Keeps

He asked for a lighter and she reached deep into her pocket and gave him one.

"Scheiza," he laughed, "ze lighters here are, like, liquid."
"Of course they're liquid stupid. They're lighters not matches!"
"No, I mean zat zey pass around fluidicly. I lose one, I get one, everyone eez endlessly passing around zair lighters in zees country."

We were sitting, a chrysalis party about to cut it's way out of several not-so-concentric circles on the beach under a tango canopy of patient twinkling viridian stars. The party had moved to the beach when the roof got to rowdy. The party had moved to the roof when the beachfront dive restaurant we had crashed without forewarning had Closed For The Night--- all the little breeze-swaying conch-shell lanterns extinguishing and the endless cascade of Fatboy Slim and Dire Straits songs giving way to the ceaseless churning of the not-so-distant frothy wrath of surf.

Mostly I watched the stars. I'd spent the day out on the beach kicking back and taking in enough golden rays of paradise (flipping on the hour like a pig on the rotisserie) to make a lobster blush, and I was Feeling It. Or maybe that was the smoke. Did I mention there was smoke? Lots of smoke. Whil the party was still inside, some bald frenchman sitting across from me starting handing me Marlboros (my first American cigarettes in months) and I thanked him, though I don't think he understood.

"Merci-bouqu" I said. He nodded. Frenchly, peering out skeptical over his long pale gallic nose. I lit up and he appraised my graceful movements. My poise, my laissez-faire.
"Ee ees very Zen, non?" he asked his friend, the other bald-headed frenchman, for the third time.
"Oui. Very Zen."

Then they proceded to ask me about California. Did I know Carmel? Did I know a little French Bistro outside the Embarcadero? Did I ever go to Yosemite?
Not that they really wanted to know these things, and I wasn't particularly keen to talk about home. But they seem pleased to know much about where I was from, and it made me happy to see them pleased, and with that settled, having said nothing whatsoever our conversation ended amicably and I eased back into my chair and watched the two cute girls.

Holy shit, where was I? Was I back home? Come across the world to find yourself only to find yourself looking at pretty girls. Shit, where was I? Guidebooks on the tables, half the tourists dressed up like they'd come straight from their Club-Med photoshoots and the other half all grungy rumpled Indian-Jones wannebe. The third half were hippies. Can there be three halves in a whole? Hand me another cigarette.

Conversations wafted over the evening scene, everyone burning out their short smoky fragrant lives all too briefly as the curry platters ilkewise dwindle and the night wanes on and the lights go out and we all go up onto the roof.
In the daytime the beach is filled with animals with pinchers. Crabs and hawkers. The crabs waddle to and fro and pay you little regard unless you step on their holes. The hawkers are a more lethal foe. They approach smiling, and greet you.

People only talk to you because they're selling something.

But at night the beach is empty. The stars sing their plaintive refrains in that merry twinkling slightly sad language that stars speak, and the seaspray flares out occasionally and the ocean roars its violent curses at the land, but the people thereon are few.

On the rooftop everyone sits and the guitars break out.

Here we are now. Entertain us.

I stand, trying to look contemplative so the girls will think I'm That Guy. My profile can't be much in silhouette. Whatever was left of my baby fat has burned off in the Oriental Sun and my hair is long and combed in a kind of bouffant pompadour that flies around my mask in the brisk night wind. Did I mention I was wearing a mask? It doesn't matter. The girls are watching the guitar players. I have to descend back to earth again, an undercurrent of villainous hunger lurking deep in my gut, and the ennui of stars calling for another cigarette. I find my french friend and pull up a seat.

"More Beer! Can I get another Beer? Jesus!"
"Trois" says Napolean, indicating himself and the smoking chick beside him. She smiles. Someone rushes downstairs to wrangle up some beers.

I feel stupid. And contagious.

Stupid musicians. The revelers love them though and despite our change in location we're drawing record crowds. A shady-looking Aussie clamors up the rickety stairs with a plastic bottle of Mystery Mead in his hand. Somebody calls from some Kingfisher and coke and some stray dogs pick at their flees restlessly. How did they get up here. The pair next to Frenchy and I have broken into the fragrant stuff and the guitars rack it up a notch and someone starts shouting militaristic coded messages to whoever will hear them through the tremulous fracas.

"White Rabbit. White Rabbit come in this is Tiger. Over. Deposit the payload."
A mosquito. My libido.
"Descend! Descend Goddamnit! Abort!"

The decibels rise and they kick us out onto the beach. I sit comfortably next to my French Brother, exalting in our zen-ness and not quite feeling up to standing up yet. A woman from Guyana recognizes me and asks what's going on. I didn't even see her in the darkness. But there are a lot of people here. And she is pretty dark herself.
"This is the best party I've been invited to this year. And now it's ending!"
"C'mon. It's not over."
"I can't believe it's over! I'm having such a good time!"
"We're just moving out to the beach. Come with me out to the beach."
"I finally get invited to a party and it's over by 11 o'clock."

Jesus Christ it's only 11. Where did those girls get off to? I find them out in the sand while the guitars start in on something more mellow and possibly not in English. Who knows what language anyone is speaking. Some guys are discussing Building Techniques in Marathi. Two women share a heart-to-heart in what sounds like French but probably isn't. My drunken Guyanan friend twirls out into the night.

"Where's that American? Where's that-- Where is? Uh... American Boy! There you are! And who are you? Where are you from?"
"America." Says the dreadlock girl to my left.
"American boy and American girl! I have to take a picture of this.

Life is a series of drunken photos, taken in the dark.

She tries to focus her camera repeatedly while I keep an eye on the girls. Keep an eye on the stars. "Want to here something magical?" I ask no one in particular. I point up to the dip of Orion, "She that one right there. That's not really a star. That's a nebula. That one dot. That is really thousands of new stars. Millions. All right there." I wipe the sand from my sweaty palms and reach for a cigarette I don't have. The wind blows from the north and the palm trees sway.

No one has anything interesting to say. Kids talk about places they've been that are nice. Places they've been that they recommend. Places they'd like to go. "Everywhere's beautiful y'know," says a Polish girl, "You can goanywhere." The music is lively but seems disconnected. Of the three musicians, one of them has dropped out, gone down long and lean in the sand like a stretched out pup tonguing the skinny girl who wins the nightly prize for Most Flesh Visible, her tiny breasts almost peaking out, wanton delicacies of pale moonskin that his hand (still gripping pick) is getting devilishly close to strumming a chord across. Like some sad Modigliani surrealist woman, beside whom sits, to my right, the girl's bored friend, hiding under her caramel truffles of bohemian hair and fending off a slathering grinning Marathi with ignorant lassitude. The shady-looking Aussie is handing out packets of something and taking modest swills from his Mystery Malt and I want to punch him in the face. The two girls are sitting next to two other girls. Birds fly fastest in flocks. The enemy is about and planning ambuscades and thrilling sallies. I have to get the drop on them. I have to make my move. I have to take a piss.

My frame tingling. My head swinging thrillingly somewhere between no moon and the delicious-smelling salty sea, I find my way. Never a backward glance. I am dizzy and blind and I rip open my fly and let 'er all out, turning against the wind so I don't get a refresher course in urinary anamnesis.
When I open my eyes all manner of strange and phosphorescent creatures are hovering around me in a harrowingly vivid hallucination. A Romantic painting of a whore's rear squats in my general direction near a highway offramp bearing the sign "No Entry" while a hunchbacked dwarf with a cellophane cellphone freakishly wipes the dew from his forehead. An phaeton drawn army of bears is sent off into the desert without bread and water, holding guns and barbed razor wire that they use to slit the squatter's face in two, savage blood and brains and hair twirling out in a mandala of waves.

But the desert is really the ocean, and as I stand and zip up my fly I feel the world slipping by me. Here I am, at the end of the continent, staring east where the world falls off into space. THE WORLD IS SPINNING! and I'm balanced precariously on the top of the barrel of a planet just as it's hurtling itself forward toward the rising sun- I'm going to fall into the fiery brink!

The present comes back to me in a flash. I walk back to the dwindling party and take a seat near the girls. Ms. Guyana has, inevitably, faded away, and the guitarist with his skinny dish as well. The two girls, and the two other girls, are speaking English Thank God. They ask what I'm writing in my book.

"Oh. Everything. Notes."
"Everything? Like what?" Like the 6 different conversations going on at once, including the ones in languages I can't understand. Like the shining filigree of constellations, the auburn color of her curled rebellious hair, and the way she casts her sad doe-eyes down over my notebook as I rap at it absentmindedly with my pen.
"You don't talk much do you?"
"Most of my conversations are in here," I say, motioning again to the notebook. "I travel sometimes whole weeks without talking to anyone except to buy food or secure a bed, so I ask myself questions. I give myself answers."
"What do you do when there start to be more answers than questions?"
"Keep movin' on."
"You should write that in your book." I would but I lost my pen. It's too dark. I don't feel like it. Too many excuses. I'll write those down instead.

The one girl hasn't looked at me yet but the other one has. She is lighter-skinned, softer, more curves and with an easy smile. I am out of smokes and afraid to ask her for one when she lights up and looks at me red-eyed and strangely silent. People only talk to you when they have something to sell. Alternatively, in my case, when they're interested in buying what you have to offer.

"Why have you come here?" I ask.
"My father was from here. We are orphans. My father was a very holy man, a sage, a guru, and he came to West Germany and got very free. Drinking, smoking, women. I learned later that he had two daughters but I've never met my sister. He wrote to me sometimes but I haven't heard from him in 13 years and now I've learned that he was last living in a monastery in Nepal. He might be dead. But I have come to find out what I can. In February I will be 30 years old, and I will meet for the first time my family."
I give her a few minutes to show her that I am allowing her story to settle in before answering.
"I, too, have come looking for my Father." I say cautiously, holding out my palms, looking to the starry sky, "He too is a very Religious Man. And I haven't ever gotten word from him." She smiles. One of the other girls digs further. "And have you found your father here?" she asks me.
Straightening out my mask I grin as mischievously as I know how. "He found me!"

Later the third guitarist returned, the other two lay drooling into crabholes and glaring up at the blaring woofer of the stars. The music of the spheres playing nightly in a never-ending concert brought to you by Big Bang brand amplifiers. He starts to play some melancholy sad virtuoso shit that just about kills any 'hep that this party's got left.

"Take off yer Emo cap, go back to Munich and collect coins in the Straße!" I want to yell, but I don't. Mostly I watched the stars. Turning around on my burnt skin awkwardly, rapping my knuckles against my notebook. Watching the universe go round and round. The guitarist stops and rolls a cigarette and asks if anyone has a lighter. I hand him mine.

"Danke," he says, "I lost mine."
"Keep it," I say, "some girl just gave it to me yesterday."