I’d never really been anywhere on vacation until then. Sure, I’d been to Sudbury, and I’d been on that ball trip to Detroit (Windsor, actually) and Toronto, but I’d been to Sudbury and Toronto before, so that was like retracing my steps. Negril was uncharted territory. And I was going it alone. Did I enjoy it? You be the judge.
I basked in the sunshine. I drank Red Cap and Tequila Sunshine. I met people, most notably a couple guys from Michigan (one a gravedigger, the other a nuclear power plant engineer), and a couple girls from Sacramento, California, one who professed to have fallen in love with me by week’s end. It’s easy to fall in “love” while on vacation, I imagine, and I’m all for love at first sight, but I have my doubts whether Becky ever really saw the real me, rather seeing what she’d projected onto me. I was flattered, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. Infatuation and lust were far more likely than love. She even went so far as to ask me to move to California, which surprised me. Tolerating one another in the real world would prove more challenging were I to have chased down that temptation, considering how little we knew one another in so short a time. Hedonism could never be a proper testing ground for what might be.
To begin at the beginning, I met those four on the first night while we were being inducted with 100 proof rum drinks that could ignite nose hairs. There were games played, Simon says for one, and others like dancing and freezing in place when the music stopped, sort of like musical chairs, but in this case, if you moved when you were supposed to be frozen (no easy feat when saturated with rum), you were eliminated. I was eliminated. Other games were far more Hedonistic. All males were to face the walls in a circle, the girls to critique our buns. The girls were instructed to test us in any way they saw fit. Before I knew it, I was all but disrobed, a succession of hands kneading me front and back. Oh, you’ve never heard of Hedonism? Neither had I. That fun and games night was a surprising introduction. All I can say is that, drenched in rum, I stood it in stride. Did I win? No. I was a little surprised to make the top five, though. I think Becky might have had something to do with that.
Once I dried out, I was adamant that I’d try scuba diving. I enrolled in their one-day course, a far more inclusive one than others I’d heard tales of, and was fitted for gear. It was serviceable, but it had seen some wear. The days were grey, both to train and to dive. But even so, once I hit the water and learned how to glide effortlessly, seemingly weightless, embraced by the sea, shrouded by fish, I was hooked. I also required medical attention. Nothing serious: softened wax impacted my ear drum while diving, leaving me deaf on my right. My equilibrium was lost. I could barely walk, so Becky was thrilled when I asked her to guide me. She stayed close, she fetched my drinks. What can I say? I luxuriated in the largesse while it lasted. It ended all too soon. The resort doctor flushed both my ears for good measure and I was right as rain again.
The week with Becky passed quickly. We marvelled at the audacity of the Turtles, a swingers club sharing our time on the resort, a little surprised when another couple succumbed to the temptation of the open air and the stars in the late-night hot tub mere feet from us. We took in the sunset each evening, took catamaran cruises to sunset cafes, browsed craft markets where she tried and failed to teach me to haggle, we went on bike rides. I forgot my SPF and paid the price. I burned a little. A nurse, she revelled in the opportunity to care for me, applying aloe and SPF and clucking at my foolishness. She shared my cigarettes, and stole more than a few of my lit ones, giggling at the sideways glances I gave her when she did.
I’ve no doubt she saw something in me that moved her, but California was a long way off, and at the time, Sacramento seemed a desperate gamble. What would I do there? I looked into it, but abandoned the idea when I realized that Sacramento was a government town with mining well buried in its past. I was too pragmatic to travel a road where a person was the only destination.
When she’d gone, I was a little out of sorts. My constant companion had left a void in her wake. Then the Michigan guys left the very next day and I found myself alone. I brushed up against other people, but it wasn’t quite the same. None clicked as well as those first four had, she foremost.
But it was also exactly the same. I discovered that there was a weekly cycle. Mondays had the same dance troupe, Tuesdays the same jugglers, Wednesdays the same trapeze artists, and so on. I grew bored. I drank too much. Drifted. And before long, I was done and wanted to go home.
It was as eventful as any resort vacation might be, maybe more so. I had nothing to compare it to at the time, and little to compare it to afterwards.
I went on only one other resort vacation after that, one that would transform
me far more than this one had.
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