passengers board, delighted not to be among them.
Where the ship had been, gulls now skimmed the water. He considered wandering back into town to lose himself in dark clubs and light conversations with strangers. First, he decided, he’d have another drink.
He ordered a beer and a pack of Silk Cuts from the bartender, lit a cigarette and forgot about it, and then lit another before the first burned down in an ashtray. He swiveled unsteadily on his barstool and looked out at the patio, where two women sat at a tiki bar, sucking pink slush through straws and appraising a bellboy skimming debris from a pool with a shallow net. The steep arches of their penciled eyebrows reminded him of drag queens he’d known in Miami, and he smiled at the association until the phrase “pool boy” entered his mind. He turned from the patio and gripped the edge of the bar. When he looked outside again, the patio was empty. He met the blank gaze of a man dimly reflected upon smudged glass, spending his meager severance pay and drinking to forget.
“I’ve come to the wrong place to seek my fortune,” he said.
He pulled an employee badge from his pocket. He studied the smooth face in a thumbnail photo and the barcode beside his name. Being fired was for the best, he thought. He’d spent too many years adrift at sea, delivering towels and mopping up spills and sleeping with strangers in expensive suites.
“A long fucking rut,” he whispered.
He slumped against the bar and entertained disparate thoughts connected to the drawn-out day. He’d never been a victim, he assured himself. Even as a closet case growing up in a rustbelt Michigan town with four closed foundries, he’d never surrendered to circumstance. On streets lined with foreclosed houses, pawnshops, and bail bond offices, he’d been restless where others had been resigned. In high school, he scavenged from abandoned buildings, stripping copper pipes and light fixtures from the walls and carting abandoned furniture to consignment shops. He made his way by selling bits of the past in a place with no future. In his ability to find modest riches amidst rubbish, Dave Fowles was a man after our hearts.
Five months after he graduated from high school, he crawled into a house strewn with the mildewed blankets of departed squatters and discovered a porn magazine splayed open to a tribute to “The Boys of Miami Beach.” He knelt down before a series of epilated men squeezing and swallowing each other, and fourteen seconds later, he shuddered and released a wordless prayer to the sound of hail beating against a cracked window. One year later, he boarded a Greyhound bus for Miami, carrying only a duffel bag, a fake driver’s license, and directions to a cheap hostel. Again, who could blame him? He’d just spent twelve months making minimum wage in a subterranean garage, flushing out the oily intestines of rusted cars and dreaming of six-pack abdomens.
In the Ambassador’s lounge, he recalled his first impressions of Miami as a place bathed in golden light. He recalled the astonishing array of foreign flags fluttering from convertibles’ antennas, the Spanish names of tiny grocery stores, pastel Art Deco motels and rainbow decals on café windows. He recalled the bronzed skin of beautiful men. He recalled the absence of grey.
He’d spent his first few weeks in Miami cradling rum-filled coconut shells in beachfront bars, downing cocktails in dark clubs, blushing at the jokes of powdered queens, and throwing up in bathrooms bathed in black light, where we flourished in filthy stalls, our wings opalescent beneath glowing graffiti. He leased a room in a subdivided house (with a gorgeously begrimed communal kitchen), fed potato chips to seagulls perched on his windowsill, and learned fragments of French from a Haitian woman across the hall. He experimented with ecstasy and cocaine and eventually settled on rum and tequila. He browsed sex shops and local newspapers, learning equal amounts from each as he explored crowded streets filled with color and the promise of new life.
Just before his money ran out, he found his first in a long series of short-lived jobs, and with it, his first lover. At a club called Rough Riders—a place we rarely ventured unless tempted against our better judgment by the playlists on MasterMix Tuesdays—he loaded industrial dishwashers and picked up bartending tricks, along with an aspiring model from Belize. For months, Dave and Miguel spent every night together, each recounting stories of places exotic to the other. Dave spoke of county fairs and cinnamon-dusted elephant ears. Miguel described the emerald feathers of quetzal birds, sapphire lakes and volcanoes shrouded in mist, overgrown ruins carved with tributes to ancient kings, and a childhood spent chasing monkeys behind waterfalls. Dave never considered that Miguel’s stories were soothing lullabies, fabrications as fantastic as any tale fashioned to draw children into pleasant dreams.
When Miguel decided to seek his fortunes in New York, he left Dave with visions of resplendent equatorial beauty and stirrings of restlessness. On the twelfth anniversary of his arrival in Miami, Dave applied for a job with Maiden Cruises, daydreaming of jungles teeming with monkeys as he checked boxes on a two-page aptitude test. He became a work
out attendant aboard the Celeste one week later.
He never set foot in Belize. He beheld the country of his dreams as he viewed most Maiden Cruise destinations, through a fitness center’s tinted windows or the plastic weave of a cyclone fence surrounding the staff sundeck. He spent his days sterilizing elliptical trainers and wiping sweat from the seats of sedentary bicycles. He spent his evenings in the windowless world below the waterline, a labyrinth of service stairwells and narrow corridors painted battleship grey, that is, until he began trespassing on the world of moonlit decks and swim-up bars to pursue illicit trysts with the besotted businessmen and college students he’d harnessed to the Celeste’s climbing wall. At least once a week, he strolled down a carpeted hallway with a fresh towel draped over his arm and a cabin number inked onto his palm. Had it been possible, we would have explained the risks of dalliance above the waterline, where maintenance crews employed the worst kinds of sprays, so that air seemed scarce and life uncertain. Once, his Latvian bunkmate tried to impart the hard-earned wisdom of exiles.
“Someday, you go too far,” he said. “You know orientation? The only thing guest should remember is staff smile. There is not fraternizing. That word. In English is fucking, right?”
Perhaps only those who have been hunted to the ends of every five-star restaurant understand the importance of reading between the lines. Dave little understood euphemisms or the limits of fraternity. Six hours ago, he’d gone too far.
He considered a smudged number on his palm and remembered smooth hands on his hips and the world listing as everything grew warm and wet. He never heard the door or saw the mother until he felt the chill of saliva evaporating from his penis. He lifted his head from a pillow and yanked his pants over his dying erection, and two hours later, the cruise director gave him three hundred dollars in back pay and fired him for fraternizing with a seventeen-year-old who’d claimed to be in college.
He rubbed the smear of ink on his palm and looked across the harbor, at the outlines of shops and houses dissolving along the shore and the tiny crescent of yellow lights appearing in their place. He pushed aside an empty bottle. It was time to move on, he thought. He’d always extricated himself from moribund places and hopeless situations, even if he’d had to leave certain people behind, including the woman wearing a ragged sweater with misery ground into its threads.
When he first saw her, she’d just been escorted from the terminal and left on the curb by two security guards. She sat down on a suitcase and pulled her sweater over her narrow shoulders and, with a difficulty that sickened him, over the bandages covering her inner arms. She lifted her face once, beheld her surroundings with a stupefied gaze and turned in his direction. He’d grown agitated by a sense of uninvited responsibility, and against his better judgment he’d persuaded her to share a cab. She looked as insubstantial as the breeze, but as he led her toward the taxi, he’d felt the impossible pull of gravity, the weight of a broken albatross clinging to his neck.
When he flagged the bellboy and abandoned the woman in the lobby, he hadn’t acted callously, he told himself, but in honest recognition of his own helplessness. Unsettled, still, he dedicated himself to spending his severance pay, flattening debased bills on the bar and dissolving lingering uncertainties in successive beers. When his fingertips went numb, he assured himself that everything had been for the best, and that his next beer would be his last before he wandered into town. At the end of the night, he’d sleep on a secluded beach, lulled by the sound of waves breaking beneath a pale moon.
Had it been possible, we might have told him how few can slumber on beaches without a care for incoming tides.
When Professor Cleave entered the lounge, he dragged his hand along his neck with a mild sense of displeasure, one he associated less with the chill of perspiration cooling too quickly than the sight of his last passenger slumped on a stool. Lost in his own reflection, the man evoked a perfect picture of intellectual dereliction. He had the pose of a man dissolving every thought flitting at the edge of a dulled conscience. Professor Cleave stepped behind the bar and began slicing limes into identical segments. The man had at least parted company with the woman, he thought, and then startled at the sound of his voice.
“I’ll have another.” Dave leaned across the bar. “Hey, I was in your cab.”
Professor Cleave appraised Dave’s lopsided smile and placed a bowl of peanuts on the bar.
“Ain’t that the shit?” Dave lifted his badge and squinted at the image of his face until the card slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. “My services are no longer required. Told the guy at the dock I’m seeking my fortunes here. Told me I came to the wrong place.”
Professor Cleave set a bottle on the counter. “That would depend on what you want to do.”
“Spent years mopping up sweat and helping people live out Everest fantasies on a climbing wall.” Dave cracked open a peanut. “Time for a change is all I got to say.”
“I suppose you know best.” Professor Cleave looked at the rings of condensation beneath Dave’s fingers. “It’s no small thing to lose a job.”
“I can pull a job on some other line.” Dave shrugged. “Just glad to be off that ship. It was turning into a sick ward. Quarantine tape on doors. People mixing up plates at buffets. Kids shitting in pools. Too many fucking people in one place.”
Dave was leaning forward, as if to speak in confidence, when two men in polo shirts stepped up to the bar.
“Two Cane Cutters,” one said. He turned to his companion. “The national drink here. When in Rome, they say.”
“Ain’t exactly Rome.” The second man tossed a credit card onto the bar. “I was pricing generators. Half are from Eastern Europe. The rest are from American companies that went belly up years ago.”
“Soviet junk the Russians don’t want and Midwestern scrap.”
“Ted’s pissed about the nickel-and-diming. He thinks St. Anne’s an opportunity. There’s still some beachfront real estate left.”
Professor Cleave uncapped a bottle of rum and feigned concentration on the garnishes rimming two glasses.
“With workers from the DR, we’ll stay under budget.”
“Bring that up tomorrow at the Plantations. I’m shifting over first thing in the morning. Can’t believe the secretary put me in the wrong hotel.”
Dave listened quietly until the men collected their drinks and left for the patio. “Guys like that can really ruin a buzz,” he said.
“Expense-account entrepreneurs.” Professor Cleave trailed off.
“Midwestern scrap. What assholes.” Dave picked at the label on his bottle. “So, Cane Cutters.”
Professor Cleave turned a lime over in his hand. “They’re popular with tourists. So they’re the national drink.”
“Watched you make them. Used to make a version when I was bartending in Miami. Rum. Red Bull. Chocolate liqueur. Called it a Bull Run.”
“You left Miami to work on the ship?”
“Wanted to see the world. Ever been to Miami?”
“I’ve never left St. Anne. Years ago, my uncle lived in New York. Or Newark.” Professor Cleave paused. “He always said I should join him, but there were too many things to do here.”
“Good to know. I’m tempted to stick around.”
“If it’s paid work you want, you’ll be a long time looking.”
“That’s what your friend at the dock said.”
Professor Cleave swept a peanut husk from the bar. “Desmond is one to foul his own nest.”
“A man after my own heart. Hiring cab drivers?”
“You’ll need to join the union, and it helps to marry someone’s sister or cousin.”
Dave lit a cigarette. “Afraid that ain’t in the cards, brother.”
Professor Cleave turned to a mounted television and watched Lyndon Buttskell smile at a reporter. “There you go again, Little Butts.”
“Who’s that?”
“Our prime minister, Lyndon Buttskell.”
“You just call him Little Butts?”
“That’s what everybody calls him.”
“Not liked much, I take it,” Dave said.
“There’s little of substance to like or dislike.”
“Not a bad-looking guy.”
“He’s the best of a bad lot.” Professor Cleave rubbed his fingertips together. “He belongs to the taxi drivers’ union.”
“He drives a cab?”
“He’s never driven a car in his life. You don’t get to be prime minister by driving a taxi.”
“No shit.” Dave took a drag off his cigarette. “Speaking of cabs, where do people go around here? Clubs, that kind of thing.”
“You wouldn’t go into Portsmouth at night. You’ll find Americans at the Plantations. People on holiday from Minnesota, Michigan. The Midwest.”
“You’ve heard of Michigan?”
“I read about it.” Professor Cleave sliced a lime in half. “Henry Ford. General Motors.”
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