“Hello, I would like a scotch.”
The bartender looks at me and doesn’t speak English, so I repeat myself.
“Hola. I. Would. Like. Some. Scotch.”
I take a blind stab at Spanish.
“Yo como Scotch?”
“Cotch?” he says back.
“Chevas,” I say.
“CHEE-VAS!” the bartender finally says because he recognizes it!
“Yes, sir!” I shout. “Chee-fucking-vas. Yes, I would like one double, please.”
“No Chee-Vas,” the bartender shakes his head.
In Costa Rica I will find a bartender who knows Chivas Regal. Yet does not serve it.
“No?” I say. “Bummer.”
“Boomer,” says the bartender.
“Sooner?” I ask. “OU? Oklahoma?”
The bartender looks...ah, well, he looks like…“Bro?”
“Oh, right,” I say, “Boo-mer. Like Bum-mer, but with the accent. Right. I getcha, man.”
“Boomer,” repeats the bartender.
This dude looks like a jolly guy, for sure. He’s smiling a smile that just makes your heart fill up like the Grinch, and he looks young but he’s probably not. These people are absolutely beautiful -- it’s incredible. They smile all the time, and they have great skin; skin that doesn’t stress, and she says it’s probably because they don’t have any. Stress. Not skin.
“It’s the island culture,” she keeps saying.
“We should totally move here, babe,” she keeps saying.
And what’s not to love?
We are on our honeymoon (ahhhh {chorus}). There’s good sex, but also a deep fear that you’re not going to have sex with anyone else ever again -- like chain smoking a pack or two the day before you quit for good. Also, palm trees and snorkeling. Excellent snorkeling. But, I mean, with the sex thing; it’s not like we were going around slutting it up before we got married. But now? Now, if I ever have sex with someone else, then something has fucked up. Something has fucked up for real.
“Goddamn,” my little brother and best man, Miles, kept muttering in the dressing room before the wedding.
You know, when it’s just the two of us? And he’s supposed to give me a hug and hold back tears and all that shit?
“Goddamn,” he just kept muttering.
His face was flushed because we’d been taking shots in our black and whites. He looked older than me even though he wasn’t.
“Goddamn, dude,” he said, shaking his head back and forth, sipping on scotch. “Man, I dunno, I just don’t want them tellin’ me what to do.”
“All right.”
“Bitches,” he whispered. “Just get off my fucking ass.”
I could hear the ice click against his teeth as he drank, and after, he took a deep breath and said, “Fuck it.”
And then I got married. It was a Saturday. It didn’t rain, which was cool.
My new wife saddles up to me and she is buoyant. It is the reason I married her. She is my life-vest. I will forever find it strange that she was, at the very least, once obsessed with me. Perhaps that sounds egotistical, but fuck you. It’s not. I’m obsessed with her too. Mutual fascination; like two aliens meeting each other.
“Hello, Missus.”
“Hallllooooo.”
She is drunk on love, sun, and tequila.
“Watcha doing?” she asks.
She’s already got her hand on the inside of my thigh. But it’s not gross - she’s not going to give me a handjob at the bar. It’s the inside of my thigh, but close to the knees, and her fingers slide underneath my leg and just sit there in a sort of...err... compacted comfortable let’s call it, between my leg and the seat. She leans her forehead against my cheek, and her left arm is around my neck as she pulls me toward her.
I am her wall. She will lean against me tired. I will hold her up silently. This is how we will be.
“In a stroke of good fortune,” I say, “the bartender has heard of Chivas.”
Her face lights up like my father with a Marlboro after a flight.
“However,” I continue, “they do not have Chivas.”
“That,” she stops. “Is unfortunate.”
“Indeed, my dear,” I reply. “Indeed.”
“What’s your name?” she asks the bartender.
“Franklin,” he replies in an island accent; vaguely British, vaguely Jamaican--a sort of Downton patois in constant flux. I love the way they speak here. Their vocabulary is somehow full of flavor and rum, even when they’re dead sober. Which is never.
“Franklin,” she says, “Franklin, I hear you have no scotch for my new husband, mi novia.”
“Novi-o.”
“Huh?” she replies to him.
Franklin circles an “o” in the air and says it’ again, “o.”
“Ohhhh,” she says. “Oh, right--‘o’. Novi...o.”
“Si,” says Franklin.
“Well, does he have anything else that is, I dunno, comparable, to your scotch?”
You know she’s drunk when she has to pump the breaks for certain words, like they’re speed bumps in our neighborhood back home.
Com. Pair. Able.
She is not in the slightest the sort of person that she appears to be when drunk. This is another reason why I love her, and it is in these sui generis of moments that I find her particularly irresistible. While normally she is kempt with notebooks and lists -- with schedules and iPhones that moonlight as alarm clocks -- she is a light drinker both night and day (especially during the day), and as she balances on the delicate edge of sobriety -- like Dionysus walking the tightrope -- she grins lovely, invades all sorts of personal space, and eventually, settles into a sort of afternoon delight that wafts…
“It smells like pot,” she says.
“It does,” I concur.
“The island’s potpourri,” she says.
“Okay,” I reply.
“Except,” she says very slowly, and then...well...hold on.
I have to explain this thing she does when she drinks. It’s not everytime, but it’s every time (if you know what I mean), and this thing that she does is this: She tells a joke, but in the process of telling said joke, she relies too heavily on the phrasing. She starts low like Cash but her voice just rises and rises, like she needs sherpas. Like she’s climbing a mountain. She over-enunciates, and surgically removes the humor. She renders the joke moot in no time at all. But there’s a charm, perhaps only if you’re in love with her, but a charm nonetheless. And in the end, don’t we do what we do for those that love us and for whom we love?
So, fuck the rest of them.
“Except, “ she says very slowly, “it tastes much BETTER.”
She has a cackle laugh and here she unleashes it. She falls to pieces against me. To my left is the ocean, the mysterious wonder; whose power is both real and imagined, and always bewildering.
To my right is she--my mysterious wonder, who’s power is both real and imagined; always bewildering.
Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Blake Bronstad
