My plane landing has left me and other pale travelers moments ago sipping cocktails and dropping island
names in distress and Baggage Claim. Suddenly we are haole.
"So what is this shit about you saving people on the Internet?” Dean says. It was the last thing I had said to
him on the phone.
“It’s not been lucrative. They think I'm some kind of gypsy freak of ambiguous gender with magical saving
powers. This can wait.”
“Do they now?”
“Yes. But never mind.”
“So you’re a freaky thang that overdramatizes everything."
“Yeah. That’s right. I'm this long bleeding faggot of alliteration. And if they've got a problem with that I'll
toss in an identity crisis as well. I'm on holiday.”
And burdened with three bags. Help, he offers none.
He does somehow convince me we should take the bus. I pine for a taxi as I’m made known my status while
I negotiate the narrow walkway on a jolting and swaying bus, the driver making it sport to tip me. Dean is
already down and distant at the end of the bus. Before me still looms an enormous lump of a knee and thigh
planted firmly on the solid swaying metal, his head an extension of his knees. I’m forced to use magical chi
chi powers to get past.
“Why couldn’t we take a cab? I feel like an idiot on this bus.”
very strip club. The street is run over and back with dare
knows what and a liberal sprinkling of what goes cheaply.
If I get knifed here I'll swear to the review board that Hotel
Street smells of pool halls with rotting dark stumps and
brutal, hidden, leprous eyes eyeing my bus.
possibly that even sucked. But I
will look at another excerpt from a
different part of the book that
might not be as bad.