Belize: Getting Zoe (Part 2)

     The most surprising thing about that morning was that I woke up in the top bunk. I have no memory of returning to the tree house, climbing the precariously steep steps, or tackling the bamboo ladder that led me into bed, though a throbbing pain in my left knee suggested that at least one of those things didn’t happen without incident.

     Cool air swirled in through the glassless windows; it couldn’t have been much past ten. When did we leave the street party? At what point had I lost my assistant, Zoe, to a car full of sexy Lebanese men? Where were my pants?

     Oh, there. The most surprising thing about that morning was decidedly not that I woke up in the top bunk.

     The most surprising thing was that my skinny jeans were slung over the guard rail, one inside-out leg dipping down towards the floor, the other tucked underneath my hip. If you find no miracle in the fact that I managed to remove my pants that previous night, then consider the fact that my hiking boots were still tied tightly onto my feet.

     Consider that.

     And now you know how surprised I was.

     I sat up in bed, top of my head brushing against the bamboo ceiling and dangled my long, naked legs over the edge, kicking back and forth like a kid in lead shoes.

     “I could have been in Anime,” I told my legs.

     My post-drinking-spree whimsy was short-lived, however. I wasn’t alone.

     Craig the sound guy was sprawled naked across the rug with his hairy chest to the sky, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and a puddle of drool spreading across the psychedelic Central American weave, like some satire of a dog.

     Pantsless, and I mean that in both the American and the British sense of the word, I trapped my lap beneath the corner of the bed sheet, eyeing Craig the sound guy suspiciously.

     A quick peek beneath the sheet. Tightly tied boots. Naked Craig the sound guy. (Bruise on knee?)

     Had we?

     No, that was ridiculous. I would never wear made-for-walking boots during sex.

     I pulled the laces on one of the boots until the knot slipped loose and then kicked the smelly shoe over to my crew member, landing it square on his face.

     “Sorry.”

     “Fuck.”

     He rolled away from me, scratching a butt cheek in my general direction.

     “Craig the sound guy. Are you awake?”

     Tying the sheet loosely around my waist, I leaped from the bed. It was the worst idea I’d ever had.

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)

Belize: Getting Wasted

Play the video and then read while listening. Enjoy and repeat as needed.



     I wasted the good weather on the jungle and the hot, unfruitful dance floors. Sun showered down on the first sixteen days and then it was a race to see who would hit the water first, me or Hurricane Carla. Board balanced on my head, I ran across the sand but she beat me to it.

     Rough waves wrecked the shoreline for days. Bored, land-locked, I searched for something to do. An overstuffed chair rested comfortably in one corner of my hotel room. Grabbing it by the arm, I dragged it across the tile, out of my room and onto the balcony. I needed to keep an eye on that water out there; check to make sure this surf was unsurfable. Face it, I had nothing to do but stare at the ocean. Well, that and let an octopus brush and braid my bush (wait for it).

     Trusty Mai Tai by my side, I watched and waited and the sea spat rocks at the land. She coughed up all manner of sea creature. She tried to splash the seaweed upon my eyelash. This was the end of the trip. This was my reward for all the hard work I was going to do later based on the notes I took on the backs of coasters.

     I tilted back in the chair, balanced my feet on top of the rail, where they could feel the spray and sipped Mai Tai after Mai Tai. Not too long and I could feel the rise and fall of the sea swell against my memory.

     The waves racked the shore, rolling the boulders against each other, up and back.

     The sign seemed unnecessary, but then, mermaids never listen.

Belize: Getting Localized

     I frowned into the empty beer bottle. Filtered through the glass, the world around me shimmered in an unappealing shade of brown. This was no starry kaleidoscope that I gazed through, no, this was the gritty lens of too much to drink and not enough to do.

     The bar had no walls, just a roof of palm fronds to hide us from the sun. We rested on dirty couches, flopped across them like rag dolls. Hell, we might have been rag dolls.

     My assistant, Zoe, came out from under her arm. “Where did we go wrong?”

     I stared at her through the bottle but didn’t offer an answer. For me, the downfall of the evening had been the after party: up until six, never long without a beer, smoking an angry joint. Oscar had left early but I was so busy rambling some nonsense about aquaponics to a couple of American kids that I didn’t notice for hours. When I thought to look for him again, a drunk girl pet me on the head sadly. “He’s gone, sweetie. I’m sorry,” she cooed.

     Zoe hadn’t fared much better. She’d left the bar on the back of Luis’s motorcycle, her arms strapped around him like foreshadowing. But he’d dropped her off at the hotel and left alone.

     I could offer no explanation. I sat across from Zoe in the morning-after-after-party bar and shook my head.

     “Men have it easy.”

     Zoe grunted in reply.

     “I can’t shop for sex. I can’t rent a local for the night.”

     I stood and walked to the edge of the shade. There, before me: a beacon of hope; a sign of better times to come.