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"This place is poison for me," she says.

She asks if she can take the newspaper.

"Stay, I will make love to you in the morning," says Al.

"You will have to wake me up."

"I can go to your place," says Al, ever hopeful.

"My place is not so clean as this." Then she laughs a bitter laugh.

"But I will be more relaxed there," says Al. The woman says nothing. Al speaks again. "Tomorrow I go to Caye Caulker. Meet me."

"Can I have cab fare?"

"No prob-lem-o." He shepherds her down the stairs and to the gate, shushing all the way. The gate clicks. I hear him return to his room. I hear the condom wrapper crackle, hear him cap the tequila. Then he pads down the hall to the bathroom.

My journal is on the floor beside my bunk. I've been taking notes in the dark. I press the light on my watch. It's 2:30 a.m. I'm a little guilty about the notes. But you find yourself looking through a dark window on two people driven by two very different sorts of desperation, and you think you ought to turn it into some sort of parable.

I'm on my moral high horse, disgusted by a man who, unable to use her, would turn a woman loose in Belize City at this hour, leaving her to weave through the ugly back streets to her sleeping baby. But the story is about the transactions we all make, about the hungers that drive us, furtive and craven, into dark places that we inhabit only to buy some time in the light. Worlds apart, Al and the woman were brought together by twinned -- not twin -- needs. This is a lonely world. Given cover of darkness, we drive straight to the things we disdain by day. We want them hidden, but more than that, we want them.

Al is still in the bathroom when she returns. She is banging at the gate.

"Al! Al! Al!" The mongrel dog who lies by the desk all day, soundless and unstirring as people come and go, begins barking wildly. Now she is ringing the doorbell. Downstairs, doors slam. Omar and the manager are cursing the woman and yelling at her to leave. She calls out for Al. His shadow slides past my door. I can sense him holding his breath as he lets himself out the main door and into his room, but she has spotted him.

Travel to Belize at BARNES & NOBLE

"Al! Al!" The lock on his door clicks in place.

Now I hear the proprietor. "It's that fucking guy in room 1!" His voice moves to the foot of the stairs. "You brought her in here, buddy, now make her leave! Tell her to go home!" Al's room is still as a tomb.

Downstairs, the yelling and door-slamming continue. Omar cracks the gate and the woman wedges her foot in the jamb. Enraged, the proprietor grabs a machete and chases her down the street into the darkness. For a while it is quiet. Then the proprietor speaks from the foot of the stairs again.

"If you want a fucking whorehouse, go to a fucking whorehouse!"

And then it is quiet for good.

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Al was gone in the morning. I caught a ride north. I figured when I got back home, I'd write up the escapade as a farce. But it just didn't seem funny. I thought of him flying down here for hookers and snorkeling. And then I thought of me flying down here to fish for stories, a slumming voyeur armed with emergency traveler's checks and a plane ticket home.

Scribbling away in my bunk, scratching around the edge of this little story, I was doing some skulking of my own. Given a front row seat at the disintegration of one man's fantasy, I found myself reviewing my own closeted collection of indiscretions.

If they were brought to light, would I live differently, or just more defiantly?

Our passions debase us. Our needs make fools of us all.
salon.com | Sept. 3, 1999

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