1 Chapter 1
If I was looking for a big, square-shouldered American meathead, I’da stayed in America. I live in San Diego, for Heaven’s sake—it’s like the square-shouldered American meathead outlet mall. Any size you want, from Extra Small to Big ‘n’ Tall, available in custom colors: brown-on-brown, red and white, even blue and green, if ink’s your thing.
Mind you, they’re not all quite as grin-happy as the guy wedged behind the little pink wooden table back in the corner of the bar. Not quite as chest-heavy. They certainly don’t all have that dimple in their right cheek that you could do tequila shots out of. He’s sipping a local beer—aLoro Loco, like me—and waiting for his ceviche, which I only know because I was eavesdropping, which I was only doing because I haven’t heard American English outside my own head in the three weeks I’ve been here, and Mister Two Hundred and Forty Pounds of Muscle and Teeth didn’t exactly whisper.
He’s from one of those states that you think of as the Midwest, but you forget they border the South, which would explain the lilt of an accent if you ever looked at a map. I’m from Indiana! He might as well have been carrying a sign.
Not that I care, I remind myself. I’ve done the whole baseball-and-apple-pie scene—hell, my last two exes were named Matt. I swear I dated Matt P. for three weeks before I knew his ball cap even came off, and we’d been having sex since our very first date. No, I came to this island because I’d heard it was hot, sultry, and sticky-wet in December if you went to the right beaches, and that was no weather report.
My latest Matt had never been real big on timing, as our twin misdemeanor convictions for public lewdness in Florida will attest; it should not have come as a shock that he would choose the day my firm restructured me out of a job to announce his intention to run off with the excessively bearded hipster douchebag that prepared his pretentious “espresso experience”—which involved cloves and peanut butter or some shit; just get a fucking coffee!—every Saturday morning when we met at the vegan café across the street from his apartment. It was near me, too—didn’t take but ten minutes to walk it—but I walked past three other cafes to get to it, and we never met at any place that was closer to me than to him. He wouldn’t walk three extra blocks to have coffee with me, so he probably wasn’t gonna be much help to me during the stress and mess of a lay-off. Not, just to be clear, that he offered.
After thirteen years in the cubicle zoo, my severance was okay. Not more than I felt I was owed, mind you, but enough that I’d be able to pay my bills and cover my nut for a few months while I looked for something else. Or enough to live like a king on an island the size of a college campus within spitting distance of the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal for eight weeks, which is what I decided I’d way rather do. I had the rest of my life to job-hunt. But I also had a car payment and exorbitant Southern California rent to worry about. I was never going to have a big pile of money sitting in my checking account just begging to be spent again, and I figure if God didn’t want me running off to Central America to drink beer and chase brown-skinned boys, He wouldn’t have invented the sublet.
And the local talent around here is not inconsiderable. Slender, tea-colored men abound, this one with a butt like a couple of basketballs, that one with lips so full you just wanna dip em in chocolate and nibble on them for days. Friendly guys with limber bodies who can dance til dawn to cumbia or Top 40 or a guy with a stick and a plastic bucket, every one of them as straight as the day is long, even when he’s drunk. Not that they care that I’m not—I’ve made tons of friends and my Spanish gets better every day. But the passionate romance smoldering in the tropical heat has yet to materialize. So most nights I sit here at the bar—it doesn’t have a name, that I can tell. Doesn’t really need one: it’s the only bar on the hill—and pour cheap, piss-yellow suds into the beer belly I’ve decided to cultivate, so at least I’ll have something to show for the time I spent finding myself. I’ll lose it when I get home—I won’t be getting shit-faced seven nights a week, for starters, and I’ll get back to the gym—but for now, I spend the nights swilling it round, the days sunning it brown, and I carry it around under my T-shirts like a proud hobby bowler showing off a new ball.
