MAXO Studio: March 2009

A Story By Kelly Kortman

I awake from day two of my cold and fever in a soaken sweat. I haven’t really eaten in a couple days, maybe a few grapes, a bite of watermelon, water, juice. I walk to the mirror, the abdominal muscles that I was working hard on the last several months but which never showed because I never dieted in conjunction are in their full glory, I literally must have lost 10 pounds as I sweated through two nights of agony and fever, I guess that‘s one way to do it. I’m now ripped like enlightenment era paintings of Jesus on the cross. My sunburn has faded into a golden glowy tan. My hair, falling out one follicle at a time since the middle of my Senior year of high school even seems fuller. I shower and wash away any remaining remnants of my illness. It’s noon, my friends have abandoned me it seems. I can’t blame them, the night before I was the picture of death. I seriously contemplated going to the hospital and getting an IV. Having no idea what that might cost and not knowing whether they have socialized medicine or whether I would end up spending more on that than say a years worth of car payments I decided to tough it out here at home.

I put on my swim trunks and walk down to the beach. Lay my towel down, load up on sunscreen cause I’m not going through the hell of sunburn again. I hear two guys and two girls sitting nearby speaking English. I almost have this feeling of Eureka! Or Thank you Jesus. It’s the first English I’ve heard in days outside of my circle of friends that I’m out here with. We exchange the usual pleasantries, where you from, how did you decide on this place, etc. etc. Two guys from Dallas, James who runs his fathers auto dealership and Tim who is a marketing director for Myspace, Sarah and Michelle are both from Sydney Austrailia have just graduated from college and are traveling for a year on a $5000 unlimited flying pass. Time passes on, we have a few beers, we throw the football around, I tell them how my friends have taken off and I don’t know when I might see them again. I tell them my deathbed story. The sun makes it’s ascent and descent in the sky, it’s four o’clock. They invite me out with them. There is a party tonight and there is a name for it in Portuguese that I quickly forget but loosely translated it means “Anything goes party.” It’s yet another in an endless stream of pre Carnival excuses to drink and have fun. For those who don’t know and I’m sure that most of you do Carnival the same as Mardi Gras perhaps without the beads or maybe there are beads I‘m not sure I‘ve never been. As the Catholics head into their period of lent and to the best of my remembrance from Catholic High School, it’s a one to two month period prior to the day of Jesus death. During this time you give up things, meat, candy, sex, in Italy probably your mistress. Things like that. Carnival is the time leading into that and everybody seemingly tries to commit as many sins as possible so that they can get them out of their system. I go home and shower, I put on my lucky shirt and shorts. We all get ready and we all have days where we come out looking like a 3 a 5 a 9 as it pertains to the best that we can look to ourselves. I’m rocking a solid 9.5, again for me. My 10 is Brad Pitts 3, let’s not kid ourselves. But there is something to be said for feeling good about ourselves that exudes through you and is picked up by the intuition of others. It goes the other way too as we all know. Not feeling good about yourself, that will exude too. Maybe this is God’s gift to me after giving me the plague for two days on my frickin’ vacation.

I meet up with my new amigos for drinks at a pre funk joint. We shoot a game of pool. We are all in a good mood. We grab a cab to this party that is in an outdoor venue. Oh by the way, still cannot find my friends, they are probably hiking through several mountains on their way to an undisclosed dinosaur dig. Did I mention their adventurousness? We see the lights and hear the music in the distance. Flashes of red and blue and yellow and green, strobes lights and fireworks. It’s amazing. We pay the cabbie and exit the vehicle, pay our cover and walk through the door to a throng of people, some in costume, some shirtless, girls included. Many people seem to be on ecstasy. There is a 5 girl to one guy ratio, I’ve never seen anything like this, girls sipping drinks on the sidelines waiting for somebody, anybody to come up and ask them to dance. My four friends have coupled up and have determined that they are going to make an attempt at faithfulness towards each other, I assume that they have not consummated their relationship yet, thusly. I am but one man in a swirling sea of music, woman, beauty and partial nakedness. I get that, “I have finally arrived and my vacation is beginning”, kind of feeling and yet I have a tiny feeling of remorse that my best friends are not here to share this with me. I buy a drink. I’m told to ensure that I open all my own drinks down here because some of the nare do wells down here for some reason like to slip roofies in your drinks and find you later and either take all your money or worse. I buy a beer and say, “Don’t worry I can open it myself.” The bartender looks at me funny but I’m not concerned. I tip him well even though tipping isn’t a thing down here.

I see my friends dancing in one little area, the girls to my surprise have already removed their tops. “When in Rome they say.” I’m smiling, surprised, laughing on the inside, mildly turned on, who wouldn’t be. I dance near them but don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to weasel my way into their little semi circle of impending vacation one night stand, or romance or whatever it turns out to be for them. I have my back to them. I take my shirt off as well, why not right? I have Jesus abs again. I’m pulling out my best moves from the eighties, the snap and slide, the hands above the head but not too far above the head if you know what I mean, the shoulder shrug, I walk like an Egyptian which leads to a millisecond of vogue-ing with immediate regrets for having just pulled that one out of the dance move vault and then just sort of fall into the old “Footloose” side to side fingersnap. To my immediate left a group of demi-topless early twentysomethings make their appearance. Two topless, two covered in body paints, all beautiful and in perfect shape because that’s just how it is down here. [(aside) This island was founded by Germans who mixed with the Portuguese, Spanish and locals. For many years the Germans outnumbered everybody in the same way that the English came to outnumber the American Indians in Jamestown and other places in newly discovered America due to having wiped out their populations with smallpox. Over time races mixed on this island. Genetically speaking what the Germans brought to the table was blonde hair, blue or green eyes and um how do I say this delicately, topheavyness, the Portuguese and locals brought, genetically, dark skin, long skinny legs, nice posteriors. You put it all together and what you have is Giselle Bundchen. Anybody ever notice that Giselle has a German last name. Yep, she’s from around here and her cousins- tall and medium are everywhere.] I make eye contact with one of the girls in the group. I look into her big, blue eyes, She looks into my eyes we have a connection. She seems as though she is on some mind altering substance but I can’t tell what. She might just have been drinking a lot but I doubt it. I say “se voce falla englais” through the din of the music, which means “do you speak English in Portuguese“. She waves her hand as to say so/so. Now I’m making sporadic eye contact with all of her friends. They are looking at me like a Turkey as it comes out of the oven on Thanksgiving day by those who have been fasting since Tuesday so that they can binge eat come this moment. I electric slide over to them. I wink at my friends who are now intermittently making out and playing slap and tickle more than they are dancing. They wink back as if to say, “It’s on like Donkey Kong my brother.” The girls seem as genuinely excited for me as the guys. It’s a brave new world that we all exist in. Before I know it I move from outside the circle of dancing mini Giselles to being on the inside. They surround me and swarm me like bees in a hive. I wonder if I am part of a ritual where at the end of it all I will be put in a pot with some carrots and eaten or taken to the top of a mountain and sacrificed to the angry God’s who created this whole lent thing in the first place. Of course this is too good to be true. I’m 41 for the love of all things holy. These girls are in their early twenties, flawless and fighting for my eye contact and attention. I begin to get “bajoes” which is Portuguese for kisses. When I turn to one another slaps me on the ass, seemingly checking for firmness, when I turn to another I get rewarded with a kiss from her and a flirtatious bite on the back of my arm or neck from another. This goes on for two songs. I see other guys dealing with this same issue from other mini brazilian model wanna be/ could bes. Of course this is anything but an issue. It’s every mans fantasy and I’m seemingly living it in the moment. In life you hear many times that you should live in the moment and few of us rarely do but I’m truly living in this moment. I’m not thinking about work, the stock market, my advancing years, my 401k or my mortgage payments. The thump, thump of the techno music comes to a 1 second halt and a slow song comes on. Very strange for this atmosphere, it’s Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” I remember how big that MJ still is around the world despite his freakishness and retirement from music, oh, some 25 years ago in reality. I now suddenly have a choice to make because I cannot slow dance with four girls at the same time. To be fair I pick the one that I first made eye contact with. I do not make eye contact with the others because I know that there may be bruised feelings because at the end of the day nobody likes to be rejected especially by a 41 year old with thinning hair and a tinge of the crows feet. I pull her close to me, music is wafting through my ears, Michaels smooth vocals surround us……“and they say why, why, they tell me that it’s human nature, why, why does it do me that way.” We kiss, I now know fully what they have meant all those years by the saying, “the international language of love”. I can feel the top half of her body touching mine, the softness and the commingled sweat of our earlier dancing efforts We kiss for the entire song. The song ends, I look in her eyes, the full moon is, at this moment, being reflected back towards me from them. It’s 75 degrees out, a wind whips in off the ocean, for a split second you can hear the crashing of surf. Another thumping beat replaces the beauty of the previous slow song, a song that I very well may never now forget. There is no need to go back to dancing to the techno music. There is only one thing for us to do and that is to go for a walk down the beach together as anything else would be seemingly redundant. After a four minute stroll we find a closed down beach bar that has big chaise chairs locked up to their nearest post, the post which holds up the tiki style roof. For whatever reason they have left the cushions on. We fall into the couch like chair still able to hear the music in the background. “dinz, dinz, dinz, dinz” with the coordinating stream of lights glowing off in the distance. We talk a little for the first time, where are you from, what do you do, how is it that you are single. Her English is fair and my Portuguese is awful. I often have wondered why you will ask someone here a question and they will just start going off in Portuguese to my astonishment. Then I remember that I of course do the same thing. I get asked question in Portuguese and start going off in English because, well, that’s my only choice. We slowly realize that beyond the basics we have everything to say and nothing at all to say. So we stop wasting our time with small talk and begin kissing again. Girls down here, and I’ve heard this from many others, love to kiss and maybe fool around a little bit and have no problem with nudity, especially toplessness but beyond that they are pretty good girls. When things begin to get heated she pulls away, smiles, looks at me and with the wag of a finger says, “No, no, no mister.” She takes my hands in hers and starts kissing me again, I safely put my hands on her back, I figure I can’t get in trouble for this. We kiss for what seems to be hours. I feel like I’m at a high school party that I remember going to in my Junior year in Schaumburg Illinois where I kissed a girl all night in some parents who were away on vacation’s bedroom who was so turned on by this that she put scratch marks all over my back to the point that it looked like I had just made love to a Puma. I’m getting the same vibe here but thankfully without the clawing away of the shoulder blades and spinal cord region. I look up into the nighttime sky and see that the moon is in a different spot altogether from where it was when we first layed down. I look at my watch, it’s 3 am. I’m exhausted, thirsty, my mouth, lips and jaw ache from this marathon make out session. Don’t get me wrong I have no regrets and this girl may seemingly be the sweetest girl on the planet but having just come off a cold I feel that I should probably zip back to the crib and get some shuteye. I get up from the couch and extend my hand. She gives me the somewhat frowny, “I’m not happy to see this end” kind of look, but in that cute way that cute girls do it when they want to be…..cute. She reaches in her purse and finds her tube top like covering. She slides it over her head. This is the first time I’ve seen her with all of her clothes on, usually it’s the other way around, ya know? We make our way back down the beach, holding hands like two young lovers who’ve been at this forever. We speak minimally. I ask her for her phone number. She gives it to me in her best English. I have no pen or paper so I try to think of ways to remember it. I know that somehow by birthday is involved with the first part and two of my favorite football players jersey numbers are involved in the last part. I of course cannot remember her name for the life of me, I want to say it’s Giselle but I know it’s not. I last heard it hours ago and I was so taken by her raw beauty that it went in one ear and out the other, my brain apparently was processing too many other caveman style thoughts at the time. I ask her how she spells her name so that I can commit that to memory as well. It’s Patricia, but her friends call her what sounds like Patchi. The music gets louder, the lights get brighter the population of beach lovers gets denser and we know that we are getting close. She says, “Although my friends are going to kill me my brother is the one that is really going to be pissed.” But again half in English and half in her language but I get it. I say, “brother.” She say’s, “Yes, we came with him, he drove.”

We make our way through the crowd of yet reveling dancers. We go back to the spot where we first met. Her friends are gone, my friends are gone. We begin a search for them, we hold each others hands not necessarily to be romantic but to not lose each other because the crowd has actually become larger since we last left. We make our rounds to all the various bars that have been set up around the outside dance floor. The DJ is working up a furious blend of house and techno. We finally come across her friends sitting at a table, they now all have their tops on as well. Apparently toplessness is mainly for the dance floor whereas sitting at a table drinking a mojito is more of a “top on” kind of thing. They look at her with darting eyes. They are purely speaking in Portuguese for my non Portuguese speaking pleasure. I don’t understand a thing but I understand everything. “Where have you been, what have you been up to, God knows, I think I hear one ask are you still a virgin?” I don’t have a clue but this is what I’m guessing. She explains herself to them to the point that they aren’t satisfied with her answers but the thought of throwing her into the ocean for making them worry so much fades from their demeanor. She turns to me and says that her brother has been frantically looking for her since two and is pissed. She goes on to say that I might wish to make my exit now since he is a big fella who has been practicing the beautiful art of Brazilian judo called kapamaria (or whatever it’s called) since he was a young child and is not afraid to use it. I haven’t been in a fight in a long time but decide that it would be embarrassing to get my ass kicked by some dude that looks like he’s doing have yoga and half tai chi. I agree with her on many fronts that it’s time for me to go, her friends aren’t happy, I’m tired and I don’t need a fat lip for the rest of my trip considering that I just overcame a blocked ear, a sunburn and the 48 hour flu. I kiss her gently goodbye and just as I turn I hear in the distance in a booming bass voice, “Patchi, no!” He weaves his way frenetically towards us and I say, “I’ll call you, buh bye!” I begin my very own weave through the crowd. He commences chase. I run through the bronzed, green eyed beauties breaking off moves like Reggie Bush running through the Chicago Bears secondary. There is a gate and a line to get out of it. It’s one of those temporary gates that they put up for parties like this where a cover is charged although they are relatively futile since you could just simply Navy Seal it in from the beach if you really wanted to avoid paying cover, or simply slide throughat one of the fence connections. I weasel my way through a particular set of these gates and wonder if I could have done the same thing a few days ago before I lost ten pounds from lying in bed during all that time with no food. The brother is now at the gate trying to do the same thing but he’s too big, he can’t fit and just as he’s about a quarter of the way through he is grabbed by off duty police officers getting paid overtime I would assume to work security at this particular function. I hear him saying unpleasant things to them and intermittently yelling at me. It seems that his English is not as good as his sisters but he’s apparently learned the words, “I’ll kill you!“ So he has that going for him, which is nice. I cut in line, jump in a cab, the cabbie says, “Where to?” in his best English. I say, “Any the F where but here just drive man, just drive!” He speeds off. I collect my thoughts, catch my breath and for the first time in a long time breath a huge sigh of relief and begin to laugh. Once we get our bearings straight I tell him to take me back to my condo at Praia Mole. I’m tired, I drift off to sleep in the cab. This is the last thing I recall.

I wake up the next day in my bed in a puddle of sweat. I recall the events of the night before and realize that there were no events from the night before. It was nothing more than the most vivid dream that I’ve ever had. A feverish delirious dream but a dream nonetheless. My clothes are still folded neatly in a pile where they’ve been since I came down with this god-forsaken cold. The morning sun is gleaming through the window. I’m soaked wet through and through probably to the mattress but I feel amazingly better although nasty because there is nothing worse than waking up in a puddle of cold, wet sheets and blankets. I spin up, put my feet on the floor and walk to the bathroom, my sunburn has turned into a golden brown and reflected back at me in the mirror is a beautiful set of Jesus abs. My friends are gone and I suggest to myself that it would be a good idea to walk down to the local beach. As I walk out of the house and lock the door behind me a smile comes to my face as I think to myself, “This day has an endless array of possibilities.”

Kelly Kortman

The previous story is purely fiction. Any similarity to real names places or situations is totally coincidental.

So it’s Saturday. Day 7 of the vacation. I’ve just awoken from my two day sick bed. Not fun on vacation, thank god we decided to do a longer length of time. We are heading back up to the north end of the island, the place I described earlier that my friends made it too but I hadn’t, Jurere. It’s where there is a Nikki beach style club that apparently we are VIP too, my airline pilot buddy Paul has a buddy who has a house up North in Jurere and has taken the time to get to know many people very well. I spend the day yesterday writing the above, sleeping intermittently, showering as I kept waking up in a series of cold sweats. I watched a few south park episodes on my computer. My buddies come home late, they read my above story and feel sorry for me because of the pure irony of the story considering that my fiction writing the polar opposite of the experience that I was actually having. Like my buddy Ardi said, great art comes through great suffering. I’m not suggesting that that is great art, but it’s better than other stabs I’ve made at writing fiction. Life goes on. We are out the door and on our way to this beach party. I just want to feel better and home that at some point today this becomes a reality. I’m still feeling a little off but this time it seems from the medication that I’m taking. I cannot tay here another day so I’m heading up with them.