The Unpublished PROLOGUE
We were all drinking whiskey at this point. There was a bottle stuck in a hole in the middle of the table to keep it from sliding. We each held our own jelly glass and Georges kept refilling them. Both Clarence and I thought that drinking was a very good idea. It was clear we were not going to get any work done. We wouldn’t be dealing with hangovers because our intention was to remain drunk until we got off the boat. And, using perfect drunk logic, I thought the whiskey might help my fever. The hallucinations began toward the end of the first day.
Clarence is a great storyteller and he complied with Georges request. He started spinning these amazing tales. There were true stories and made up stories or what we’ve come to call “legends.” Many of those involved literary figures that I knew Clarence had never met. But the stories were so convincing even I started to believe them. As Kurt Vonnegut says in the first line of “Slaughterhouse Five” “All of this happened, more or less.” I began taking notes but I soon developed dexterity problems and most of them are illegible. I did write them up on my computer as best as I could before passing out.
There were touching stories of Clarence’s youth. Stories about his folks and the people he met while growing up and beyond. They jumped around in time too. He started out chronologically but then started to drift. He’d tell a story set in the sixties and the next one took place a few weeks ago. I have kept them close to the order in which they were told. As I look back over them now I’m amazed at how good some of them are. I have very little memory of actually writing them. Clarence says that he doesn’t even remember telling some of them.
“You’ve know so many great writers!” said Georges after the first of the Norman Mailer stories.
“I love writers,” said Clarence. “They’re driven by demons.”
“Yes! Well said!” said Georges. He then jumped to his feet, grabbed the bottle and danced around the deck for a few minutes. He danced to a tune only he could hear. Finally he returned, sat down, refilled our glasses and smiled.
“I spent the most extraordinary week-end of my life in a beachfront motel outside of Cabo San Lucas with a lactating Mexican whore called April May June,” he said to nobody in particular. “She was a sexual athlete who did the most extraordinary things. Have you ever experienced a reverse ceiling squat? Or a Japanese rain job?
“No, I don’t think so,” said Clarence.
“You’d remember if you did,” said Georges. “But she was the only one in the world who could perform these things since the death of the famous courtesan Jin Cho Ling who was the first woman to ever successfully execute the Shanghai face hat.”
“That sounds vaguely familiar,” said Clarence.
“But April May,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard Clarence, “had a maneuver all her own. It was her crowning glory. It was her piece de resistance. A stunning act of sexual theater she called, and this is a rough translation, “Logjam At The Artists Entrance.”
Our imaginations ran wild.
“I think I need to meet this woman,” said Clarence.
“Me too,” I said.
“Too late,” said Georges. “She died two years ago in a car crash in Cuba. She was driving one of those old American cars they have down there. It was a 54 Buick. No seat belts, no air bags. She hit a truck, was thrown forward and the dashboard statue of St. Christopher went straight into her forehead and killed her instantly.”
He looked out to sea and wiped away a tear.
“Since St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers, I believe he escorted her directly to heaven,” he said.
“Makes sense,” said Clarence with no trace of sarcasm.
“Now I’m done with sex,” said Georges. “Not even blow jobs. No more human contact for me. You let somebody blow you, next thing you know the cocksucker wants a ride home.”
Of course this was all utter nonsense. The ravings of an idiot but I wasn’t about to question him again and besides, storytelling helped to pass the time and a lot of what he had to say was darkly amusing. After getting back to the real world I sold a show to Fox Television called “Chance” and I named one of the characters April May June.
