It's a savagely hot day, July 1987, so hot that folks south of the Mason Dixon Line who can not afford an air conditioner are slumped over in iced down metal tubs in their backyards, at beaches, rivers, and walking around malls window shopping, chilling—cloaked in streams of cool air.
Henry’s sitting at his desk in his Key West Bungalow office with the air conditioner on staring at a blank page rolled in the platen of his Smith Corona typewriter.
He dials his Grundig radio to KXKW, boogie-woogie music for the Southern Keys, having heard somewhere, when you're down, listen to upbeat music.
After pouring a high ball glass full of Jack Daniels clean, he swigs all of it, hoping the liquor would bring out the mettle in him.
He felt like his heart was wrapped in a leather sheath. He couldn't stomach the vacant feeling, and topping himself was an option that took more balls than he had, besides, who would take care of the tribe?
His pattern of woe centered on the foggy responses his stories received but was chemical mostly. Not surprisingly, using dope and booze like it was Lithium Salts bore fruit because it sedated the electrical circuitry that ran wild in his brain.
He'd think paranoid shit like—How many New Yorkers read his weekly column in HEADBANGER Magazine? Could the toothed wheel in the machine that calculated readership be missing teeth?
Or, were his readers captivated when they read his column? Or did they read a few paragraphs during breakfast, distracted by the wonderful tasting jam on their toast, spilling their coffee all over the kitchen table, and using the free issue of HEADBANGER Magazine to wipe up the mess?
Money was no problem, there was plenty to support his family which he called the tribe— Lucia his Cuban wife, their lover Summer Wynd, the Chihuahuas, Che y Mia, and Pedro the woodpecker.
He drove a classic 64 Chevy wagon and the tribe lived in the idyllic settings of the Florida Keys. They could get on a plane and travel at will, the girls cooked sumptuous gourmet meals and had little to do but clean house, or take the pets to Dog Beach where they luxuriated on beach chairs in thong bikinis drinking pina coladas.
Sexually, the threesomes nightly carnal adventures were orgasm packed and draining. Usually, around 2 AM they would pass out, fatigued, tangled in a sweat and cum soaked scrum.
You couldn’t call the threesomes’ sex lovemaking really— it was rough-edged, and the girls often closed their eyes, fantasizing about screwing the Dog Beach lifeguard, Dirk.
Henry felt aroused during sex with the girls, but he didn't feel romantic, and sometimes, he too closed his eyes imagining he was in bed with Sharon Stone.
Lucia and Summer Wynd were affectionate and warm alright, often hugging Henry and the Chis, saying — my baby, my darling, or I love you so much. But, when it came to sex, emotions were tossed out the window in favor of prolonging the grinding process of getting off.
When Lucia was 17 she took a bus from Placata, Cuba to Havana. She desperately needed money to help support her 10 brothers and sisters who had quit school and were working on sugar cane plantations.
She was a natural beauty, people were drawn to her glaring desirability, men sitting at sidewalk cafes in Havana would eyeball her intently as she walked by.
In no time Fidel Castro took her under his wing and she became one of the many strumpets who serviced him.
Fidel reportedly slept with 25000 women. It was a mystery who was counting and why bother? Because after 1000 women, you could say you had 1000s which would impress those who cared.
If a woman slept with 25000 men, she's called a slut, not a hero. Blame it on the Whore of Babylon and leave it at that, because the double standard as it's called is so deeply rooted in genetics and culture it would take an excavator to dig it out.
Much of the money Lucia made from sexing Fidel went to her family in Placata, using the rest to rent a small room in Old Havana and go to acting school. Acting came naturally to her, one night while sitting with a group of friends in a local gay bar, Cabaret Las Vegas she says,
Dios mío, acting, what a joke, I learned to act when I was a baby, screaming like a banshee for my Madre's teta. I’ve been acting ever since to get what I want.
Soon, with the help of Fidel’s friend Ernesto Daranas, the celebrated post-revolution Cubano filmmaker, Lucia had supporting roles in local films such as— The Last Supper, Vampires of Havana, Voice of the Sea, and Guava Island.
And, if she had stayed in Cuba she would have become a big-league star because she could act— opening herself up on the screen and going inside her soul to engage sentiments as though she had thousands filed away inside for every situation.
When she met Henry he was working as the editor of The Gringo Times in Havana and the love gods pounced on them. But her rosy film career ended as the couple quickly absconded to Cancun, Mexico on a midnight schooner, escaping the socialist state and Fidel.
If Fidel had known Lucia was with Henry while they were in Havana he would have thrown her into Prisión Taco Taco and had Henry shot. You see, Lucia was the only woman who could scratch a particular itch he had, intellectually and sexually.
There was nothing on the horizon for the women in Fidel's circle. He was married and had hordes of women because he could and nobody in Cuba, not even his wife, dared to confront him.
It was as though Fidel the dictator had an infinite supply of free mileage which was good for whatever he wanted in Cuba and maybe the world.
As the couple settled in Key West, Henry retained a top immigration attorney, Avi Dickman, for Lucia and she was on her way to green card heaven.
An hour later, Henry is still staring at the blank page in his Smith Corona typewriter, feeling like he's been sucked into a void, left there, plucked out, and finding himself back in his desk chair later, like alien abduction, but he had blacked out.
Did his copious consumption of— Jack Daniels, pot, cocaine, tramadol, and Xanax cause the blackout? Maybe, but he'd have to be dragged by a team of mules to an AA meeting.
He was sure— the heartfelt 1st person proclamations of reformed alcoholics confessing they’d be pulling up daisies without the 12 steps masked the statistic that only 6% of AA members stayed sober.
So he used, enjoying the wonder of it and accepting the consequences because it was better than sitting in a church basement listening to the spurious victory speeches of reformed alcoholics.
Finally, he goes to work, as he’s typing the 3rd sentence of a story the phone rings, an official-sounding man with a Cuban accent says,
I’m Coronel Diaz of the Cubano Revolutionary Army, Comandante Castro would like to speak with Lucia Vargas.
Henry figures it might be a prank call, but if it's Fidel there would be no putting him off because his power had long arms. He agrees saying,
Yes of course señor, she's in the kitchen,
he yells for Lucia who’s stirring a pot of Paella to come to the phone, she asks him,
who is it? He says,
Fidel,
and she says,
Santa Madre Maria, he’s going to send an assassin to kill me.
She picks up the handset of the phone saying,
hola comandante, cómo estás? The strong man of Latino socialism answers her in Spanish, saying
Mi querida Lucía, I have an itch which only you can scratch chica, come back to me and Cuba is yours. You’re the queen of Cubano cinema. Or would you rather I send an assassin to your bungalow on Gecko Lane? She answers without thinking,
we live on Cathedral Avenue, not Gecko Lane comandante, darling I’ll be getting a Green Card soon, Fidel chuckles saying,
So, the queen of Cubano cinema is going to be a card-carrying member of the Americano bourgeoisie. What’s next Disneyland?
Comandante I have a pot of Paella on the stove, hola, I miss you mi toro.
The tribe was in a polyamorous relationship— a hop skip and a jump away from being swingers, which was in the realm of giving or getting in a glory hole.
Sex is everywhere, even if you don’t want it, it will find you.
Well, they'll screw you when you're trying to be so good
They'll screw you just like they said they would
They'll screw you when you're trying to go home
And they'll screw you when you're there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get screwed.
Is anybody exempt from the worlds' pervasive sexual culture?
Probably not, rumors run wild of nun fetishes and convents full of vibrators, but nuns, like priests, often struggle with their vows of celibacy under which even masturbating is forbidden.
Many Catholic nuns and priests who are celibate eventually give in to temptation, having a wank maybe. The US Catholic Magazine's thoughts on chastity read like this,
Celibacy is a gift that God bestows on those who are called to the priesthood.
Being chaste a gift from God? It's more like God has sentenced those called by Him to live with their heads clamped in a vice as the vice handle is slowly tightened clockwise.
Anyway, looking backward you can blame world debauchery on the ancient Greeks.
Aphrodisiac, eroticism, homosexuality, narcissism, nymphomania, pedophilia— are all derived from the language of ancient Greece which tells you something about its society, mainly that Caligula wrote the manual on kinky sex and cheap thrills.
The phone rings as Lucia finishes talking to Fidel, it’s Dave Spleen, editor of HEADBANGER Magazine in the Big Apple, Henry picks up the handset saying,
hello, and Dave says,
Christ almighty I’ve been trying to call you for the last hour, why don’t you get call waiting? He tells Dave,
If I told you who Lucia was talking to you wouldn’t believe me, anyway what’s going on?
I hear your pal Bag Head opened a cat house at The Palace Hotel in Oneonta, Alabama with that fat gal of his, Bessie. Her father who doesn’t own a razor and looks like Walt Whitman bankrolled it. I need a story from him, a bit on the new chicken sack, call him, I can’t get through, the line is always busy at the cat house. And, I need a bit from you. Give your sultry Cuban wife a poke of something nice and juicy for ole Dave, gotta go gotta deadline to meet!
Dave hangs up. He’s hot for Lucia, but he’d have to stand in line because she’s a goddess. On the other hand, his wife Goldy Spleen's a skank with frizzy bleached hair that's coming out in clumps, hopefully, it's just the bleach and not alopecia. Goldy had a thing for rabbit skin vests, spandex pants, and wore high soled gym shoes, she had odd fashion sense.
Goldy smelled like dried anchovies, was skeletal and not sexy, but she had a stick in the claw she used to keep the clamps on Dave.
She grew up in Shanghai, China where her father was a missionary. At 17 she was a promiscuous preacher's daughter who’d sneak out at night and go drinking with her girlfriends in the Shanghai red-light district. Her father the padre often accused her of courting the devil.
She became friends with a Chinese boy whose mother was the mamasan of a particular Shanghai chicken shack. The working girls watched over Goldy, teaching her masturbation techniques that prolonged orgasm and a made a fella's matchstick feel like a baseball bat— known as the Shanghai Squeeze or China Clinch.
Goldy mastered the China Clinch and her abilities served her well throughout her life. She married Dave Spleen, often performing the ancient pudwhacking technique on him. She had the golden touch, Dave bought her so many gold chains that she looked like the rapper Big Sean when she went out
Henry had been reading Charles Bukowski's book, Factotum. He wrote simply like Hemingway whose writing he labeled true grit. Buk's writing style proved you could write nonchalantly and lay bare the hidden, darker designs of human beings.
Factotum was published in 1975. It's creative nonfiction written about Bukowski's boozed encounters during WW2.
Henry was moved by Bukowski's drive to live, write and laugh about it in the face of horrendous challenges— he had a horse face that was severely scarred by years of being afflicted with acne Conglobata, he worked dirty jobs for small pay, lived in flophouses, was anti-social to boot, and a 24/7 alcoholic.
Buk couldn’t hold on to a typewriter, having to pawn them to survive. So he became adept at writing longhand with a pen, mailing 5 manuscripts a week to Clay Gladmore who published the New York magazine, Frontfire, which Buk liked.
After sending out 1000s of stories to Gladmore and other publishers, he received the following letter inside a large manilla envelope full of rejected manuscripts from Frontfire Magazine.
Dear Mr. Chinaski:
We are returning four stories but we are keeping My Beerdrunk Soul is Sadder Than All The Dead Christmas Trees Of The World. We have been watching your work for a long time and we are most happy to accept this story.
Sincerely,
Clay Gladmore
Bukowski was thrilled to the bone as he held his first acceptance slip from the number one literary magazine in America in the 40s.
41 years after WW2, Henry's sitting in his office wondering if his writing would become world-famous? LAUGH, not a chance.
And, he detested it when people said,
maybe your writing will become world-famous after you die.
This, a smart ass comment repeated so often over the years that it came out of the mouth easily and laid there dead.
In the end, 95% of every so-called writer's work in the world would end up at the bottom of a landfill as a sumptuous lunch for a horde of Book Lice.
There were a handful of 19th Century impressionist painters who became famous after death, but they were deep-sixed so what did it matter to them?
Lucia, Sumer Wynd, the Chis, and Pedro the woodpecker returned to the bungalow around 6, having spent the day at Dog Beach. Henry asks,
so what ya do at the beach today other than show off your bodies and stare at the lifeguard, Dirk? Summer Wynd answers,
darling, we’re so, so drunk, too drunk to cook dinner, would you be a dear and order Chinese?
He dials Fu King Chinese and the lady owner Ping answers,
Fu King Chinese, Ping, may I help you? He asks,
Ping do you do the Chinese Clinch? She answers,
no fresh claim today, all out. He goes on,
how about the Shanghai Squeeze? Ping says,
we no take away cocktails.
The tribe is in the living room of their bungalow, Henry’s using the landline extension, Lucia gets up from the sofa, still loaded but knowing the score. She goes to him and rips the handset out of his hand saying,
Grow up pendejo, Summer Wynd and I are hungry, I’ll order, she speaks into the phone saying,
I apologize for my husband el idiota, we’d like an order of Peking Duck, some fried rice, wonton soup with pork dumplings, spring rolls, and some sweet and sour pork.
The tribe waits in the living room for the delicacies from Fu King Chinese, Summer Wynd switches to The Playboy Channel because she's horny maybe.
The porn film Deep Throat comes on the screen. There are 17 sex scenes in the film, but the tribe was too loaded to count.
The movie became Porno Chic in New York before it was shut down by the long arm of the self-righteous.
Mike Nichols who didn't direct porn, but directed some noteworthy films— Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, and The Graduate, tells Truman Capote to go see Deep Throat and the word’s out in Chi Chi Manhattan society.
The star of Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace doesn’t look like a porn star, she looks as innocent as a farmer's daughter with a sweet freckled face.
Linda was clearly talented at fellatio though— did she invent the deep throat method of swallowing a schlong whole? Probably not, regardless, Linda’s style of deep throating made her famous overnight.
Unlike most porn films Deep Throat had a sense of humor, cutting to scenes of rocket launchings and ringing church bells during moments of climax. Touches of cinematic artistry that contributed to the meteoric popularity of the film.
There are rumors Deep Throat was funded by the Mob, and Linda Lovelace made the film under duress, making very little money considering the 600 million dollars Deep Throat grossed, most of it going to the Mafia.
Certainly, Linda Lovelace whose real name is Linda Susan Boreman had more than her 15 minutes of fame. Years later during a Larry King interview on CNN Miss Lovelace said she had become a feminist, going on to denounce the porn industry as a witness at a US congressional hearing.
The tribe is midway through Deep Throat as the Chinese food arrives. Summer Wynd changes the channel and Henry pays the delivery guy and closes the front door.
As they eat in the living room, they watch a rerun of the 60s sitcom Mr. Ed, about a talking horse. Lucia loves the show and asks,
How did the gringos teach Mr. Ed to speak?
Henry picks up a spring roll and jokingly deep throats it, then coughing, unable to catch a breath, spitting a large portion of the egg roll all over the living floor, while a smaller portion is lodged in his airway.
Summer Wynd jumps up, picking him up from behind, gripping him with her arms around his lung area and her fists clenched performing the Heimlich Maneuver.
Henry spits out the bit of food that is caught in his throat. After the drama, they break open a six-pack of cold Bucanero beer, laughing as Lucia says,
Dios Mios, what would we have written in el idiota's obituary? Henry Lucowski died yesterday while practicing deep throat fellatio on a spring roll?
