What We Needed
The three of us originally planned to go island-hopping in the Caribbean for 10-12 days to celebrate college graduation. Not that our commencement was in any way praise-worthy. In fact, we’d all cruised through our four years with minimal effort and fanfare. So I suppose the vacation was really just an excuse to drink Red Stripe by the caseload in our best attempts to convince comely exotic beauties to recreate the Lancaster-Kerr beach scene in From Here To Eternity.
But after reviewing my finances, I knew that we would have to scale back our trip if I was going to be able to afford to go. I was a scholarship kid and the money would be coming out of my own savings. The cost wasn’t a factor at all for Travis or Derrin. They were both trust fundies and seemed to have unrestricted access to their fathers’ bank accounts.
So we decided to limit our trip to one island – Puerto Rico. There would be plenty to do and see to keep us busy between the beaches, rain forests, bars, etc. Besides, Derrin had said he had a Puerto Rican housekeeper as a kid and had a thing for that type ever since – soft eyes, raven hair, winsome bodies. I could tell that the opportunity to fulfill some prepubescent wanderlust was very appealing to him.
Our original plan was to spend the first four or five days touring the island and taking in all the tourist sites. But after we missed the tour bus on the first day, inertia kept us at the bars of San Juan pretty much the whole time. The nights were blurs of dance clubs, giggly island girls and empty Cuervo bottles. Mornings were spent stumbling back to our rooms, sometimes alone and sometimes not. The afternoons consisted of each of us filling our ice buckets with a three dollar bottle of Captain Morgans & a two liter of coke and slowly emptying them as we recuperated in lounge chairs by the pool.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that the discos weren’t the safest places to loiter after about 1-2 in the morning. Cash-soaked, liquor-drenched Americanos were prime targets for muggers, pick-pockets and bad characters in general. Fortunately for us, we were able to find a few places we could drink, relax and fraternize in relative safety after hours.
The bordellos.
Now it’s not necessarily what you think. They’re actually very nice establishments with bars downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. The working women chat you up as you drink and, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, lead you upstairs for a little stress relief. But if you just want to sit and drink, there weren’t a lot better places to do it. The Lucky 7, the Hawaiian Hut and the Black Angus were our favorites, the latter in particular.
We had three or four days to go and morose melancholia was beginning to set in. You can only drink so much before you drown in introspection or regretful contrition. Travis & Derrin dealt with it in their way and I dealt with it in mine. They had requisitioned a handful of girls at the Black Angus for a few hours of depraved gluttony. I had requisitioned a bartender to keep my glass filled downstairs.
I watched her descend the stairs through rum-filled eyes. It wasn’t just her natural blond-hair that made her stand out from the rest of the native women working there. It was just a clumsy gracefulness that seemed more than a little out of place. And I couldn’t figure out if she was smiling at me or just in spite of me. It wasn’t even a smile really. More of an upturned lip acknowledging me acknowledging her.
By now, I’m sure that everyone who worked there realized that I was only there to drink, but she sat down next to me anyhow.
“Is it ok if I hang out here while they clean my room?” she asked without regard to what my answer would be. She said it would be about a half hour and ordered a drink on my tab.
“You probably want to hear my story. How I got here, right?”
I’m sure she had a story, well-rehearsed and completely false, that she repeated to different men every night, explaining how she went from rural South Carolina to Puerto Rican whorehouse. Probably filled with larger-than-life characters and tales of rebellious (mis)adventure. I imagined the real story had more to do with a sexually abusive father and parasitic “boyfriends”, but neither of us really cared at that point.
“It depends. Do you want to tell it?”
“Not really” she conceded.
So we talked about personal nothings. She drew on a cigarette, leaned back in her chair to exhale, then leaned back in to draw me nearer. As if affirming some secret only the two of us shared, unspoken. Every few minutes she would take my left arm, pull it towards her and look at my watch, mindful of how much time we had left until she had to go back to work. And every time she did, I was filled with more and more panic that I was about to lose something I’d never had. It never occurred to me how little sense it made.
A khakied Brit walked across the room and placed his hand on her shoulder.
“How bout we go upstairs for a bit, sweetheart?”
I followed her eyes as they went from mine, to his hand, to his face, then back to mine again.
“A little later. I need to finish this conversation first”. Docile yet subtly assertive, he got her point and sulked over to the girl at the next table.
Effortlessly she took me by the hand and walked me over to the bartender.
“How long you gonna be?” he asked.
“The rest of the night” she answered for me as she took my wallet from my pocket, extracted four crisp one-hundred dollar bills and handed them to him.
Placid serenity washed over me as she led me to her room and laid me on her bed. Using the chair in the corner to support herself, Lillian leaned down and slid off her surprisingly casual heels and began to remove her stockings.
“No, that’s not what I want” I protested.
“I know, but I just don’t want to wrinkle my dress” she replied, seemingly amused by my chaste resistance. She turned around and knelt in front of me so that I could unzip her dress. It was only when she pulled it over her head and laid it gently on the chair that I noticed her become nervous, self-conscious. But it passed in a moment and she was herself again.
Now clad only in her bra and panties, she straddled my body and placed her lips next to my ear.
“Trust me” she breathed.
Using her left hand, she deftly unfastened the buttons of my shirt, unbuckled my belt and undressed me. She carefully folded my shirt and pants and placed them next to her clothes before lying down next to me. Her lips pressed against my ear as we wrapped our arms around each other and drifted off to sleep.
I was awoken by Travis the next morning. We were being “asked” to leave by management and the faster the better. I looked around groggily to see she was gone. Not a trace of her remained except for a faint scent of perfume. Travis tossed me my clothes, I got dressed and we left.
Before falling back to sleep in my own hotel room, I found a pink envelope in my jacket pocket that hadn’t been there before. In it were 4 fifty dollar bills and a note scribbled in eyeliner;
Before falling back to sleep in my own hotel room, I found a pink envelope in my jacket pocket that hadn’t been there before. In it were 4 fifty dollar bills and a note scribbled in eyeliner;
“Here’s my half. We both got what we needed – L.”
