Belize: Getting Zoe (Part 1)

     This story, like many in my life, begins with an inescapable hunger.

     It was three beers past a bottle of rum and the half moon was high. The boys had dined on steak and snake but the only thing I had rolling around inside me was a shit load of booze. Where’s a taco truck when you need one?

     “Tacos sound good,” Zoe confirmed.

     “You reading my mind?”

     “No, I’m listening to you talk to yourself.” She slapped my thigh and pulled me from the chair, tilt-a-whirl head and all.

     We slipped out through the red curtain that separated the bar from the street and stepped into the night. One in the morning is as good a time as any to eat the forbidden street food. Better, perhaps, because of the liquor. Show me a gut bug who can outlast me in a game of Kings and I’ll call myself colonized.

     We ate out of newspaper cups and told the other drunkies we had boyfriends.

     “But you don’t have a boyfriend in Belize.”

     “No thank you,” I answered through a half a taco.

     “You should come with us. You are very beautiful.”

     “That’s not really a reason to go with you.”

     “You break my heart. I love you.”

     “No.”

     “Your friend is coming with us.”

     “My friend is eating tacos with me.”

     Nope. I was wrong. My friend was tipping like a see-saw into the opened window of a slowing moving taxi cab. Two of my new boyfriend’s crew were trying to pull her in. I grabbed onto her legs and yanked her back towards sanity.

     “They’re going dancing,” she told me once I’d extracted her from the car.

     “I don’t think that’s the case.”

     “That’s what they said. I want to go to the club.”

     “I don’t think there’s a club.”

     One of the men in the car stuck his head out to talk to us. “There is no club. There is a hotel room.”

     At least they were honest.

     “But we have a disco ball.”

     He showed me. They did have a disco ball. A two-inch keychain disco ball.

     Zoe grabbed onto my shoulders. “A disco ball. Crystal, it’s okay. They’re Lebanese.”

     Such flawless logic for a woman who, seconds later would pat the top of the taxi, starting it off on its journey, and then fling herself in through the window, blowing me kisses as she vanished from the street.

     I would have attempted a rescue, but gone are my days of diving through the windows of moving vehicles.

Go on the the next part: Belize: Getting Zoe (Part 2)