Story
Damien, at the outset, knew of one thing.
Travel. He had been committing the act since 1978, when he was 19. First Panama, then Sweden, then Uganda. He never seemed to stop.
Happening one day, overnight almost, he became a foreign correspondent for the NY Times. He'd chime in on art activity of the southern sphere. Who was what, doing who. They all read it, and they loved and invited him further inward.
Damien, one day, found himself with an email:
Damien,
What does Mazatlan look like today compared to the days of Kerouac?
For instance. Something like that.
In the course of weeks, Damien found himself in paid-for hotels and suites garnished with brandy and sparkling wine. To make himself susceptible to the wanderlust of the unfortunate, he'd sneak into late-night theaters and bars, flirting with strippers and backgammon players, feeling his way along the wall toward the bathroom where he'd puke the tequila and beer onto the wall.
Damien tried to hit a low but couldn't; wouldn't, even. His money was held at a low of twenty-eight thousand dollars, including hookers and fireworks and rounds for the bar.
On an evening like tonight, as the sun is hitting the horizon like a silver star on the fridge, magnified by the purple-heated phosphorescent tube of the kitchen centrality, the family buzzing around it like bees, hornets even, and that made my math badge brilliant with light. I promise.
This evening happened so that Damien was presented with a group of two, friends, from LA. Friends of friends. Gómez Rubio and Dr. Barraza, friends of friends, felt their way around the fluorescent fish tank entryway, rubbing rolling hips to ass cheeks against diners along the way. They sat after shaking, nodding, smiling. They spoke in Spanish and then English. My tongue wasn't warmed to the land yet.
After we fucked, I saw them to the hotel exit, my hand firm against eithers under-the-hip. Outside we kissed and hugged, and I had an erection that nipped the pant leg of my fellows. I waved them goodbye.
Damien had been to many places, but his drug problem had never been the problem it had become in Mazatlan. He did heroin, coke. He drank till sleep. He woke to the muffled sounds of a woman next to him in bed, sleeping in and off the fucking and drugs they did. His writing fell into the cracks. What would the paper think. He thought of his wife and kids and grandkids, all shaking their heads at his funeral where he wouldn't show his face because his face had too may needle holes from doing heroin in his face.
That was really when he woke up.
He said boy, I really shouldn't be doing this stuff. For my kids and grandkids.
He straightened up and once in a while he would call home and thank his family for being strong while he was away. It had been two weeks since he left LA, and though the paper hadn't even noticed he'd left, his family had thrown many parties. Specifically pizza parties where his own parents showed up and threw in Terminator to the chagrin of Mom, that bitch.
The paper started to notice and they thought to call up the guy and ask how the project was going that they sent him on, and he said yeah, its fine, i'm drunk all the time. And they didn't care because he was a writer, they fucking ran the game in writers these days, so who knows… But he said he needed help on finishing the project and they asked if they could be of some assistance, being his boss and all, plus it was beneficial to them to complete the story.
He awoke the next afternoon to the pounding of his neighbors having anal intercourse, and it sounded so fucking brutal.
The following day he slept in and didn't know how someone could sleep till noon with the sound of anal penetration happening on just the other side of a two inch wall of fiberboard in this cheap fucking hotel on the main drag of Mazatlan.
They had snuck in some sleeping pills into his last night's cocktail, those bastards. And wasn't it convenient that I didn't remember having that cocktail, last night on the patio overlooking the bay, the one that I had every night, with that man from the elevator doing pushups on my bathroom floor.