Someone had stored a bottle of Dry Sack in the pantry. Kit wondered if it was customary to leave a gift behind. What a delight! He felt as if he had found Captain Kidd's lost treasure. O merry man was he!
Sitting with his trusty Olivetti portable at the desk, he scrunched his bare toes like snails, and each time he set down his glass he added a new water-ring to the etched surface. Wasn't long before he he'd fashioned interlocking rings. The Olympic Games: a chuckle.
Cassandra crept in, silent as a fairy. Tinkerbell stalking Peter Pan.
"Hope you saved me some." Evidently she had been eating dates.
"Wow! Your hair."
The spiky raven bob was history. She sported a crewcut stiff with Butch Wax. White as Alpine snow.
"Like it? Can't wait for Inez to see it."
Inez again.
It chafed him to think of her. Dark, firm muscles, buttocks most desirable. She was sprawled langourously across Cassandra's creamy sheets.
To change the direction Cassandra was going in, Kit said, "It took balls to change your hair that way."
"Why, thank you, sir."
"I mean it. It's boss."
"I'm blond all over."
"Show me."
She pirouetted naked. Then postured like a burlesque queen.
He cupped her knobby breasts with lazy hands. Then he snaked an arm around her doll-like waist and guided her back to his chair. Tilting her so that she would be fully illuminated, he commanded hoarsely, "Spread for me."
"You're creeping me out."
"From Solomon. My beloved thrust his hand through the hole in the door. I trembled to the core of my being."
Cassandra withdrew. "No!"
Scalded, Kit stormed from the room.
*
Ibiza swarmed with sexual mayflies. Trysts lasted only for a day.
Late that evening Kit went alone to a dance hall. The sherry had given him a headache. Inside a smoke-filled room with indolent ceiling fans he found a Mod crowd clapping praise to a jazzy flamenco artist. The bartender asked what he wanted to drink. Kit replied he didn't know.
"I've been drinking jerez and I have a headache. What do you suggest?"
The man poured him a yellow liquid that soon clamped a vise upon his brain.
"Hola, El Norte," came the greeting. Kit turned to encounter a young man in a floral-print shirt and khaki chinos. The open collar revealed a full shag of chest hair and a gold medallion showing the minotaur. Capped teeth glowed in black-light florescence. He purred, "I saw you come in and waited for that drink to work on you. My name is Ramon."
Kit grinned. "You look like a Ramon."
"Where is your lady?"
"Excuse me?"
"The little pageboy who pedals around with a camera."
"Ah," Kit smirked. "I'm getting the size of you."
"Hah.Not so fast, amigo."
*
Ramon told him of a nude beach a few miles south. Playa Cavallet, where the Children of Ba'al frolicked. Kit envisioned voluptuous women, tawny as Tunisian dunes, holding their breasts in milky supplication.
Fertility rites beneath the crescent moon.
To which the sons of Barca bayed like horndog jackles.
Already the row with Cassandra had slipped from his mind.
They sauntered down a lane of shuttered bodegas. Kit wore a green avocado paisley stuffed into western jeans.Wheatstraw hair tumbled lionlike about his shoulders. Ever self-conscious, perpetually posing to his imaginary camera, he gloried in this freewheeling psychedelic cowboy persona.
"I have a car," Ramon said. "We can ride now."
Parked behind a sleek one-passenger Messerscmidt was a dented primercoated Morris Minor. Kit stood fascinated with the Kraut car. It looked like a cockpit and canopy of an aircraft fuselage on wheels. It sported a vanity tag. VALKERIE.
"She's one of Nico's friends," Ramon explained.
"Nico? As in Velvet Undergrounnd?"
"Si. Come get in. The wreck is mine."
The British automobile cranked up like an old man with emphysema coughing to death. Then it farted black smoke. Ramon revved it and then allowed it to idle.
"So, Senor Kit. Do we pick up your little pageboy?"
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