In third place comes the rest of the world. If they get it, great, if they don’t, you can’t please ‘em all. It’s not like I’m aiming for bestsellerhood.

With that in mind, I particularly like the following short story, Fear and Lusting in Las Palmas. I had just so much fun writing it that it was terribly hard to edit. It has references to things I find amusing sprinkled like so much green-fairy dust; and if you’re wondering, yes, it’s not as much a nod as a stagedive in Hunter S. Thompson’s direction.

Enjoy.

We are somewhere around Nosara when the Redbull begins to take hold. Cookie, the red-haired svelte Bratislavan sitting on my left on the back of the speeding convertible BMW, turns to me wild eyed, pupils dilated because of the pitch black night, the new moon, and the hydroponic pot she had been having earlier. I don’t think Cookie is her real name, actually, but it was what I started calling her when I realized that Carolinkia – or whatever she’s called – wasn’t really going to stick in my head. I’m not too sure if she has been into the pot either, but I sure had. I stare back, wild-eyed as well, watching her henna hair try to escape her head and fly away in the windstorm.

“Nothing to see here. Stoned photographer passing through. Run along now.”

She stares at me for half a second to be sure I’m done talking and then her jaw hinges down, letting out chiming laughter like a music box has just opened. Lightly placing her hand on my forearm, she says something on that bird-tongue of theirs to the other Bratislavan sitting on my right. Cutter looks just like her twin sister, only a small mole near her mouth was placed in a different spot by whomever designed them. When cold-sober I can tell them apart by that tiny detail, but I don’t think I could be expected to recognize women that would fool a DNA test while I’m dead drunk, stoned out of my mind and hopped up on Redbull and antihistaminics. Cutter replies on the same warble-garble and then I get the music box laughter treatment in stereo.

“I should have you girls deported,” I think out loud and jump up, seatbelt forgotten, and balling my hands into fists I throw my arms up in the air and yell in my deepest, raspiest tone “Am I not your Lord?!”, only to hear a man’s voice coming out of the car’s front seat. Fear overtakes me, fueled by the silver lining of paranoia from the pot, and I crash down on the back seat with the force of 100mph. Who the hell is in the car with us? I curse Corey’s guts and the moment I had tried his cocaine-laced joint. Bastard hadn’t admitted to it being laced, but I could tell. I could tell, just as I am now sure that I lay shuddering in terror in the back of a speeding Beemer, Bratislavan models who speak like their voice has been run through an encryption algorithm for pigeons on each arm, the car’s top down so that we can get buffeted by the lukewarm night air, probably for the desired net effect of me sobering up so that my head is cool by the time our driverless vehicle crashes into the first guardrail, tree, pony, peasant or whatever the fuck gets in our way. We should have brought a driver, we should have had somebody sitting up front, minding the wheel, pushing the pedals, switching the gears, and then we wouldn’t have these phantasmal voices coming at me from the empty seat.

“Good, stay down, insano,” the same voice says. This time it sounds suspiciously like Corey’s, and then I remember he is indeed at the wheel. Good. Although I’m not sure I want to have a coke-lacer driving, it is better than having the car drive itself – or worse, be driven by a order-barking phantasm.

Next thing I know I’m lurching forward, almost crashing head-first through the windshield, stopping only by virtue of not fitting through the two front seats, and as the car makes a hard turn my head jerks off to the right, hard, but my neck doesn’t break as expected but instead my cheek ends up cushioned against something soft but firm, like a small water mattress. I contently leave it there for what seem like hours, relaxing, taking my well-deserved vacation, until Cathleen asks if I find her breasts comfortable.

“Hmm, yeah”, I reply, raising my hand to it to fluff it up like a pillow. Once it’s reached the degree of comfort I’m looking for, I slowly ease myself back into it.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Charles?”, she asks.

Some time later I realize that the question is not a rhetorical one, and deliberately ponder my answer. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, to give her any off-the-cuff knee-jerk response like “The mix of pot and Redbull, or maybe the tequila. The rum and coke must have had an effect in there too. And the half-bottle of Absolut I drank to drown the taste of the cocaine Corey put in the joint”, which is actually what ends up drooling out in a long slow phrase, without my moving from my comandeered human pillow.

You know Cathleen, right? You’ve probably seen her in a hundreds pages in dozens of magazines, none of those photos shot by yours truly; not too tall, kind of stockish, blond hair, great tits. Any of the first two would disqualify her for a real modeling career, but Cathleen doesn’t make love to the camera – she makes it bend over and butt-fucks it with a strap-on dildo, dispensing no lube, taking no backtalk. She is a living sacrificial pyre in a cold night, and you can’t help but draw closer to her for warmth, and closer, until a tongue of flame laps out and consumes you.

That alone has secured her spot.

Yeah, see? I told you you knew her. Hope it didn’t hurt too much.

On second thought, I hope it did – you had no business going near her.

“I think I was never breastfed” drips out of my mouth as a corollary.

Shit, the kind of answer I was trying to avoid.

Cookie chortles something about Cathleen stealing her boyfriend, so my lively cushion takes my chin in her left hand, raises my face up to meet hers and gives me a slow, sloppy kiss, eating my lips, sucking my tongue into her mouth to bite it off, entangling it on her own, finding it unworthy and pushing it back into my own oral cavities, where her own vocal tendril immediately follows. Just as I am about to choke on our entwined tongues she releases me and, with just a bit of laughter that feels real, alive, like it came out of a person, presses her hand against my forehead and pushes. (Did that just happen?) I stay momentarily suspended in my heels, poised in the limbo between front and back seats, until some god of the road makes up his mind and I crash back with the twins again.

I think I pass out, because we’re not on the highway anymore and the Beemer is stopped in a parking lot in front of a huge Art Deco facade, probably from the 30s, which is stuck to a huge modern building they built about 16 minutes before we showed up. They do this all the time here – take an old building, rip apart the guts but leave the first 15 centimeters intact, and then promote it as “Hotel Ringamarole, In Las Palmas Since 1930″. As I’m thinking about that the huge figure of a man dressed in a shining blue kimono, his face carefully done in fantastic make up, begins unfurling towards the sky, overshadowing the hotel and blotting out the stars. He extends a perfectly manicured hand over the building towards me and pointing with a purple fingernail thunders in a British accent: “Fifty years ago? Get out of here… nobody was alive back then!”.

I gape, flabbergasted, and a choked cry comes out of my throat as I point to the sky, trying to call the twins’ attention, hoping they will protect me from whatever primordial entity I have displeased, but they don’t seem interested in the tarted-up diety that is slowly deflating, collapsing behind the hotel again.

The peacock that is Cathleen prances out of the car and onto the 1930s bait-and-switch job, disappearing into the lobby. The twins climb out of the car at the same time, each one dragging me in their direction. I think the one on the right – Cookie? Cutter? – wins, and once they’ve lugged me around for a bit I find myself supported by both again as they half-carry me, half-push me into the lobby.

Corey walks in front of us, the smile that says he has enough money in the breast pocket of his extremely expensive tailor-made suit to buy the hotel twice over opening the door for us. His sharp haircut, always thrown in a carefully arranged post-coital disarray, makes the hostess ignore the swaggering drunk that walks besides the Bratislavan goddesses of modeling. But neither his personality or looks can save me from what I have coming, so Hephaestus’ statues drop me in an armchair just in time for my head to loll to the left so that I can see Cathleen prancing towards the elevator, and for a 1/250 second she turns towards me and winks, right before the elevator doors close, so I decide that damn the torpedoes and if I have to die someday it might as well be like that, and try to jump up from the seat and run up the 23 floors to her room, but my legs refuse to obey and I’m still crashed there by the time one of the sisters puts a cup of coffee in my hand, says something about me drinking too much, and coaxes me into imbibing the dark, bitter ambrosia.

I just want to get back to my room and order some complicated shit from the kitchen, something that will take them hours to find the ingredients for – like bean empanadas with sour cream and cilantro, or a mixed fruit salad bathed in rum, cognac and cinnamon – and then carry it to Cathleen’s quarters as a sacrificial offering, something that will show her the burning rings I make people careen through for her, presenting their pride like the skin of a killed sabertooth, showing their shredded self-love so that she will let me keep mine; but then a pattern begins to emerge from the upset beehive of people moving around me, and I realize that the thin ones in T-shirts with stuff written on them are workers, carrying and positioning lights according to the demands of a soldier who, armed with a clipboard, a turtleneck and a leather jacket makes sure that everything pleases the Queen Bee, one of those pretty tanned young things they call entertainment reporters in this country, who is appropriately surrounded by two or three drones that look more like they belong hitting on some unsuspecting girl in a not-too-upscale-but-fancy-enough downtown bar.

Three things happen in three subsequent frames.

Click. Another armchair is placed right in front of me, carefully positioned so that it faces mine, specifically chosen for their similarity. Whirl.

Click. Flash, and suddenly somebody moves Las Vegas into the room around me and turns it on, billions of watts all helping hatch the real being that is cocooned inside my body. Whirl.

Click. The room is no longer overexposed, or perhaps the trickster god that’s playing with me is using exposure bracketing tonight and I’m now on the underexposed frame; but the rest of the world has ceased to exist – now it’s only me and the Queen Bee, who’s sitting across me on the other end of the pool of light that’s all that remains in the darkness that was before Planet Earth. Whirl.

Switch into video, 30 frames per second. Soldier bee starts the night roll call, with workers hurriedly jumping to attention. Roll camera 1 (camera 1 has speed!). Roll camera 2 (camera 2 has speed!). Marker (clap). Go!

“Cut!”, I yell out.

The workers freeze in terror, stupefied that somebody other than their sire dared call out orders. The body language from their shadows tells me immediately that no one besides the Soldier, not even the Queen, is allowed to direct them. The Queen sits still, her mouth half-open, lower jaw hanging out in the middle of a sharp breath intake, whatever words she was going to utter piled up in a horrible car crash behind her uvula. She eventually realizes that something is going to fly into her mouth and the jaw clicks shut, a sound I can clearly hear above the preternatural stillness of the empty world.

Her crew inches closer to our floodlit clearing, so that I can see their outlines fidgeting, glancing at each other and occasionally in my direction, switching their weight from one foot to the other, a low buzzing barely audible. Some sort of silent hive raffle takes place and then the loser – a skinny kid wearing a baseball cap with the profile of a swinging monkey on it – takes a step into the light, flinching from it like Max Shrek deciding to step into a bright Guanacaste afternoon.

Me, I’m still drunk but the pot is beginning to wear off. The coffee the twins brought got me nowhere, even if it was good, tasty coffee roasted just right. I usually have a double espresso when I wake up, one cup of my personal dark roast blend when I’m on the shower, and then random cold caffeinated beverages during the day, not to mention my usual chocolate-covered coffee bean snacks and the Redbull/vodka mixes at night.

Giving me a cup of coffee and expect me to sober up is like prescribing Paracetamol for the migraine of a morphine junkie.

Nervous guy takes off his baseball cap and starts wringing it, trying to strangle it so that he doesn’t go alone into the dark night. He stares at his feet for a couple of years, starts to speak twice and always cuts himself short, probably used to deal with prima donnas and certain that he’ll lose yet another job over a capricious interviewee.

“Yes… ah…. sir, we… er…”

“Twins,” I burp out.

His glance shoots up, uncomprehending, his mind completely occupied with trying to process what sort of strange demand I have before I have to repeat myself or clarify further and he ends up as an intern in Diario Extra, classifying the gory photographs that not even that newspaper dares use; and forgets the rule about not making eye contact with a wild animal or a show guest.

“The twins… sir?”

I let my head fall back and left, hoping to look aloof and distant while all I want to do is lay my cheek in the back of the couch to make the room stop spinning, and try to breath slowly and deep as I was taught in yoga class. Unconsciousness, bad. Oxygen in brain, good.

The intern looks around, lost, in the verge of tears, and he shrugs his shoulders and then releases his whole body with a sigh of despair. Just as his eyes begin to moisten, a flood beginning to break over the dam of his eyelids, the circle of light that is the room finally stops spinning and I am able to give the guy a break.

“What’s your name?”, I exhale.

“Me, sir?”, he asks, looking around to the black world to see if there’s anybody else I could possibly be talking to. “Turo, sir. Arturo.”

“Thanks, Arturo.” Remember to breathe. “I came here with two twins. Redheads. Long hair, white skin. Like china. Can you get them for me?”

“Yes, sir. Both?”

“Sure kid, why not? One on each side.”

“Each… side?”

“Armrests. On each side.”

“Sure, sir!”

I’m pretty sure that this request makes as little sense to him as if I had asked for a Chessire-puss costume to dress on while the interview is conducted, but he’s happy to have been thrown a rope to drag himself out of the quicksand of uncertainty he was on, and immediately sprints from the lit area and goes to fulfill his life’s purpose.

The tanned reporter looks pleased with herself now that she knows what’s going on. The guest is a diva – that’s something she can easily relate to. I bare my teeth in her general direction, attempting to smile, and closing my eyes I practice my breathing some more.

The girls must have not been far, because soon enough I find one sitting on each armrest. They place their hands on my shoulders, and right-hand-girl leans to my ear and asks what do I need.

“Want to be in an interview?”, I ask, knowing what they’ll say before the reply comes in unison. They’re as much camera hogs as all the rest.

“Yes!”

“Great. Sit there and look cute. Rest your face against my head if you want to appear in the shot, I think they’re going for close-ups.”

Of course I have no idea what they’re going to shoot, and I don’t really give a crap. I asked for the sisters in a flash of inspiration so that they serve a double purpose. First, one on each side will support me, so that if there is a sudden surge of alcohol I don’t just keel over and fall from the couch. That wouldn’t look good on tape. But second, and most important, they’re decoys. With a twins on each side, most people watching this won’t give a crap if they’re actually interviewing a white rabbit in a top hat that keeps taking a watch out of his vest pocket and worriedly glancing at it.

Persuade. From the latin suadere – to present in a pleasing manner.

“Here, my precious boyfriend, we brought you a Redbull”, left-side-girls says.

I could marry her, but I don’t hate her enough.

Off we go again. Roll camera 1! Roll camera 2! Marker! I can feel the weight of their stares as the Soldier hesitates, but it is lifted as soon as he yells “Go!”

“This is Mirandaveracruzdelajoyacardenal, and we’re here with local photographer Carlos B., or Charlie, as the local team calls him” the Queen Bee lets out in a single breath, facing the camera. Later I’ll probably doubt that was the name I actually heard, but for now it’ll do. “Carlos is a photo artist of international renown,” – Miranda continues, lying through her teeth, making it up as she goes along, probably with no clue whatsoever as to who I am or what I do but figuring out I must have a pretty good name for myself if I got this gig – “and he’s here with the NoAd promotional campaign crew as their still photographer. How are you, Carlos?”

“I’m fin…”

“Or, do you mind if I call you Charlie?”

Did I take too long to answer? Did I finish my line? Or did this psychotic woman hopped up on who knows what just cut me off? Is the rest of the bloody interview going to be like this? Damned Corey and his promotional stuff, but a gig’s a gig – you made your choice, now pay your price.

“I’m fine, thanks.” I’m sure there was something else. “Oh, and sure, call me Charlie.”

She chuckles with practiced ease, like somebody pressed a button on a sound effects box. “You have such a though job, Charlie. Hanging around with gorgeous women in beautiful clothes – or almost none at all – that are there just for you.”

“Well…”

“Other women hold these models as the unrealistic standard of beauty,” she rants on with a conceited half-smile, knowing full well that she looks as good as the best of them, “and the closest most people are to them is the E! channel. Or our own specials, of course.”

She stops, baiting me into trying to put a word in but, having learned my lesson, I wait for a question.

“How did you get your start in this industry?”

I have a story prepared for exactly this question, full of hardship and struggle, where even success is bittersweet. It’s a story that’s perfect for telling when drunk – you can stop at any moment to try and get your bearings, and you’ll only look like you’re trying to work up the courage to continue.

It begins with my moving to New York and struggling for years as a photographer’s assistant, working late nights inhaling developing fumes and doing the actual printing of the images for about $10/hour while the photographer himself gets to sign the print and charge thousands for it, until angry at the unfairness of it all I set fire to his darkroom as a way of resigning. I barely escape going to prison because the photographer had a stack of illegally-shot voyeuristic photos bigger than J. Edgar Hoover’s and, since he doesn’t know if I kept some for insurance, he decides it’s not in his best interest to notify the police about his assistant with arsonist tendencies and just writes off the whole thing as an accident.

Unable to afford anymore even the small place I was renting, I look for roommates and end up moving into the spare bedroom of a struggling model, fresh off the break up with her womanizing, smack-peddling boyfriend that got her addicted to the stuff – a fact I don’t find out until I get home one day and find her passed out on the kitchen, a needle still stuck between her toes.

I help her go cold turkey, telling myself I’m doing it for my own sake more than hers, because I can’t possibly live with a heroin addict. We go through hellish weeks, where more than once she offers to perform unspeakable sexual favors if I’d just let her out and help her get a hit. She finally emerges, emaciated and drawn but with a light in her eyes, and soon after she’s back looking gorgeous. She’s impulsive, full of fire and life, and she helps me over come my main problem…

“Oh, which one is that?”, Miranda asks, but I return the favor and just plow on.

… and also convinces me to take a chance, close my eyes and leap, and spend my last $800 in a brick of film, some umbrella stands, a very simple enlarger, a backdrop and a couple of high-powered flashes. Between gigs doing sweater adds she poses for me in our living room, which has been converted into a rudimentary studio, and we shoot as much film as possible for long, seemingly endless nights, until we’re both exhausted and retire to our separate bedrooms, having sublimated any possible sexual urges by having a glass phallic symbol ravaging her emotions and capturing them into film. During the day, when she’s out working, I divide my time between my darkroom – our converted bathroom – and walking around town trying to promote us both.

Here I pause, to add dramatic tension and see if Miranda will try to say anything. She seems to have gotten the idea, so after drinking the rest of my Redbull and tossing the can over my shoulder into the void I just carry on.

One day there’s reason to celebrate: not only I’ve sold some of our photos to a local fashion magazine, that paid nearly $8,000 for all rights to them, but I’ve also gotten us a future gig with said magazine. She doesn’t believe me until I push a wad of bills at her, a full half of the proceeds, and then she goes ballistic – the magazine will give us both a world-wide audience. Awash in wealth, we go out to dinner to celebrate our new life of financial affluence.

We drink, we laugh, we have a blast. Sometime during dinner a cloud passes over her face, and she gets her purse and leaves for the bathroom, denying that anything is the matter. Minutes later, as she’s coming out, a guy, maybe 30 years old, runs after her and grabs her arm. She struggles free and within seconds I am at her side, the Platonic relationship having appointed me to watchdog status. There’s an argument, a fistfight nearly breaks out when I find out he’s the heroin-provider boyfriend, but at the bartender’s first mention of police he vanishes out the front door.

The return to our apartment is covered by an uncomfortable silence – there are questions I want to ask, things she wants to say, but none of us is up for taking the first step. I make a couple of attempts at jokes and she attempts laughing at them, but mostly we fail. We walk together into the living room, the ivory canvas backdrop still hung in front of a wall, and we each pull towards our opposite chambers. We tremble in the brink of disaster, knowing full well that the relationship will change completely, both pulling at an invisible chord that we can’t let go off. I make one last wordless pull, the rope tenses and then releases as she crashes into my arms, weeping, apologizing while I comfort her, tell her there’s nothing wrong, and at some point later we end up tangled in my bedroom. You can only sublimate for so long.

I wake up late the next morning and she’s not on my bed anymore. An early morning shoot, more likely than not. She won’t have to submit to those anymore. I whistle as I brew the brown piss we call coffee, thinking that’s another one of those things that are going to change around here. I skip a step or two, dancing towards the shower carrying with me my steaming cup of bad coffee, so ecstatic that I don’t even mind when I open the bathroom door and prancing in, stumble on something in the floor, spilling coffee all over the already dirty shower curtain.

At least not until I realize that I what I stumbled over was her leg. Her body is prostrated besides the toilet, torso slumped down, a trickle of bloody solidified coming out of her nose and over her upper lip, right leg ready to trip me, left leg at a weird angle with the needle still stuck between the same two toes.

She was already dead, jacked up on heroin she probably got from her ex last night.

I leave unsaid that her death helped her fame, catapulted me into the industry limelight and made all photos I had taken of her immediately sellable; forget to mention the part about how I falsified the model release form so I could cash in; ignore a ton of details. I’m too drunk to remember them or to even notice if I told the story correctly.

It’s all just as well, anyway, the story is all bogus. I cooked it up a couple of hours ago when Corey mentioned the interview.

At first it was an exercise in creative thinking that got out of hand, but when I came in and saw pretty miss Queen Bee reporter I decided on impulse to run with it, going on one of those short circuits of certainty you get when drunk, just to see if she checked up on it. She swallows each and every one of the cliches without even stopping for air.

And the story accomplishes its main objective – to waste as much tape as possible, stopping her from asking too many questions. As a positive side effect having to hold on to the plot like a lifeline helped me drag my consciousness along. The Queen Bee waits for a moment, ostensibly to recover but holding still so that camera 2 can zoom in on the single crocodile tear rolling down her face, and when the sees that it’s zooming back out she flies right into the questions again.

“You said earlier that she helped you overcome your main problem. Which one is that?”

“Oh, I’m terribly shy.”

She laughs a bit, and leans forward looking at me half-quizzically, half-impish. “Shy?”

“Yes, terribly so,” I say as I turn to smile at one of the twins. “I can’t for the life of me start a conversation with a woman, and once I somehow manage to I just rant along for hours, afraid it’ll stop.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“I am! It’s legally considered a disability in the industry and… look at the time… gotta go, have a shoot upstairs. Ciao!”

The twenty minutes I promised Corey I would dedicate to the interview have expired, so I bolt out of the sofa so fast the twins fall against each other and, as I run blindly out of the pool of light, hyperactive again, without waiting for my eyes to adjust and barely managing to rip off the wireless mike somebody had strapped on me earlier without my noticing, I throw it back to poor Arturo who looks just as confused as the rest of them.

Someone – Corey – grabs my arm as I’m struggling to get to the elevators. “Hey, that was great buddy. Great story. Any of that true?”

Oh, please. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? He knows I don’t even do this shit for a living, that this is probably the first time I’ve been close to so many professional models, much less having them pose for me. It’s like my name got picked out of a hat. Or did he just not ask me what I think he did? Damned Redbull keeps you awake but doesn’t sober you up. Must get more coffee, as soon as I shake Corey off. I turn to speak to him and manage to focus his eyes – bloodshot, raw chunks of meat with a colored iris in them – and realize what exactly is wrong with him: he was been into his stash. Probably was getting stoned or coked-up out of his head while I was trying to sober up by way of interview. He would probably pay me $500 an hour right now if I just start making famous-people-noises about lost earnings and his misuse of my photos, but I have more important things to accomplish.

“Nope. All made up. Which room is Cathleen’s?”

“546.”

“Thanks!” I bolt out as fast as the Redbull will carry me, only to be pulled back by his arm – he still hasn’t let go of me – and the pounds of muscle he has as over me.

“You can’t leave just yet, wait a second. We … You still have to shoot … what’s her name … I’m so fucked up … The one with the black hair and skirt and the thing … The pig’s blood all over the dress …”

“Carrie?”

“Right-o. You still have to shoot Carrie. Upstairs, floor 5. Same floor as all the girls.”

No further encouragement necessary. This time I manage to get to the elevator, stop by my room, pick up my photo gear and bolt up one more floor. My plan is just to get to where Carrie is, sit her in a couch in her room, take a few frames and then pretend something’s wrong with the flash or the umbrella or something, and then speed out of there and into Cathleen’s room. Right as rain.

Wrong, I think as soon as I exit the elevator.

Seriously, this is my first real photo shoot. The first reaction when Corey called to ask me if I could spend a weekend at the beach, all expenses paid, shooting still of 12 models for NoAd’s massive ad campaign was disbelief; but then I thought “why not? Mean people do succeed” and accepted that my having this opportunity was only another sample of the universe’s twisted sense of humor.

I closed the deal, set dates, and then anxiety set in.

Equipment needed to be bought. It was expensive, but I did it without any whining. I needed to practice with the light. I did that too, with much less pain that anticipated. But what was bugging me the most wasn’t my lack of equipment or experience, but rather the fact that these models had actually worked with real photographers before. They knew what good photos were supposed to look like. Even worst, I was going to be shooting digital, which meant that they could at any time ask me to show them what the hell I was doing. The Corey Crew were supposed to be putting out a calendar with the photos I gave them. What if midway through it they realized what a terrible investment I was?

When you’re on a shoot, you’re only in control for as long as people think you’re in control. If the photos were coming out nasty, well, there goes their confidence in me.

It was obvious I couldn’t act like a real photographer – I had no clue whatsoever what a professional photographer acted like. I couldn’t just come in and act like Joe Blow who just bought a digital camera from Amazon.com.

So that left only one option.

I decided to play it goofy, to make a complete fool of myself, going Gonzo on them. I’d be lucky if I were half as experienced as most guys these girls have worked with and models are predators (they’re actually sharks when it comes to smelling the fear of insecurity) so my plan was to throw them off balance, make myself look like an eccentric, and if they don’t like it they can go bugger off. For that morning’s shoot I leave aside the Acapulco shirts, the swimming trunks, the beach stuff, and go out in a pair of raggedy cut-off jeans and a T-Shirt with a blue caricature of a lumbering cephalopod with membranous wings, eyes placidly closed in sleep, little Zzzz… coming out of his head. Tomorrow will be Worship-Me-Like-A-God t-shirt day.

That’ll show them. Let them ask what that cute thing is, and I’ll rant for hours about sleeping gods lying dead in sunken minarets at the bottom of our oldest oceans, gods who influence artists in their dreams, gods that will one day rise not to conquer but to lay waste to the world, only a few survivors left so that they can careen around their scaly masters, pan-fluting away for all eternity.

As soon as I slip the shirt on I feel like a dire wolf already – it’s been a long, cold winter and I’m hungry, ravenous, and that hunger has cut through to my bones and stripped away anything that wasn’t necessary for survival. Fear and insecurity went away with the comfortable summer, gone into the past, shaken before they became a hindrance in the winter. I drop down to all fours and stretching my arched back so that I can look out the window, I howl at the sun knowing full well that somewhere there’s a full moon waiting for me.

When I get to the pool the models recoil at the sight of my supine form pacing around them, snarling every so often, ignoring the unsightly ones, focusing on those that have a plumpness of character I can sink my fangs into. I gaze around, weighing them, measuring them, finding most of them wanting, looking for whomever is going to be the easiest target for my mockery, someone I can tear to shreds in an OrsonWellian display to show the others who’s boss, and I lock onto a stout figure, rock-solid breasts barely covered by the white swimming suit, pasted smile on her empty moldable face; and receding into my hind quarters and opening up my maw, fangs dripping with hunger, I aim for her neck and lunge through the air, an unstoppable savage bringer of death.

She turns to me at the last second and her face looks puzzled momentarily, but then the expression turns to one of recognition that briefly slows me down in the air.

“Awwww, that’s So CUTE..”, she exclaims, her voice pitching up and exploding on the last word. Nevermind that, I think, and unhinge my jaw so that I can just grab her larynx in it and crush it, killing her before our tangled bodies touch the ground.

“…It’s like a cartoon baby Cthulhu!”

Out of control I morph in the air and land into her arms as an attention starved puppy, tail happily wagging, trying to lick her face.

“Who’s the nice puppy with the cute Cthulhu shirt? Huh? Who’s the nice puppy? Does puppy like me? Does puppy like it when Cathleen scratches his tummy?”

And that’s how I first learned her name.

That does me no good right now, as I stare at my second TV crew of the night – and the worst thing is that I’m supposed to work with these guys. Corey’s company is also filming the girls for TV spots (which partly explains why they don’t mind going with an inexperienced photographer – whomever is shooting the stills will be a second class citizen anyway), and I’m supposed to shoot both the girls and the production of the special.

The hallway is filled with light stands, movable tripods, expensive high definition cameras, and about eight guys obeying the orders of one director, a nasty guy whose name I don’t want to remember that has an extensive list of filming credits keep scrolling behind my eyelids. This guy knows his way around the girls, having shot NoAd campaigns since bikinis were ripped off straight from a still-warm mammut, and really has a handle on how to make them perform. As much as I hate his guts, I probably couldn’t help but admire his experience and professionalism on any day on which he doesn’t stand between me and my mistress. But today I raise my hand at eye level, index and thumb stretched in front of my left eye so that they frame his skull like a small focus finder, and slowly and deliberately begin squishing his head.

Unsuccessfully.

One of his crew, a nice guy named Eddie, notices me and nods at the director, bringing the weight of his gaze upon me. He shrugs and without saying a word gestures towards the set, giving me his royal permission to stand on that hallowed ground he has set up and photograph them; then he brings his index finger up and presses it in front of his lips, signaling at the boom mike hanging over the area.

My head full of Redbull and bloodstream full of alcohol want me to just ram through the gang of people, throwing aside those $250K cameras and flinging lighting grips, maybe taking that great hand-held 24 fps digital Panasonic with a Leica lens with me and hoping nobody will notice in the chaos, but the party-crasher voice of reason throws a wet blanket over the whole thing. Can’t screw up too badly, it says, you may want to be present at the next event Corey produces.

I get my equipment and just as I’m going to walk into the set and start shooting away, thus fulfilling my responsibilities, Eddie stops me and points to the floor. Icy fear creeps into my bones when I gaze down and realize I’ve unwittingly step into a snake mating ground of tangled plastic vines, writhing as they try to break free from the hundreds of thousands of equipment dollars they got plugged into against their will, attempting to cling to me and trick me into releasing them.

This can’t possibly be happening. I look for Eddie, ready to implore that he carries me out of that mess, but I forget all about the ophidian morass when at the end of the hallway, billions of parsecs away from me, I spot Cathleen lying against her bedroom door, half-watching the interview. She has changed into loose-fitting worn-out pajama pants and a cut-off mini-shirt that barely reveals the curve at the bottom of her breasts, a combination that makes her look sexier than any of the skimpy swimming suits she has paraded in front of the camera. There’s a water bottle in her hands, and she’s looking straight at me.

Fuck the fear.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and go all Kwai Chang Caine on rice paper, stepping around the crew and while ignoring everyone, shooting photos of the team, the equipment, Carrie being interviewed by the director, just clicking away with the available light to get as many frames as possible, but mainly to look good for Cathleen. Screw Carrie, anyway, she’s as dull as a sledgehammer, boring as an Easter matinee and dumber than a barrelfull of thugs graduating from high school only because they were on the football team. Earlier I couldn’t get a single decent photo of her; mainly because she insisted to paste this fake smile on her face. If you’re going to pretend to be nice, at least do it properly. Get a damned mirror and practice, for Nyarlathotep’s sake. When reviewing the photos she put all the blame on me complaining about the light being bad, like I had the magic charisma-projecting flash.

And you know what? The light was bad. The light sucked. It’s really all my fault. I noticed, I should have fixed it, but there were no sparks with her, there was nothing going on, and I wanted her out of there so fast it was like a heart attack on the wrong side of the chest, paralyzing my right arm, stiffling my index finger so that I didn’t take any more photos.

The memory pisses me off and makes me loose my zen. The rice paper starts crunching beneath my Nunn Bush sandals, cable snakes begin pulling at my legs, the Fear begins creeping in again. Cathleen smiles at me, a little bit sideways, with a positive I’m-waiting-for-you-but-not-for-long twinge to it, and goes back inside. Calm down, I tell myself, just think about what’s waiting for you. Breath in. Be the calm little center of the world.

“The hardest thing about my modeling career…”, comes Carrie’s voice, only to be cut off immediately by the director.

“No”, he says with the authority one would use to with a dog that’s trying to come inside the house but isn’t supposed to, “Say it just the way I do, then go on from there. ‘The hardest thing about modeling is…’”

“The hardest thing I’ve had to do while modeling…”

“No. Repeat first, then go. ‘The hardest thing about modeling is…’”

“The hardest thing I’ve had while modeling…”

This is too much. It seems that being a 23rd level Gold-Digging Skank with +3 to Cash Location hasn’t left many experience points available for other things. Like a brain. Carrie starts to complain, whining that she’s doing exactly what he’s saying, while the director continues giving the same instructions in the same angry monotone. I feel my forehead moisten, and find that it’s covered in droplets of sweat. The camera trembles a little as my hands begin to shake and I know what’s coming next: my legs will tense, one foot half a step behind the other, providing support, my hands will turn into fists, and I’ll be ready to hit somebody. It’s the proximity to the dumb skank that’s causing it, having to listen to her drivel, nonsense that she probably knows is just plain wrong but can’t stop now, because stopping her yapping would be a public admission of her own stupidity. This is even worse than the Fear, the Fear would be something positive and easy to handle right now.

This is the Rage.

I have to get out of here before I have to end up explaining to some police officer that it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t kill the brunette – it was the dangerous combination of Redbull, caffeine, alcohol and whatever Corey put in the pot that made me do it. You see, officer, with just regular pot this would never have happened. Find the lacing bastard, send him to prison so that he ends up with a tattoo-covered husband named Big Mike. That’ll teach him.

No, can’t allow it to happen. I bolt off, running towards Cathleen’s door, cutting in front of the video cameras and the reflectors. All around me people jump up moving in slow motion, arms flailing wildly, pointing at the equipment, but I can’t make out a word they’re saying because of the bizarre way they sound when the tape is played slowly, so I assume that they want to warm me about the filming going on, but fuck that because they’re shooting video anyway, until there’s a check as something pulls my left foot back, strongly, and then releases.

Oh. Shit.

There’s a metal rustle behind me, an aluminum Ymir waking up from his dead slumber, the gods having finally decided to intervene and stop me. I can feel the glacial air of the frozen giant in my neck as I hear the crying sway of metal, but what freezes me in the spot is not just the return of the Fear, much worse this time than what I felt with the appearance of the gargantuan executive transvestite, but the unescapable fact that all around me the film crew has gone silent. It’s not just me this time – they probably can see it, inching behind my back, ready to grab me by the neck and throw me over the railing five floors down into the lobby, the progenitor itself of the race of frost giants stopping me from joining his exact opposite element.

Paralyzed, unable to turn, I feel the primordial beast pull back air, inhaling, trying to suck out as much oxygen as possible, and then he lets it out in one freezing exhalation, covering the filming crew and with its poisonous chill turning them into frost wraiths as well. They all lurch at me with unnatural speed, just as the metal swaying becomes a screech as the colossus chases me, and I run as fast as I can, racing off towards the warmth I can already feel coming off Cathleen’s room, my gaze firmly set on the flickering of flames I can see coming from beneath her door.

I race off, bolting, jumping over the rest of the twined copper and rubber vipers littering the floor, speeding as much as possible, dodging the children of the Wendigo as they try to stop me, going too fast to realize that the former crew seems to be running past me, not at me, until I run head first into something frail, and me and whatever gossamer being I just body-slammed go rolling into the carpeted aisle, limbs in a tangle.

Whatever delicate thing I rammed whimpers something about a boyfriend in a chirping bird-like voice.

I jump up, shaking invisible lint off my shirt and, pretending I don’t have a metallic force chasing after me, extend a hand to Cookie to help her up.

She stands up, tears welling in her eyes, and immediately bursts “You almost killed me!”

“No, I did not…”, I reply and, since she seems unconcerned with what’s going on behind me, I turn around to see if some sort of Odin came down and slain the blasted thing. There is no metal titan there, just a wasteland of fallen light stands, broken cameras, torn light gels and angry crew, most of them trying to crawl from under the mess that descended upon them. Only two of the guys are left standing, and this time they really do seem like they’re going to chase me.

I grab Cookie’s face in my hands and pulling her close, lightly kiss her forehead and then whisper in her ear, “I almost gave you life!”.

She looks at me uncomprehending as I cackle maniacally and run the final yards to Cathleen’s door, the cost of the equipment be damned, I won’t be here tomorrow anyway, and her door opens just as I am getting close to it, white light embracing me, burning out the frame, as I cross the threshold to gladly immolate myself into the pyre that is her.

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I began writing it to exorcise some recent issues, as a way to crawl back up from the creative wasteland said issues had moved me into, using it as a tool to force myself to create something more intimate, in the manner of my earlier photos, instead of hiding myself behind the patina of sense of humor and sarcasm of my other stories.

At first the story progressed quickly – words came easily, phrases started building up, paragraphs just appeared out of thin air. Every so often I’d hit a bump, but with the help of stubbornness and a few screwdrivers I managed to just ride over them, finishing a section and moving on to the next one.

Then something happened and I stopped writing. The flow of words had become a trickle and I just couldn’t seem to get over the current section. Last Sunday, after trying to force myself to put down 1000 words and not managing to get more than 400 out, I just collapsed on my couch to wonder what the hell was going on.

I went over what I had written, reviewing which chapters managed to hold my interest and which ones I just fast-forwarded through to get to the next one. A pattern slowly emerged. Just as it had happened when I was writing, I realized that the bumps in the story were the even-numbered sections, those set in the character’s past. Those were there only because I had sold myself on a gimmick for the story and wanted to carry it through because I liked the idea. Pulitzer delusions, maybe.

The obvious solution was to cut them out, prune them, leave them in the floor of the editing room. Something stopped me, however. Those chapters were the ones that were more self-indulgent, the ones I had been writing as a way to spite a person, or just to fictionalize some recent events. Bendrix, from The End of the Affair, came to mind immediately: a book takes me a year to write – it’s too hard work for revenge.

I had run out of anger.

Off those chapters went. Put together they constituted less than 25% of what I had written, and the result is something much cleaner, something I want to continue building on top of.

It also gives me the feeling that my subconscious was telling me that the future is much more interesting than the past.

If you’re curious, the removed sections follow this note. The rest will stay locked up in my machine until (if ever) the story if finished. I may continue this storyline later, when I’ve put more time and distance from the events.

“We could arrange something,” his wife says. “I don’t know, agree to see other people.”

She pauses, waiting to see his reaction.

“Are you trying to insult me?” he replies, “I have no interest in seeing other people. I’m married to you.”

And so it had begun.

For some reason he had missed the obvious signs. When she had made that comment during dinner, red flags should have appeared all around her, sirens screaming, alarms going off in his head. For some reason it didn’t happen. In retrospective, with that clarity that being outside the situation gives people, he thinks he can come up with an explanation: he had been so used to his wife’s jealous fits, to her insecurities, to having her always think the worst possible thing about him when he hadn’t ever even lied to her, that another comment along those lines didn’t seem out of place. He just thought she was baiting him, goading him into accepting all those thing she suspected about him.

He wasn’t surprised either a few weeks later when, while he fast-forwarded through the ads in some show they had taped, she threw her hard back and with practiced spontaneity, said “You know what we could do?”

“About what?”

“You know, the house.” She pauses for a moment so that he can accomplish the context switch. “We could be roommates. We would live together, but we each do our own thing. We both share the rent, and then arrange something for when you want to bring a chick to the house – I don’t know, tie a handkerchief to the door or something.” And she laughs, with that hideous it’s-a-joke-I’m-not-serious tone she uses for when she doesn’t have the guts to just come out and say something.

It isn’t until almost two weeks had passed that it finally hits him, a bucketfull of cold water thrown straight at his brain as he is trying to finish a particularly nasty section of the program he had been working on. He starts to slowly put scattered events together, at first nudging them close to each other to see if they fit, then throwing more and more things on the table until in the end he starts just dragging tiny, heretofore irrelevant tidbits from the dark recesses of his memory, and piling everything in an unstable stack of recollections.

All the times she had to stay working late at the office, even after the company had reorganized the financial department years ago so that they didn’t have to pull all-nighters anymore.

Those strange occasions where she had to go to work on, for instance, December 22nd, and had returned home well after 3am.

The I’m-tireds, it’s-too-lates, it’s-too-earlies, ate-too-muchs, it’s-8-already-when-it-was-really-7s, and other greatest all-time hits she used to pull on him to escape any hint of sex. Oh, let’s not forget the I’ve-got-to-leave-now-maybe-when-I-return, and then she comes back home and crashes on the couch to randomly flip between channels.

It is then that he realized that the sooner she left, the better. Her attitude, her behavior, her whole manner of being, were slowly turning him into something he despised. He was being transformed into the stereotypical spouse that hears insinuations in everything the mate says, that wonders if the other person is really where they said they were going to be, that worries if they’re doing what they said they were going to be doing.

She was turning him into her.

And whatever else happened, he couldn’t allow that.

Oh shit.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

What the fuck did you do, man? What the fuck did you do?

He looked at his hands, holding them under the sink as he rubbed them vigorously, seemingly making no dent on the filth covering them. His mind swam with vague recollections of what had happened, his right hand reached for the loofa and started trying to take the skin off his left hand, and then

he was on the toilet, doubled over, execrable, wet noises coming out of somewhere in his upper body, and acrid stench filling his nose and causing more of the painful splattering gurgles to emerge, his hand hanging limply over the toilet bowl and into the sludge-filled water, his stomach trying to rebel again and choke him to death and

he kept telling himself to just walk towards the shower, forget the sink, just stumble towards the shower and open the cold water, just don’t slip on the stupid rug that was there precisely so that you didn’t slip on the stupid floor, please don’t step on that rail that hurts, and just get in there and who gives a fuck if you have a shoe on, or pants, and screw the wallet and your ID’s, just open the water and let it

hit him like a pillow case full of bricks, cold and hard against the back of his head, and the sensation was so agonizing that he would have screamed had not some part of his consciousness-in-exile told him that may attract the neighbors and then he would have too much to explain, and so he bit down, hard, on the back of his hand, and held his teeth there even when he tasted something sweet in the water, something warm and sweet that relaxed him, just as the water stopped ramming into him and turned into a blanket that enveloped his body, returning feeling to the skin he would have swore was dead and about to fall of his still moving carcass.

He opened the hot water as well and slowly, gently, he slid down to the tiled floor and curled up, a child in amniotic fluid, the sins of the night gradually washing away from him, oblivion coming and taking from him the worries of the inevitable clean up, and he slept.

Mauricio threw his head back slowly, closing his eyes to get the glare of the computer monitors out of them for just a moment. He brought his hands up to his face and slowly rubbed his eyes, giving up after a few seconds on any hope of stimulating the lachrymals into refreshing his dried-up eyeballs, and with only a minimum of groping he got his eye drops from the desk and used them.

He held the pose for a while, mildly entertained by the fact that with his face to the sky (or the ceiling, for that matter), neck stretched, hands behind his head and fake tears running down his face, he must look like a parody of a supplicant to a higher power.

“Mauricio,” Roldofo’s gruff voice jerked his mind back to reality. “There’s a phone call for you.”

He opened his eyes back into the office reality. Rows after row of desks stretched around the space he lorded over, like pods on the human fields of the Matrix, betting clerks of the horse department taking a strangely uniform break after because the Kentucky Derby, the Superbowl of horse races, had just started and no more bets could come for at least two hours. The fifteen clerks of the department, his small, irrelevant fiefdom, were all relaxed after long hours of dealing with stupid, thick gamblers, their only redeeming feature being that they had money to spare and wanted to throw some (or most) of it at the book.

“I don’t care if it’s a VIP,” he replied to Rodolfo, regretting at once the grumbling tone he was using with a the big guy who was, deep inside, as tender a Sweetums the Muppet. “Tell them we’re not taking any more bets.”

“It’s not a client, it’s a personal call. Some guy named Arturo Rodríguez. He said he’s a friend, mumbled something about loyalty.”

“Hmmm, OK. Please tell Laura to pass it through.”

Mauricio felt like he hadn’t achieved much in his life. Considering he was an Anthropology major (solely because there wasn’t actually an Archaeology career) the fact that the was leading the horse betting department of an online sportsbook and not discovering a lost civilization somewhere, clearing the dust off some bones fresh off a dig site, or at the very least classifying pottery to see if said dig site was Pre-Columbian or Post-, felt like a futile accomplishment at best. Still, it reflected his loyalty to the company, his regimentation for achieving his ends (however irrelevant in the grand scheme of things they may be), and the fact that he stoically believed in the pure, internal beauty of discipline, like a member of an symphonic orchestra that no matter how senior or how experienced he may be, how many concertos he may have lead the other cellos on, he still must fall in line with the guidelines set by his conductor or risk spoiling people’s edification through music.

Too much introspection. Rodolfo was gone and the small orange light on his desk phone had been blinking for a while, indicating an incoming call. He hadn’t heard from Arturo for several months now. He was a loyal friend but Mauricio had the distinct idea that Marianella, Arturo’s wife, didn’t like him one bit, so Arturo took pains to see Mauricio outside any circle where he may run a chance of running into his wife. Mauricio considered it a mostly sensible compromise: it allowed Arturo to avoid friction with his old lady, while at the same time keeping him in touch with old friends.

He dreaded pressing the blinking orange button. It had nothing to do with Arturo – he just hated phones. His people at the office teased him saying that he must be the last single person in Costa Rica without a cell phone, and that he should get one if only to support the nationalized phone service. Mauricio, however, couldn’t get over the fact that having a cell phone would make him reachable everywhere, something that while for most people it was precisely the reason to get one, for him it was nothing but yet another roadblock in the way to finally disappearing, leaving behind any possibility of somebody tracking him down.

He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was not like he was planning to bomb a building or attempt to assassinate the president or print counterfeit money or something. He just treasured his privacy more than anything else in the world.

Hell. Arturo. Right.

He picked up the handset and pressed the insistent little bugger that kept nagging at him for his attention. “Mauricio, horses.”

“Hey, Mauricio, how are you?”, Arturo’s voice came from the handset, just a bit more sirupy than usual.

“Hey ‘Turo, how are you buddy?” he replied, the gusto in his voice genuine. Arturo was a close friend, and close friends you not only respected; you loved them like they were your family. More than that, because your family at least had the blood bond – friends were strangers who had earned it. “I haven’t heard from you for a couple of months.”

“Good man, good.” Came the automatic response, no spirit whatsoever behind it. “Listen man, when can we meet?”

Mauricio glanced at the weekly schedule, which was pasted regularly on the wall for anybody on the team to see. Today was Friday… so considering bet influx and factoring the possibility of any of his clerks getting sick…

“How about Sunday?”, he replied, looking aimlessly around the hall.

“Can’t wait, man. Seriously.” There was strain in Arturo’s voice, an almost imperceptible wavering as he beseeched, “Can you show up tonight? I need to talk to somebody I trust.”

“OK, sure. Tonight, then. Where?”

“How about Big Dog’s?”

“Pavas?”

“Right.”

“I’ll be there. Hey ‘Turo,” he paused momentarily before hanging up, the certainty that in the more than a decade he had known Arturo, his friend had never requested any favors, holding himself back from requesting help even when he was going through what was obvious to all his friends were bad times. While Arturo probably made more money overall working as a software development consultant that Mauricio could hope to make as a betting clerk or, needless to say, as an archaeologist, he knew that the software market had gone in a steady decline for almost the last two years. Arturo just sucked it in, tightened his belt, stuck his chin out and weathered the bad seasons; but while the lean months must have taken its toll on Arturo’s reserves, he was never depressed – gruff, maybe, but he always managed to find the spirit to joke about things or some spare cash to buy his friends a round of drinks. If Arturo was pleading for somebody to talk to, which was precisely what it sounded like, things must be bad. “Is everything OK?” he prodded, without kicking himself for not finding a way to ask that wasn’t so cliched.

“Yeah, don’t worry. Well, they’re not. But it’s no use worrying about them. It’s just…” He stopped, holding himself on the threshold of some confession. “Not over the phone, OK?”

“No problem. Is eight-ish OK?”

“Eight it is. See you. Thanks man.”

Big Dog’s Sports Café was a small bar at that strip of San José where Sabana is still morphing into Pavas, and it’s feeling more than a bit unsure of its identity. There was a mix of small office buildings, the largest one a whopping four stories high, and which belonged more to the Sabana side of things; and the furniture stores, appliance stores and bars that covered most of Pavas’ main street. The schizophrenic end result couldn’t possibly be good for business: people who wanted a bar kept going further into Pavas or Escazú, while the area wasn’t highly valued for business real state which caused most buildings to end up only half-occupied, looking like they couldn’t make up their mind if they were derelict or engaged. As Mauricio walked there he couldn’t help but wonder why most of those business didn’t just pack up and leave for greener pastures. Probably, he thought, the area was just enough: just cheap enough for moving not to be cost effective, just respectable enough so that a new address wasn’t necessary for making business, just reachable enough that employees didn’t have too much of a hassle getting there. The zone walked the very fine line of pure, unapologetic mediocrity, and (completely in line with its other behavior) managed to barely survive while doing it.

Big Dog’s itself was a similar mix. It had the air of a bar born in a good family but that has come down in the world, and instead of the lofty goals its progenitors originally had for it, dreams of being filled with attorneys and doctors and general managers and politicians, stuffed with money and eager to spend it on Lynchburg Lemonades, Chocolate Martinis, Singapore Slings, Knockouts, it had to settle for secretaries and bank clerks and – at best – a financial advisor or two, people that went there and drank beer out of the bottle, putting the glass aside like they had been given a fork to eat peanuts, guys and girls who when bored gawked at the large screen where random games of multifarious sports were sometimes projected in order to allow the place to maintain the pretense that it had something to do with sports, and who sometimes drank too much and became despondent of their lifestyle and ended up clutching the somewhat filthy toilet, loudly invoking Great Cthulhu.

Arturo was sitting at a table near the glass-less window, as Mauricio had expected, given ‘Turo’s hate for smoke. His back was to the door and he was trying to push a lime wedge into a Corona bottle with that singlemindedness that alcohol can give you, the husks of two other beers that had gone through the lime-rape and subsequent drinking standing in line on the table. A cheap short-sleeved burgundy shirt draped over his slightly overweight form, jeans that he had worn a couple of days too long and dusty hiking boots, Arturo looked just picture perfect for the bar – the only thing missing was a gold-digging secretary looking to get knocked-up by the boss and thus getting on the alimony gravy train sitting beside him.

Giving the lime a slight twist as he pushed down, he finally managed to get the damned thing into the bottle, sprinkling himself with lime juice in the process. He brought his fingers to his lips and licked each one with an abandon that Mauricio had never seen him do anything, turning his head and scanning the bar as he did it and finding Mauricio as he walked towards the table. Arturo stood up and, as Mauricio extended his hand in greeting, Arturo unexpectedly hugged him. He certainly looked better than Mauricio had expected, given the tone of voice he had when they had spoken.

“How are you, man? Great to see you. Thanks for coming. Grab a seat. Corona? No, you’re a Pilsen man, right? Hey, bar-girl! A Pilsen for my friend, please. Sit down, sit down. Say… what’s up? How’s work? Always at the same horse betting thing? Of course you are, that’s where I called you today. Sorry, you know I’m not a big drinker, two of these and I’m ready to climb on the table and yell Rancheras at the top of my lungs, and this is my third. Good of you to come, man, good of you to come. Seeing anyone lately? No? Well, you know, it happens when you’re picky. So anyway… yeah…”

He finally inhaled, held his breath in for two seconds, and exhaled. Mauricio had managed to squeeze in a grand total of three words, two grunts and maybe a nod during the whole tirade, so he just observed his friend as ‘Turo jabbered and gesticulated as in a frenzy, making greeting gestures towards Mauricio and almost knocking over his Corona, which Mauricio managed to straighten up just in time, and then flailing bombastically to clear his arms off the table and missing the Pilsen bottle the pale-faced baggy-eyed waitress was bringing by mere inches; and when he finally stopped to breathe, Mauricio took a long swig from his bottle, thinking that in doing so he was setting himself smack down in the average clientele of the bar, and decided that unless Arturo had been surviving solely on chocolate-covered coffee beans for the past three weeks, something was seriously wrong with his friend.

“Yeah… ” Arturo continued, “So what have you been doing? Mostly the betting gig?”

“Mostly, yes,” Mauricio shrugged.

“What about your Archaeology classes? Still in college?”

“Anthropology.”

“Right, they don’t actually give Archaeology here, was that it?”

“Yes. There’s this dig site that I may go to, but you know how those things are. They don’t pay as well, and they take forever.”

And damn it, that was true. They didn’t pay well at all, barely above minimum wage, mostly because him and the others were supposed to be only students who not only didn’t have any use for the money but used the excavation work for extra college credits – which may have been true for most of his classmates, but after dropping out of a Law career that he had joined only to please a former girlfriend and spending the following years on personal pursuits, Mauricio was already pushing 32 and had the bad habit of supporting himself – so they were used by the University expeditions as a trained substitute for the cheap, generic labor they would otherwise need to get on site. And the expeditions did take a long time, but what really screwed up your planning is that it was a random amount of time: you could start with a nice plan of how you were going to clear and bag everything, which would be followed to the dot for three out of the four weeks that had been allotted for on-site work, and the somebody got lucky, stumbled onto a secondary site, and next thing you know it’s your third month removing dirt with a toothbrush and some dentist tools – leaving aside how long you were going to spend numbering, tagging, weighing, dating and classifying all the little bits of pottery, bone, jade or stone that the team found.

Sportsbooks were a steadier, better source of income, but he had to be careful that the siren song of easy money didn’t distract him from what he really wanted to do. He had had enough of that already.

“And how’s the sportsbook treating you?”

“Well. I’m doing fine. Storing some money away, you know, in case I want to move out or something. Or just spend some time on a site.” He drank from the bottle, studying his friend. Arturo leaned over the table, supporting himself on his elbows, holding the Corona with both hands, arms close to the body, looking at him intensely but with eyes that felt vacant, his mind either having vacated the premises to make room for more alcohol or just occupied someplace else. Mauricio though that his posture seemed coiled, like the inner springs of a cobra baton ready to be unfurled by a security guard to bash a dangerous bar patron over the head. “How about you? Job OK?”

“It is! This has actually been my best year, in the past five that I’ve been a consultant. Remember that project I told you about six months ago?”

“The ones that wanted you to come on board full time?”

“I did. It’s a cool project, they pay on time, and I still get to fix my own schedule. It works really well.”

“I’m glad for you!” So it wasn’t money. “How’s Nella? Always in love with me?”

Unfortunately he had picked a bad time to drop the question, because Arturo was drinking his beer and, since they were sitting across from each other, the bottle blocked his face and Mauricio couldn’t see if there was any reaction. He did seem to soak up for longer than usual, but when the bottle came back down on the table, already half-empty, Arturo’s face was blank.

“You know how it is…” Mauricio could almost see the footnote, a disclaimer saying that whatever he though of his wife, his duty as a husband was to complain and joke. “Nella’s insane.”

“We know that, she married you.”

This was the standard exchange, which took place almost every time Marianella came into the conversation, but Arturo’s spirit wasn’t into it today. He leaned back on the chair, his shoulders collapsing, the looped energy going out of him. He raised his beer and started to say something, holding his mouth open and his bottle on the air as if time had stopped, then sighed as if the little energy he hadn’t spent on his initial rant had been drained out of him with the effort of just starting to talk again, and his body crumpled back into the chair again. Mauricio stared at his friend, who avoided his gaze and finished his bottle with one gulp.

Both sat quietly in their own chairs, the static of a hundred happily drunken people enveloping them, Arturo looking at Mauricio like a local TV channel had gone off the air and white noise had filled the screen, but he was too worn out and weary to walk up to the TV and turn it off; Mauricio’s mind wandering, mistrustful, wondering what had dragged Arturo so far down.

Some minutes later – none of them had been keeping track – Arturo stirred back to life.

“God I’m tired.” He rubbed his eyes with both hands, and then pointed a thumb over his shoulder to the door. “Let’s get a cup of coffee somewhere.”

“Sure.”

“Where to?”

“Dunno. Wherever.”

“Let’s go to my place. It’s close enough, and I make one killer cup of coffee.”

With that he slunk out of the chair and, without any further words, he started for the door. After calling for the waitress and taking care of the bill, Mauricio followed.

Mauricio sat still on one of the couches at Arturo’s apartment, holding his beer, uncertain at how to react to what his friend had just told him. Arturo was obviously plastered – hell, had actually been drunk already when Mauricio got to the bar – and the first hour after they arriveed he had just kept guzzling can after can of Guiness until, his eyes glassy and his movements jerky, he had stumbled onto the sofa and collapsed, passed out but still holding onto a mercifully empty black Guiness can.

Fortunately for Arturo, Marianella hadn’t come back to the house early. It was actually fortunate for Mauricio as well, since he wasn’t exactly in the mood to stand there and while she perorated about him leading her poor, innocent husband astray and making him drink obviously more than he could take. “It’s only when he goes out with you guys that he does these things,” she would say. He’d get extra shit brownie points if Arturo happened to barf all over the sofa, burping in technicolor over the already picturesque furniture that only Nela could have chosen.

His first thought was to call a cab and leave, but even after having had a few beers he wouldn’t bring himself to just dump his friend there like a half-dead junkie in the door of the emergency room. Who knows how much he had actually drunk, it might take him a while to wake up and then…

Oh fuck. What if he actually had alcohol poisoning?

Honestly, he had no idea how much Arturo had drunk during the day. Maybe the four coronas and six or seven Guiness were enough to you ripped but not to actually poison you, but what if he had started earlier?

[...]

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It’s not that I lose interest, it is just that I lose focus – I start to overedit old stuff and don’t get anything new set down on paper.

Then tonight, while drinking some Glenlivet and watching a live performance of Moby Dick, an idea ocurred to me. I’m going to start publishing the various chapters online as I finish them, instead of just keeping them somewhere expecting the whole blasted thing to be done. This will probably force me to write regularly, and to remove that pesky overediting obsession.

A new section will be uploaded at the very least every other Monday, and I promise not to go back and edit the old ones, except when absolutely necessary to fix an error. The only little detail is that they’re written in Spanish (with a nice dose of Costa Rican slang and some Spanglish), so they might not be easy reading for a non-native.

We’ll see how it goes.

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