libation to the gods

        In blazing gotterdammerung the sun made its emotive exit from the stage. McEwan sat on a dock by Indigo Bay and watched the seaplane shuttle arrive from Florida. Awaiting it was the island taxi. A huge blue sedan manufacured in Detroit right after WW2. Fastidiously preserved.
        Beside it stood the driver. A tall black man, dapper in a white linen suit. McEwan knew him as Daddy Doc. Yoruba lineage. Very old, but straight of spine. Augustly mannered and regally reserved. Civil to everyone and professionally courteous. Most striking feature, an icy stare, hidden most of the time behind grotesque mirrorshades.
        McEwan watched a vacation couple alight from the plane and load themselves into the taxi. Giddy and gabby. Without speaking, Daddy Doc drove away with them. As the taxi passed by, McEwan waved to them and they waved in return.
        Wasn't life grand?


                                                                            *


        He decided to follow the taxi to the hotel. He walked along the causeway and thought about a play of his that was currently in troubled production in New York. He laughed. When wasn't there trouble?
        All of his plays, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway and Way Off Broadway, had been bleeding migraines. At the moment he was determined not to be involved in production. He had told the producer and director to consider the playwright dead. Deceased. Just like Shakespeare.
       Their silence was deafening as a dropped tray of dinner plates.
        "Figure out how you want to do it," he had cajoled. "Shanghai the cast. Sleep with all of them if you must. Get drunk, drive up to the Cape and fuck their brains out in P'town. But leave me alone. I'm trying to write."



                                                                             *


        The hotel offered a spiffy South Beach trattoria run by a Cuban couple from Calle Ocho in Miami, and he would have a cup off coffee and a saucer of sliced guava with cream cheese. Then he remembered that the new busboy there was his King Sailor lad. So he picked up the pace. He would get the lad's name and address and maybe buy him a small gift.
        Las Palmas was a neon jewel at the end of a long driveway flanked by white-painted royal palms.
Breezes off Indigo Bay danced in the washingtonia fronds. McEwan smiled. Landscaping had created a little piece of Henry Flagler's Gold Coast. Perhaps too stately for the poor island. But what the hell?
        McEwan strode inside. Polished brass and wood glinted, reflecting globular lighting from the ceiling fans. He could see himself in the blond hardwood floor leading into the trattoria. Lighting in there was subdued. Diffused luminescence leaked like ectoplasm from tubes behind the bar. The bartender's white bib apron glowed in the ultraviolet radience above the glassware. Each table owned its individual pool of light, cast by green-shaded brass lamps. Swank for the Go-Go '90s.
        The dress code was casual.
        McEwan wore a burgandy and white rugby shirt and khaki cargo slacks. He spotted the busboy, bent over a distant table and clearing away the bottles and slop for a party of five. The smug waiter swooped down like a raptor and snatched away the gratuity.
        McEwan sauntered to the deserted bar and from there he admired the firm buns of the lad. African buttocks drove him crazy. God, the lad is gorgeous!
       


                                                                           *


        "Serve you, sir?"
        The bartender startled the bejesus out of him!
        The Cuban was dark of groomed beard and swarthy. Crisp collar and cuffs. "Sorry. You're having--?"
        "Meyers on the rocks."
        "Very good."
        So much for coffee and guava with cream cheese, McEwan mused.
        When the bartender set down the rum and turned to go McEwan asked, "Excuse me. That busboy. What's his name?"
        "Jimmy. Jaime. Take your pick. He's a real scamp."
        McEwan slipped the bartender a New York fin.
        Two drinks later he paid the bar tab with his AMEX card. The receipt came with an additional piece of paper. In faint pencil: Jaime's home address.
        He went outside. There were iron tables on the flagstone patio overlooking the seawall. Not far to the East, foamy surf crunched upon coral battlements.
        An array of flambeaux flickered. The wind sighed in the Australian pines. He was quite alone. He sat at the table nearest the seawall. Opened his tote bag, withdrew a notepad and a Uniball pen.
        Then like the ancient Greeks in Homer he poured a sacrificial libation to the Gods.
        This ridiculous ritual cost him a modest amount of Planter's Punch. He laughed. No harm in a bit of honest superstition.
         He began composing a dramatic scene. Silver-tongued Calliope sat with him, singing strange exotic words, tapping her new tamborine.

candles part three cont.

        The Jolly Roger was serving hair of the dog. There would be cinnamon rolls and dark coffee on the sideboard, compliments of Hannah Ramirez, owner of the upstairs bed-and-breakfast. McEwan bought a Daily Gleaner from Chubby Guzman's kiosk on Bowling Green and strolled on to the pub. If that crazy Cayman guy who ran the place was in a good mood then together they could solve the problems of the world in the context of soccer.
         In college McEwan had played rugby. Even drove a battered aquamarine VW Bug with a bumper-sticker: RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD. He boasted that soccer was played by pussies and watched by hooligans. Bashing toward the goal, he would imagine he was a naked Celt smeared blue with wold. Battling the entire Saxon Wulf clan.
         "So who's going to win the World Cup?"
         "We been through all dat."
         "All right. Then who's going to have the most rowdies thrown in jail?"
         "Now dat's worthy of thought."
         Sports, McEwan was thinking. A white man and a black man can always shoot the shit about sports.
         "Tell me about your local hero. Guzman."
         "We call him Angel Eyes. All the women love him. He gathers dere foolish hearts and runs away wid dem."
         "How is he on the field?"
         "Could be anudder Pele."
         "Well, Cap, I'm off to the club.


                                                                              *


         Established in 1936 during the hey-day of boxing, the club housed a ring and a gymnasium that provided punching bags, free weights, skip ropes, wrestling mats, and lockers and showers with an optional low-fee towel service. Built of cement block and stone and painted in broad horizontal stripes of cerulean (sky),avocado (rain forest) and burnt sienna (earth), it stood proudly in a neighborhood of island poverty. The finest tropical hardwoods were installed, maintained and polished throughout the years. Like the church, it was a center of spiritual sanctity, supported by people who did not mind pouring their hard-earned money into it. It was their basilica. Even gangsters showed it respect. After-hours scrub parties kept personal areas clean and disinfected. The entire place was swabbed and as trim as a navy gunboat. In fair exchange for volunteer custodial work the club gave its members a bonus sense of self-worth and esteem.


                                                                        *


         McEwan stripped down to a jockstrap and gray flannel shorts. He started his reps. Sit-ups and ab-crunches. Thinking that Maurice could only envy such perfection.



        
        
        

   

candles part three

        Wrapped in soiled sheets and feeling as hung-over and strung-out as ever, Bernice listened to the discreetly muffled grunts and coughs he made during bathroom duties. The little noises of intimacy. In her mind they acquired maddening cadence, the blood-beat resounding from cave wall to cave wall of her skull like a bass drum.
        He is so damned self-absorbed. If only he knew or cared that I exist!
        With mixed emotions, nausea and despair, she turned her head to the bedroom wall. Before she knew it her thoughts had slipped into neutral gear and she was interpretting the scallops of paster as if they were tea leaves.


                                                                            *


        McEwan showered and buffed dry with terrycloth that smelled wonderfully of her vanilla soap, and he thought, what a chimerical person his wife had become. Before going out he checked in on her. Fetus-like beneath the sheet, hiding, so it seemed, from the world. He even grieved a little.


                                                                             *


        Up the cobblestone avenue of flaming bougainvillea and croton, McEwan ambled to the crest of a hill. Through the pine and seagrape and migrating dune he could see tiny mangrove islets. Beyond, the broad Caribbean rippled in the sun all the way to the far horizon, where clouds, pink and mother-of-pearl, sailed like Spanish galleons.
        He felt splendidly free of care.
        Sans souci.
        A perfect title for his nearly completed play.
    

candles for santa barbara part two

        Standing in his library amid raucous recollections, McEwan gazed at the framed lithograph of Thomas Hart Benton's poker scene from "A Streetcar Named Desire." He remembered the lad Maurice had brought to the party last night. Introductions were warm and earthy and all eyes gleamed. He remembered the creamy chocolate buttocks and sotto voce cries and whispers. "Be still, be still, my little hummingbird!"
       The affair had been an olfactory buffet. Nutmeg, cinnamon and waswe seed.
       The boy had been costumed as the Carnival character King Sailor. McEwan peered behind the sofa and discovered the white duck trousers and feathered crown. Evidently the boy had fled in his skivvies. Taking the bottle of spiced rum.


                                                                                   *


        It took twenty minutes to fix breakfast.
        Swiss muesli with skim milk and a stand-up pot of cowboy coffee. He was pouring another jolt of joe when Bernice joined him. She uncapped her St. John's Wort and downed a handfull with a swig of Evian.
        "When did they all leave?"
        He replied, "I have no idea."
        He watched her walk shakily from the nook and wondered if she remembered the throes of athletic passion, when he fucked her as he had fucked the lad.
   

candles for santa barbara

        The air at dawn was verdantly cool, sifting through a riot of hibiscus, oleander and orchid. A sea breeze gently nudged through the bedroom lattice and fanned the two people supine in the marbled light. Their bodies smelled of perspired Bombay gin and Meyer's rum. Bedsheets were pungent with roiled sex. Sounds of early morning did not disturb their moist slumber. (A milk truck jounced down their serpentine lane of stucco walls and Spanish tiles, its cages of ice and bottles jangling and clinking. Half a mile distant, gulls cavorted in a cumulus din, hungry and mean, over Indigo Bay.) Finally McEwan woke. He studied the frowzy features of his wife for a moment and then slid from the wide brass bed. Bernice stirred and let go a dainty fart. Tumultuous red frizzy hair masked her bloodless porcelain face. All he could see of it was a dreamy Mona Lisa smile.
        McEwan crept through the windy old Queen Anne house and collected martini and highball glasses. Amazingly a few wooden bowls had mixed nuts and cubes of dried fruit remaining in them: dregs of his Carnival artists & models blowout. The Key West crowd flew in on the seaplane shuttle, got laid, and departed in an orgone frenzy. An orgy worthy of Petronius: it paled in comparison to those incredible parties hosted by that Creole libertine up the lane. A craftsman who made his fortune in the States, selling amulets and talismans to New Age shops, Maurice lived like there was no tomorrow. He would cart in a troupe of voodoo jumping jacks, The Dancing Dead. And hold court during calypso mating rights that surely riled the Underworld. Gamblers bet on cockfights and even the occasional duel, with Maurice providing black-powder pistols. Rancor and lust blazed amid tropical flambeaux. He boasted that his role model was the Roman tyrant Caligula.
        "Where did you hear of Caligula?"
        Maurice shrugged. "Camus."
        "Ah, you've been sharing a bong with old Pico."


                                                                                        *


        Maurice had skin the color of  cafe con leche. Determined to look younger than his years, he shaved his head daily with a straight razor. No tell-tale gray moustache or beard. He kept fit and trim and would parade about shirtless. His nipples, including a small third one, were the color of jungle mahogany. Women wagered Maurice was the most romantically desired man on the island of St. James.
        Profoundly bored with McEwan, he looked about the room. "Isn't that your wife idling by the bar?"
        Bernice was wearing a "tropical heatwave" gown that held her melons like a grocery sack.
        "That's her."
        "Excuse me, Guv. You are such a mandarin."
        Maurice rubbed his golden earring and walked away, feeling lucky.