Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The roadside motel we’d booked proudly proclaimed, on its front signage, that all rooms have “Color TV.” In the lobby, which had a 1970s gestalt and faint smell of secondhand cigarette smoke, it was cold as an icebox. A blasting central AC vent hummed loudly from the ceiling.
A leathery lady with a cragged face checked us in, and, annoyingly, we had to share a room. Fortunately, there was one with twin beds, otherwise we’d have done rock-paper-scissors for the couch, floor, or bathtub.
The hotel was surprisingly full. Not with other east coast refugees, either, but with Europeans.
More Europeans! Florida was full of them. This time, though, no Austrians or Italians. It was Dutch and Germans. (The travel company that booked the Dutch and Germans together on the same tour group might have chosen more wisely.
One Dutch Karen I mistook for a German flipped out on me at the breakfast buffet. Her face crimsoning, she was enraged I thought her to be German. That WW2 bad blood still hasn’t died down totally, I guess...) Though I was still “with” the Austrian, in a long-distance relationship, I wasn’t quite sure we’d ever see each other again, and I happened upon a few more European lovelies.
Was it wrong to chase after women if in a relationship, long-distance or not? Yes, sure, but with a potentially catastrophic hurricane a possibility to hit us, inching closer on the radar every news day, I wasn’t thinking much of tomorrow or of anyone on another continent who I might never see again. I was focused on the moment. Crappy of me, yes, but the swirling blob of death on the television was encroaching and disrupting my moral compass…
There were three of them, in that crew of European girls. Nasdaq and I met them at the breakfast buffet (and we fortunately didn’t mistake them for Dutch, though I’m not sure if they’d have been offended as the Dutch Karen.) One of them was a pretty brunette, with an hourglass figure, who looked a tad like a younger Shania Twain. Another was a model skinny blond, sporting a super cute, tight little ass, and the last was a gangly tall blond with a sharp face and big bird nose.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The brunette was the best looking of the three; she was nice, but shy, hard to pry from her shell.
The tall blond neither I nor Nasdaq had any interest in, but the shorter, skinny blond, with the ass, was hot, and outgoing, easy to talk with, though her English wasn’t too great (and at the time my German vocabulary didn’t exceed more than three words).
Like so many other occasions, I chased the wrong girl, and courted the more outgoing blond, leaving Nasdaq to try his luck with the brunette, with whom he’d taken a fancy.
Like I said, it was a crappy thing to do, and I guess I’m a bad guy for pursuing the blond, since I technically had a girlfriend, but I wasn’t convinced I’d see her again, although she’d been talking of coming back to spend Christmas with me.
With that storm approaching, we were receiving daily doses of fear and paranoia from the news. Every day, newscasters in suits and smug smirks would update us on the progression of the hurricane, throwing their arms up at the screen, bestowing the terrifying multi-colored mass, the swirling harbinger, the creeping blob of death on the radar.
The news would often then show looped video footage of hurricane destruction.
The storm being a most unwelcome houseguest, totaling Caribbean islands, causing biblical floods; the blustery beast raging, ripping roofs off buildings, and flinging cars in the air like an angry child throwing toys. Every day, we’d flip on our Color TV and, gasping and awing, we’d watch the storm, with its whirling winds of devastation, hurtling towards our Florida peninsula. The storm stalking us like a deranged serial killer.
And I’ll admit that, if these were my final days, I was seeking the company of a beautiful young woman.
The blond and I spent a lot of time together, walking on the beach, talking. But when I worked up the nerve to kiss her, us standing side by side on the beach, under a drizzly, windy, starless sky, as I went in, she turned her cheek, rejected my advance, and suddenly told me that she had a boyfriend and rushed off back to her room.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent That one hurt. Not only had I betrayed my long-distance girlfriend, I’d also gotten rejected trying. It was like a sword cutting me with both edges. A real punch in the gut. That sinking feeling of rejection spiked over me, and I felt like a walking pile of shit.
Alone, I ambled on the beach for a little while longer, trying to clear my head of my lamentable actions. But the rain picked up noticeably and the wind began to roar. Peering out at the dark waters of the nighttime sea, the swirling water black as ink, I saw the Gulf of Mexico’s waves cresting and crashing violently at an eroding shore, which appeared somehow both magnificent and raw.
Even though I’m agnostic, whenever something really scary transpires, I find myself praying to God. I don’t know why. Force of habit, maybe.
I was praying to God the storm didn’t lash us too badly. The storm surge from those waters wouldn’t be pretty. I didn’t trust that our cheap hotel would stand up to the force of those waves. And those images of that devastated town we’d passed by were flickering in my mind, making me feel queasy, but at least the greater scheme of death and destruction alleviated the guilt and dejection related to my girl problems.
I stomped through the wet, heavy sand, back to the room, squinting and pursing my lips because the howling wind was whipping sand at my face. The grains of sands were smacking at me so hard they felt like tiny shards of glass.
Trudging back through those nasty winds of the upcoming storm, I have to say I was still slightly disheartened by getting rejected so blatantly by the blond. We’d spent the day together, talked, gotten to know one another, had a romantic dinner, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she turns out to have a boyfriend?! I wish she’d mentioned it earlier. Maybe she just wanted a free meal? Maybe she didn’t like me enough to be physical with me? Maybe she was a virgin? Maybe she wanted a more casual, friendship thing? Who knows… Not that it matters much, in retrospect.
But I’ll admit that immediately after the blond darted off, after my failed smooch, I teared up. I didn’t shed any tears or break down crying. But I did feel barbs of sadness run through me, and my eyes did get watery. I don’t know why I reacted
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent like that, so strongly. I’d only just met her. Perhaps it’s because that was the first time a girl had flat out refused my try at kissing her. It was a sting to my psyche.
It may have also been that I projected the Austrian onto her. They were both young skinny pretty German-speaking European girls. Maybe it was like the blond was a substitute for my geographically distant girlfriend, and her walking away reignited my recent emotional pain...
I collected myself and walked it off, but, as I mentioned, I decided to retire for the night earlier than expected because of the deteriorating weather conditions. All I wanted then was a warm shower to wash the sand from my hair and face and to lie down and relax, drink a few beers.
Stepping back into the room, I pulled the door closed and mopped a shaky hand over my windswept face. Then I swung around and found Nasdaq seated by his lonesome, slumped in a chair, nursing a beer and watching the hurricane on the Color TV. Turns out Nasdaq had had no luck. He’d been hanging out much of the evening with the brunette and the bird nose and said he couldn’t separate them, attempt his Casanova ways with the brunette.
We drank a few beers, laughed it off, but both of us, inside, were disappointed, I think. And things only got worse when we saw on the news that the hurricane, which had appeared, in the “cone of probability,” to be more likely to hit Miami, had taken a sharp turn. It was now barreling straight towards us! Our attempt at escaping it, just like our Casanova attempts on the Germans, were futile. In vain.
We were sitting ducks. The storm was about to smack us directly. Not to mention our cheaply priced and cheaply built hotel was only about a block from the beach…