From “Stories for Friends”

One thing we can all agree on is that the crew smells better than Trash Island. We could collectively raise our arms and even the generous waft of stink skittering across the greasy deck would not shake us in our olfactory agreement: the place has gone sour. We were not orphaned of a mother’s hygienic sensibilities, but somehow, in our own ways, we all ended up on the Coyote. The Coyote is a retired shrimper from Mississippi that has spent her golden years hauling trash and tetanus from the mainland for a couple of decades before the island became uninhabitable due to the smell. She lays in wait until the unusually hot winds and abhorrent temperatures stop cooking the table scraps and diapers that came out on the last load of garbage and only made it as far as the palms on the edge of the beach before the heat set in, overheated the tractors, and baked the land crabs that have become de facto beneficiaries and benefactors of the waste disposal industry.

My job before coming aboard was as a line cook at a little bar in Cancun named Triste. Previously, I’d been holed up in Lubbock, Texas often in my box truck sleeping off a terrible hangover compliments of too many Lone Stars and bubblegum vape. I’d often park on the curb, convenient to where I’d been working in customer care for a bail bondsman on Buddy Holly Boulevard (a shop named Happy’s). I was a teenager so a cold night in the back of an old UHaul with a can of chili and a 12pack of beer kept me treading in the DMZ of apathy, right between bitterness and bliss. After two years on the same block, with periodic trips to Amarillo for BBQ, I was starting to become discontent and one afternoon I woke to find the motor had been lifted and removed in the night. A trail of oil and antifreeze went down the boulevard past the neighboring bail bondsmen and vape shops. I hopped on my bike and followed the stain til I found the motor in a terrible heap at the foot of a decommissioned grain elevator. “What a waste.” I thought, and returned to the immoveable carcass of my truck to retrieve my Jansport and a ballcap before riding South. Fuck the dust and the desert and Happy’s and Texas A & M, I was headed for the sun and beaches and a Mexican beauty. The first several hundred miles of the ride were terrible with little regard shown for my well-being by the lifted trucks and semis blitzing by me like diesel filled, hypersonic jets being manned by engorged, pasty faced codfish in cowboy hats, spitting tobacco and cigarette butts into the slipstream with such accuracy as to land the warm spit or dying ember onto the front of my shirt. I considered that this journey might be an opportunity for reflection, but the intermittent moments of what seemed like introspection turned out to be the mediocrity of the quicksilver on the road ahead or the smell of raw meat and cow blood steaming out of the massive slaughterhouses looming gray in the distance atop the brown dirt fields, lit sparingly but brightly by piercing orange sodium halides. Despite the environment I pedaled onward, filled with an optimism I desperately clung to, mostly because without it I would have become another clod of earth on the side of the road waiting to be washed away or, if lucky, grown into a cactus. The trip took four weeks and was unremarkable. I expect I’d have more to say about it if it wasn’t for my bad attitude and my consistent sipping off the bottle of codeine stashed in my water-bottle holder. Regardless, I made it to Cancun and Triste on a Friday afternoon. After the proprietor of Triste, a strangely proportioned gringa from Sarasota named Tabitha, brought me another bottom-feeder margarita on-the-house, I asked if she might like a hand operating the small open kitchen.

The next day I was studying the tools of my new trade, a microwave, a crockpot, a fryer, and a flattop, when a subtle resentment started to build in my belly. Between the codeine withdrawal, the homemade cheese I’d eaten at a stand just north of town, and my precedingly latent anger that had been stewing for most of my life, I determined three objectives to achieve by the end of the month: try not to shit myself while cooking the popular beans and chipped beef quesadilla, hydrate, and become a pirate.

I hated being a cook and I was bad at it. Drunk gringos would come in tripping over the uneven bricks on the front stoop of the door, often breaking a flip flop, laughing, then complaining that I was a white dude from Texas making tacos. I would become so frustrated I’d scream over the chorus of sizzling. The customers would laugh and I would be miserable with a headache driving sweat out of my skin and into my eyes. As far as I could tell Cancun was just a sunnier version of Lubbock and the more pleasant climate meant that the drunks were out in the street versus holed-up in the back of a box truck. I could eat as much of the food as I pleased but after a week I realized I had to figure out an alternative as I was coming dangerously close to failing my first goal for the month. Eventually, I made do with tortillas and the couple pieces of fruit an old-timer with cataracts and a torn up sombrero would inevitably drop off his little push cart on his way to the beach. I made just enough to pay Tabitha an exorbitant amount for the punishment of sleeping on her porch couch constructed out of cinderblocks and blankets. I’d wake up in the morning to her hovering over me, topless, her tits tickling the tip of my nose and her cigarette ashing into my hair, cackling, and saying, “Time to get up, cowboy, the tourists ain’t gonna shit without our help!” And I’d be hungover, the gringo variety of cheap margarita, laden with sugar, splashing around in my gut and my forehead, making the morning walk to Triste a duty of painful endurance leaving me to question whether I’d improved things for myself or just simply adjusted my latitude and nothing else.

I worked seven days a week and dreams of a siesta went unfulfilled until my third week when Tabitha got so drunk the night before I woke up on my own accord and walked to the beach to get my first bath in a month. I felt cleansed and alert after a few minutes squating in the ocean with my head above the waves; albeit a little nervous due to my inability to swim and a previously unrealized terror of sharks. That’s when I saw the Coyote anchored not far off the shore, the name in white block letters across the bow stained with rust streaking down from the decrepit rail. A couple scraggly characters arrived at the rail and began dumping buckets of something over the side. I stood at the water’s edge and squinted out at the process before realizing it was old oil they were pouring overboard. I chuckled and watched as the handful of figures on deck started spraying what looked like dish detergent into the water. I understood two things immediately: on the television at a dive in Lubbock, I’d seen folks with rubber gloves dousing oil covered pelicans with Dawn dish soap and realized the crew was covering their tracks -And- I needed to be aboard a boat like the Coyote; I needed a place where I didn’t need to give a fuck.

The Coyote bobbed around off the beach for a few days, periodically firing up the engines to move away from the beach after dragging their anchor throughout the day. I could just see the beach down the alley from Tabitha’s porch and after my customary tit tickle alarm I would look down toward the boat trying to determine how to get aboard. One morning I saw a half deflated inflatable skiff headed to the beach. I threw off the raincoat I used as a blanket and ran down the alley, bouncing off the cobbles and walls until my legs caught up and I bounded down in time to meet two haggard looking degenerates walking away from the beached skiff. They both had half-smoked joints sitting in the corner of the mouth, stuck in place by resin until, lit up and puffed handlessly, they were dislodged and offered simultaneously to me by both men with no greeting or small talk. I pinched one joint in each hand and put one in either crease of my lips which seemed to please them as they tapped their temples with their stained fingers in approval. They started up toward a rickety tienda that sold tequila out of an old chicken coop the shifty owner had fashioned into a makeshift liquor locker. The two guys never said a word but paid the man and I followed them back to the boat, caught in the wafting cloud of weed smoke that puckered my nostrils with the spice of gasoline, all three of us carrying four bottles in either arm like proud padres. They pushed the boat into the waves and stood waist deep, holding the sides looking at me with no particular expression other than the very slight look of amusement that never seemed to shake out of their whiskers. “These are my people.” I thought and I pushed on the bow, leapt in, and we sputtered out to the Coyote in the primordial bubbling tar of a dirty carburetor.

I left Triste 23 years ago. Here we are, swaying atop the rainbow sheen of our anchorage off Trash Island, and when I clamber on top of Coyote’s wheelhouse in a wistful attempt to rise above the stink, I look aft at the expansive back deck and I start to hear the sizzle of beef and the deck looks just like the perpetually dirty flattop, covered in a slurry of coagulated greases and burnt bits of meat and beans. The flattop would never again become the stainless surface it had been its first fateful day on the line of Triste, and neither would the deck of the Coyote, but I believe there is something worth considering if a place exists so far in the past and seems so fleeting, yet keeps emerging in my daydreams to milk my minds teat of comparisons and perspective. I never shit myself while wearing the cook’s apron, I try to hydrate (though fresh water and electrolytes are not often readily available, we have an ample supply of expired Hi-C and cream soda we scored off a pallet slated to be left on Trash Island), and I am a pirate. I set goals and achieved them but as the years pass by on the Coyote, I more regularly become sick with nostalgia for the life where the hot smells only came from the grill and the the dumpster out back, versus the persistent, thick, putrid fog that hangs like cellophane from the pockmarked steel of the hull, the air, the landcrab we boil for dinner, the beach, the palm fronds, the seabird’s wings, the hillside, our hair, our hands, our fingernails. I am a pirate and, while the notion is romantic, I promise you the reality is less meaningful and more disturbed.