RUM, SWEAT AND LOVE: A PIRATE WEDDING IN PARADISE

Part i: WE SEIZE THE HIGH GROUND

Yes I am a pirate
A few hundred years too late. The cannons don’t thunder
There’s nothing to plunder
I’m an under 40 victim of fate.
Arriving too late; arriving too late.

Jimmy Buffett said it first but Jack Johnson said it best. And yes, Bec and I have always considered ourselves pirates. Our relationship has long been a sordid key part with Captain Morgan, Sailor Jerry and his pin-ups; even a few ugly rounds with Admiral Nelson and Ron Vicaro.
We’ve stormed high to-do yacht parties, escaping on booze-laden electric Duffy Boats; spent months traveling every coast of the great US mainland; lived in beach shacks and oceanfront, clifftop luxury; and on random weeknights we’ve even been known to re-pierce my ear, don eyepatches and bandanas, and go terrorize the normals.
So it’s only fitting that we sanctify our union in the jewel of the carib, St. Lucia. A lush strip of land nestled south of Martinique (where the legendary Black Bart attacked and hung the governor); just west of Barbados (where the rum and the fierce ran thick); and east of the storied Spanish Main. I was coated in a thin layer of sweat the moment I stepped onto the tarmac under suffocating tropical cloud. The layer thickened as we stumbled through customs. By the time myself, my fiancé Becca, and my parents were navigating through the two-bit cabbies and shyster porters waiting at baggage claim like barracudas just beyond a narrow reef opening, I looked like some desperate malaria victim. Frank Charles (Frank Tours) was to be our local guide and driver, a big black man with an honest smile who pulled us through the riffraff to his taxi where we loaded our gear and pushed off. By the time we left the liquor store in Vieux Fort, laden with over a thousand EC worth of booze, my sweat had burnt through my t-shirt and began working on my polyester traveling jacket. The locals wondered at a man wearing such a heavy thing in such a place; the kids giggled and reached out to feel it as I walked by.
We stopped at a small joint on the corner for chicken and fish roti and beers. The breeze passed through the high school up onto the deck where we tried to catch our breath the first time since leaving our homes. It was another adventure into the unknown. St. Lucia is only about 13 degrees above the equator or so. The good doctor once said about Vegas “I’ve never been able to properly explain myself in such a climate,” and while I can handle the desert, that goddamn Caribbean humidity reduced my brain to an overheated mush.
“Yes, checking in . . . uh Rebecca and Ryan, uh, yes, we’re the ones getting married. Yes. No, that’s a different member of my family. Jesus, they’re not going to be here for a day or two. Yes, there are going to be a lot of us here.” I had thought only slightly of this as we wound through scrub-covered hills peeking over the Atlantic, then the Caribe, skirting the rainforest, into the well-decorated lobby of the Jalousie Plantation where I was now attempting to express who I was. There were going to be a lot of us here. And the first of us had arrived, sure enough. But where?
The smiling girl behind the desk called our concierge, a woman operating under the title of “Romance Director”, and more smiling locals appeared with trays of stiff rum punches and eucalyptus-soaked cold towels. The romance director arranged a meeting for the next day and sent us on a shuttle up to our suite and it stopped at a private walkway halfway up a hill where another girl waited with two more rum punches.
“Hello, I am your butler” she said and I nodded, grabbing the drink and giving her my empty glass, still uncomprehending of such things and after a brief explanation and tour of our quarters and its amenities, still none of which did I understand, she left us alone. I was a shell-shocked gabacho sweating through his fedora, clutching an unopened b ottle of Bounty rum and a wedding suit bag. It wasn’t until I’d submerged myself in our private plunge pool that I was able to begin to process things. This plantation, our home for the next week, was more oceanfront village than hotel. My parents had been driven to their room by a shuttle too. They had a nice one-bedroom cottage with its own plunge pool, just above the ocean and the helipad. But reserved for us was a grand villa suite, a stateroom equipped with all the fineries reserved for the most esteemed guests of a sugar plantation including top-of-the-line technologies like plasma televisions and central air conditioning.
We had a sprawling back patio with an infinite plunge pool perched against a straight cliff drop, warmed by the sun to the perfect temperature just off the end of the wraparound deck. In one corner was an outdoor shower that allowed you to feel the ocean breeze come blowing up the hill to dry you off as you dripped naked in God’s last Garden of Eden. For added effect, a papaya tree stood erect with its fruits hanging off the stalk under palm leaves just where the yard started, all of it in the shadow of the strikingly black Petit Piton. Truly where heaven met earth. A few sips of the Bounty as we surveyed our domain; we were, after all, the King and Queen of the whole damn thing. Regardless our social positions back in the mainland, one thing was certain here – this week we would live up to our nobility. Just after sundown we were sipping Chairman’s Reserve, the premium island rum, at the oceanfront bar with my parents and two Canadians they’d met on some hazy romp through Jamaica. We dined without much event at THE BAYSIDE, a beachfront veranda with a thatched roof and aged-wood crossbeams. Stray cats wandered throughout, keeping the birds away as we sweat and spoke loudly about how nice the snorkeling was in front and how phenomenal the rum was, even if the sugar was imported from the Guayanas. With all-inclusive we lived like scions of the plantation owner – yes, we’ll have appetizers and salads, rum and that malbec, love varietals, why not? Consumption enjoyed only by the most depraved and decadent. Part of the secret to such abundant consumption lies in the constant sweating. Our bodies bailed water at all times so that for every drink you downed, about 1 quarter of it was lost through your pores as it went in and another quarter would be gone by the time you’d called for the 3rd round. And so we finished the night with drinks at the CANE BAR. The Canadiennes struck up discourse with everybody, befriending even the general manager, an affable large man with a small beard and a true host. The Canadian, late into the drinking, told me the secret to a successful marriage.
“The secret,” he paused for effect, “Is to have an unrestricted marriage.” Then he cheersed me with a glass of the good old Chairman’s.
The night ended around our plunge pool, smoking a j of seedy schwag and staring across the infinite black water below. It smelled like the rainforest exhibit at the Baltimore Aquarium. Geckos reflected like ghosts on the white wooden French colonial, the sounds of water flowing and frogs swooning and our slurred whispers hung just overhead for a beat before floating off into the air.
The next day the parents and the Canadians went on a tour of the island with Frank Tours’ number one man Ronald the Maniac. So it was me and the girl alone, one last day by ourselves before the circus starts. We swam in the water, crystal blue, not too warm but just cold enough. Baie de Silence is nestled between the two Pitons, a World Heritage Site, for those concerned with propriety. Gros Piton stabs the sky to the south where it comes to a point but punching straight up to our North was the rock face of the Petit Piton, more menacing if only because of its proximity.
But we swam out to a platform floating in a twain of water, zebrafish and tetras bobbing around the corners. We laid out on it, flipped off it, swam back to shore feeling the stretch in our arms and our backs. I’d carry the girl over the rocks at the water’s edge, to where the resort had trucked in white sand to soften it up. We sat on wooden chaises and planted a sand in the ground to request food and drink. We ate fishburgers which you could watch them pull in every morning in big nets surrounded by gawking tourists in polo shirts holding expensive DVD camcorders like some damned Nat Geo special.
We drank Coconut Rum Punch. Eventually we gave in and ordered straight Chairman’s. I rotated between a book about pirates, a book about Sinatra, and ANNA KARENINA. Becca rotated between DHARMA BUMS and gossip magazines. The sun went in and out and when the rain came it cooled you off. Mother nature’s air conditioning.
Just where the beach ended in the winding waterfront road of the resort a cluster of droopy-eyed Rastas gave us knowing nods and occasionally glanced at their small boats to make sure they were still tied up. One of them, Dr. Feelgood, was a man in shorts and a palm hat who sold us 5 joints for $100 EC. He left them curled up in a leaf and with a fist pound rolled back to his stoop. He also offered water taxis to Soufriere in a small two-stroke dinghy capable of outmaneuvering police boats and Coast Guard cruisers. Dr. Feelgood was to become as good of a friend as I’m sure a local would want to be with some tourist. Tourist is still a tourist, though at least everybody looked you in the eye when they spoke to you. Even Dr. Feelgood, just providing another service, unofficially of course, though he and his friends were never wanting for access to Jalousie. The rich playboys need their candy, right? Hell, Cane Bar looked like some Newport Beach coke den, Mercedes dealers and cougars fighting off the years. What would air conditioning and rum and shiny counters be without drug-induced depravity?
Bec’s mom and stepdad arrived that afternoon, as did my Uncle Pablo and Aunt Kim, young masters of their universe who lived a luxurious life by their own rules and conventions.
Bec and I were down at her mom’s cottage for sips of rum. She told us she’d arrived with a couple friends of ours who had opted to save money by staying for a night in a rustic cabin without air conditioning. Jesus. Sounds like suicide.
Then it was on to my parents’ place, cabin hopping like kids at summer camp though through some miscalculation the counselors had given us full run of the place without any rules except that we relax, drink a lot, and occasionally engage in some sort of watersport. We told them about our meeting with our Romance Director, a stylish but slightly confused woman who toured us through 3 tiers of wedding grounds and ironed out the final details. Remember Ryan: all the paradise aside, you’re here to get married. Don’t let the rum and bumps and this goddamned camp metaphor allow you to forget that.
We dressed up all fancy that night and dined at THE GREAT ROOM, the old plantation ballroom, all dark wood and lofty dreams complete with a painting of a proud negress behind the bar, one of her chocolate breasts cascading out of her blouse.
More wine and rum and sashimi and the finest steak I’d eaten since dinner at The Palm in Beverly Hills on Easter ’09.
“So, what do you think of the place?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, I’m glad we had to fly so far to come to a place just like Hawaii but, hey, did I say that?” Uncle Pablo chortled, drink in hand.
Thus began a comical, twisted and sarcastic weekend. The crowd of characters coming was a monumental collection of happy cynics, jokers, derelicts, nihilists, and wholesome folk; a select few in our random world spanning from roughnecks to brokers to artists to governmentals and intelligentsia.
Again the night ended with Becca and myself swimming in the plunge pool, dressed in only God’s linens, smoking one of these local j’s that got you just high enough to add a surreal tint to the world below. It was The Bayside for breakfast, omelettes and banana French toast and fresh mango juice. The cats ran around our feet. As I said the cats kept the birds out. The whole island is set up with organic solutions like that. Mongooses were brought in to hunt the deadly fer-de-lance when the French first stole the island from the Caribs (who had stolen it from the Arawaks). When mongoose started hunting goats instead of snakes, they brought in dogs to capture the mongoose. Cats to hunt the bugs and the birds and the mice. Let nature do its job.
We spent the day in a haze of sun and rum punch, faced with such harsh dilemmas as whether to wait for our waiter to bring our drinks before swimming or just go for it and return to half-melted ice and tepid rum. In the afternoon the girl and I went for a snorkel in their private lagoon teeming with parrotfish and small silver eels and schools of squid, which swim forwards and backwards, their angry eyes staring you down as they jet away.
Boots and Linz were the first friends to show up, the ones who’d stayed in the rustic cabin in the rainforest, at Mago Estates. They’ve been regulars on many of our sordid adventures, usually through one SoCal hamlet or another wherever we lived. I’ve known Linz since before she and Boots were together; Bec has known her since they were underage drinkers and was a bridesmaid at her wedding. Now she was 6 months pregnant. This would be their last vacation before committing to that grueling 18-year-plus adventure of child-rearing in a world growing increasingly confusing and sick. So it was good to see them running around like two sweethearts at the swimming hole. Soon Boots had 2 Piton beers in his hand, drinking for both of them. He also brought his mastery of language to the beach.
“Yeah, when I saw our place I just ejaculated all over it.” God Bless Boots. Close to 3 we made our way up from the beach to check on the remaining arrivals, including a whimsical friend carrying antique cameras, friends from all corners of Baltimore, who might be arriving soon, and to alleviate Bec’s fears that everything would fall apart. That was when we first saw Uncle Miguel, top of the stairs by reception, smiling through a moustache wet like a sweat mop. From behind him popped Bec’s friend who had been traveling alone without a clue about where to go or how to get there, bag of vintage cameras in tow, a whimsical faerie who flowed across the breezeway to give Bec a hug. August Wetherby, the legendary gentleman of leisure in the line of Wetherbies, smiled in Khakis and Polo, Calvert Gilman casual as he checked in. He was happy to see us and gave me a great hug. Then came Kitten, our surrogate wayward kitten and Bec’s Maid of Honor. Finally was Skelly, always running it strong from back in the days when Bec was in college to this wedding, when she was the avid otivator, a physical trainer with prominent features who’d convinced August to sign up for a hike of the Gros Piton on Saturday. “How you gonna climb that?
“It’ll be easy,” August said. “I’ll just follow Skelly’s ass up the hill. Nothing’ll stop me.”
Then from nowhere rolled Luca and his new bride Cynth, both glowing from a water taxi ride from Soufriere. Luca and August and I had all lived together once, a long time ago, through what had been one of the most debauched periods in our combined lives. It was during those important years when you begin to become the man you’ll be. I’d like to think we were some of the good ones, in spite of our depravity. It’s been a long time since all of us were together on the beach and certainly we’d never done it up this proper, from this altitude. From the Jalousie Plantation, floating through the cliffs, a man could hardly even make out the gutters where we’d once traipsed around like a couple streetrat millionaires.
August and the rest went back to their rooms to change and check in. Luca and his wife Cynth the Angel came up to my stateroom for drinks and views. We discussed the current state of the nation, debating the effectiveness of the president’s new strategy, the economy, and the current closures in the world of lawyership. We discussed St. Lucia’s dependence on tourism and bananas, importing molasses for their rum from South America, and what books we were currently reading. We discussed his relations with his taxi driver, a very important and profound relationship on the island; discussed friends and family; goals and life. It had been too long since we’d had such a session but it also felt, in some respects, as if we’d never stopped, slipping back onto the same wavelength like a man slips back into an old story he carries close to his heart.
August and Whimsical Mel exploded onto the back deck, already hopped up on rum and the static energy built up over 13 hours of traveling. August was fast to the mini bar we’d built on the deck as I puffed and waxed philosophically about how far us bastards had come. We’d seized the high ground. Ye gads.
Bec and Linz and Skelly and Kitten and Boots had been up at the mansion the Plantation had given them and soon came on down with more booze as Mel fluttered around with antique cameras and August grew red with excitement and rum and the sun dipped behind the massive monolith which loomed menacingly lazy above us. Kyle arrived, a final great ingredient, the truest of friends and the best of brothers. We’d been slightly tense waiting for his plane to arrive, hoping he’d make it to the resort without issue. Finally I was pouring the man a drink – no longer a mere boy – as the last survivor of that legendary depraved summer in San Diego with me and Luca and August showed up in paradise.
He already walked with a fluid gait, his driver having stopped at various bars along the way from the airport. He offered Kyle drink, smoke, coke, and prostitutes, all of which my brother refused like the classy derelict he is. Soon Luke and Cynth had to head back to their place. Mel, who’d been amazing August with her heavy drinking, succumbed to the strong sugar fire she’d been downing since she ran into my uncle in the Miami airport and he’d taken her under his wing for the arrival and drive to the resort in St. Lucia. “You’re sharing a room with him?” he’d guffawed about August, “You better sleep with your ass against the wall.” But after she passed asleep in Bec’s and my bed, August was kind enough to give her a foot rub. One down as for the rest of us, the Bayside.
The crowd was like a twisted tropical Olive Garden commercial, our numbers having swollen to 22 laughing maniacal whites, some Italian looking, eating breads and swilling rum and malbec.
The air was electric. Such a group had never been assembled in such a place – and probably wouldn’t be again, not for a long time, if ever, No, one of us would have to die and deign that our funeral be held in Abaco or Nevis and even then good luck finding a cemetery nestled between two old volcanic mountains.
Before I’d left the room I called Dr. Feelgood.
“Yup, we need 2. The good stuff, make it snow in the Caribbean.”
“Okay mon, be at the beach in 20, keep an eye out for my boat, I’ll flash my light.” And so I found myself at the water’s edge as the Dr., a phantom standing on the bow of a small dinghy, punched a small package into my hand. I pressed a crumpled wad of US and EC dollars into his hand and he pushed back off into the night.
“That man,” a security guard told me as the boat disappeared, “Is a bad man. They come at night to steal other people’s boats.” “Oh. I thought he was just one of the tourguides. Man, it’s crazy here. Geez, thanks for looking out, bud.”
Then back to the table where everybody was ordering everything – fish and beef and duck and so on, drinking Chairman’s reserve and house chardonnay and that malbec, sweating onto our plates as August engaged Aunt Kim in a discussion about stock and brood and Kitten laughed like we hadn’t seen in a long time and Skelly turned to accost August who had now appeared behind her and neither would back down but it was all with good vibrations so when Luca and Cynth showed up, cleaned and dressed, a wild cheer arose from our band of merry, drunken friends, gorging ourselves under a full moon that peeked out from under the clouds and made the world wild. After dinner came runs to the bathroom with the straws Dr. Feelgood had given us full of the Soufriere headrocker, pure but sticky, the way mother nature intended. More wild conversations, people running around and climbing through the place like jungle cats hopped up on booze and nobody was ready to stop when they kicked us out so we tromped along the pool, up the stone steps and by the pond to the Cane Bar. In the air conditioning we took the drinking to another sordid level as conversations grew sloppy and we draped ourselves into oversized furniture and occasionally popped out onto the terrace to breathe and smoke and show people where tomorrow’s party would be held.
The Canadians, on that full-moon night, pointed out King Kong’s head as the GM had pointed it out to them. The Petit Piton takes on the gruesome semblance of the silhouette of the legendary Kong but only truly under the moonlight, a black monolith staring at the horizon and waiting for his blond girl to come home.
More dancing and drinking, why not? Toots, rum, cigs, a Cuban cigar. The smoke grows thicker in the wet air, almost reconstitutes. Luca and Cynth head off for sleep and the rest of us head off to the hilltop mansion but Kyle and Bec and I spot the Bonzos, old family friends and legendary freaks, at the top of the steps and we run up to greet them. Hugs and all and Dad and Mom come out of the Cane Bar to see their greatest and oldest friends, the truest family any family has ever known. They were now the first descendents of the children they’d all once been together. When I’d started on my own journey of life they’d been the age that I am now. And so it had come full circle here as well. For tonight I’d let them catch up with my parents and rest.

~

So it’s August and Kyle and Bec and Skelly and Kitten and Preggo Linz and Boots with the LLLLLLLatenight; rum and vodka and the last of Dr. Feelgood’s wares. The girls climb into bathing suits and go swimming, drag August and Kyle into the shower. Kitten’s doing the grind to the music as Kyle tries to keep it together and Bec orders a pack of cigs from their butler, room 809, their mansion, Jesus, and tomorrow we have to wake up way too early for a day after such a night. So we say goodbye to all and slip back down the hill.