8.
YEMANJA
They stayed in a Motel 6 where cars whizzed by on the street outside, and it reminded Ross of a poorer cousin to their Holliday Inn on Sheridan Road. The second floor was reached by a stairwell, and all the rooms hung off of a wrap around balcony that looked onto the parking lot. The weather was hot and good and even when the sun was gone they still felts its warmth. They looked down on the road and the little strip mall across from them.
“Even though this isn’t Miami, it’s still fucking amazing,” Flipper said.
And Ross and Jimmy agreed.
As Flipper sped down the highway, Gwen Setfani roared:
I kinda always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend, whoa
I kinda always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend, whoa
I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them, whoa
I kinda always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend
“We’re not stopping till we fucking get to Saint Augustine’s... Or Cocoa Beach. Or just Florida, Goddamnit. Today is the today. Tonight we will sleep on a beach!”
“That seems like a terrible idea,” Flipper noted.
“Our lives,” Jimmy pronounced grandly, “are full of poor decisions.”
“Mine wasn’t,” Ross said. “Up until recently my life wasn’t full of any decisions.”
And now I'm another ex-girlfriend on your list
But I should have thought of that before we kissed
I'm another ex-girlfriend on your list
I should have thought of that before we kissed
“And do you regret that?” Jimmy asked.
All he had to do was ask for Ross to remember all the nights since they’d left Chicago, and the night before when the three of them, heated up by the Georgia night, Jim Beam and pot, began to make out slowly on the porch then make their way into the little motel room. Not that they needed weed or liquor or any excuse. As Jimmy said, plainly, somewhere into the warm night filled with its cheerful darkness, “I love you guys. I love you both so much.”
Lust and love were not exclusive. Ross’s heart beat faster, and his blood ran a little quicker. He tingled at the memory of lying in the dark with the two of them so close, closer to anyone than he’d ever been except maybe Anigel.
“I don’t regret anything,” he said.
They drove for five straight hours, taking breaks so minimal that Jimmy said, “They don’t really count.” Thanks to empty Big Gulp Cups they forewent stopping at rest areas and peed in the car, and they stopped once when Flipper declared that he had to shit and wasn’t going to shit in the car, and then they all realized they had to shit, and that was also the time Flipper and Jimmy switched from passenger to driver. By mid afternoon they were driving over bites of water and inlets which presaged the Atlantic, and they arrived in Cocoa Beach, a city painted in pastels and lined with palm trees, the very personification of all things Florida.
In the backseat of the car, Flipper was stripping and pulling clothes out of his bag. Ross just enjoyed the sight of him, but as Flipper pulled on a Hawaiian shirt and searched for his sunglasses, he said, “Gotta look the part.”
“Where do we eat?” Ross said.
“I don’t care,” said Jimmy. “We’re here. That’s all that matters.”
“So this is the Atlantic,” Ross said.
“Whaddo you think?” Flipper asked him.
“I had always suspected that we are so small you couldn’t really tell the difference between standing here and standing on the shore of Lake Michigan.”
“And can you?”
“Well, one is salty and one ain’t. And that’s a sponge right there.”
Ross stopped talking and stretched out on the sand. This was a lonely stretch of beach and the eastern sky was darkening while they felt the sun on their back. A breeze came up off the water.
“We needed to be here,” Jimmy said, the late day light playing on his thin arms and his round shades. “I needed to be here.”
Then he said, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do when we get back home.”
“We just got here, James,” Ross said. “No need to think about home.”
“I’m that way,” Jimmy shook his head. “At the happiest time I’m thinking about all the shit in the future.”
He finished off the very spicy, slightly overpriced steak taco. A great long wave rolled toward the sand, fell apart on the land and rolled back into the sea again.
“I think I have depression,” Jimmy said.
“You just figured that out?” Ross looked at him and they both laughed for far longer than they should have.
“Is it supposed to be this way?” Jimmy wondered. “It feels like a war every day just to get up and live. To be so fucking terrified. I feel like for every bit happiness I have there is a bill coming. The anxiety, the fear.”
“The dark,” Flipper said.
He folded up the foil wrapper of his taco and put it in the bag. He turned his back on the wind and took from his backpack his paraphernalia.
“You think that’s why we’re all together?” Ross said. “Cause we all know.”
“I had forgotten I knew,” Flipper said. “I do forget. I mean, sometimes I’m so fucking happy I don’t dare look into the future. I just feel so good. And then, one day, I fall.”
“And what a great fall it was,” Ross said. He shrugged. “Or is.”
The sound of seabirds, the smell of great, great sea water was so damn good, the air on them, the good wide air.
“I could just stay the fuck here forever,” Ross said.
He said, “You know, sometimes I feel like I’ve discovered it. The happiness, the trick so that I will never fall into despair or… whatever it is. And then almost as soon as I’ve got it, it comes again, Jimmy. It sneaks up on you. So I know.”
“I think the whole reason I had to be down here before the day was over was so I could get to this beach, get as far away from bullshit as I could.”
“And do you feel far from it?” Ross said. He was smoking a cigarette now, and the sky over the endless Atlantic was purple.
“Almost.”
“Almost this,” Flip Sanders said soberly as he held up an easily eight inch blunt and put it to his mouth, lighting it. The smell of pungent marijuana rose up in a hazy cloud around them, and Flipper passed the blunt to Ross, who inhaled and coughed, his eyes widening, and then passed it to Jimmy. In a circle, like s slow sacrament it went while pain was numbed and pleasure remembered, and things that could not be changed no longer mattered. Jimmy, rifling through his canvas bag, chuckled and said, “Well, fuck!”
“Huh?” the others said.
“You guys wanna do acid?”
“I’ve never—” Ross started, but Flipper said, “Yeah.”
“Yes,” Ross agreed.
“Am I hallucinating?” Flipper said.
“If you are, then we all are,” Ross said.
Flipper stood up and was surprised he could.
“We are not hallucinating,” he said.
“Can we go to them? Will they want us?” Jimmy asked.
Ross’s lips were numb. His body was light. His spirit had risen out of his skin, and he could feel every round grain of sand under his feet.
“I cannot not go to them,” he said.
And the three of them began walking.
North of them, a bonfire had been raised, a small spark, but now it painted the night orange, and as they came closer, of course the light was bigger and bigger. There were drummers pounding rhythmically on great high drums and dancers moved about, not wildly, but with dignity and all in white. As the boys approached it was Ross who could make out the words:
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
“The fuck….” Jimmy murmured. “It’s following us.”
Yemaya Asesu Asesu yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
The women wore white dresses with white turbans and they were brown and brownish tan, a few white, and there was joy, but no silliness to their movements, and around them were others, some clapping, some in their own dance, some dressed elaborately, some not so, but all in white, and Jimmy, from wifebeater to trousers was in white and Flipper wore a white fedora and Ross was all in white and it was a moment when he knew God was real, whoever he was. Someone nudged Jimmy and handed him a plate of food, stewed meats, plantains he assumed, fragrant things he was too white to name. Ross was already eating, and as the music went on, every shadow of sorrow fled. There was, for the moment, no time for that.
“Are the stars up there or down here?” Flipper wondered, for they were three hours into an acid trip, and high above them burned the stars brighter than he’d ever seen, and they burned on the water, stars bobbing up and down in little white boats, traveling out to sea.
“Stars….” Jimmy said. “Stars…”
The woman beside him laughed and said, “Those are the boats to Yemaya, put out to see with our prayers.”
