jenny and mac

        Pirate Jenny wore an eye-patch. She told inquisitive strangers, tourists, idiots and fools that she lost her eye in a Key West bar-brawl. Truth is she was struck by flying debris in the prop-wash of her daddy's seaplane when she was fourteen. Piddling around the dock. Fishing a little. Reading his Hemingway books and smoking his Lucky Strikes. Ensconced among steel drums and glass carboys. Loved to be near her Skipper.
        


                                                                                *


        Barometers were falling and the wind off Indigo Bay made her khaki trousers flap like gale warning flags. She wore the Skipper's peaked military cap with its 50-Mission crush (dented by earphones) anchored firmly on her head. She tugged its visor down. Her refitted Coast Guard Albatross was gassed up and ready to go. If McEwan and his wife hurried, they could take off before the storm hit.Waiting on the dock and screwing her eye to the tropical tree line, giant mahogany way back in, she tried to force by sheer will-power of thought McEwan's arrival.
        She cut a rakish figure.
        Looking like an aviatrix from the days of Pancho Barnes. Sandy flaxen hair and a hide tanned to a deep hickory. Cerulean eyes and crow's feet.
        People assumed her name was lifted from George Wunder's Sunday comic strip "Terry and The Pirates," with its soldier-of-fortune character with an eye-patch. But they were wrong.
        She was Pirate Jenny from The Three-penny Opera!


                                                                             *


        A skeletal road of bone-white sand crooked out of the lush primeval forest of coconut palms, tall and bent according to dictates of sun and wind. The road continued around a corner, beneath drooping lantana and shady ficus town trees. Then it morphed into a hardpan of crushed seashell, and wound past chicken-scratch shanties with faded picket fences and humble yards rearing mango, avocado and banana.
        Daddy Doc's taxi lumbered into view. It left the road and rattled onto the dock.
        "Yo, Daddy!" She saluted the seventy-year-old man known best for his Yoruba magic and herbal medicine. His uncanny affinity with both Oreshas and Saints gained him unwanted notoriety.
        He gave her a nod. Mirrorshades shielded his eyes. He often said that eyes are windows to the soul.
        To McEwan she snapped, "C'mon! Let's go!"
        "OK OK," he muttered, assisting a grotesquely thin and wan Bernice. "Two suitcases, rear seat."
        "Gottem! Get aboard. I'm right behind you."
        She did not mention to anyone that taking off could be dicey. Her passengers looked commited to the flight. She herself was always up to a challenge. Made life worth living.
        "Kind of choppy," McEwan interjected, seating himself beside her. "Might be a rough ride."
        She glanced sideways. Noticed his brown leather World War 2 facsimile bomber jacket and his feathered early-frost hairjob. One hundred percent yuppie, right down to his irritating know-it-all attitude.
        "You're not co-pilot, Mac," she said dryly. "Please sit aft with your wife."
        The Albatross was a heavy bird. During a past life it had performed rescues on the high seas. Pirate Jenny grinned, lips pealed back, baring her teeth.
         All right, girrrl. It's showtime!


                                                                                     *


        The Albatross climbed slowly, resolutely, with dauntless finesse, skimming over Cabo Verde low enough for McEwan to count the trees. Almost. He glimpsed the fire-gutted lighthouse, stone wounds open to the sun. As they gained altitude the verdant panorama of Saint James passed beneath as if in a
dreamy silent movie. He felt a zooming in his stomach. Once again he felt like a kid on his first airplane ride.
        His pride had been stung.
        Stung in that tender secret place where he remained an adolescent. Damn her!
        During the five years he had known her Pirate Jenny treated him with brusque contempt. He was clever not to mistake it as garden-variety feminist male-bashing. He knew the problem went deeper. The source of her dislike, he felt, was rooted in his duplicity. He was a gay playwright and his friends in the theatre were of the same feather. Bernice was his beard.
        Aware of the complexity of his guilt, he enjoyed status quo. Preferring not to be outed.
        He loved Bernice in his undefined way. Thus the abuse.
        Pirate Jenny would have none of him.
        Well, fuck her! Fuck her in the ass!


                                                                                *


        McEwan was born in Victoria, British Columbia. His first lover killed himself after they had quarreled over a poem. McEwan and Sam McLeod had written a poem together. Two voices shared within a romantic villanelle. Sam submitted the piece to a literary magazine and it was published with no credit going to McEwan. The spat resulted in a slap to Sam's blushing face. McEwan stormed from the chintzy flat, never to see his beloved again. He wrote a play.


                                                                                  *


        Ten years later he found a narrow niche of success in New York. Critics found his dramas embarrassingly derivative, lurid as Tennessee Williams and gonzo as Sam Shepard. He had yet to find himself. One day he wrote this way, next day he wrote that way. He worked with a catty old queen in New York, a rapacious wit who fancied herself as a mistress of ridicule. She coveted the talents of young men, earning their loyalty by being an adept dramaturge. A wax museum Tallulah Bankhead, she edited and produced their raw works in exchange for raw adulation. Unbeknownst to them she was an energy vampire. McEwan slept with her once and the result was an amicable mindmeld. They cavorted painting the town, ending up at Elaine's.
        When away, writing in the Caribbean, he burned votive candles to the good queen.


                                                                              *


        McEwan first met Pirate Jenny at his Carnival party. She arrived with Maurice and Jaime, and was introduced as the seaplane pilot who had shuttled in most of his guests, from Key Biscayne, Key Largo and Key West. Drunkards all. He assumed she was a bull dyke costumed as someone from some pulp magazine with cover art by H.S. Ward.
        They shook hands. Her grip was crushing. His was mincing, almost Middle Eastern. Styled after Alec Guiness in "Lawrence of Arabia."
        He recalled how she would be smitten with Bernice. The brassy bitch evidently viewed his wife as a vicitm of mysogyny. Sisterhood, bah humbug!


                                                                                *


        Pirate Jenny broke into this mental tempest.  She hollered above the roar of the engines, "Hey, back there! Mac, how's your wife doing?"
        Bernice had slumped over, fastened by her safety belt.
        He groaned, "Oh, God."
    

the affair

        Bernice enjoyed her sunsets on the terrazzo patio, sipping demitasse espresso, and waiting for her husband. By twilight she would be sharp and smart and ready to start anew with the booze. Today she sat in the shade of the frangipani. She strummed her folk guitar in the bossa-nova style of Luiz Bonfa and Charlie Byrd. Samba triste.
        Blue notes, in melancholy chords.
        Waiting for Mac was like waiting for Godot.
        She grew bitter.
        She put away the guitar. Klick-klacked in canvas-top wooden clogs, over to the al fresco bar.
        Bombay gin and Rose's lime juice with crushed ice. A most excellent tonic for the sagging spirit.


                                                                                 *

        Footfalls beyond the garden gate. Not an idle carefree gait. Not McEwan's. Whose?
        Maurice. "Where's the Guv?"
        "Somewhere."
        "Returning soon?"
        "Maybe."
        "Splendid. I came to visit you."
        "Ah. Hah."


                                                                                   *


        Leisurely they smoked their own. Maurice relished his Cuban cigar, blowing neat rings toward Bernice. She responded with coquettish exhalations of Player's Navy Cut. She wore a cotton print blouse with a rain forest motif and stone-washed blue denim shorts. He wore a rumpled safari jacket with sleeves pushed up. No  shirt. Genitals abundantly packaged within a black Speedo. She arched her spine so that her breasts rose and her nipples pressed against the fragile cloth. Her voluptuousness achieved the desired effect. His eyes were taking copious notes, causing her to blush and her nipples to grow hard. She leaned forward to pick up her drink. The glass was beaded with icy sweat. Her freckled bosom swung and came to rest with a jiggle. She saw that he had an erection.
        She giggled.
        Maurice grinned. "What?"
        "Tit for Tat."
        "What a child you are. Teasing a man like me."
        "What kind of man?"
        Her green eyes zinged like summer lightning.
        Together they laughed and blew more smoke.


                                                                               *


        Night-blooming floral vaginas opened langorously in the dark. Their perfumes invaded the patio. The torrid jungle crept closer. Bernice imagined jaguars posing passively as shepherds, with monkeys and wild pigs in placid repose. A tableau from Rousseau. Then as her visualization reconstructed itself in a cascade of pixals she saw the same animals in a greasy nightmare from Bosche. Her mind quivered. Incandescent jelly on a knife.
        "Are you still with me?" He was massaging her warm thigh.
        "Just thinking."
        "About Mac?"
        "No."
        "Let me fix you a fresh drink."
        "While you're up, turn on the colored lights."
        "Christmas bulbs!"
        "They hang all year. I've thrown away the boxes."
        Maurice found the switch. The lights were strung overhead in a canopy of small nebuli. And others tracked along the stucco wall. They reminded him of those cheerful Texas ice-houses (beer-joints along the highway) where every day and night there was fiesta. Outdoor wooden tables and benches. White-flour tortillas crammed with spicy beef stew. On the side chipotle and chorizo. Nachos con queso. And bottles of beer so cold that when he ordered, Dos cervezos, por favor!, the barman inside the dusty shack had to yank the frosty bottles apart. With dramatic flourish: Muy frio!
        Lots of laughter.
        On road trips Maurice preferred the company of women. Saucy farmgirls and spicy students away from Mami and Papi for the first time in their budding lives. Cinnamon-hued lilies of the field, their conversations were artful, lilting, and playfully devoid of that tiresome machismo he found in peckerwoods and truckstop heros.
        Sexual encounters were fluid and come-what-may.
        If the chicks liked beer, then so much the better.
        At the ice-houses Christmas lights were strung overhead and glowed all year. He thundered across the prickly pear wasteland in a huge Dodge Challenger. British green with racing stripes. It dominated the road. Redline was an existential drug. Riding in that car actually gave him a hard-on.
        Those were the days!
        His infant business struggled to stay alive. He could not pay someone to distribute his stuff. So he did it himself. He drove from Texas to California, all routes leading to Sedona and Santa Fe.
        New Age shoppers listened to his mojo spiel. He awakened their totem spirits. Flirting and fucking. It was all salesmanship. Baubles, bangles and beads.
        He learned to sell in bulk to gurus, faith healers and professional shamans. In time he became very well connected. His sixth sense allowed him to intuit market trends. He found answers not in the crunching of dead numbers, but in the sniffing of sagebrush at dawn. Whenever his journey hit a snag and he was beset with frustration, misery and fatigue, there was always a Texas ice-house glittering in the desolation.



                                                                             *


       The colored lights caused Bernice to smile.
        "Thank you so much."
        "You are welcome."
        Maurice removed his sweaty safari jacket.
        Touching his third nipple, she asked, "Is there a story to go along with this?"
        "As a matter of fact, there is. According to Daddy Doc."
        "The witch doctor."
        "I can introduce you."
         "We've met." She shivered and folded her arms, hiding her breasts.


                                                                              *


        Like most affairs it began with a caress and a loss of control. For months they had been tantalizing each other. Experienced epicures, they savored moments of heightened attraction. Discussing art, music, philosophy and literature, each would become aroused to the threshold of sublime madness. Controlled sexual energy enhanced the pleasure of their company. So went their tantric theory. It was a fool's game.


                                                                              *


        Bernice placed a CD on the Bose system, spread some sheet music upon the Byzantine rug and fired up a dozen candles in a haphazard glut throughout Mac's library. Then she brought forth a volume of Frederico Garcia Lorca.
        Candlelight glinted in her fiery pubic thatch and in the hurricane swirl about her impish face. Booze had brought a waxy blush to her pixie nose. The light also shone in the sweat of her heavy breasts, hips and thighs. She was enticingly zaftig and Maurice loved to stroke her paunch.
        She smiled upon the lust he still displayed.
        It had been an hour since she took in hand his quaking rod and kissed the nappy curls that trekked into the badlands of his groin. She recalled the slapping of their bellies, the savage rutting.
        "Tonight," she announced. "We have a program of Crumb. Voices Of Spanish Children. Based on poetry by Lorca."
        Music began playing and Bernice traced the notes on the page as they heard them. His eyes followed her fingertips. He knew deeply that he would never forget this exquisite romance.
        His mind drifted into the moment.
        This was absolute sensual euphoria.
        All of his romances had been peak experiences. All had been pyrotechnic, but brief. He did not rue this. Nor did he rue the future of this thing with Bernice.
        Suddenly he wished to ask, what did she ever see in that self-absorbed scatter-brained twit McEwan.
        "Can I ask you something?"
        "No," she replied with the softness of rapture. "We are busy with the music."

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.