Apeman
In man's evolution he's created the city and the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off me clothes and living in the jungle
'Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in a coconut tree
Oh what a life of luxury
To be like an ape man
Apeman - – The Kinks
How can it be so hard to drown a governor?
So this dyke who swims like a friggin' mermaid, saves his ass -- his head cradled in the crook of her arm she paddles back through the crashing waves & pulls his wrinkled pale-white ass out of the water where a couple of the hippies drag him up under one of the palm trees & give him mouth-to-mouth & weirdest CPR she had ever seen -- one of them danced around Alex wildly shaking some sort of gourd/rattle & chanting some sort of mumbo-jumbo. Alex is periodically spewing water & making aquaous sounds like bad plumbing. Then this little white dog with an eye patch licked him on the face until he regained consciousness. They saved him. Damn! What are the odds? I thought they’d all be too stoned to even notice him. They looked too stoned. The shit they were smoking smelled potent! Christ Almighty.”
Anne picked this beach partly because it was a nude beach – in Hawaii that translated to: remote, down-some-spine-tingling-trail, no lifeguard, few beach-goers, & when she discovered there was no cell-phone service, that cinched it – perfect place to “lose” Alex. Somehow keep him lost until after the next election.
Besides that, the local beach-goers were a bunch of pot-heads, stoned out of their fucking gourds. Combine that with where they were: huge spine-crushing waves on a skinny hundred-fifty-yard-wide beach with a sharp serrated rock shoreline on each side. The beach was sort of a dinkie-assed landing strip – if you drift too far to the left or right, miss the beach on your return sea-voyage/swim then you’re shredded meat, beat merciless against the jagged lava rock until it's a toss-up if what’s left of you is marine or land-dweller in origin – rescuers all scratching their heads: “Could be human.”
“Dyke mermaids, stoned rescuers . . . “ She hadn’t realized she’d said it aloud until she heard:
“Kind of a tight knit community down here, in spite of what it looks like. Diverse but diverse in a tight knit way. ”
Anne glanced to her left, the direction of the comment. First thing she thought was that he could be some sort of card shark, grinning that brand of card-shark grin. The song: Can't You Hear Me Knockin? began playing in her head. She looked away from him for a second & the song faded, when she glanced back the song resumed. She wondered if she shook her head would it rattle?
In contrast, the guy looked like somehow through no effort on his own he'd outlived the dangerous . . . crowd he was part of. More contradictions: he looked extremely laid-back, almost to the point of drool, a middle-aged hippie maybe, kind of a Beach Kahuna. He sat in a beach chair with a laptop in his lap. Bemused expression, loop-t-loop grin, looking down toward Alex.
Things had settled down; Alex had obviously recovered & was down hanging out with his rescuers. Maybe they’ll get him smoking pot, he’ll overdose and . . . She wanted to ask this guy: You don't recognize your own governor?
***
To Roy Rodgers Alex looked like some sort of professor, professor of . . . something. Something Timothy Leary might be professor of – Mystical Magical Mysteries! or something. Handsome guy, white hair, like Leary, older than Roy Rodgers, but not that much, maybe five, six years. Actually, he looked almost exactly like the governor. No way. Even in Hawaii the governor couldn't come to a clothing-optional beach & sit around nude in a circle of pot-smoking hippies without serious, excuse me – drastic political consequences.
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