Mark is constantly checking his maps, marking out roads and searching for new ones. Mark wanted to be the rugged jungle adventurer. Somewhere hidden in his childhood fantasies, he was a dashing rogue capable of banging any girl that walked past him, and capable of navigating his way out of a treacherous jungle with one hand on the wheel, and the other clutching his old pipe as he blew smoke rings out the range rover window.
“You just make me want to smoke. It looks so casual.” He pulled out an oiled leather bag of tobacco and a black pipe that looked well-traveled. “You should take up the pipe, being a writer and all, it might suit you.” He held it out in a manner that seemed perfect, curled comfortably into his hand, nestled as he packed it with a knot of tobacco. “A well packed pipe lasts about a half an hour. Plenty of time to write.”
“I tend to roll joints here.”
He smiled, “You’d be surprised how high you get off of good tobacco.”
Like most guys with heroic aspirations, he liked me because I reflected what he wanted to be, not who he actually was. If I held a mirror up and explained that he was a mid-thirties rich boy waste of space who fled the states because he was secretly afraid of commitment, and the only reason that he couldn’t escape the beach of the dead was that he was a lousy navigator and couldn’t read a map without GPS unit and a digital voice guiding, there is a good chance that he would avoid me entirely in the hotel lobby bar.
“You know, I don’t think I ever noticed this little dirt road before.” He tapped the map with the stem of his pipe. “Strange isn’t it? You can search for something, pour over the whole page time and time again, and then at some point, there it is, staring right up at you.”
“This calls for a beer.”
“I think you’re right.” He puffed at his pipe, scribbled a few notes on a small piece of crumpled paper, then checked the line with his ruler and scribbled a few more notes. I waved at Enrique. He ambled over.
“Dos de mescal, por favor,” Mark said. “Y dos mas cervezas, tambien.” He set two hundred pesos on the bar. I clutched at the coins in my pocket. “No no, don’t worry about it,” Mark said.
“I just gotta go to my room and get a few more bucks.”
“Really, allow me. You’ve been such a help.”
I shrugged.
Mark seemed to fill out more, take on some color. He lit a wooden match, puffed a few times, and leaned back in his chair. Most of the guys that I know smoking pipes are the sorts to sport a fedora hat, an ugly smoking jacket, and an outdated mustache. Mark, on the other hand, seemed entirely comfortable in board shorts, flip flops, and his old black pipe. It didn’t seem so postured as others with a pipe. He puffed a few times, squinted out at the ocean and watched a few waves roll in.
“Do you know what they call it when a bull elephant is in heat?”
“Nope.”
“They call it Must. As in, he must get laid.” He leaned forward in a confidential manner. “He’s charging around with this huge fucking hard-on, fighting with everybody just to stick his dick in anything.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got friends like that.”
He chuckled through his smoke. “Looks painful to me,” he said.
“Yeah, doesn’t sound so great.”
“But that’s nature. That’s exactly what keeps a species going, the must. They either get their rocks off trying to propagate the species, or else, in some cases, die trying.” He sat back and puffed a few more times, thinking on it. “Of course, humans aren’t like that. Most men just masturbate.”
I never thought masturbating might save my life. “Seems a decent alternative to dying trying to get my rocks off.”
He sat forward and pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “But it eliminates the must. Men who masturbate lose the instinctive need to get it on, and this makes them weak.” He sat back again.
“Right, like wasting your chi or something like that.”
“Oh, sure, in some eastern religions they relate jizz to life force. People call it chi, and they tell you that it’s dangerous to waste it, as if it’s days or weeks of life you’re blowing in a load, but this is just a metaphor. Masturbation doesn’t make you weak by wasting your life force. It makes you weak because you lose the desire to fight for what you want.”
“The fight or fuck philosophy.”
“Right,” he pointed the stem at me. “Exactly.” He puffed at his pipe. “I like that, ‘fight or fuck’. You do have a way with words.” He laughed and rolled the phrase around on his tongue again. “Fight or fuck.” He let it slip with a tendril of pipe smoke. “I think it must be fun to be a writer.”
“If you say so.”
Everybody sees writing as glamorous. Nobody ever sees the flipside. Wrong girl.
Andrew Tomacelli 