Chapter 1 Pt. 2
Main road. Blaring motorcycle taxis. Santa Tourist slathered in sweat, tramping with his luggage. Has he been walking in circles this whole time?
Dodge right. Fifteen strides under a confluence of sagging powerline coils. The Happy Pig Eatery's wedged between a hot pocket-sized laundry and a mini-mini-mart. Fine progress, but no mission accomplished, yet.
Cross the seething bloodstream of traffic. An arterial labyrinth filled with mom-and-pop shops selling all manner of gimcracks amid a small battalion of masseuses, masseurs, and transmasseursi dressed in purple nurse smocks. "Mah-sage. Mah-sage, sir." Past the bustle on the left-hand side, a rusted, rickety green fence.
The Mange Dog Maze?
Ah, there it is: 'bout the heft of an emaciated nutria, rooted on the ground and quasi-lifeless from the blood-boiling humidity. It strains to lift its head as if to say, Food? No? Well then, fuck you. I'm taking a nap.
A drift right and a sharp left onto the famous White Beach talcum sand. Another right or left or a plunge into the surf? At first blush, the scene bears the familiar reek of commercialized tourist corpse cannibalism gone wild. Paradise Lost to Pizza Hut.
"Dah-gie."
It's left. Traci stands up from a white plastic table in the sand, adjacent to Fianchetto's Revelation's open-air bar, waving me in.
In front of the checkerboard patio, shaded by coconut trees, a perfect row of eight lounge chairs face off towards the ocean. Scattered units of tables, geared up with San Miguel sunbrellas and tiki torches, litter the deck. The shiny, onyx-colored bar wraps through the middle of the patio, back into a hookah lounge shrine to 1970s PTSD, with a farrago of nostalgic war kitsch like Too Late the Hero and Nam Angels paraphernalia plastering the walls.
Traci and I lock eyes. She's a shortie, tanned, with attractive almond eyes and chestnut hair perfectly feathered at the shoulders. Perhaps a bit fuller than advertised, but well within the accepted variances of online dating. And besides, her powerful curves augment a billowing bustline suspended in a light blue tropical dress. A shimmering ocean I'd like to take a long, deep swim in.
Uh oh. Hold the phone, Gus. She's performing an evolutionary search function of her own, past my decaying hairline, towards an invisible but very real space between where my verticality ends and her ideal mate's begins. Wait. Did I put down I was 5'6" or 6'5" on my profile? Can't remember. Maybe blame it on dyslexia?
"The Dougie in the flesh."
Say something witty, yet sensitive. Of course, I enjoy long-haul flights. They afford me proper time for proofreading Shakespeare's sonnets and working on advanced theoretical physics. That is when I'm not helping out at the orphanage, of course. Wait? Did I forget to respond?
On tippy-toes. "I'm good."
She scrutinizes the bags under my eyes, then nods. "You look knackered."
What the hell's a knacker? Next stop: Get a Kiwi dictionary.
We sit down at a small table plunked in the sand, opposite an early fifty-ish couple in matching sunhats.
"This is Anna ..." A peroxide-burnt blonde fashion skeleton with a bevy of yin-yang jewelry and bracelets for bones. Pasty as a ghost in a sweat lodge. "'Hello."
"... Jon ..." Greying, tan with wiry swimmer's muscles draped in a gaudy leopard-print shirt.
"'Ello." He raises two highball glasses filled with an ice-chummed slurry oozing from citrus to bloodred orange.
"And then there's Nathaniel ..." Traci points over Jon's shoulder, to a lanky horn-rim geekazoid wearing a soldier of misfortune-style shirt and besieged at all sides from the end of the patio bar by a trove of empty shot glasses. The same crazy, high-flying Peter Pan-of-a-bitch, kiteboarder on Bulalog Beach. He holds his drink up towards Traci... "Keep being a bitch. It's your most endearing characteristic!"
She plays it off. "Yeah, nah. He's quite the peculiar ..."
"Ratbag Queer." The lively, early forties woman in a blue tankini seated next to Traci takes off her earbuds and pipes up. "... and Carrie Lee."
"Lovely." Carrie Lee fidgets in her chair as the Filipina waitress lowers a lemon loaf cake to her placemat.
Faster than a Formula One pit crew, Traci pulls out her iPhone and frames Carrie Lee posing with her food and drink. "Happy gumboots."
"Happy gumboots." Bright white smile, then Carrie Lee slides off her oversized sunglasses and lashes a stern look at her plate. "You're shit. Pure lemon shit. There."
She takes a bite as Traci giggles. "You'll have to forgive The Carrie Bearie. It's the liquid Tourette's, eh."
Carrie Lee holds up her glass of Mango Mojito. "Guilty as charged, eh. Cheers."
The clink of cocktail glasses. I nod toward an unmistakable e-book cover sticking out of Traci's canvas beach bag. "Submerged Desires?"
"Eh?" With a wry smile, she picks up the Kindle, clears her throat, then affects a posh Oxford accent while reading the splash page. "A steamy classic, eh, about a U.S. Submarine captain embroiled in a life-changing extramarital affair with a trisexual Soviet midget atomic engineer set, eh, during a nuclear apocalypse in an alternate Cuban Missile Crisis." Traci presses the Kindle next to her ample bosom and sighs, "Cleo Hathaway is me soul mate," before plopping it back in the bag.
Traci's ringtone. Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know." "Jumping wombat tits! Bugger all. One seccie, sec." She pops up and walks out of earshot.
Jon's crooked-tooth smiles at my placemat, conspicuously absent of booze. "Looks like yer've got some catchin' up ter do."
"That, I do." I spin in my seat, searching for the waitress.
Carrie Lee. "Oh, my."
Anna and Carrie Lee stare past me like they're seeing some rare Landshark stomping ashore.
From their sightline, a young surfer decamps from the hookah lounge fog, stretching his six feet of well-proportioned body clad in Rhodesian-camo bush shorts and a Bintang singlet. Long, crisp hair blowing in the wind, he yawns and stretches, training his eyes up at the blazing sky, posing not as a mere mortal, but an abdominally-enhanced Nordic demi-god.
Seconds later, a winsome bikini-clad woman emerges from the lounge. He pats her rump as she catwalks by, then, with dramatic flair, places a pair of cheap yellow-rimmed sunglasses on his perma-tanned face.
Jon nudges Anna. "'Eh, remembah meh?"
Back to reality, Anna.
"Umeh ..." She points at me, grasping for the word.
"I'm Jim … No, shit, Doug. My name is Doug."
Jon guffaws. "Sugah an' spice to meet ya', Mistah Shit Doug."
"Jonathon!" Anna fires a scathing glance at Jon.
I try flagging down the waitress. No luck. "Um, you're ESL teachers, right?"
Jon's stuck chewing on his ham and cheese omelet, so he points at Anna, who retorts. "It has its moments." Chuckling. "You haven't lived until you've heard schoolchildren in Borneo butcher English with a Cockney accent."
"I was a customer service rep for a fertilizer company in Waipu. Nineteen years, but the last two we lived in Christchurch," Carrie Lee chimes in wistfully.
"I've always wanted to visit New Zealand, what with all the hobbits, sheep and Ma-ori."
"Maori." Anna leans forward. "What brings you to the island, Jim, uh, Doug?"
"Good question. After drowning my youth on booze, useless passions, and menial jobs that were like watching artificial grass grow, I woke up stark, raving sane one day and realized this isn't who I'm supposed to be."
Anna nods. "None of us are."