Pine Cay

The tropical storm raked the island with warm rain, and in its wake I had to look for someone down near the Devil’s Cut. The sand road had flooded; filled with murky, pearl-colored water of unknown depth, and despite my vehicle’s fat wheels and high undercarriage I decided to play it safe and go off-road, crunching through the reeds near the shore-break where Columbus’s men landed 500 years ago…right onto the island’s private runway. Fishtailing across the cracked tarmac, spattered with mud, bumping over rocks, humming along with Regina Specktor’s ‘Fidelity’ playing on repeat in my head (“suppose I never, ever saw you”/”suppose it never fell apart”), face tilted out the side-door for any executive jets that might take this highly inappropriate moment to drop out of the low cloud cover for touchdown. Back onto the parallel sand road, swerving past the pigmy garbage truck trundling towards the dump, heavy with stone-faced workers who sardonically yell “Joe-Ni-Deep!” at the sight of the red bandana around my head, the four days’ stubble…and at that most excellent moment, I think: I could live down here.

Except for the bugs. Staying in a farmhouse in a clearing in the scrub jungle, 200 yards from the beach, means all manner of crawlies and beasties come out to sip at your blood. You wake up four times a night, pad into the living room, and soak yourself in bug spray before heading back to bed. Out kayaking in the Caicos Banks, sea turtles and bonefish diving through the sand below, the sea breeze keeps the buzzing buggers back…but once you get back onshore, you’re theirs. Which is why I found it surprising, walking along the beach one late morning, to see the 10,283-richest woman in Europe and her 17-year-old stoically mute Italian boy-toy stumble out of the weeds stark naked, running for the water.

“Bonjour!” I called, with a cheery wave.

“Gawk!” The Countess went, sprinting double-time for the breakers.

“Arf!” cried her little dog (a four-legged one, not the two-legged), galloping after her.

Having interrupted the spirit of the doubtlessly post-coital swim, and having gained some small measure of revenge for La Comptessa’s open mockery of my French accent at a dinner last year, I gave another faux-oblivious wave and continued up the beach past them…but her little bijoux chein decided to switch national alliances and follow at my heels. Creating an issue for both the Countess, who, now safe in the opaquicity of the water, began to call for her little monsieur to return to her, as well as for me, threatening via pantomime to drop-kick the animal into a convenient rip-tide and send it to Spain.

Back in Providenciales, riding in the back of a pickup towards the docks, seeing campaign posters on everything. “They call elections now,” someone told me later. “President wants them held in March, so he can bring up Haitians and make them belongers, keep him in power, but the Queen calls elections. He is so corrupt. It is hard to hide that kickback wealth, a tiny place like this.” The campaign posters are stapled to the rickety boards of chicken-shacks, taped to the grimy walls of auto-repair shops and windowless cinderblock boxes; and in the hills above, facing the ocean, the steel and concrete skeletons of new condos and hotels, sprouting all along the island chain. Some need to hide their wealth, true; others want you to be able to see it in a boat from miles off.

Crowd Control

“Think about it,” the bartender with the red shirt and the long greasy hair tells me. “What’s the Cat known for?”

“Alcohol poisoning,” I joke, and regret it. The downstairs bar around us is empty except for a pair of washed-out women in hooded sweatshirts and a bony man flicking a piece of tape between his fingers. The bartender stares a hole through the back of my head.

“Guess again,” he says, very quietly.

“Music?”

“What’s the capacity upstairs? You don’t know, so I’ll tell you. Six hundred. How many smoke, you think?”

“Say half.”

“And all those people, filling the upstairs, suddenly needing to smoke, come outside. Clogging everything up. Listen, I used to smoke. I stopped smoking and drinking three years ago.” He holds up a bottle of Budweiser in each hand for a significant moment, before lowering both into the cooler behind the bar. “But this is America, and in America, I believe you have a God-given right to kill yourself however you want to.”

I drink up, jot a few notes, and leave. No way will that part of the discussion end up on my DC Style blog on the smoking ban.

First Week, New Year

I win the National Press Club’s short story contest, using the first chapter of the book; an agent in NYC is reading the first 40 pages. AARP the Magazine story comes out. OnTap issue comes out. Post story runs on Sunday. Amy Lin story runs in the City Paper.

New Year’s down at Lake Anna—a giant house in a forested stretch off the 606. Three days with journalists and other drinkers with writing problems, not to mention the contingent of increasingly belligerent Russians. I get the opportunity to work on my grilling skills, and develop an affinity for Rusty Nails.

I come back to a new office—and a desk with my chair and screen to the door. People sneak up and shoot rubber bands at the back of my head. It makes me think of the television ad where the monkeys scream and leap and basically destroy the life of their one human co-worker.