CHAPTER TWELVE
Andrea was awakened the next morning by the sharp, irregular pitching of the ship and the sound of someone slapping wet towels off their bedroom walls. She opened her eyes to find that there was a whole lot of strange junk in her bed and the walls had been replaced by a three-dimensional representation of the open ocean.
"Holy fuck! We're in a goddamned lifeboat! That son of a bitch has set us adrift! Sean! Wake up!"
Sean's head was resting on a rather unusual pillow-a case of pate foie gras with perigord truffles-and his right foot was dangling in an ash-can full of Mumm's Cordon Rouge on ice. Andrea shook him as she counted the land formations visible on the horizon and reached a total of zero. "That maniac has set us adrift in the diametrical center of noplace!"
It didn't take Sean long to confirm that Andrea had made a correct assessment of the situation. "Jesus Christ. I wouldn't have believed it. I don't believe it. I didn't believe it. I won't believe it. Shit!"
Andrea's guitar case and their luggage, including Sean's typewriter and all his manuscripts, lay in the bilge of the thirty foot craft, which was crowded with some of the oddest provisions ever to be provided anyone marooned at sea.
"Look at this shit," Sean snorted in disgust when they'd taken the inventory. "A dozen cases of champagne but no water. Tate jots gras, three kinds of caviar, smoked oysters, camembert cheese, herring in cream sauce, smoked anchovies, sardines, and fifty other kinds of appetizers. A goddamned tub of sour cream and onion dip. Radishes and celery and carrot-sticks. Triscuits and sesame crackers and melba toast, fritos… enough potato chips to stuff every teeny-bopper in Des Moines for ten years. But no real food. Five pounds of Columbian tops with pipes and papers. Acid and mescaline and every other drug known to freak-kind. But no first-aid kit."
He opened a chest marked "navigation aids." He pulled out a set of charts and a sextant and a compass. "Look at this." He came up with a gallon can of KY jelly. "There's a note on top. It says, Wise up and mellow out. Sex is the key to salvation. After you have fucked one hundred times you will be able to reach land safely. Have fun. Your friend, Johnny Popper.' That dirty son of a bitch!"
Sean wound up to throw the can overboard but Andrea grabbed his arm. "That's for me, stupid, not for you, and we can't afford to start throwing things overboard for giggles." She confiscated the can and opened it. "Jesus, he's dyed the KY green! That loony doesn't miss a trick. Now why don't you see if you can figure out where the hell we are and how we're supposed to go about getting somewhere else."
Three hours later it was plain-to Sean at least-that where they were was in trouble. There were painstakingly explicit directions with the sextant, and the charts were quite clear. They were sixty miles from Martinique and a slow current was carrying them straight out to sea. Ordinarily the lifeboat, equipped with sails and a powerful engine, would have carried them to Martinique in time for a late lunch, with leisure for a little sport fishing on the way. But although the rigging for the sails was there, the locker marked "sails" contained seven dirty red bandanas. And although there was enough gasoline in 50 gallon drums to get them to Mexico City, the engine was missing its spark plugs. To add insult to injury, the standard oars had been replaced by two plastic toy paddles-one red, the other yellow. There were other alterations, subtle and not so subtle, in the boat's emergency equipment. The short-wave radio had turned into a battery-operated record player. The library consisted of the Mickey Mouse Club song and Frank Sinatra's version of I'll Be Home for Christmas." The drawer marked "flares" held a cap gun and two dozen rolls of caps. The chest labeled "fishing equipment" was occupied by a bamboo pole fitted with ten feet of purple knitting yarn, a red and white bobber, and a hook not quite large enough to land a guppie.
"What the fuck are we going to do?" Sean asked in exasperation. "I mean, to all intents and purposes we've been murdered, right?"
"Let's fuck."
"What?"
Andrea spread some caviar on a cracker and popped it into her mouth. "Has your command of vernacular English forsaken you? I said, Let's fuck." She made a circle with two fingers and pushed another finger in and out of it
"Oh, I get it. You believe what the Guru wrote on top of that KY can-that after we've fucked a hundred times well reach land safely? Well as far as I know sexual intercourse has no influence at all on ocean currents, and I'm goddmaned if I'm going to fuck with you because the Guru tells me I should. It's probably some trick to keep us from figuring out anything that'll really help. Or maybe he thinks what he did will be okay if we die happy."
"Are you not going to fuck with me just because the Guru says you should? Listen, there's not a whole lot else for us to do out here."
"Fucking expends semen, which is very high in nutrients, which then have to be replaced… "
"Sounds like a high school biology teacher's reason why you shouldn't jerk off."
"But we don't have a lot of nutrients around to replace them with on this goddamned floating hors d'ouvres tray."
"I've got the solution to that."
"What?"
"I won't eat. You'll eat and I'll suck you off and swallow it. You'll fuck me without coming and I'll get off, and then I'll suck you off. Those nutrients you're so worried about won't be wasted. Great ecological breakthrough. Perfect recycling. May be the answer to the world's food problems."
"For Shitsake!" Sean laughed in spite of himself. Andrea was sampling the onion dip and rolling a bunch of joints.
"The way I figure it" she said, "Johnny Popper's just goofing on us. Trying to teach us some kind of lesson. If he'd wanted to do us in he could've tied a couple of those Cordon Rouge cases to our feet and dropped us overboard instead of putting them on ice and throwing them in a lifeboat with us." She lit up a joint, took a hit, and passed it to him.
Sean started to take a hit, suddenly became furious and threw the joint overboard. "I suppose you think we're bound to be spotted by a fishing boat or a plane or something? Well for your information we're not in anybody's fishing grounds, we're nowhere near commercial shipping or air lanes, and even if we were we'd have no way to attract anybody's attention. Except with this." He picked up the cap gun and fired three shots into the air. He looked all around the vacant horizon. "Where are they? Why aren't they coming? Do you think maybe they didn't hear that?"
Andrea lit another joint. "Throw these damned things overboard if you want to throw something. We've got these to burn." She handed it to him. He took a hit and obliged. "The way I figure it," she said, "the Guru's gonna come back and pick us up again after a little while. He's got to. I mean, John and Joanna and Joe Lee are on that boat, and they're going to start asking questions."
"Not for a while. After all, we did tell them not to wait up for us. The ship'll be docking in Martinique today and maybe Baloney can get away with telling them that we suddenly decided to go back to New York, had a plane to catch, and didn't get a chance to say goodbye."
"Hardly likely they'll believe it."
"Maybe he'll tell them we asked to borrow one of his lifeboats for a little cruise of our own."
They continued in this vein for some time, with Andrea rolling joints, lighting them, and passing them to Sean, who took one hit from each and threw them overboard. "We ought to be writing notes on these damned things," he said. Andrea sampled half a dozen kinds of hors d'ouvres. "Why don't you open bottle of champagne? These things are making me thirsty."
Sean pulled a bottle out of the ice. "There's no corkscrew, and these bottles aren't the kind you can open with your thumbs. He found a knife, chopped the cork up trying to pry it out, and finally extracted it with his teeth, nearly blowing his head off in the process. "And incidentally," he said, swaying a little bit under the influence of the marijuana as he passed the bottle to her, "even if the Guru wants to come back and pick us up, how the hell's he going to find us? The ocean's a big place, you know."