We Swam In the Warm Ocean

We swam in the warm ocean. I lay on my back and floated like a well fed otter, soaking my skin and whiskers in the salty brine. I imagined what wild sea animals drifted beneath me. I wondered if I was being stalked by the shark; a great white preferably or a tiger: Man-eaters with rows and rows of smiling razors and a 2600pound-per-inch chomp through bone, leaping out of the water with half of me in their mouth; my corpuscles dissolving with salt – invisible pink in the vastness of water, intestines and marrow spilling out into the sunny afternoon for the krill and the shrimp to feast upon.

I let myself drift in the ocean, my face burn in the blistering heliosphere, my imagination run wild about my death, about the end of material me, all of my matter mere food for other matter, not thought but sustenance; heart, liver and head swallowed whole by the mighty carnivore, limbs falling useless to the sea floor for the crab and the cuttlefish, my testicles sheared and ripped, sliced through and exploded into the ocean, my semen swimming wildly in the ocean hoping for ovum but withering and drowning within seconds; millions of microscopic progeny evaporating in the primal soup. I stain the coral with my blood.

All they will find of me is a belt buckle and a steel button from my cut off Levis. I drift in the sea and let my mind wander, not once opening my eyes, which were red before the sun. I don’t care if I drift to Portugal or Guinea. I contemplate the octopus next, his slithering silk and inch along, a thousand sensitive suckers to feel the complexities with, each sucker equipped with chemosensors.

The cephalopod tastes what it touches; chameleon of the deep, along with the cuttlefish able to instantly change from one complex pattern to another, not only sensing and recognizing the weird combinations of his purple, brown and green environment, but mimicking the rocks and the sand and the textures with his skin, his electric shimmering epidermis. His entire body undulates and pulses like water. Patterns of blue and white lines ripple across his body, synapses firing and delicate receptors receiving, a symphony of deceit and camouflage wafting across his intricate skin.

The octopus slithers and hides, crawls into crevices, abandoned shells and bottles. The octopus is a delicacy, tender and sumptuous, hunted often and torn apart savagely by the predators of the sea, i.e. the bigger fish; limb by limb they are feasted upon until they have lost too much life force and die.

I open my eyes and turn over, observing my location. The water was clear and I kept my eyes open underwater. I could see but blurrily. Fish swam about me of all shapes and colors, schools of ten or twenty at a time, dark colored fish, silvery and blue, like the ocean itself. I changed positions again, getting my head above water, breaking the surface, and taking a much needed gulp of air. I was pretty far out, maybe a half mile. The people were quiet and looked like ants. I decided I should return to my back and do a gentle back-stroke towards the shore. I closed my eyes and gently kicked my feet, gently stroked my arms towards the land. I thought of the blue whale and wondered what it must be like to be the largest thing on the planet, a monolith, a goliath of the earth, without predator, feasting on plankton and krill cruising the oceans like the Earth was no more than a cage in a zoo, a park, circumnavigating the planet often.

I wondered about the sea turtle – two hundred years of life just cruising through the deep blue… Would that be more peaceful than boring? I hope so, maybe a smaller brain helps. I swam backwards towards the shore faster and faster. I seemed to build stamina as I went along. I began to hear the beach-combers and sunbathers, the Frisbee kids and the adult kites.

Eventually I could stand up. I then slowly waded out of the water, an exhausted Godzilla; too beat to destroy the town just now. I needed to rest my fire breathing rage. What a joy it was to be free. I gave myself the time to absorb the spirit of the ocean, the deep and the beach. I let the aquatic life seep into me.

I wrestled with the colossal squid and pried its enormous beak open with my bare hands, breaking apart the beast and enjoying a later feast of calamari, enough to feed the entire Polynesian village I now live on with my fourteen wives and sixty two children. I grill the shellfish, flash-caramelizing the skin, leaving it tender and never chewy. The nine hundred pounds of flesh takes all day to cook, but I am an expert chef and renowned on my island as a gourmand. I produce a lovely palm wine as well, a drink stronger than vodka and sweeter than rain. It takes the entire village to chop up the forty feet of sea monster, but we have plenty of sharp tools and work well in the sun, most of us dressed only in loin cloth, the women’s breasts exposed, brown nipples like doorbells exposed in the sunlight.

I waded out of the surf and located Pistol. He was asleep with a shirt over his face, and a shirt over his legs, to prevent himself from burning further. I joined him and continued my various beachfront fantasies.

Suddenly I am ordering raspberry daiquiris under a Cuban umbrella and writing in my journal, another best selling book about the seductive Havana scenery; the sooty pillars and macho statues of the Paseo de Prado, the poverty stricken princesses with their dark island skin and perfect builds, the boys as well, with their daring legs and able swim. I would lead a rebellion against the rebellion and demand to have my pornography published as high art and really cause a great sensation. My home country loves me but the Cubans are mixed about me. I am a great tourist attraction and also a tyrant, bearded now and with large belly, sucking down bottles of rum by the cartful and cigars the same I do my best to impregnate every beauty on the island. I am an artistic tyrant, a lunatic genius with more cock and balls than sense, but what passes for power these days?

It was a lucky break for me to be born and treated like I was on this planet so far. I had ample time to exercise my free wheels. I was nourished by god and tempted by the devil, recited every oath and believed in no dogma. I was allowed to exist freely in my tiny mind and wonderful style.

I played ballgames as a child in the field across the street from my grandparents. I scored touchdowns and hit homeruns. I made daring catches and won the game often by a powerful swing or a leaping snag. I was always the captain or for certain picked first. I was athletic and daring. When we raced our bicycles I always had to jump the highest over the mound of dirt we ramped off of. I broke many seats and pedals by coming down too hard and more than once came up bloody, but I never stopped jumping until I had the height I craved, which was the highest. In my neighborhood I was the youngest, and the one most anxious to leave town.

I stared at the water – the hot twinkling Atlantic Ocean calm and vast, bigger than anything on earth, except the Pacific Ocean, endless, a body would need a craft to cross it. I thought of Norse Explorers crossing it in the beginning of the Eleventh Century, sons and grandsons of outlaws, in renegade boats screaming across the waters to Newfoundland, one of the most aptly named provinces in the entire world. I thought of the Spaniards and the Italians in their glorious vessels well stocked with food and wine and fresh water, stacked to the gills. Experienced seamen worked the boats. A daring voyage like that, circumnavigating the globe in a time when the general notion is that the world is flat, requires real experts, men of the salt, men of the grind, who can go long hours and never actually break their backs. This is no time for slave work. It takes two to three slaves to do an experts job and the food cost on that is too expensive to make it across the dangerous waters. They would die of thirst with slaves. I wonder how well those seamen were paid.

I thought of the first boat builders, the wild adventurous nature that is deeply seeded in our DNA – how many men perished in the open waters, trying to see just how far out they can go? Row! Row! Row! What sort of ivy league crew could skim across the Atlantic and find new land? – I grew weary in my thoughts and finally just stared, just observed the evanescent waves baking the gossamer spray of rainbow light; the gentle waves crashing on top of each other, one after another, in rhythm, timed to the great pulse of the universe, the tug of the moon, the rotation of the earth, the bizarre puzzle of gravity. Countless bodies past my eyes, but my animal-lust was non-existent. I was exhausted from my swim and my mind was reeling in every direction at once. – I could do nothing but close my eyes and sleep in the waning solar heat.