The Gates of Hell
Jim gave everyone the day off to go to the beach so we loaded into the truck, most of us sitting in the bed with the sun beating down on the crowns of our heads. I felt extremely happy for the wind rustling my hair as we sped toward Puerto Viejo in the heavy late morning air. Once we reached the road that skirted the coast, I noticed how each beach had a different personality. While one had jet-black sand, another—only a few hundred feet away—was blanketed in velvety beige.
In the scattered villages along the ocean's edge, dugout canoes littered the shore, each a perfect piece of artistry made whole by hours upon hours of work and many thrusts of a blade. One spot near the ocean held the poorest shack I'd ever seen—the façade looking so tired that it seemed to be straining with all its might to hold together. The ragged boards, uneven on top and bottom with gaps in between, were topped with a rusted zinc roof that skewed precariously due to the jaggedness of these supporting planks. Laundry hung from a drooping line in the yard, and on the crumbling cement steps a half dozen small children, bodies covered with thick mud and hair matted with the same dark ooze, played games.
When they heard our engine droning, they stopped and looked our way. A dog ran under the house as we drove by—skin and bones and pleading eyes. I winced, convinced that if he ran into one of the boards that served as a support for the house, it would tumble into a pile not unlike a scattering of thick pickup sticks. It was obvious that a major tropical storm had not blown through in quite some time since this tenuous structure was still standing in this incredibly wild setting at the edge of the sea.
The sun stayed with us when we arrived—unlike the previous trip when the heavens opened and we were forced to have the beach mass surrounded by a handful of stoned Rastafarians. The Caribbean was fierce, pounding the shore and infusing the already damp air with its salty spray. We decided to put in an encore appearance at Sanford's, the dubious scene of our impromptu communion before. As Tobie and I walked in ahead of the others, the stoners looked us over with a mixture of lust and hate. There was a peculiar difference in these men that set them apart from any other group I'd seen. They didn't even try to disguise their feelings: you knew, without a doubt, how they felt about you the minute your gaze met theirs. Lust and hate would seem to me to be a dangerous combination, and I'd never thought of it before, but wouldn't being regarded with these emotions rather than adoration explain the difference between being made love to and being fucked?
The word fuck had come up in conversation with one of the volunteers the day before. He had mentioned how much he'd enjoyed a recent trip to Belize and I was reminded of Ellen Gilchrist's short story "Belize," which I'd just finished.
"You might enjoy it, although it's a bit trashy," I said.
"What's trashy about it?" he asked.
"Her abundant use of the word fuck in the story," I replied.
"You say fuck all the time, so why wouldn't you write it?"
"Touché!" I said; "maybe I will."
I admired Gilchrist's courage, especially since this story, as well as others as brazenly honest, were published in Drunk With Love in 1986, well before most women writers, especially those from the south, had had the courage to use profanity in their writing. In "Belize" her protagonist takes no prisoners:
"'What do the rest of them do?'" I say. I am sick of Whit. He's so goddamn jolly all the time. So goddamn gung ho. Davie had fucked me that morning while I thought about the orange peels. I feel like I've gained ten pounds. It's hot as the gates of hell."
It would be a very long time before I'd have the courage to put the word in a piece of my writing, and it's a strange coincidence to me now that Gilchrist had mentioned George Gabb, the Belizian woodcarver who had inspired my poem "Adam's Perspective," though not by name:
"Whit's been out exploring. 'They have two industries,' he says. 'A man who carves sharks from mahogany and a man and woman team who make herons from the horns of cows.'"
When we had visited Gabb in Belize City, I had had the same impression Gilchrist's protagonist had had of the town:
"The capital city is like a little town in the Delta, only dirtier; dirtier than anything in the world. The bays that cut into the land from the Atlantic are filthy. Things float on them. Paper cartons, shoes, orange peels…"
I would have added the broken partial ribcages of cows and scraps of fish skin, especially near the central market in town where sea turtles were turned upside down and slid under a shelf on rough concrete, their flippers slowly pulsing as if they were dreaming of water. When I read that their shells are so sensitive, they can feel a blade of sea grass as it brushes across them in the water, I was horrified at the treatment they received, though the fisherman who snagged them did not handle them with mal intent as they were simply seen as food to be sold and consumed.
That day on the beach in Costa Rica, I looked around our long table at everyone, settling on the face of the volunteer who'd called me on my resistance to writing profanity, and thought how strange life was that it had brought us to the same table. Everyone was laughing because there was no way to be heard over the pulsating music, though it didn't stop anyone from trying to talk. The waiter brought beers for everyone and we toasted the fact that we'd landed in such an incredibly amazing spot for an afternoon of exploring. I felt grateful that I'd been given the opportunity to see several of my friends in this odd world. They certainly didn't seem to be depressed about the experiences they were having—in fact, they seemed as if they were having the times of their lives. I was left asking, yet again, Why can't I?
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