by theenglish

“Well, what do you think it is?” I ask taking another toke of the thick, but poorly rolled joint.

“I can’t remember.”

“I’m telling you; it’s his dick.”

“No, it’s not. It is like an arrow or something. I read about it when I was a kid, but I’m fucked if I can remember now what the hell it’s supposed to be.”

“Look.” I move over to the left side of my recliner so Al can follow my finger more easily and point out the pattern of stars. “There is his bow, and his arms; down there are his legs, and that’s his belt. So, what’s that hanging down there? That, my friend, is a penis.”

“Maybe you’re right, or maybe you just need some serious help for your Freudian obsessions.” He grabs the joint from me, takes a long puff, and then examines it carefully. “Especially considering the way you rolled this thing.”

“Like you can do any better.”

I lay back on the recliner to enjoy the effects of the pot as it slows down time and amplifies the constant drumming of the waves. We had spent most of the evening drinking at a bar down the road. When we got back, we brought the plastic recliners from house, along with a cooler of beers, a pack of cigarettes, and the marijuana, down here to a small concrete patio on the beach to enjoy the sound of the surf.

A friend is letting us use his beach house for the weekend, to relive the years we had spent here in El Salvador together. Now that I’m married and living in Canada again, and Al has moved down to South America with a serious US State Department job our lives are much calmer than the raving, drunken, days of our twenties. Most of our expatriate friends have moved on and are living in other countries now, but we decided that this was still the place for an extended weekend.

Al had been in the region for most of the week travelling up through Guatemala City and Antigua by bus before returning to El Salvador. Last night, Wednesday, we spent in the capital, drinking at our old Ex-Pat club. The same bartender was still there, but he seemed much older and more fragile than before; it was a strain for him to read the receipts from the till. But he had been there forever and the bar was his life, so the current management felt that it was a decent thing to do to let him keep working there on slow nights.

Being Semana Santa, the week when most people go away on vacation, the place was pretty dead except for the new regulars who didn’t seem to think too much of us when we said we had been part of the old crowd. But we satisfied ourselves by reminiscing about old times and playing a few games of darts and snooker, neither of which we were very good at anymore. We stumbled out of the place around one in the morning staggering down the street as there was not a cab to be found.

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