I’ve only just returned from the Virgin Islands, and this is the first time I’ve been able to sit down and write something since. The dates in my Filofax are mostly blank, generally being filled with little notes like “band practice?” Or “lunch by myself at mom’s house” or “drink alone. drink with Blake. ” Or “follow up call to girl from last night?” I can usually complete one or two of these things before I’m worn out, and have to pencil in “nap” right before I take a nap. I should probably go to the dentist soon.
I booked the most ridiculous flight down there because I was drunk on tour while doing it. I flew out of Orlando at 11:45 PM, which was cool, but didn’t realize when I got into Puerto Rico at 3 AM that I had a four hour layover before my next flight to St. Thomas. When I got in everything was closed, and I was the only soul not quickly shuffling to the exit. I figured since Puerto Rico was basically an American state that people would, for the most part, speak English. Wrong. I’m walking around asking if there’s a place to smoke, and people keep saying “Oh no, no habla Ingles.” Finally, I find one woman security guard who can kind of speak English, and find that the whole airport is non-smoking. She was totally wall-eyed so making any sort of eye contact was impossible. So, I walked outside and smoked two cigarettes before returning to the gate through the security checkpoint.
Luckily for me, there was one duty-free shop still open. I purchased a bottle of Jack Daniels and a liter of Diet Coke and preceded to mix half of the whiskey with most of the cola in my blue Nalgene bottle. Hallelujah! Sweet solace.
Apparently who ever runs the airport loves old video games because dotting the entire facility are little Namco arcade boxes. You know, the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga splits. There were also a couple Tekken 2 and X-Men the Arcade ones, but they were all turned off. Major bummer. I got five bucks in quarters and got further in Ms. Pac-Man then I ever have in my life. There I was, all alone in a strange place getting drunk, yelling and cheering myself on dodging ghosts, and attempting to then turn around and eat them. I coughed up all the quarters and topped out on level 9. After I blew all my money I had I found a bench seat in the corner near my gate to settle in and watch the third season of Mad Men. I got halfway through the third episode and about a third of the way through my drink before passing out around 5 AM.
I woke up, my face wet with drool, my laptop askew on my lap burning my left thigh, and still astonishingly drunk. I checked my phone, and had about fifteen minutes until boarding time. If I didn’t have my impeccable internal alarm clock I might have missed my flight. I choked down the rest of my whiskey and headed for my departure.
Since the flight was only a half hour and to an island the plane was nothing more than a two propeller Cessna. If you’ve never flown in one, they seat eight including the pilot and are smaller than an Excursion SUV. You feel every gust of wind, and, in my case, feel completely unsafe. Now, I am a consummate white-knuckle flyer so I was contended to be wrapped up in my warm state of inebriation. But the weather was nice and there wasn’t too much by the way of wind. The flight was populated entirely by men, and as I recall I kept trying to crack jokes about Puerto Rican girls. I was met with stone cold faces. In hindsight I probably smelled like a booze hound drowned in a distillery and was no doubt frightening the clientele, butI don’t think I could have done it any other way. As we ascended to 2,000 feet my thoughts went from “We can survive a crash from this height” to “Nope, ain’t no one getting out of this one.”
I got picked up by my two friends who are currently living down there, and hit the fucking beach.
If you’ve never been to Caribbean you’re not missing a whole lot. I mean, there’s beautiful beaches and all kinds of really sweet blended rum drinks to sample (the rum is for the most part dirt cheap), but because it’s a bunch of islands almost solely dedicated to tourism anywhere you go, save for the odd folk bar, which are mostly unfriendly, is incredibly expensive.
I was staying the duration of the week on St. Thomas. St. Thomas has been completely gutted and raped to accommodate the bustling tourism industry. There’s some scenic vistas for sure, but a lot of the landscape is cold industrialization and too many cars. Large cruise ships dock daily spilling out tourist after tourist who are mostly old, white, and totally clueless. They tuck their collared Polo shirts in to their pleated cargo shorts and pull their socks up over their knobby knees. The 35-40 year old versions stroll around in tank tops or sleeveless shirts emblazoned with things like “School of Pumping Iron” or “Something-something Gym” and cart around their bleached-blonde-boob-jobbed wives.
There’s two kinds of natives on the island that I identified as “folks” and “locals.” The “folks” are descendant of the original indigenous peoples of the island. They generally despise the tourists (for good reason. See above.), and most of the locals. The most popular form of employment for folks on St. Thomas is taxi driving. The taxi drivers on the islands are like the Mafia. They own everything, cops, and clubs included. They make so much money it’s obscene. In the Virgin Islands they don’t have to operate with meters and they don’t get taxed so they can charge whatever they please (usually $15 to $20 dollars a person occasionally with discounts applied to those who live on the island. There’s no “splitting a cab” here). There’s total deregulation, which is actually kind of cool actually. When they aren’t driving way too fast around blind mountain passes they stand around and mean mug everybody. I don’t want to completely pigeonhole them. Many of the folks I met were very helpful and friendly, but there’s a whole legion of them who are really, really racist. I can put it the way someone put it to me on the island.
“Here (meaning on St. Thomas), you are the nigger.” That’s a direct quote, so don’t go putting me on a cross. I’m pretty sure he lifted the line from American History X though.
The other type are “locals,” meaning insufferable Chad’s and Tina’s who get wasted on a couple of beers and have nothing interesting or intelligent to say other than “JAGER BOMB!” It’s important to understand that Jager Bombs are really, really important to the upper-middle white “working” class in the V.I.. You don’t joke about Jager. In fact, one of the bars we went to had several “variations” of Jager shots. These variations were just chaser shot glasses with a different kinds of soda (root beer, orange etc.) floated with Jager. It was pretty foul. These locals mostly work at the fancy tourist friendly joints. When you go out in St. Thomas it’s not dissimilar to going to college bars in a college town with big city prices, so it wasn’t that much different than going out back home except for the breezes and the view.
The two people I know living on St. Thomas don’t fit into either of these categories. I guess the island to be on is St. John where we spent the entirety of one day. Something like 70% of the island is a national park, and there’s less folk, less locals, and since cruise ships don’t directly dock there, way less tourists.
I don’t want to salt all over my time there. It was a really great experience and I mostly lounged on beaches and got drunk and soft all day. I snorkeled for the first time through a school of fish and swear one of them waved at me, and of course I freaked out because I thought they were going to swim up my trunks or bite me or something. I also came back looking bronzed as shit with a sunburn on my shoulders that was unbearable for the first few days. I suppose that’s what you get for passing out face down drunk on a beach without applying sunscreen. I also got some Cuban cigars, but that’s another story… Actually, the next story.
NEXT TIME ON TOTAL LETDOWN: “A Humorous Story That Would Have Been Unfortunate Had the Ending Been Different.”
