BocaGrande

Standing outside of Indira's hut I felt rather uncomfortable.  It was because of the new cargo shorts I had ordered on Felicia's clothing computer.  The shorts were too snug in the crotch, and they had entirely too many pockets.  I counted nine before discovering yet another tiny snap-button pocket at the back of my left thigh.  Why would they put it there, I wondered, and was there anybody on the entire face of the globe walking around in these shorts with something in each of those pockets?

Still feeling queasy about the dream from which I'd recently awoken, I slid over to an uncurtained side window and peeped inside, half expecting to see three corpses sprawled in a river of blood on the floor.  There were no bodies.

Just then the side door swung open and Indira appeared on the wooden stoop.  "What are you doing there?" she said.  "Come in."

I followed her inside.

In the living room she gestured for me to sit on the black leather sofa, but when I plopped down and rested my hand on the fabric I realized it was a fake leather product called "Fauxther," a high-quality imitation not quite as pricey as the real thing.

"NuMeade?" she said, gesturing to an unopened pint on the coffee table.

"I'd better not."

"Something to eat?" she said, pointing to a bowl of fruit next to the brew.

I was tempted until I examined the offerings.  There was something deeply unsettling about the way she had arranged a banana over a pair of plums in the center of the bowl.

"No, thank you," I said.

"Very well.  Suit yourself."

I looked around her place, which was beautifully decorated:  tasteful paintings hanging at regularly-spaced intervals on the teak-paneled walls, a chandelier whose dangling gems appeared to be pieces of Matrix opal (probably Fauxpal, I figured), and in the center of the space, beneath a domed portal that undoubtedly let sunlight stream in during daylight hours, a circular garden of tall, graceful plants; but I couldn't tell from here whether the tiny forest was real or fake foliage.

"Nice digs," I said.

"Thank you. Would you like the tour?  The bedroom is quite unique."

"Maybe later."

"So Zen and Felicia are away for several days?"

"I guess they have to pick up supplies."

"I hope they'll be able to get the ingredients for my Chicken Tikka Masala."

"What's that?"

"It's a curry I haven't had for years.  Zen will find the garlic and jalapeño with no problem, but the coriander, cumin and garam masala I'm not so sure."

"Sounds interesting."

"Damn, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it," she said, reaching for the fruit bowl and snatching up the banana.

She peeled it exquisitely slowly, staring hungrily at the meat of the fruit the whole while.

Here it comes, I thought, steeling myself for the upcoming erotic show.  But I watched in disappointment as she twisted off a two-inch section of the pulp and popped it into her mouth.  Drat!  She was one of these women who ate a banana by breaking it off into pieces.

She devoured the fruit, standing quickly to carry the peel into the kitchen for disposal in the mulcherator.  But instead of returning to the living room, she said, "Come, there's somebody I want you to meet."


She held out her right hand as if I was supposed to take it.  And, in fact, when I reached her, she grasped my left hand, walking me to the front door as if I were a little boy.  That was a bad thought to let enter my mind because suddenly I felt as if I were in a mother/child relationship with her.


"Who are we going to meet?" I said.


"We're going to see the man who rules this village:  the chief, the sachem, the cacique, the big-time literary muckety-muck of Taller de Autores."


"What's that?"


"'Taller de Autores'?  It is how this village is called."

"What does it mean?"

 "I'm not sure--I don't speak Spanish well."

She donned a pair of NiteSee glasses and gave me a pair to wear.  She was still clutching my hand as she led me outside, and I felt repulsed by the touch of her clammy palm against mine.  Fortunately we didn't have far to go, just a few hundred yards to the center of Taller de Autores.  We climbed the porch steps to a modest ranch-style hut, and she knocked on the front door.  A moment later we heard a high-pitched male voice call out, "¡Ven!"


We entered and saw--at the far side of the space, standing in front of a cook-top gas range with his back to us--a small, slender man who appeared to be wearing nothing but a shiny green vest over his torso.  His flat, bony posterior was fully exposed, the lower third of each buttock indistinguishable from the top of its skinny thigh.  When he began to turn to greet us I braced myself for a sight I didn't want to behold, but with relief I saw that he was wearing a tan, leather loincloth, the butt strap of which had been invisible from the rear.


"Hola, Indira," he said.


"Hola, Jesus," she said.


She pronounced his name "HeyZeus."


He smiled at me, quickly crossing the floor to close the distance between us.  "And this," he said, "is obviously the infamous Lee Rowe."


We shook hands.  I couldn't help but notice the number of silver rings pierced side-by-side through each of his eyebrows.  And on his head he wore a red bandana tied in the historic pirate fashion.


To Indira he said, "I've just fried up some of the drug we'll be using esta noche."


"Drug?" I said.


"I got a primo batch of Literalis just esta mañana."

"I've never heard of it."

 He smiled big, turned his face slightly upward and got a distant look in his eye as he recalled the words to an ancient poem.


"Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise."

"Coleridge?" I said.

"I'm impressed, Mr. Rowe."

"Opium?"

"Similar."

"Hashish?  Ganja?"


He shook his head, saying,  "Although it does have something of a 'munchies' side effect--the almost insatiable hunger for book-binding glue."


"By why Literalis?"

"Because it probes the logical, linguistic side of the brain, blocking emotional impulses from crossing the
corpus collosum into the rational hemisphere of the cerebral cortex."

"It's been years since I've taken drugs voluntarily."

"No te preocupes, hombre.  Don't worry, man.  It's not like any psychedelic high you may remember, the kind where you feel totally out of control.  Getting stoned on Literalis is the exact opposite.  You are in complete control of your faculties.  Come, you will see."

Indira made a beeline for the living room, and I followed reluctantly.  Jesus made a quick detour to the kitchen, standing before the InstaMeal to give it voice commands:  "Coconut water," he said.  "And ice."  Rejoining us, he removed a huge golden-tinted bong from a low shelf behind his beanbag couch.   The bong had a large circular carburetion port in front of an enormous bowl.  After we were all seated--Jesus on the couch, Indira and I in beanbag recliners--he poured coconut water into the top of the chamber, followed closely by three or four ice cubes.

He then shredded with fingers and thumbs about five mushroom-like fungi that resembled dessicated miniature shrunken heads and stuffed them into the bowl.  Putting his mouth inside the chamber, and putting the index finger of his left hand over the carb hole, he lit the substance with a disposable iGniter, simultaneously inhaling deeply until the Literalis had cherried.  He sucked until the chamber had filled with smoke, then removed his finger from the carb and passed the bong left to Indira.

As she expertly handled the device, sucking milky smoke into the lower lobes of her lungs, I began to feel anxious, as if I were a teenager once again about to take his first hit of Eucalyptaline.  Did my hand shake a little when I reached out to take the bong from her?

I put my lips inside the chamber, plugged the carb hole and inhaled like a newborn baby gasping for his first breath of non-placental oxygen.  Just as I got the smoke down into the lower reaches of my lungs, Jesus exhaled the smoke from his.  I thought I would burst or pass out waiting for Indira to do the same, but after she did I felt it was incumbent upon me to keep the stuff inside a few seconds longer.

After I blew it out and passed the bong back to Jesus, he said, "Bastante  That's plenty.  This is some potent mierda, and we don't want to become pedants."

While he walked over to a wall-sized bookcase filled with ancient tomes I kept waiting to feel the effects of the drug.  Either the stuff wasn't getting to me or it was the subtlest high I'd ever experienced.  Jesus returned with three books so old they were literally disintegrating before our very eyes and handed one each to Indira and me.  He practically threw himself down on the beanbag couch and began eagerly snuffing at his book, smelling the front and back hard covers and inhaling, all along the spine of the volume, like a bloodhound catching a scent.  I watched in horrified fascination as Indira did the same.

Not to seem out of place or to make them uncomfortable I began to smell my tome, too, and was greeted by the prototypical odor of "old book"--ancient grasses and acids and an underlying vanilla vapor overridden by a powerful mustiness--that was a mnemonic aroma carrying me back to my first visit to the Library of Congress Museum in Washington D.C.  But that was the extent of my high.

Jesus and Indira, on the other hand, had begun to gnaw at the bindings of their books, crunching down and chewing on the petrified cardboard, paper and glue as if they were famished cats each feasting on the spine of a half-devoured bird.

When they looked up at me, bits of binding lodged in their teeth, aghast at the absence of voraciousness in me, they grew self-conscious, sheepishly setting their books on the floor.

After exchanging glances with her, Jesus said,  "¡Está bien!  Right.  Let's get started."

"Get started?" I said.  "On what?"

"Didn't Indira tell you?--we're going to workshop your book, Utomepia."

"But why?  I've finished with it."

"Have you?"

"I thought I had."

"Are we ever really finished with anything until we're finished, amigo?  Here are some of my observations.  The book is hugely entertaining, rushing at breakneck speed from one scene to the next.  But, like almost everything in life, the strength is also the weakness.  We have an expression here in Taller de Autores, "La gallina pesa menos después de poner un huevo," which translates roughly into English as "The chicken weighs less after laying an egg."  Do see what I mean?"

"You're saying I laid an egg with Utomepia, and I'm diminished because of it?"

"No, no, caballero, I'm saying the book is the chicken. ¿Entiendes?  Do you understand?"

"Not really."

"Never mind, then.  Let me just spell it out as simple as I can.  The book it's just demasiado stuff happening back-to-back.  Because of that we have no real tension.  It's just a--como se dice--a laugh-a-minute.  There's no real characterization, and the pace is like cardiac fibrillation.  You've got to slow things down, amigo."

Indira said, "Yes, I agree.  It could be so much more.  Take, for example, at the very start when you have the main character taken into custody.  That first chapter is so short; you skip over the opportunity to develop his character.  So when Jesus and I got together early today we wrote a little scene to give an example to you."

"Sí, sí," Jesus said.  "In the holding cell the night before he is sent by van to El Paso, he shares the space with an old man, and they talk.  Indira, give us the copies."

She handed a sheet of paper to him, one to me, and kept the last for herself.  When I examined my page I saw it was typed out like dramatic dialogue.

Jesus said, "You play Lee Rowe.  I'm Uncle Rocky."

"'Uncle Rocky'?"  I said.  "I'm not sure where you're going with this."

"Just humor us," Jesus said.  "You'll see in due time.  Let's try."

"All right."

Uncle Rocky:  What're you in for, young fella?

Lee Rowe:  Refusing to write a book.

Uncle Rocky:  What's the problem--you don't like writing?  You hated English in school?"

Lee Rowe:  Actually, I was very good in English, and I wanted to be a writer after I had Ms. DuMont in eleventh grade.  She would always have us read our essays aloud in class, and it was then I realized the power words have over people.  I could make kids laugh and I could make them cry.

Uncle Rocky:  So what's the deal?  Why not write the book?  Why go to all the trouble of avoiding the unavoidable?

Lee Rowe:  I've got a little problem with authority.  I don't like being told I have to do something.

Uncle Rocky:  Goes back to your old man, huh?  Was he a bastard?  Did he beat you?

Lee Rowe:  He was a drunk.  But I'd rather not talk about him, Mister.  What about you--what are you in for?

Uncle Rocky:  Plagiarism.  They're going to hang me at sunup.

When we finished the brief scene, Jesus and Indira were smiling big, nodding approval at each other over the words they had written.

Jesus was nearly ecstatic.  "Mira, hombre," he said. "¿Ves?  Do you see?"

"Yes."

"¿Qué te parece?  What do you think?"

"Interesting."

"Ah--interesting," Indira said.  "That word."

Jesus said, "What about it?"

She said, "It means 'I'm not really interested, but I don't want to offend.'"

"I see," Jesus said, looking offended now.  He nodded to himself for a good minute, allowing the awkwardness to swell into nearly unbearable proportions before saying to me, "I failed to tell you of another side effect of Literalis."

"Oh?"

"When you crash from the drug tonight the gates of your corpus collosum will be flung open allowing a flood of neural impulses to travel instantaneously from the emotional hemisphere of your brain.  Try not to overreact to the feelings which are magnified from being repressed."

It was his final pronouncement for the evening.  The "workshop" session was over.

Indira said, "I'm properly bushed.  Time to call it a night.  Lee?"

She stood and extended her hand.

I rose, saying to Jesus, "It was a pleasure meeting you.  I'll certainly keep in mind the suggestions you and Indira made--if I ever decide to revise the book."

My comment seemed to brighten his mood, and he jumped up, saying, "If you are interested in more helpful advice and insights on the literary world please check out my blog 'BocaGrande.'  The Uninet address is BocaGrande.glo."

"I'll do that."

Outside, under a full moon that had popped to the horizon like a radiant pearl bobber rising to the surface of a black sea, Indira pulled me close to her.  The lightly fragrant scent of patchouli perfume, a thousand times more potent than the Literalis we'd smoked, immediately had a profound effect on me.  I could feel her hot body against mine, and the image of her meditating earlier in the gauze-like sari came to mind.

"Dear Lee," she said, "I really must give you the tour of my hut.  I have one of those circular vibrating beds with a mirror on the ceiling above.  Surely you must be curious to see it?"

I couldn't say whether emotions would soon be pouring through my corpus collosum, but I was certain that the blood had started coursing through another organ, making my new cargo shorts feel even tighter in the crotch.  I lamented my lack of willpower as I let her drag me toward her place.  I decided that if I ever did rewrite Utomepia I was going to make the MC a more disciplined man.