(Originally Written February 14, 2009 in the Journal)
An excerpt from Habitaciones
After all the revelry and madness of Cabarete Joseph decided it was time to follow his self-imposed dictum and go to the Habitaciones con Banos. When he awoke at seven the next morning he felt like ripping his eardrums out to stop their pulsating rhythm that seemed to magnify the trob of pain in his head with each thud.
"It's too early for this" he said to himself. As he closed his eyes he imagined two miniature versions of himself on his shoulders. The one on the left, clad in red and clutching a pitchfork urged him to sleep while the one on the right, draped in a white bath robe urged him up. Joseph listened to neither of his mini-selfs but didn't feel like actually dealing with his subconscious turning his actual conundrum into a rehearsing of some Looney Toons medley. He got up out of bed, grabbed some hair of the dog and showered.
Normally drinking off a hangover usually struck a nerve in his conscious, but his conscious was so overloaded by his week of flesh that this minor offense slid through the cracks. After showering he headed to Dick's for breakfast. The very smell of food made him nauseous and intensified his headache. He grabbed a beer from the colmado next door instead and drained it with a thousand milligrams of aspirin.
A taxi drove him to Sosua. A bus drove him from Sosua to Puerta Plata - from Puerta Plata to Santiago - and finally from Santiago to La Vega. He was asleep when they arrived to La Vega and almost got stuck on the way to Santo Domingo. Luckily, a child no older than five fell down in the aisle next to his seat and screamed. The thumping resulted at a quickening pace as Joseph's eyes nearly exploded from opening so quickly at the disturbance.
It took a second for him to come to the realization that he was in La Vega. He collected his stuff and exited the cool bus into hot 0 though not Sosua hot - and stale air of the city. He hopped in a cab and headed for the habitaciones. The driver stared at him for a second to study Joseph's features. His eyes told Joseph that this was the first time a white tourist had ever asked to be taken there. How one gets that from somebody's eyes is unknown, but Joseph knew it intuitively.
Ten minutes later the driver dropped him off at the place. It seemed to Joseph it was even more rundown than he remembered. The lawn was wild, overrun by tall, thick grass. Joseph wondered if some large animal was lurking in there waiting for something or someone to invade its guarded territory.
Joseph carried his things to the door marked "oficina". Setting his things down to knock the door flung open at an alarming pace. A bare potbelly with other features greeted him. There were a lot of features that Joseph could have noticed about this man - his metallic gray hair sandwiching a shiny coffee tinted head or his exotically blue eyes or the fact that this Dominican man was as tall and broad as he'd ever seen a Dominican be, but his midsection, which protruded out over his belt in a semi-cockeyed fashion demanded Joseph's first glance.
All of this stunned Joseph and it took him longer than usual to change his English thought process into audible Spanish. Just as the words escaped his lips they stopped. The steely blue eyes of this forty-something or older or younger for that matter - Dominicans seem to age either spectacularly well or the opposite and Joseph simply could not mentally age them so he gave himself a 30 year margin of error. But the eyes struck Joseph as exceptionally odd.
"Yeah. My eyes are blue. My mother was half-German. What can I do for you?
Whenever Joseph was attempting to translate his English thoughts into Spanish words and someone spoke English to him the whole thought process in his head derailed. Joseph stammered back that he needed a room for a week.
The guy seem surprised. Like the first taxi driver he encountered the quarter German, fully Dominican (as Joseph learned from the man's drunken tirade the next night) was expecting Joseph was looking for something a bit more illicit. However, the man obliged Joseph with a room for 150 pesos for a week.
Joseph sat his bags down in disbelief inside the room. The dilapidated outside of the building hid a pleasant room with a clean, queen sized bed and a table and a fairly ornate wooden chair. The bathroom, despite lacking a showerhead, was more than acceptable. In his mind Joseph expected the place to house a wooden frame with no mattress, a hole in the ground to squat over and a host of cockroach roommates. Joseph was overcome with thoughts. Part of him was relieved and pleased with his surroundings while the other - and drastically smaller part, was disappointed that he was not disgusted by the room. That part of him was counting on squalor to be an inspiration for writing.
The Habitaciones aren't quite in La Vega, an overgrown town full of factories and motorcycle mechanics. It's on the way from La Vega to Jarabacoa, a more peaceful and scenic mountain village. The Habitaciones are in a town called Jagua Gorda. There's not much there, just the Habitaciones and a couple of colmados.
It was peaceful during the late afternoon and early evening. Joseph popped out of his room about 8:30 to get a little bottle of Brugal to help him sleep through then night as he didn't have a TV or radio for background noise. By the time he had got back to his room the ladies of the night had come out. He had to avoid them with all of his might as they were even more persistent than the beach patrolling cigar salesmen. One of them, a pretty girl, was standing by his door.
As he walked up he planned his escape in his head. On arriving he opened his mouth to speak but before a single word escaped his lips she greeted him with a smile and stepped aside. The smile nailed him to the earthy pathway he was walking on. He stared at her with a goofy, yet charmingly boyish smile. She laughed and told him to have a nice evening before walking away.
Joseph, now aware of his surroundings again continued to the door. It was an awkward few steps and his feet felt like cinderblocks and his legs moved as if they were composed of jello. Like any red-blooded man Joseph enjoyed a good looking woman, but he was always incapacitated by a good looking woman's smile.
[In a gua-gua again and headed back home. Impossible to write]
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