Burning Desires
Part III
by Kerry Joyce
illustration by James Corwin
After the Whammo Hut went home, I turned my attention with futile expectancy toward the rising tide. I watched as wave after skirmishing wave advanced upon the little neck of beach, inexorably annexing dry land into its own dark world where nothing ever grows old, but is instead mercifully devoured with a frenzied swiftness.
As a life long Midwesterner, I was surprised at how quickly the sight of the ocean’s power and the sheer immensity of it had grown to bore the shit out of me. “What I need is wave after skirmishing wave of cold beer advancing upon my parched tonsils,” I decided. And in that spirit, my soggy sneakers and I pegged our way across sand and sandwich wrappings on over to the Twisty Bread Bar and Grill.
Entering the Twisty Bread, I couldn’t help noticing that the place was filled to a great extent with a certain universal kind of degenerate. The kind who disengages from his appointed bar stool only reluctantly. To visit the rest room, say, or the cigarette machine, at closing time (parting is such sweet sorrow) or on rare occasions to seek redress for some real or imagined slight, in defense of mother, motherland, or some cellar dwelling sports franchise.
In short, it was a dive. In fact, it was eerily similar to a place called Brenda and Eddie’s back in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio except the degenerates there were my oldest and dearest friends, where as these degenerates were complete strangers.
I quickly found my comrades, Dr.’s Reekey and Crittendon, under one of many blue clouds of smoke. Sangre Diablo was renowned for its cheap cigars and Crittendon was growing quite giddy from his incessant puffing, as well as the acquaintanceship he had struck up with Couzo, a locally distilled liqueur, made from fermented garlic bulbs.
“This stuff is guaranteed to get you positively stinko after only three or four shots,” Crittendon slurred with sublime satisfaction. It was already quite evident he would not be getting a refund.
In addition to its wondrous buzz, Couzo, according to legend, temporarily bestows upon all who drink it, certain magical powers. The imbiber was said to be protected from werewolves, vampires, angry spouses, jealous husbands, tuition paying parents, serial killers and the like, and yet it was consumed only by the tourists, at least publicly.
“It’s made by the Garlic Eaters,” is the only thing the locals would offer in explanation for their abstinence. Even the off duty bartender, an aspiring computer geek named Frank.doc, who had joined us at our table, refused to elaborate.
Crittendon couldn’t have been more pleased. “It’s made by the Garlic Eaters you say? We’ve come all this way to Sangre Diablo to study their community, and this delightful stuff is made by them? Dr. Reekey, do you know what this means? We’re not just getting drunk, we’re doing scientific research!”
Dr. Reekey did not seem to hear what Crittendon was telling him. He was busy confessing with wide-eyed, deep feeling to a Twisty Bread waitress that the real reason he had selected the Garlic Eaters as a subject for scientific inquiry was that the women of Sangre Diablo were in his words “the most exquisite specimens on earth.”
Still, Dr. Crittendon needed someone to share his good fortune with and insisted on buying me a glass of Couzo. He sketched out his elaborate scheme to charge off bucket loads of the stuff to the university on the back of a cocktail napkin. I sipped my Couzo slowly. It tasted like shrimp scampi without the shrimp . . . or the noodles.
Meanwhile Frank.doc kept babbaging on about all the neat stuff he had downloaded off of various bulletin boards with his modem equipped IBM clone, which was faster than a 486, vowing all the while that Sangre Diablo Bell Telephone would never take him alive.
“There are 9,284 known facts about George Washington, and everything else is just a bunch of historians’ gas. That’s why God gave us the delete key,” Frank.doc explained. “You gotta separate the wheat from the gas.”
Crittendon was getting quite bored with Frank.doc and said in a loud voice, “Young man, in the information superhighway of life, the isle of Sangre Diablo is destined to be nothing more than a rest area blow job.”
Frank.doc took this rebuke in stride. He calmly explained that the world was quickly reforming itself into what Frank.doc called the “electronic great chain of being,” an entity that would soon transcend all the old divisions of race, class, religion, geography, and nationalism.
Not soon enough for Crittendon, however. Four proud citizens of Sangre Diablo, who were in the dark about information superhighways, but were apparently quite familiar with rest area blow jobs, lifted Crittendon bodily out of his seat and carried him screaming out the side entrance with Dr. Reekey and myself close at their heels.
Frank.doc stayed behind at our table, alternately pondering the electronic great chain of being and his killer phone bill.
Next month; Part IV of Burning Desires, “Running Against The Wind”
