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| Posted on 2004-05-01 02:12:40 by Denver | |
Florida | |
| The Army Corps of Engineers dumps sand along the entire stretch of Florida coastline between Fort lauderdale and Miami. A man in the hotel told me that. On the beach I stood and watched a plane fly across the sky with a banner that said BOOTLEGGER Hot Bod Contest. Cash $1000 LIVE CASH MUSIC I dialed a phone number I had written on a bar napkin as I sipped a bloody mary by the pool. I walked down to the beach and dipped my pubic region in salt water. a sun tanned woman with an ankle bracelet sat on the beach in a pink bonnet on a folding chair. We watched the Queen Mary II make it's way out of the inlet and set sail up the Atlantic. Sleek yachts with five thousand horses powering their jets- huge- real floating tanks- navigated the turn from the inlet right near our little beach party. She told me her favorite book was Pillars of Salt by Ken Follett. A historical novel. We talked about the end of her twenty-five year marriage and her son and his lack of religious curiosity. One of her major failings as a parent. I told her about the electric pink neon palm trees. We had rented about a dozen of them for the banquet the night before. A light show, a slide presentation, guest speakers, a hawaian shirted cruise ship band, endless supplies of wine and beer, and these neon pink palm trees. They weren't cheap. And they were dangerous- if you touched one of them you would probably receive a thousand volts. At least that was what my boss, Chad, said. I told him I thought they clashed with the other decor. The owner of the catering company we worked for, Peter, had picked them out. "They're so fun. People love them. They're all getting their pictures taken in front of them." Chad had explained to me. And so, that night, as we ate dinner down at the hotel restaurant Chad kept slipping back into the hotel ball room to see if any of the conference attendees had stuck their hand out to explore the sizzling pink outlines of florida's favorite tree. Sure enough, as we were exploring the dessert menu, Chad came back with the bad news: a woman had been struck down by one of the flurorescent trees on the bandstand. It was terrible, I told her, as we sucked down oysters at the hotel bar and watched the first game of the Miami Heat-New Orleans divisional playoff. "Why don't you have a girlfriend?" she asked. One hundred years of solitude is my favorite book, I said. Later, as she lay naked on my bed i noticed a large tattoo of a palm tree on her ass. I put my hand on it. "What is this for?" I asked. "I had it done when I moved down here." "Why?" "I just liked it." "What does it stand for? "Stand for?" The tattoo. Is it freedom from your marriage? From convention?" "No. I just like palm trees." | |