Don't Get Too Comfortable The I David Rakoff

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.I am known after having been in town for all of four hours.We skim along the water back to the private island, the mariachi from the night before sitting beside me, already wearing his bedizened costume.THE SUN GOES down giving way to a clear Caribbean night awash in stars.Belize apparently sits just underneath the path of many satellites.We can see them skittering back and forth across the sky.A group dinner has been set up outside, underneath an enormous umbrella of palm fronds.The chef is roasting an entire pig in a covered pit.Occasional wisps of smoke curl up through the sand, like vain attempts at escape by the spirit of the butchered animal.The crew toasts one another and the models on a day's work well done.The mariachi plays.Alejandra calls over to him and makes a request.She laughs a little as she says the name of the song, half joking.Even though she asks him in Spanish, the ironic, camp lilt in her voice is unmistakable.He begins to sing.It is a sweetly traditional tune, a song a mother might teach her child.As he begins, Alejandra and Vanessa laugh and exclaim in mock-sentimentality.But they cannot sustain the joke, and soon they just sit and listen, eyes cast down, with faint smiles on their faces.This is my classic trajectory: the midafternoon freak-out followed by that evening's outflowing of fine feeling, brought on by a number of factors: relief at my impending departure, a drop in temperature, and the very tangible perquisites heaped upon me—good food, alcohol, and the general deference accorded an American journalist abroad.I have been having a little sesión privada of my own.My version of the extended cock tease is that throughout my short stay on Cayo Espanto I have been affecting either a wide-eyed, disingenuous unfamiliarity with luxury, or, alternately, claiming outrage at the social inequities of the place.Whenever Obed has asked me if I'd like something, I have responded with a scandalized, “Oh golly, no! Thank you so much, though,” horrified that he might think I would want anything, only to have him then bring me the drink, the chair, the umbrella anyway, and then I, uttering a sheepish and humiliated “thank you,” drink, sit, take the shade.Every single time.I am suffused with well-being and just as quickly sickened with myself.Mine are the tears of the Walrus, bemoaning the wholesale carnage of his little oyster friends as he scoops another bivalve into his voracious, sucking maw.THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, back at the San Pedro airport, I wait to board the small eight-seat plane—a boxy little number with some unsettling rusty spots, and the completely terrifying airline logo on its tail fin of a man (our pilot?) flat-out asleep under a palm tree with his hat over his eyes.I watch the baggage handler as he stuffs our luggage into the bottom of the fuselage.A leathery man in his fifties, he wears a tight, faded yellow T-shirt with Daffy Duck on it.Daffy is staggering, his drunken path indicated by a dashed, serpentine line.Beside him are the words “I was Loony as a Toon at Samantha's Bat Mitzvah.”It would be nice to think that this T-shirt was his from the start, that he was at Samantha's bat mitzvah, sharing in her family's joy as she came into Jewish womanhood, and came away with this souvenir of his time there.But, much like the consoling fiction of a private island where three beautiful goddesses wait, trembling and naked beneath the mosquito netting for someone, anyone, to come and satisfy their burning, unquenchable desire, I kind of doubt it.WILDMANA flower grows in Brooklyn.The tiny chamomile blossom has pushed its way through a crack in the gray pavement.Before I can come up with a hackneyed metaphor for its patient and valiant struggle toward the light, “Wildman” Steve Brill—edible-plant expert, vegan cookbook author, and “New York's best-known naturalist”—bends down and summarily picks the small domed bud to point out to us the plant's physical characteristics.Advantage asphalt.This mini-lecture seems more a gentle attempt to sell us the small magnifying loupes Brill has available for $10 than to impart any truly useful botanical knowledge.The real information will come once we walk through the gates of Prospect Park, Brooklyn's 526-acre wilderness.There, we will learn all about how to identify and forage our own wild edibles.Left with some time to kill as our group assembles, Brill entertains our youngest member, two-year-old Adeline, with “Pop Goes the Weasel,” played by clapping his cupped hands in front of his open mouth.By changing the shape of his lips, he is able to create a surprisingly supple instrument that can play an impressive range of notes.The whole range of notes, in fact.Brill does not stint on the length of his version.As he moves out of the minor-key bridge back to the initial verse, Addie's attention has shifted.Then again, so has Brill's.His clap-mouth has put him into a minor fugue state.With his eyes now focused upward with an expression both dreamy and vacant, he appears almost saintlike.Or would, if not for his Intrepid Explorer drag of wicker pith helmet and cargo pants.One of our group, a teacher from upstate New York, addresses Brill as “Wildman,” with the respectful deference of an acolyte and no trace of irony.Brill, in turn, sees nothing odd in the honorific.This man is waiting for a fellow teacher, a cybernetic pen pal from an online Christian prayer forum.They have chosen this expedition for their first face-to-face meeting.It's unclear if it's a date or not, although she'd be well served if it wasn't because, unbidden, he tells us, “I had a friend in college who caught an albino squirrel, and mistreated it so badly that the animal eventually retaliated, and bit him really, really deep right here,” he says, indicating the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb.“The squirrel wouldn't let go until my friend broke its neck.” There is no way to tell what this man thinks about his anecdote.His tone is almost completely uninflected, holding neither outrage nor humor.Also in our search party is a venture capitalist who runs a nonprofit theater program for inner city youth in Newark.He has completed numerous wilderness survival courses.There is a Deborah Harry type, her hair bleached to the color and consistency of dry straw, her eyelids shaded with pink to offset her pink rhinestone cat's-eye glasses.She is here as part of her day job, which is assisting in cooking classes at New York's Natural Gourmet Cookery School.With her is her boyfriend from Mexico, whose head is wrapped in an American eagle scarf and whose T-shirt reads “Gateways of Annihilation.” Just twelve people out for a Sunday afternoon of diversion in a lovely city park.We're almost a Seurat painting.We have followed the instructions we got from Brill when we signed up, and have arrived with packed lunches, plastic bags for our eventual hauls of free comestibles (as well as air-permeable paper sacks for any mushrooms we might harvest), scissors for snipping, and small garden spades for digging.We have read and signed the consent form absolving Brill of any liability should we become sick, injured, or die outright from anything we might mistakenly eat, and now we are ready.“Walk this way!” Brill cries, and he's off, John Cleesing across Grand Army Plaza and into the park [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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