Last night I had the pleasure of witnessing a grassroots multi-level marketing movement. On average I probably end up at one of these per year. And I’m finally reaching the point mentally where I can tune out the subject matter and see these operations in a blueprint sense.
The theater involved hearkens back to holy big-top revivals. Gospel and brimstone beneath the Tent and miracle healing before the crowd. A slick preacher and gang of crones hiding among you to testify. Go and watch “Leap of Faith” and you’re equipped with all the foresight you need to view the core of this industry at which point you can start to appreciate not only the entertainment value but more importantly the ties to our own lost primal nature.
For all the fanfare involved in a well-presented network marketing product, you should be entertained. So while I was enjoying myself, doing my best to disguise overt laughter at frequent absurdity and half-facts as enthusiasm for a product, I scanned the crowd. Listening to the questions. More importantly listening to the answers. When is a genuine concern actually a template for promotion? It’s hard to say. It’s probably safer to assume it occurs at every point.
Trade out the legs of a gazelle for the brain of a human and this is what makes it primal. It’s a classic wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing scenario: With no idea of who is in the herd and who is leading the pack, the big cats clean up. Or dogs. Whatever.
But doing my best to tone down my obvious prejudice and give the devil his due: this thing was efficient. No energy wasted.
This is it. It’s the best. Best buy in.
Because once we are in the room, we are at the mercy of our heads. We are about to be bombarded by a steady onslaught from all sides for the next 60-90 minutes. Our frailty and ignorance will be tossed in our face as our most material desires are made paramount and we are handed salvation and a shiny new pen.
I’m not denouncing or celebrating. I’m merely impressed by the nature and the evolution of capitalism.
With the illusion of corporate structure, these operations are a sleek temptation. And I wonder what are the expectations as the pack enters the Tent. How many people do they need to convert to consider the thing a success? How many to drive the Jaguar? How many to “make Director?” How many to feed themselves?
For the cheetah, it just takes one.
And it could be you.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
The Channel Hat
And we did it just like that.
When we want something,
We don't want to pay for it.
- Jane’s Addiction
The retro 70’s nylon mesh hat has been the bane of my headwear existence since resurfacing lo these past few years. I remember wearing a black and orange Stihl chainsaw hat to parties in the late 90’s for the pure ridiculousness of the thing.
By no means am I anti-fashion. But as I’ve always told my lawyer, the circumstances for me to actually “rock” one of these things would have to be exceptional.
With a long awaited bump in the south swell and with the surfers tearing their fingernails out over a dire summer of wind-blown monotonous flatness it seems like outrigger canoes may be taking the heat off standup paddlers, at least in the case of the breaks outlying the greater Outrigger/Kaimana Beach area. These things explode off the line up with all the grace and control of a ’67 Cadillac barreling down a groomed ski run. Simple math will tell any monkey that a 30-foot boat dropping in on a 10-foot wave face may result in trauma at the bottom.
Getting caught in a decent set is already like being in a washing machine, but add 200 pounds of composite polymer spiraling out of control and it becomes more like a blender. The experienced will relieve themselves prior to venturing out into a break occupied by one of these things.
The hit came furiously, dashing the white boat and all three occupants in a hellish avalanche of whitewater, paddles and terrified yelping. The woman was held under long enough to come up raving about black leprechauns in the coral heads and pulled the hair out of anyone dumb enough to come near her for the first 20 minutes as the lifeguards viewed the whole horrible episode 250 yards away from the binoculars, laughing smugly at the spectacle of it all undoubtedly stoned and eyeing the jellyfish signs greedily like packrats hording useless mothballs.
The flotsam of the impact zone surged and subsided like the stomach of a great whale making ready to vomit and had the eerie feel of a Cessna water landing gone the way that water landings usually go. I picked up a huge red bucket, looking over a guy treading water naked and gripping a pair paddles with the anesthetized look of a man who has just been raped by a herd of rabid buffalo.
“This your bucket?”
“Hold on to it! I’m making a break for the boat! Can you see it?”
The boat rested comfortably on the reef a good 50 yards in just off the channel where the swimmers make the 200m pull to the new windsock. I offered to take his paddles but he was beyond reason and kicked off into the reef, overshooting the stranded canoe by 100 yards. He was not seen again.
The old steersman made it to the wreckage first coughing up seaweed and swearing incessantly as a waterman on a 14-foot rescue board swooped in to ferry the woman to shore. I fired the red bucket at the old man as another set crested and the waterman shouted at her to lean into the wave. Making it barely over the lip, the wind tore off his camouflage retro Bintang Beer hat. He had time to look back and see me swipe it off the surface as the next wave kicked them toward the beach. The look of exasperation said that this was indeed an integral part of his wardrobe, but the possibility of nailing the distraught woman bit him hard in the instincts and he dug hard for the shore, crossing his fingers that fate would put it back on his head.
Unfortunately, it was a perfect fit. And it goes without saying that as one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, the same goes for someone with my head looking a gift hat in the bill. I lost him somewhere in the mosaic of humanity littering the beach like plastic and knew it was mine. Another clean take, and completely absolved, I marched into the shower like any sun-blackened fool stepping like a camo-crowned stone pimp straight out of 1970.
To celebrate my bravery, I headed to Times Supermarket, the Friday night 6 pack brand decision already handed to me by furious tides of fortune.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Hangover
I set up these two friends of mine from high school who both live—unbeknownst to each other—in Manhattan now, both happily married and long removed from our days of pulling over to the side of the road during a disagreement and settling it with a beauty bark wrestling match at twilight in front of the junior high school or pitching cans of ravioli down 14 stories to the street late night at the Art Institute on the Seattle waterfront.
I sent them each other’s phone numbers, encouraging them to catch up. With a 15-year gap separating their last meeting they agreed to meet for a drink somewhere in
The first call came at 4pm HST from Dale Pittman, co-founder of the Mukilteo, WA fight club circa 1990, the only member of his family to escape the clutches of the Pacific Northwest now firmly entrenched like a root weevil teaching in the
His message was calm and collected. “Dale and I are having a beer. Looking forward to seeing you out here…”
Three hours later at sunset, the text messages had started to pile up:
MARK: Left you a VM. We know you are screening. Please send bail money.
MARK: Tell me something. How can Dale take a piss so fast? I’ll hold.
ME: He has an inhumanly wide urethra
MARK: He should be in labor
DALE: Holy shit that boy can party need backup to continue assault on ronomus(sic)
ME: Stop being a pussy. Or do some kegel exercises.
DALE: Going to hard liquor I am taking ronomos down
The last message came roughly after 1am and I’ve heard nothing from either of them since.
But fifteen years of memory lane is a hard surface to just casually skip down on a Thursday with a mixed belly of alcohol. Especially for a pair of small-town boys on the horrible precipice of middle age, bound to the grave reality of the 5am alarm clock. I’m sure this morning they regret not only answering their own respective phone calls, but most likely any and all circumstances leading up to their ever meeting in the first place. Though time heals all things...
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Blues for Sheri
It was the end of the fall semester 1998, a full year before I would be tossed in jail for DWI and the rugby team had formed a loose alliance with the WSU Hawaiian club which for all intents and purposes meant that we spent a great deal of the free hours between classes hunkered down in the campus apartments or private housing eating mushrooms or getting in bar fights.
The owner of Shakers, the cleanest of two filthy campus bars told us that we were consistently the best group around at attracting negative attention. We were universally despised by Alumni, the Greek system and the football team alike for our unblemished record in the bar fighting arena.
So in the winter of 98, on a Friday night when the snow blew so hard that not even four layers of flannel could prevent frostbitten nipples, with finals looming over an increasingly tense institution of juvenile delinquents, Shakers was packed to the ears in a mosh-pit standing room only throng there to witness what to this day need only be remembered as the Kiss.
Ryan Leaf had blown off classes his senior year, poised to go #2 in the upcoming NFL draft. On any given night he could be seen bursting into a room screaming how he could buy and sell each person present and anyone who didn't like it could suck on the knuckles of his 6'1" 390 pound right guard Ryan Mcshane, always at his side like some kind of fat pit-bull terrier drunk on the power of the hand that fed him.
We all stood at the bar in the narrow corridor leading to the pool tables we had affectionately labeled The Gauntlet, with our red-headed step child Joe Schnerr perched atop a stool he had earned the right to stand on after becoming the only man to escape three to one odds from on top of a stool after the results of an organic chemistry lab had gone horribly wrong. Schnerr was ordering a round of Long Island Ice Tea when Mcshane bulled his way in the room, cutting a swath to the bar and sending Schnerr toppling over the wrong side like a coin over the edge of a bulldozer arcade game.
The bartender, a dropout from
The Bass and I were the only ones in between them as Schnerr flailed his arms trying to get a grip of Mcshane who looked over at him and snorted, ordering two pitchers of Coors light on Leaf’s dime.
"Calm him down," Mcshane advised us with all the confidence of a evangelical preacher used to the subservience of a compliant and sterile flock. He got his pitchers in each hand and toasted one in Schnerr's face taking a frothy pull off the top, spilling it down his chin.
"Let me get that for you," I said to him, grabbing a napkin off the bar and dabbing the Coors off his chin like a sloppy infant before he hand time to react.
"What the fuck!" he spat. "Don't fuckin' touch me!"
This was not a warning. His face elevated to a fire-engine shade of red almost instantly the inevitable explosion only seconds away. The bar staff and Tony moved as quickly as they could, knowing the ugliness about to unfold as Mcshane calculated whether to set his beers down before killing me.
In a split second, I took the decision away from him as my hands shot up to his ears. I yanked myself up to his level and recognized in his eyes and in the deep pit of his soul a level of genuine terror that I am positive he had never encountered before as I smiled and planted the sloppiest kiss in the history of inappropriate public displays of affection on his mouth.
The collective groan from the crowd was quickly eclipsed by the noise of the two 64oz pitchers of glass shattering on the floor as Mcshane closed his fists in a double axe handle and smashed me off his chest. He got one good shot to drop me with a right cross but I slipped in the beer, letting it sail harmlessly over my head. I was up in an instant in time to see the bartender doing his best to subdue the brute with the Bass yelling that it was a Polynesian cultural sign of respect.
I wanted no part of this lie making it clear to anyone within earshot that this was nothing more than the kiss of death. Mcshane roared in protest but Leaf came up and stuck his million-dollar hand in the chest of his lineman. He threw $200 down on the bar saying something to the effect that we weren't worth the spilled beer on the floor and that he'd see us all in the drive through.
With a final yelp of protest like the gingerbread witch 86'd by Hansel and Gretel to her fiery hell Mcshane was forcibly ejected and Tony eyeballed us, pointing to the opposite end emergency exit, the exodus point he'd become only too accustomed to sending us out when as now, things got out of hand.
Knowing it was too much, Schnerr pocketed one of the $100 bills and lead the procession to the back. We all tumbled into the snow giggling like Japanese schoolgirls on a three-day sugar high listening to the howling storm mixing with the degenerate wailing of Mcshane making his way up Colorado street in the distance in a dejected display of outright defeat that must vividly haunt his redneck nightmares to this day.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Groundwork
It’s been a while since I’d skipped rocks on any substantial body of water, and it showed as I struggled to get much of anything across Hilo Bay. But as my shoulder flared it occurred to me that rocks can teach you a thing or two about what it means to be an upstanding member of a society.
Getting hit in the head by a rock teaches you to work on your agility, and that standing your ground can be a painful process.
Maybe it’s not that simple…
With little else to do but let my mind roam free in the face of next-to-no-business at the Lomilomi tent for the first annual Hilo Bay BBQ Team Cook Off I tore through an autographed copy of the Bikram guide to yoga which had been left to me as a parting gift from my previous life as a semi-unwilling gigolo.
This was a “Will work for food” engagement in a somewhat tainted sense of the term. There would be a bill attached to my services, but half of the contract stipulated that I be allowed to consume all the grass-fed beef, chicken, pork-butt, rib tips, corn, kalo, uala and lau lau I could pack away for the duration of the event which went down between 9am July 3rd and 4pm on the 4th.
Bay-front Hilo has lost some of its spectator glimmer at least in the eyes of the locals since camping out at the bandstand has been outlawed by the Gestapo, and burning of over-the-counter ordnance in the public parks mercilessly cracked down upon. But the cops left me to myself for the most part after they walked by the tent as I crackle-popped the cervical vertebrae of a dirty redneck refugee of Guam—a victim of a malady I can’t pronounce he blamed on military-based side effects of either nuclear testing or Vietnam—with my bare hands. It was hot and I don’t remember the details.
It’s the rocky and treacherous sound of moving bones and joints that inspires fear and/or awe in the hearts of people. It’s the common dread of personal paralysis I think. Though as always I was there to do a job and as a genuine professional, I was not there to prey on public fear. I was there to prey on pain. Though after this dry run, it seems that bodywork and barbecue may be mutually exclusive as I only worked on four people over the entire event including a huge pregnant haole woman who saw my table and tackled me as I was heading off for the day.
Even the Team, “From Hawai`i,” who had commissioned me in the first place only sent their leader Joe to me. My work—as ever—was flawless, but as I sat there hour after hour, thumbing through the gospel according to Bikram, and a spinnakered galleon fired empty mortar blasts from the bay building up to the 8pm pyrotechnics, I took a minute to wonder if my own negativity was influencing business.
This is a foreign thought process to me for the most part, but I have been depressed. And the Kohala coast was the last know sighting of my dignity which vanished rapidly at the end of one of those long weekends you might see in a romance film where the girl has to make a choice after being told that the boy didn’t put his life on hold, jump on a plane and hitch-hike up the Queen K just to crash her hotel room and sip Tropical Itches poolside.
There is a great deal of rock between Hilo and Kohala. Massive jagged peaks and valleys full, and raging streams of smooth volcanic afterbirth which I hoped—along with the petrifying amount of meat and kalo(and maybe even Bikram) might serve to strengthen me, my head, my heart and whatever else is kicking around my insides these days.
The Lomi deal was contingent on me finding a suitable place to stay as “From Hawai`i” would be camped out at ground zero for the duration; no place for a working journalist trying to maintain top physical health for a grueling schedule of four customers. No mere parking lot would do.
Fortunately for all involved—the four customers, The Team, various onlookers, etc—I had a standing invitation to visit the Enocencio clan, sturdy Hiloians and militant Mormons firmly dug into the landscape like the double fist-sized kalo they farm from the ground 100 pounds at a time amid the goats, chickens, pigs and constant threat of foreign invasion.
They take the kids direct from Alu Like right out of the projects and toss them headlong into the fields, forging a hybrid respect for labor and authority with a god-fearing Latter Day Saint. With the debut of Michael Bay’s spin on Transformers looming on the July 4th horizon, the kids were begging to be released from lo`i duty to which their master “Mr. James” replied with a dismissive grin, “I think you’ll have plenty of fun. You’re going to transform taro into poi!”
This is tough-love Hilo style circa 2007. That awareness of earning every scrap of food, water, clothing, pride and self. And every mixed moment of humor and pitiless resolve that you might not recognize for what it is until much much later that has carved—at least in this case—a family in stone.
While Bikram is preaching his backward bends, these people are perpetually going forward, pulling roots from the soil, harvesting and epitomizing the true heart of “busting ass” and “living off the land.” If the millionaire yoga guru showed up in Hilo, they would calmly listen to his banter, explain to him the error of his thinking and then shoot out his tires if he didn’t leave.
They fully support the visitors, as long as they stay visitors by leaving. And these guys might floss their teeth with Bikram’s ponytail and make a chicken coop with his bones as soon as his welcome wore thin.
As evening faded and the children screamed on subjects as varied as who got to ride who’s bike and why did Makana piss on everyone? a run down hippy woman with a face as creased and worn as the lava flows made her way through the small crowds accompanied by a man dressed hotly in a white full length chicken suit, both of them preaching and clucking animal rights and ecology distributing non-biodegradable fliers which littered the grounds later when the rains came. The clan mentioned that maybe they ought to be up in the mountains protecting the rights of living animals butchered senselessly rather than chatting up a pack of indigenously conscious carnivores devouring chicken long rice next door to a BBQ convention. Their propaganda came down hard on slaughterhouse conditions of course, but fell even harder on the deaf ears of a huge family of 3rd generation farmers with no shame and no compulsion to stop raising three more on anything that moves.
There is a strong sense of a stand taken a long time ago that won’t be changing anytime soon. Like outcomes, or at least paths determined well in advance. Walking in the footprints of ancestors on heels calloused by the land and never stopping to even think about fixing something that isn’t broken.
Those were my stones of wisdom or inspiration from the latest and maybe the last Hawai`i excursion before the Superferry springs from the closet, bringing unity to the islands and opihi pickers to Hilo. Where the Enocencio’s will be on watch with Blue Pit bull determination and Winchester firearms: Strength in muscle and intensity. The land may be changing slowly, but the foundation remains. These old rocks and the ones beneath will always be around in one form or another, long after all there is for us to know doesn’t matter any more. We could learn a good deal from them.
Getting hit in the head by a rock teaches you to work on your agility, and that standing your ground can be a painful process.
Maybe it’s not that simple…
With little else to do but let my mind roam free in the face of next-to-no-business at the Lomilomi tent for the first annual Hilo Bay BBQ Team Cook Off I tore through an autographed copy of the Bikram guide to yoga which had been left to me as a parting gift from my previous life as a semi-unwilling gigolo.
This was a “Will work for food” engagement in a somewhat tainted sense of the term. There would be a bill attached to my services, but half of the contract stipulated that I be allowed to consume all the grass-fed beef, chicken, pork-butt, rib tips, corn, kalo, uala and lau lau I could pack away for the duration of the event which went down between 9am July 3rd and 4pm on the 4th.
Bay-front Hilo has lost some of its spectator glimmer at least in the eyes of the locals since camping out at the bandstand has been outlawed by the Gestapo, and burning of over-the-counter ordnance in the public parks mercilessly cracked down upon. But the cops left me to myself for the most part after they walked by the tent as I crackle-popped the cervical vertebrae of a dirty redneck refugee of Guam—a victim of a malady I can’t pronounce he blamed on military-based side effects of either nuclear testing or Vietnam—with my bare hands. It was hot and I don’t remember the details.
It’s the rocky and treacherous sound of moving bones and joints that inspires fear and/or awe in the hearts of people. It’s the common dread of personal paralysis I think. Though as always I was there to do a job and as a genuine professional, I was not there to prey on public fear. I was there to prey on pain. Though after this dry run, it seems that bodywork and barbecue may be mutually exclusive as I only worked on four people over the entire event including a huge pregnant haole woman who saw my table and tackled me as I was heading off for the day.
Even the Team, “From Hawai`i,” who had commissioned me in the first place only sent their leader Joe to me. My work—as ever—was flawless, but as I sat there hour after hour, thumbing through the gospel according to Bikram, and a spinnakered galleon fired empty mortar blasts from the bay building up to the 8pm pyrotechnics, I took a minute to wonder if my own negativity was influencing business.
This is a foreign thought process to me for the most part, but I have been depressed. And the Kohala coast was the last know sighting of my dignity which vanished rapidly at the end of one of those long weekends you might see in a romance film where the girl has to make a choice after being told that the boy didn’t put his life on hold, jump on a plane and hitch-hike up the Queen K just to crash her hotel room and sip Tropical Itches poolside.
There is a great deal of rock between Hilo and Kohala. Massive jagged peaks and valleys full, and raging streams of smooth volcanic afterbirth which I hoped—along with the petrifying amount of meat and kalo(and maybe even Bikram) might serve to strengthen me, my head, my heart and whatever else is kicking around my insides these days.
The Lomi deal was contingent on me finding a suitable place to stay as “From Hawai`i” would be camped out at ground zero for the duration; no place for a working journalist trying to maintain top physical health for a grueling schedule of four customers. No mere parking lot would do.
Fortunately for all involved—the four customers, The Team, various onlookers, etc—I had a standing invitation to visit the Enocencio clan, sturdy Hiloians and militant Mormons firmly dug into the landscape like the double fist-sized kalo they farm from the ground 100 pounds at a time amid the goats, chickens, pigs and constant threat of foreign invasion.
They take the kids direct from Alu Like right out of the projects and toss them headlong into the fields, forging a hybrid respect for labor and authority with a god-fearing Latter Day Saint. With the debut of Michael Bay’s spin on Transformers looming on the July 4th horizon, the kids were begging to be released from lo`i duty to which their master “Mr. James” replied with a dismissive grin, “I think you’ll have plenty of fun. You’re going to transform taro into poi!”
This is tough-love Hilo style circa 2007. That awareness of earning every scrap of food, water, clothing, pride and self. And every mixed moment of humor and pitiless resolve that you might not recognize for what it is until much much later that has carved—at least in this case—a family in stone.
While Bikram is preaching his backward bends, these people are perpetually going forward, pulling roots from the soil, harvesting and epitomizing the true heart of “busting ass” and “living off the land.” If the millionaire yoga guru showed up in Hilo, they would calmly listen to his banter, explain to him the error of his thinking and then shoot out his tires if he didn’t leave.
They fully support the visitors, as long as they stay visitors by leaving. And these guys might floss their teeth with Bikram’s ponytail and make a chicken coop with his bones as soon as his welcome wore thin.
As evening faded and the children screamed on subjects as varied as who got to ride who’s bike and why did Makana piss on everyone? a run down hippy woman with a face as creased and worn as the lava flows made her way through the small crowds accompanied by a man dressed hotly in a white full length chicken suit, both of them preaching and clucking animal rights and ecology distributing non-biodegradable fliers which littered the grounds later when the rains came. The clan mentioned that maybe they ought to be up in the mountains protecting the rights of living animals butchered senselessly rather than chatting up a pack of indigenously conscious carnivores devouring chicken long rice next door to a BBQ convention. Their propaganda came down hard on slaughterhouse conditions of course, but fell even harder on the deaf ears of a huge family of 3rd generation farmers with no shame and no compulsion to stop raising three more on anything that moves.
There is a strong sense of a stand taken a long time ago that won’t be changing anytime soon. Like outcomes, or at least paths determined well in advance. Walking in the footprints of ancestors on heels calloused by the land and never stopping to even think about fixing something that isn’t broken.
Those were my stones of wisdom or inspiration from the latest and maybe the last Hawai`i excursion before the Superferry springs from the closet, bringing unity to the islands and opihi pickers to Hilo. Where the Enocencio’s will be on watch with Blue Pit bull determination and Winchester firearms: Strength in muscle and intensity. The land may be changing slowly, but the foundation remains. These old rocks and the ones beneath will always be around in one form or another, long after all there is for us to know doesn’t matter any more. We could learn a good deal from them.
Ocean of Wisdom
It will please you to know that I have recently resigned my commission at the 4 seasons Lana'i due to an overwhelming amount of tyranny.
That being said, I have a belly full of antibiotics addressing my latest bout with what local medical gurus are telling me is in all likelihood the clap (further tests are pending), and am standing by for the 340 flight over to Maui.
I've stopped taking these STDs personally because of the "all business" society I'm locked up like a Hindu prank monkey in. And just in time. The freaks are descending like a plague upon Kahului eagerly anticipating laying eyes twinkling with visions of enlightenment upon the bespectacled visage of the Dalai Lama himself.
For years, Maui has been a hotbed for those international goons on the blind trail to total consciousness and the meaning of life. So it's no wonder, with that much vibe clogging up the spiritual airwaves not to mention the vog steaming in from Volcano, that he'd be making a stop to personally straighten them all out once and for all, Buddhist monk style.
I imagine quite a few heads will roll for this one. All of them, especially upcountry, have been abusing the system for years and the time for compassion may be swiftly coming to an end.
The room mate, a devout Lama groupie and 6 months sinfully pregnant tried to get me to fly over yesterday and walk on as a volunteer, but I'm not dumb enough to stumble into that kind of bees nest. The volunteers will have it worse than any; the first to bear the brunt of his wrath.
I don't know much about this guy, but with the kind of stroke he wields in the physical and metaphysical world, I imagine over the course of 14 lifetimes, he would have had to survive some serious knockdown bar fights with ornery sherpas or otherwise kicked ass in the name of religious tolerance. No one comes by that kind of street cred without getting their knuckles bloody.
I do know that he bears resemblance so striking to the late author Hunter Thompson, that one would be a fool not to trace the genes back to the source before making any wild claims against either. But I'm sure I'm not too far out on the olive branch to speculate that Thomson himself wrestled a few yaks into submission in his day.
Were circumstances different, I might be inclined to challenge His Holiness one on one to either a banana eating match or a battle of wits, no holds barred, but due to the heavy medication and current trade embargos, I think I'll take this one in from the sidelines with cranberry juice and an open mind.
Which is best I'm sure. This will be a three-ring circus of the highest degree. Some will be blessed for the being there alone, while others will scoop up the red dirt he walks on, either keeping it for posterity, selling it to the uninformed masses or devouring it outright on the spot for reasons even the craziest of us will not grasp. Power of any kind is a weird thing, especially out here at the edge of the world and doubtless you are all thankful that the vigilant are always standing by in sickness and in health keeping one paw at all times on the circuit breaker.
That being said, I have a belly full of antibiotics addressing my latest bout with what local medical gurus are telling me is in all likelihood the clap (further tests are pending), and am standing by for the 340 flight over to Maui.
I've stopped taking these STDs personally because of the "all business" society I'm locked up like a Hindu prank monkey in. And just in time. The freaks are descending like a plague upon Kahului eagerly anticipating laying eyes twinkling with visions of enlightenment upon the bespectacled visage of the Dalai Lama himself.
For years, Maui has been a hotbed for those international goons on the blind trail to total consciousness and the meaning of life. So it's no wonder, with that much vibe clogging up the spiritual airwaves not to mention the vog steaming in from Volcano, that he'd be making a stop to personally straighten them all out once and for all, Buddhist monk style.
I imagine quite a few heads will roll for this one. All of them, especially upcountry, have been abusing the system for years and the time for compassion may be swiftly coming to an end.
The room mate, a devout Lama groupie and 6 months sinfully pregnant tried to get me to fly over yesterday and walk on as a volunteer, but I'm not dumb enough to stumble into that kind of bees nest. The volunteers will have it worse than any; the first to bear the brunt of his wrath.
I don't know much about this guy, but with the kind of stroke he wields in the physical and metaphysical world, I imagine over the course of 14 lifetimes, he would have had to survive some serious knockdown bar fights with ornery sherpas or otherwise kicked ass in the name of religious tolerance. No one comes by that kind of street cred without getting their knuckles bloody.
I do know that he bears resemblance so striking to the late author Hunter Thompson, that one would be a fool not to trace the genes back to the source before making any wild claims against either. But I'm sure I'm not too far out on the olive branch to speculate that Thomson himself wrestled a few yaks into submission in his day.
Were circumstances different, I might be inclined to challenge His Holiness one on one to either a banana eating match or a battle of wits, no holds barred, but due to the heavy medication and current trade embargos, I think I'll take this one in from the sidelines with cranberry juice and an open mind.
Which is best I'm sure. This will be a three-ring circus of the highest degree. Some will be blessed for the being there alone, while others will scoop up the red dirt he walks on, either keeping it for posterity, selling it to the uninformed masses or devouring it outright on the spot for reasons even the craziest of us will not grasp. Power of any kind is a weird thing, especially out here at the edge of the world and doubtless you are all thankful that the vigilant are always standing by in sickness and in health keeping one paw at all times on the circuit breaker.
Animal Rights: An Open Letter to Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts
With the Halekulani knocking Four Seasons off the Hawaiian Travel & Leisure throne in 2007, I find myself thinking about drooling dogs.
In 1965 researchers conducting studies based on Pavlovian conditioning hoped to show that when administered an auditory stimulus coupled with an electric shock, the behavior of dogs could be manipulated. This didn’t exactly go as planned. What the studies ultimately showed was that these dogs learned helplessness. When they were left in a small and easily exited cage, the conditioned dogs would not move even after the administration of multiple shocks. Unconditioned dogs leapt quickly from the cage while the rest lay down whimpering under shock after shock, accepting their fate. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.
It’s now 2007 and learned helplessness flourishes at the Four Seasons Resort on the privately owned island of Lana`i.
I was hired as an independent contractor and signed an agreement to earn 40 percent commission plus tips as a massage therapist in the spa. This is great money, especially coming from Oah`u where it’s hard to get that kind of scratch without strong political backing and consecutive happy endings. This was based—I was told—on my “skill” relative to other therapists in the spa who made the same or less. The week before I turned in my uniform the same person told me adamantly that I was in fact a mediocre therapist hired “in hopes that you work your way up to Four Seasons standards.” Other contractors told me repeatedly that this was done “just to get to you.”
And there in both the nervous acceptance of such bipolar reasoning and the source of it is where the dog has its day. Upwards of 30 therapists have exited in the span of the approximately one year tenure of the reigning manager. Begging the question: Where does the problem lie? But this isn’t a psychology tirade or a rant about percentages or money even, though it might seem to be on the surface.
This is for anyone who gets $8 taken from their paycheck for every 25-minute service performed to replace no more than an ounce of oil and to wash a few sheets, and is then “asked” to fold that laundry. For anyone with the balls to question that fiscal logic, told the issue was not to be revisited and later labeled by management reactionary, arrogant and a planter of “ideas.”
For anyone who had to travel—by boat or plane—to work and found that their schedule was changed or that they wouldn’t be needed after all and in lieu of an actual explanation, told to deal with it.
For a wife and son and daughter recklessly threatened with homelessness after their father’s twelve years with the company was dashed in an instant without warning following his termination and consequent expiration of employee housing.
This is for the receptionist 7 months pregnant with incapacitating back pain who limped out of work for emergency care barely able to speak and was told. “If you get finished before 4, come back.”
Dogs do what dogs do and given the right motivation, humans are as predictable as any dog. When you can work three days out of the week and come home with $1500 that makes you motivated. And apparently in the eyes of this hotel, expendable, easily replaced and open to the kind of abuse that if applied to a unionized workforce might result in a fistfight.
This is also not a shot at an old boss by a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s a question to an entity that allows the kind of free form tyranny that traumatizes people on a daily basis to the point that they dread, not only their work environment but also the threat of having to leave it.
The question is: Why are people in 2007 treated like animals were 1965?
In 1965 researchers conducting studies based on Pavlovian conditioning hoped to show that when administered an auditory stimulus coupled with an electric shock, the behavior of dogs could be manipulated. This didn’t exactly go as planned. What the studies ultimately showed was that these dogs learned helplessness. When they were left in a small and easily exited cage, the conditioned dogs would not move even after the administration of multiple shocks. Unconditioned dogs leapt quickly from the cage while the rest lay down whimpering under shock after shock, accepting their fate. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.
It’s now 2007 and learned helplessness flourishes at the Four Seasons Resort on the privately owned island of Lana`i.
I was hired as an independent contractor and signed an agreement to earn 40 percent commission plus tips as a massage therapist in the spa. This is great money, especially coming from Oah`u where it’s hard to get that kind of scratch without strong political backing and consecutive happy endings. This was based—I was told—on my “skill” relative to other therapists in the spa who made the same or less. The week before I turned in my uniform the same person told me adamantly that I was in fact a mediocre therapist hired “in hopes that you work your way up to Four Seasons standards.” Other contractors told me repeatedly that this was done “just to get to you.”
And there in both the nervous acceptance of such bipolar reasoning and the source of it is where the dog has its day. Upwards of 30 therapists have exited in the span of the approximately one year tenure of the reigning manager. Begging the question: Where does the problem lie? But this isn’t a psychology tirade or a rant about percentages or money even, though it might seem to be on the surface.
This is for anyone who gets $8 taken from their paycheck for every 25-minute service performed to replace no more than an ounce of oil and to wash a few sheets, and is then “asked” to fold that laundry. For anyone with the balls to question that fiscal logic, told the issue was not to be revisited and later labeled by management reactionary, arrogant and a planter of “ideas.”
For anyone who had to travel—by boat or plane—to work and found that their schedule was changed or that they wouldn’t be needed after all and in lieu of an actual explanation, told to deal with it.
For a wife and son and daughter recklessly threatened with homelessness after their father’s twelve years with the company was dashed in an instant without warning following his termination and consequent expiration of employee housing.
This is for the receptionist 7 months pregnant with incapacitating back pain who limped out of work for emergency care barely able to speak and was told. “If you get finished before 4, come back.”
Dogs do what dogs do and given the right motivation, humans are as predictable as any dog. When you can work three days out of the week and come home with $1500 that makes you motivated. And apparently in the eyes of this hotel, expendable, easily replaced and open to the kind of abuse that if applied to a unionized workforce might result in a fistfight.
This is also not a shot at an old boss by a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s a question to an entity that allows the kind of free form tyranny that traumatizes people on a daily basis to the point that they dread, not only their work environment but also the threat of having to leave it.
The question is: Why are people in 2007 treated like animals were 1965?
Celebrate With Us
The Wednesday night guided meditation and healing service sounds a little too Fight Club for much of the non church crowd, but being holier than them, I have a high tolerance for both healing and mortal combat.
The man had the worn look of old and poorly maintained leather abused by the trail as he stumbled from his crimson Toyota, wife trailing behind him as he pulled on a Trilogy sailing shirt to cover the uniform sunburn of a broken down first mate. They made their way to the back entrance of the church as the Preacher sat in front of his piano banging out a quiet version of Om Shanti. They sat two pews in front of me.
I like to sit near the back to keep my eye on things. As part of the volunteer agreement the Healing Arts Center practitioners use the last half hour to offer services to anyone who can make their way to the front pews where they all convene patiently throughout the service in their green fuzzy leis waiting to dispense therapy.
But not me. I like to come from the back like a porn star. A grand entrance from the Ti leaf blessing station directly across from the communion wafers. It’s my own personal arrogance hard at work, but at least I don’t come in the middle of a song.
Drunk in church is a sure way to write your way into the collective consciousness of a congregation. And the sailor had plenty of ink. Thinking of drunken churchies, I picture an indigent man stumbling in on an icy night at a church sandwiched uncomfortably between a Persian deli and a methadone clinic on the dirtiest streets of wherever, USA. But this one rolled up stupid in a red flatbed, straight out of Kihei in the heart of Kapahulu.
After the singing comes the prayer requests. When you hear about everyone’s dying relatives or missing children or any manner of the Lords will personified. The sailor wanted none of it. As the deputy pastor walked from person to person, listening and broadcasting their prayers to the group over the wireless microphone, he became increasingly frantic, raising his arms in fury and exasperation each time she picked someone else. At one point, his wife had to pull him down like someone restraining a pit bull.
But his time came.
Just as the woman behind him leaned in telling him to be patient, the pastor spotted him. She walked up and held the mic forward for him to speak and he boldly tore it from her grasp.
He was out of the pew and into the aisle with the grace of a seasoned televangelist, his head cocked backwards and a dramatic drunken sway to his frame. He alternated between a two hand prayer grip on the handle of the microphone and one hand raised for either calming effect or balance.
“I’m going to do it,” he announced to us softly under the soft glow of the high ceiling lights with the grim determination of a plumber. “It’s been my lifelong goal to move to O`ahu. And now. Here! I! Am!”
He paused for emphasis, nodding his head with subtle arrogance. He assessed the unresponsive crowd who had never seen anyone with the mic other than the mikanele. You could almost hear the unison whispers from the gray hairs that this was not the reverend Sky St Jon.
“Today I did it. I finally enrolled at the UH. Just under the deadline with less than 20 minutes to spare. And I’m going to do it!”
At this point all heads were down. He had the feel of a snake that might strike upon eye contact.
“See… I’m here tonight,” he bent his knees to meet the downcast eyes of the congregation as he balled one hand into a fist, “to receive your prayers for my prosperity.”
He let this sink in, standing back up and pointing a thumb into his own chest.
“For the prosperity of me, my wife and our two children as I complete my schooling at UH Manoa which I enrolled in today.”
Just under the deadline. Yes. We were all clear on that one. He flopped his arms out parallel to the floor and dropped the mic. The deputy pastor scurried to grab it as the bounces echoed to the high ceilings and back. He sat down with a piously superior nod. His wife patted his back nervously as the pastor asked for his name to properly invoke the prayer.
“It’s Bryce!” he shouted in disgust without the benefit of the amplifier as if his name had been Jesus or Mohamed or Kamehameha I.
“Let us pray,” she began, “for Bryce and his family embarking upon this new journey and know that god wants us all to prosper in all of our-”
“Celebrate with us!” He was up again, the wife pulling at his shoulders and the gray haired old ladies disabling their hearing aids under the pounding waves of his verbal diarrhea.
We work on the people in the front pews as the group is coming out of guided meditation and some are dropping satchels containing more prayers into a wood chest on the front stage. It’s a relaxing time. There’s a song droning on in the background about healing or love, I can’t remember.
I had my eyes closed and my hands around the back of the neck of a lady from Baltimore, feeling for tension in her cervical vertebrae when Bryce was able to sneak up on stage behind me. His voice boomed across the church and I nearly ripped her head off in alarm.
“Love is the way!” He bellowed with arms up again. “Love!”
And then he was gone. He came in late and he went home early. And I haven’t been back there since. He left his mark like a careless Picasso and now he’s free somewhere up in Manoa terrorizing the business department with drunken theories on capitalism and the global marketplace I assume. Because he’s the kind of thorn-in-your-side hit-and-run artist that you have to give a sort of grudging respect to if for nothing else his calculated sleaziness, which leaves no time for someone to catch up with him in the parking lot and give him the kind of healing he really needs and truly deserves.
The man had the worn look of old and poorly maintained leather abused by the trail as he stumbled from his crimson Toyota, wife trailing behind him as he pulled on a Trilogy sailing shirt to cover the uniform sunburn of a broken down first mate. They made their way to the back entrance of the church as the Preacher sat in front of his piano banging out a quiet version of Om Shanti. They sat two pews in front of me.
I like to sit near the back to keep my eye on things. As part of the volunteer agreement the Healing Arts Center practitioners use the last half hour to offer services to anyone who can make their way to the front pews where they all convene patiently throughout the service in their green fuzzy leis waiting to dispense therapy.
But not me. I like to come from the back like a porn star. A grand entrance from the Ti leaf blessing station directly across from the communion wafers. It’s my own personal arrogance hard at work, but at least I don’t come in the middle of a song.
Drunk in church is a sure way to write your way into the collective consciousness of a congregation. And the sailor had plenty of ink. Thinking of drunken churchies, I picture an indigent man stumbling in on an icy night at a church sandwiched uncomfortably between a Persian deli and a methadone clinic on the dirtiest streets of wherever, USA. But this one rolled up stupid in a red flatbed, straight out of Kihei in the heart of Kapahulu.
After the singing comes the prayer requests. When you hear about everyone’s dying relatives or missing children or any manner of the Lords will personified. The sailor wanted none of it. As the deputy pastor walked from person to person, listening and broadcasting their prayers to the group over the wireless microphone, he became increasingly frantic, raising his arms in fury and exasperation each time she picked someone else. At one point, his wife had to pull him down like someone restraining a pit bull.
But his time came.
Just as the woman behind him leaned in telling him to be patient, the pastor spotted him. She walked up and held the mic forward for him to speak and he boldly tore it from her grasp.
He was out of the pew and into the aisle with the grace of a seasoned televangelist, his head cocked backwards and a dramatic drunken sway to his frame. He alternated between a two hand prayer grip on the handle of the microphone and one hand raised for either calming effect or balance.
“I’m going to do it,” he announced to us softly under the soft glow of the high ceiling lights with the grim determination of a plumber. “It’s been my lifelong goal to move to O`ahu. And now. Here! I! Am!”
He paused for emphasis, nodding his head with subtle arrogance. He assessed the unresponsive crowd who had never seen anyone with the mic other than the mikanele. You could almost hear the unison whispers from the gray hairs that this was not the reverend Sky St Jon.
“Today I did it. I finally enrolled at the UH. Just under the deadline with less than 20 minutes to spare. And I’m going to do it!”
At this point all heads were down. He had the feel of a snake that might strike upon eye contact.
“See… I’m here tonight,” he bent his knees to meet the downcast eyes of the congregation as he balled one hand into a fist, “to receive your prayers for my prosperity.”
He let this sink in, standing back up and pointing a thumb into his own chest.
“For the prosperity of me, my wife and our two children as I complete my schooling at UH Manoa which I enrolled in today.”
Just under the deadline. Yes. We were all clear on that one. He flopped his arms out parallel to the floor and dropped the mic. The deputy pastor scurried to grab it as the bounces echoed to the high ceilings and back. He sat down with a piously superior nod. His wife patted his back nervously as the pastor asked for his name to properly invoke the prayer.
“It’s Bryce!” he shouted in disgust without the benefit of the amplifier as if his name had been Jesus or Mohamed or Kamehameha I.
“Let us pray,” she began, “for Bryce and his family embarking upon this new journey and know that god wants us all to prosper in all of our-”
“Celebrate with us!” He was up again, the wife pulling at his shoulders and the gray haired old ladies disabling their hearing aids under the pounding waves of his verbal diarrhea.
We work on the people in the front pews as the group is coming out of guided meditation and some are dropping satchels containing more prayers into a wood chest on the front stage. It’s a relaxing time. There’s a song droning on in the background about healing or love, I can’t remember.
I had my eyes closed and my hands around the back of the neck of a lady from Baltimore, feeling for tension in her cervical vertebrae when Bryce was able to sneak up on stage behind me. His voice boomed across the church and I nearly ripped her head off in alarm.
“Love is the way!” He bellowed with arms up again. “Love!”
And then he was gone. He came in late and he went home early. And I haven’t been back there since. He left his mark like a careless Picasso and now he’s free somewhere up in Manoa terrorizing the business department with drunken theories on capitalism and the global marketplace I assume. Because he’s the kind of thorn-in-your-side hit-and-run artist that you have to give a sort of grudging respect to if for nothing else his calculated sleaziness, which leaves no time for someone to catch up with him in the parking lot and give him the kind of healing he really needs and truly deserves.
Dumbing Down
Michael Vick Buys Place in Florida -- Bankruptcy Coming Next? Michael David Smith sports.aol.com/fanhouse
Look to who benefits most. Who benefits from the fall of the high and mighty poster boy black male? Definitely this society in its racial rainbow of deluded hegemony. To paraphrase the immortal words of Tony Montana, we need someone to point the finger at and say "that's the bad guy." But do we need that? The finger. The guy. The horror. The revulsion. The hate, lies, truth and redemption.
Do we need the distraction? Over what? Dogs?
Pile a high profile human drama along side or on top of a million trivial others for what? So we can ignore real issues like CFCs, the ongoing US genocide against indigenous cultures, and of course how the latest terror threat to the homeland is being dealt with by Jack Bauer.
You love your dog? So what? The thing barks all 10 hours of the day it's neglected, in a language few can take the time to hope to understand. This is not a security measure. That one is a line born and bred, most likely by dogfighters. Because what criminal worth his weight in Iams Original Biscuits is afraid of a dog? Angry dogs are nothing more than ignorant bullies, their teeth sharpened on charging meeker targets their whole life with no built in response for what happens the day something stands its ground with a harsh command, sledge hammer or a piece of poisoned meat.
Subscribing to any other point of view is simply grazing with the herd. Or in this case running with the pack. Who let the dogs out?
When Vick is released, I plan to have a guaranteed and unrestricted contract good for the remainder of his life to act as a new symbol for PETA. We will call him the Black Falcon of Doggie Death and he will be the canine equivalent of the boogeyman; the first face of fear for all dogs and dog owners with animals chained up in bondage and barking at the slightest breeze. We're regulating noise pollution here for one. Keep your dog locked up, muzzled or otherwise sedated or the BFODD will descend from the heavens with a burlap sack full of nooses, bats and shovels. He'll kick in your front door as the children scream and take your gnashing bag of teeth, hair, ticks and fleas straight to doggie hell.
Now that we’ve settled that: Forget about down to earth when you talk about cruelty to animals and the culture of sport. The deified goliaths of gridiron navigate a completely different level. This is a fact that media fed mortals will probably never grasp. But it remains. Why hold them to a higher standard? If anything you should hold them to a lower one. These are your gods. The will of gods is not questioned. You have given them the keys to your stolen kingdom. You and your children emblazon your bodies with their names and worship at the limitless altars made readily available 24 hours a day by your blatant need to believe in something larger than you. You support war, and savagery and the capitalistic acquisition and abuse of land and these, your heroes personify the spoken and unspoken desires of your pagan hearts.
You've given away your right to judge these people. They make you millions. They make you believe. They help you to conform to what passes for culture in what is at its best a borrowed society. Where the only true culture is McDonalds, limitless debt and slavery. And you ask them to lead a dual life.
Yes yes. But to the point already. The benefit lies in the black hearts of white men who count on these cultural tragedies to illustrate how a hundred billion dollar franchise like Las Vegas or online gaming is tame by comparison. Casino owners. The college campus bookie. The sportbook snake oilers and of course networks like ESPN who pimp them out to you the people. The degenerates in their garages hunched over a screen, ignoring the call of collectors. The wife who squandered the college fund on the first three Notre Dame games. The list is endless and filthy and ripe for a natural disaster. Or a reality show. We’ll put them all on an island with nothing but coconuts and machetes and a tribe of Maori nationalists and see who comes out with perspective.
The benefit lies in the plausible deniability of the savagery that fuels the collective hopelessness in the cultureless wasteland. In the end we’re all dumber for participating. For listening. For taking the time to judge. For giving a damn and being distracted by it all. I’m still going to pay Vick that money, not because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s revolutionary. And it’s time to complete the circle
Look to who benefits most. Who benefits from the fall of the high and mighty poster boy black male? Definitely this society in its racial rainbow of deluded hegemony. To paraphrase the immortal words of Tony Montana, we need someone to point the finger at and say "that's the bad guy." But do we need that? The finger. The guy. The horror. The revulsion. The hate, lies, truth and redemption.
Do we need the distraction? Over what? Dogs?
Pile a high profile human drama along side or on top of a million trivial others for what? So we can ignore real issues like CFCs, the ongoing US genocide against indigenous cultures, and of course how the latest terror threat to the homeland is being dealt with by Jack Bauer.
You love your dog? So what? The thing barks all 10 hours of the day it's neglected, in a language few can take the time to hope to understand. This is not a security measure. That one is a line born and bred, most likely by dogfighters. Because what criminal worth his weight in Iams Original Biscuits is afraid of a dog? Angry dogs are nothing more than ignorant bullies, their teeth sharpened on charging meeker targets their whole life with no built in response for what happens the day something stands its ground with a harsh command, sledge hammer or a piece of poisoned meat.
Subscribing to any other point of view is simply grazing with the herd. Or in this case running with the pack. Who let the dogs out?
When Vick is released, I plan to have a guaranteed and unrestricted contract good for the remainder of his life to act as a new symbol for PETA. We will call him the Black Falcon of Doggie Death and he will be the canine equivalent of the boogeyman; the first face of fear for all dogs and dog owners with animals chained up in bondage and barking at the slightest breeze. We're regulating noise pollution here for one. Keep your dog locked up, muzzled or otherwise sedated or the BFODD will descend from the heavens with a burlap sack full of nooses, bats and shovels. He'll kick in your front door as the children scream and take your gnashing bag of teeth, hair, ticks and fleas straight to doggie hell.
Now that we’ve settled that: Forget about down to earth when you talk about cruelty to animals and the culture of sport. The deified goliaths of gridiron navigate a completely different level. This is a fact that media fed mortals will probably never grasp. But it remains. Why hold them to a higher standard? If anything you should hold them to a lower one. These are your gods. The will of gods is not questioned. You have given them the keys to your stolen kingdom. You and your children emblazon your bodies with their names and worship at the limitless altars made readily available 24 hours a day by your blatant need to believe in something larger than you. You support war, and savagery and the capitalistic acquisition and abuse of land and these, your heroes personify the spoken and unspoken desires of your pagan hearts.
You've given away your right to judge these people. They make you millions. They make you believe. They help you to conform to what passes for culture in what is at its best a borrowed society. Where the only true culture is McDonalds, limitless debt and slavery. And you ask them to lead a dual life.
Yes yes. But to the point already. The benefit lies in the black hearts of white men who count on these cultural tragedies to illustrate how a hundred billion dollar franchise like Las Vegas or online gaming is tame by comparison. Casino owners. The college campus bookie. The sportbook snake oilers and of course networks like ESPN who pimp them out to you the people. The degenerates in their garages hunched over a screen, ignoring the call of collectors. The wife who squandered the college fund on the first three Notre Dame games. The list is endless and filthy and ripe for a natural disaster. Or a reality show. We’ll put them all on an island with nothing but coconuts and machetes and a tribe of Maori nationalists and see who comes out with perspective.
The benefit lies in the plausible deniability of the savagery that fuels the collective hopelessness in the cultureless wasteland. In the end we’re all dumber for participating. For listening. For taking the time to judge. For giving a damn and being distracted by it all. I’m still going to pay Vick that money, not because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s revolutionary. And it’s time to complete the circle
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Domestic Tranquility & Equestrian Logic
With the rampant psychosis stinking up the spa and the island of Lana`i as a whole like fertilizer, I have taken to disappearing to mainland Maui on my day off. The ferry ride is generally smooth unless we smash into one of the many humpbacked menaces currently inhabiting the channel like fat koi in a barrel. We need to start eating these whales, but that is a discussion for another day.
I had generously accepted the invitation for beer in Pa`ia and horse whispering from Sera, the former outside center for the WAZZU Women's Rugby team. I still have no photos for you but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that in itself is far too much talk.
I'm back on Lana`i now, suffering from no sleep and perched on a dock, I can feel the earth rotating on its axis. This is an unnerving and painfully nauseous experience that is complimented nicely by the pork sandwiches I've been eating all day. But I cannot vomit or these carp will go crazy, riding the steam of puke like lightning into my mouth and down my gullet where they will spawn until my intestines rupture with their foul offspring.
The horsing about proved to be fine. I had never personally been atop one of these beasts, but have since cultivated a somewhat more profound respect for Zorro and other pertinent swashbucklers. The animals are not to be trusted. It tried repeatedly to buck me into the pineapple fields and I sustained superficial back wounds from the multitude of low bridges it attempted to peel me out of the saddle under. In the end it all came down to kicking the brute in the side and making that clicking sound between the teeth that gets large animals moving.
The dancing in Pa`ia was sub par. Unrecognizable tunes and samples and DJs growling into rotten microphones about god only knows what. The two $14 double Jager shots were the final straw.
We fled back to her studio where she smoked a hand rolled joint of pure nicotine venom the proceeded to do crotchless hanging ab lifts from the 3 in 1 tower of power. She then hung upside down on inversion boots until I lost interest and started tearing apart her stuffed animals.
It was all a whirlwind 24 hour period and I had to be back in Lahina for the 6:45 boat. So we pawed at each other until 5am when her ex boyfriend walked through the door in direct violation of his restraining order.
Right away I could hear the teeth start to grind. This would obviously not go as he had planned it and being a thuggish Brit he would be an improvisational cripple outside of anything more cerebral than a duel in the yard.
He had some kind of eerie red light and I figured he must have rode his 10 speed in and snaked the tail light off at the last minute as a symbolic gesture that perhaps the red light express was making its 5am stop in Makawao.
The light did nothing more than illuminate him, blinding him as she yelled at the light repeatedly to leave. He muttered pathetically, fumbling at the light switch.
The 80 watt halogen at the top of the high ceiling was like an awful premature sunrise, illuminating her draped over me in her PJs as I yawned casually in a borrowed pair of women's underwear. I stretched lazily looking at him with one eye, taking time to flex the biceps.
A cheap parlor gag, but it was early and I didn't have time for yard brawling. It worked as effectively though as a punch to the nuts. He backed slowly out over the threshold like a freshly buggered British gelding as I made that clicking sound between my teeth that gets large animals moving.
I had generously accepted the invitation for beer in Pa`ia and horse whispering from Sera, the former outside center for the WAZZU Women's Rugby team. I still have no photos for you but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that in itself is far too much talk.
I'm back on Lana`i now, suffering from no sleep and perched on a dock, I can feel the earth rotating on its axis. This is an unnerving and painfully nauseous experience that is complimented nicely by the pork sandwiches I've been eating all day. But I cannot vomit or these carp will go crazy, riding the steam of puke like lightning into my mouth and down my gullet where they will spawn until my intestines rupture with their foul offspring.
The horsing about proved to be fine. I had never personally been atop one of these beasts, but have since cultivated a somewhat more profound respect for Zorro and other pertinent swashbucklers. The animals are not to be trusted. It tried repeatedly to buck me into the pineapple fields and I sustained superficial back wounds from the multitude of low bridges it attempted to peel me out of the saddle under. In the end it all came down to kicking the brute in the side and making that clicking sound between the teeth that gets large animals moving.
The dancing in Pa`ia was sub par. Unrecognizable tunes and samples and DJs growling into rotten microphones about god only knows what. The two $14 double Jager shots were the final straw.
We fled back to her studio where she smoked a hand rolled joint of pure nicotine venom the proceeded to do crotchless hanging ab lifts from the 3 in 1 tower of power. She then hung upside down on inversion boots until I lost interest and started tearing apart her stuffed animals.
It was all a whirlwind 24 hour period and I had to be back in Lahina for the 6:45 boat. So we pawed at each other until 5am when her ex boyfriend walked through the door in direct violation of his restraining order.
Right away I could hear the teeth start to grind. This would obviously not go as he had planned it and being a thuggish Brit he would be an improvisational cripple outside of anything more cerebral than a duel in the yard.
He had some kind of eerie red light and I figured he must have rode his 10 speed in and snaked the tail light off at the last minute as a symbolic gesture that perhaps the red light express was making its 5am stop in Makawao.
The light did nothing more than illuminate him, blinding him as she yelled at the light repeatedly to leave. He muttered pathetically, fumbling at the light switch.
The 80 watt halogen at the top of the high ceiling was like an awful premature sunrise, illuminating her draped over me in her PJs as I yawned casually in a borrowed pair of women's underwear. I stretched lazily looking at him with one eye, taking time to flex the biceps.
A cheap parlor gag, but it was early and I didn't have time for yard brawling. It worked as effectively though as a punch to the nuts. He backed slowly out over the threshold like a freshly buggered British gelding as I made that clicking sound between my teeth that gets large animals moving.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Fifteen Minutes of Shame
"I went from Phoenix Arizona all the way to Tacoma."
-S.M.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
Though why anyone would want to go from one to the other is a mystery. Anywhere in western Washington is preferable, unless you can hit the Hilltop Area on a good night. I learned this the hard way from countless evenings shackled in Tacoma with the Filipinos and of course from Mix-a-lot. It reeks like wood pulp, but Phoenix is bad for many more dire reasons.
The outlying boroughs represent the worst of the strip mall plague, a hybrid with the cookie cutter hell on earth mentality of a Wal-Mart on every corner. A giant-sized monopoly board booming with everything a humanoid needs to never stray too far from the Neighborhood. Finely manicured lawns belying the severe water shortage of the fastest growing settlement in a culture ripe for a 30-year stretch of Darwinian equilibrium.
It must have been planned that way, and planned well. Because they come in packs to the desert, staying put in the awful dry heat that tears the sinuses and begs for some kind of natural disaster.
I was here for a few days to visit Smith, who came a couple months before to enroll in Harley Davidson school and was now living the lowlife with thugs similar to himself, dressing up in mechanic scrubs all day everyday, learning to manufacture bikes from common household appliances.
Smith told me he’d been burgled nonstop since arrival. But of all the houses in the neighborhood, no one could figure out why they would rob him. He lived with a mohawked biker named Blue, a self-proclaimed hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fucking son of a whore and Tito Jackson, a bad rugby player who owned not only the house, but a serve napoleon complex, commanding no respect from the bikers and a frequent recipient of beatings and food theft. Night-managing a meat packing plant, his fridge was always full of steak. For the duration of my stay we'd all been on a steady red meat diet while Tito was away for some kind of rugby insanity in Missoula, MT.
But the protein had gone to our brains. Phoenix was no place to raise a family and no place to kill four days. After the mountain biking with tarantulas and sidewinders, any initial excitement was eclipsed by the narcotic heat and the dull redundancy of the urban landscape. Mexico was our one salvation.
It was a half-ass idea, which we lived frequently by, and it was all we had. Smith’s schedule and my flying times allowed us a keyhole window of opportunity for a late afternoon departure and a taxing speed run down to Nogales, Mexico where we would have about 4 hours to go wherever the night took us before fleeing back to the airport for my 6am flight to Boise.
We recruited one of Smith's classmates, a hulking brutally tattooed chain-smoker ape named Matt, covered with skulls and other images of death, pushing seven feet from Chicago. Matt was a former truck driver and had no issue with driving the whole distance in my rental car.
We met up at the Shady Apple Buffet where it was always feeding time and where the true hogs came to wallow. This was in-your-face strapping on of the feedbag at an obscene scale. No one here, sunning themselves under the heat lamps red glare was under 200 pounds with the exception of the Mexican wait staff and bussers who obviously knew better than to tangle with the fried chicken.
Sirloin steak wrapped kielbasa garnished with a heavy layer of gravy. Chicken fried hamburger patties in thick black sauce. Pork meatballs in sweet barbeque. All the fat food groups were represented en masse and complex carbohydrates were nowhere in sight. The locals wheeled themselves up and came with unflinching appetites, sparing nothing for the meek as they cut a wide game trail to and around the various troughs of food, belching and farting a chorus of approval to the cornucopia before them, trampling each other in glee on the way to thirds and fourths, the smallest getting only the scraps and licks if they got too close and the behemoth grand master gluttons carving a path of eatery, that in the right light would be just as appreciated and highly praised as any great athlete at their pinnacle. Like Jona Lomu on the wing unstoppable and rolling through all in his path. A terrible machine of devastation.
We paid our five dollars, Smith and Matt were both big enough to have to eat like these pigs just to go without starving. Human garbage disposals with limitless metabolism. They ate until the staff couldn't keep up with the mounting piles of plates at which point Matt began griping about the level of service and some residue in his coffee cup. As soon as he started smoking we decided to leave.
"I'm wearing my Cannibal Corpse shirt for this thing," Matt announced grimly like it was the perfect fashion choice for a fast drive across an international border. "We'll make perfect time. I need to get my hands on some Demerol." His eyes gleamed black like a sharks and we could see that he was the perfect choice as driver.
We picked up a 19 year old youth named Mook who wore a red pinstriped mechanic scrub in bright blue. The name on it said Sol and the thing was adorned with a number of high octane advertising logos. Evidently there is a market for everything. Mook had bought this thing somewhere with the purchasing zeal of any kid in a surfshop buying his first obnoxious pair of Quicksilver board shorts with the naked lady playing cards all over them.
The sight of Phoenix fading into the afternoon was enough to lift my spirits and Smith as well. Except for a wild run in with Tom Sizemore at a Dairy Queen drive through, the ride was smooth. We were stopped for gas when we spotted the border patrol SUV pulling in for burgers. I immediately went about shooting several rolls of pictures when Sizemore leapt from the drivers side in a border patrol outfit with his arms raised, fingers in some Hollywood gangland pose screaming, "que pasa??!" Like he'd had enough of the paparazzi.
Smith told him to keep his fat ass in the car our run the high risk of a serious thrashing. Smith could never stand actors outside of New Zealand and Sizemore, taking note of the size discrepancy was quick to take his advice.
Nogales, Mexico is a border town in the strictest sense of the word. Without a doubt in the entire world, in closest proximity to its sister city of Nogales, Arizona of any of the world’s sister cities. We skipped across the border without identification following behind two fratboys full of nerves asking a group of girls just returning where was the place to go?
The girls turned nose and skipped away without even an insultory giggle and the fratboys were left grabbing their pants and grunting about how it didn’t matter. We headed straight to the other side of the tracks where the brothels were just starting to jump. Before the drugs, Matt’s first priority was to land a solid prostitute. He’d been away from his wife in Chicago for too long and the pressure of bad food and despicable entertainment prospects had him ready to jump ship or kill someone. I’d seen the spark in similar eyes before and there would be no stopping him. I wondered what the implications, social and otherwise were going to school in such proximity to whore houses. Because god knew, it would be stupid to think of one of these punks going four years without getting hooked to a serious sex-trade addiction. I imagined all the Friday night fights and casual relationships that must have gone down in flames here just across the border. Or did the women down here just pass this off as an acceptable casualty in the southern Arizona mating game?
We encountered heavy resistance from the bouncers at the Shangri-la over my camera, but I assured them Smith was the lead anchor of the New Zealand equivalent of 60 minutes and we were here to do the initial groundwork for a story on the rebirth of mainstream prostitution in the United States. It was a major story that would go all the way to the Whitehouse. And this camera was vital.
They didn’t believe me at all, but Smith’s accent was so strange to them and the raw size of both him and Matt the Driver was too much to make an issue over the camera. “No pictures of the girls OK?”
This crushed Matt’s vision of a chalky porn clip to be emailed home to his wife, but he took it in stride and I pushed in the door clutching my backpack like a bible and looking for the closest table as Matt whined about how he’d so been looking forward to his wife’s reaction to his “engorged cack showing the local girls how we do things in Chicago.”
Brothels don’t bother me per se. But the whole strip club mentality makes me queasy. Because I know somewhere in there is utter despair. And I can smell it like old fish. It clings to the skin for days and the memory fades, but never really goes away. Despair is a bad thing. But these were bad men and boys with nothing better to do then revel in the defilement of a culture while satisfying their own base desires.
Our cover charge permitted us one free round. And we all ordered Dos Equis like sheep. The girls were all arriving or just starting their shifts. Some kind of weird MTV Beach Club soundtrack bared over the loudspeakers as the first of the dancers took the oversize stage and began wriggling out of their bathing suits.
Matt, who had volunteered to remain completely sober with the exception of drugs roared as a 6 foot blonde waltzed by him in a green bikini. “She looks almost white!” he announced to the group as Smith shook his head, drained his beer and stuck one finger in the air for another round. Matt summoned the lanky blonde over and demanded she bring her friends. Though undoubtedly none of these girls could be that close to one another on a Friday night. This was the home stretch. Where money was made and we were talking bulk orders marked up 50 to 200 percent especially for trash like us. Any sense of camaraderie could go out the window. It was every woman for herself and the winners would reap the spoils with fat wallets, ginger walks home and horrifying bowel movements.
“Get him two!” declared Matt sticking a long peace sign in the face of Mook who had remained faintly in the background except to bitch about the price of the beer. He flushed bright red and spit up his beer as Matt announced that the boy has been gay for the past 10 years and we were here on a special mission on a mandate from his father to cure him of it or leave him for dead. The table we were at was small enough for Mook to reach under and jab his beer bottle into Matt’s balls causing him to gag on his own beer in ecstasy, wrongly assuming it was one of the girls.
A gentle looking brunette named Cali promised to take care of the boy and that was good enough for Matt who after the bottle had taken about all the foreplay he was capable of. He asked the blonde if she was ready, wiping the beer from his goatee. She told him the going rate for a lap dance and he laughed, rising up and pointing to the back, opting instead for the complete ride. He had paid top dollar for his ticket and was ready to have it punched.
This was our divine inspiration. As Matt lumbered off dragging the blonde by the hair, smith was seen whispering to one of the two girls in his lap after which she dragged him off to a dark corner. And I was left with Mook to mind the table. I was doing my best to communicate with the 22 year old on my lap, an unwed mother of two who could have passed for any college girl down for a night of whoring from UA or ASU.
She explained her jade necklace to me, a memento of her first son’s birth. A green thing gleaming innocently amidst the dull carpeted walls and cut-rate lighting. She was demanding that I buy her a drink and then have me do whatever I wanted to her. But I assured her all we had was Vicodin and our prescription was up to date.
She pawed at me like a big cat and I could almost buy into the purring. This would be a fine place to retire. The booze was costly, but if the lighting was right, the deftly elegant barbaric nature of this brothel would be something sublime to escape the everyday despair of life as the clock ticked down to zero. I could bathe here in the carnal radiance like some kind of charred and withered iguana perched on a black rock just within tongue shot of the shit-pile where the fattest of the flies swarmed in the sun all day long.
“Watch the table.” I told Mook, getting up to follow her back to her room more in curiosity than anything else.
Her room reminded me of my old college dorm room that I shared with Norimasa Kawaguchi. Fortunately the other bed was empty and I laughed grimly at the thought of what it must be like on a busy night in this place around last call.
“Clean sheet?” I asked her, pointing at the bed. And she smiled and nodded. “Good. It’s the most practical way to prevent the spread of infection. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know what you say,” she replied, plopping down on the bed and patting the space next to her for me to follow.
The language barrier was terrible. The extent of my Spanish language command comes from the lyrics to Cancion del Mariachi from the Desperado soundtrack. But the guitar was no where to be found. She had many oils with worn down labels I couldn’t read. “Que?”
She smiled pointing to her behind. Of course I knew that, but it never hurts to ask. I plopped down next to her holding a red bottle. “Rosa!” she announced happily. Some kind of rose scented oil. I took a deep whiff. Strong, but good. She gingerly rubbed her neck and in her eyes was the confusion I’ve seen in many people when I’m not paying them the attention they feel they have coming.
“What’s wrong with your neck?” I demanded pointing. She smiled and nodded, simulating a back and forth whipping of the head with her hair dangling down her back to her ass. “I see. A lot of hair pulling last night? Yeah, it’s fun for the first hour huh? After that the scalenes and SCM take a beating.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She said and I shook my head pointing at the bed.
“Lie down,” I said, “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning, but I’m dying to work this rose oil into your neck. Never mind the reasons, I’m a complete professional. You’ll see.”
She understood down. Evidently the repeated ferocity of her line of work was straining not only the neck muscles but well into the rhomboids and traps. She had respectable adhesions all throughout. After an initial balk at what the hell was I doing, she relaxed pausing only occasionally to shriek in pain or murmur “good,” as I massaged her back, spending a good 15 minutes scrubbing the base of her skull and stripping my thumbs along her neck. Two doors down we could hear Matt screaming and bashing his head off the walls.
“He’s an angry lover.” I explained, sinking my elbow into her rhomboids. “But a superb driver. Your co-worker is in good hands.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “But good.”
This was one of those ‘man bites dog’ situations that I love to find myself in. Going the other way, when the public expects the obvious. A half hour later she sat there next to me smiling with the pillow-crease imprint on her face. She got up, grabbed the necklace and draped it over my neck. Her son’s necklace. But the demon in me would not even blink about the idea of taking it. It was the law of the jungle. Something must be exchanged. Gifts should never be questioned. But she shot down my arrogance with an imp’s grin and a quick head shake.
“Mi hermano. Un vendor.” She giggled. “Cheap.”
Her bother sold them on the street. Fantastic. I slapped her playfully off the bed.
Outside we said our goodbyes. Hit the street for the remaining hours. Rumbling through the streets of Nogales pretending to be warriors in a far off land taking five from the rigors of battle to swill mead and pay for sex. Matt couldn’t let up about the blonde. He told us she was virtually useless. He had to do all the work.
“I had to grab her head to make it do what I wanted to.” He whined.
“I've heard girls appreciate it when you direct them with that type of thing.” Said Smith, “And they are in the pleasure business, you were just helping her do her job better...”
This was true. Helping. That’s what we were all about. Hands helping hookers. Tattoo it on our foreheads. Money to burn and time on our hands. The only injustice was that Mook was stuck at the table. But he was only 19 with the rest of his life to get down and dirty in the doldrums of our most noble of causes. Because the path of darkness can shine bright too, we had told him as we ordered huevos rancheros and carne asada burritos before the long drive home. He told us we were crazy, but we knew what he really meant and for his insolence we filled him full of flammable liquid and forced him to smoke a dozen cigarettes until he passed out.
Matt was the first one to call me queer when he heard I massaged the prostitute. But I told them I was never a huge fan of pre-marital sex anyway. Sure I engaged in it to maintain the status quo from time to time, but I never pay for sex with prostitutes, at least not in brothels. And this way I could write it all off as a business trip. Because it was business. Another clean transaction in the interest of international relations. But it always is. And we deserved credit for handling it all in stride the way we did like complete professionals. There was no passport stamp to prove it had ever happened and no hard or forensic evidence due to the strict regulations on photography, but maybe it was better that way. We knew it in our hearts, and the shame we might have felt were we lesser men was replaced instead with grim determination to proceed back to Phoenix and from there in life, with our mouths shut, our minds open and one hand free to shake a fist at anyone in our way with no business sense.
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