Nowhere Man 27
The dance floor lothario
The police questioned Ricardo for an hour before the nurse insisted that he needed rest. I didn’t get to speak to him until the following morning. Steve had gone off on his own to speak with several brokers, looking to find one willing to take on a quick sale of the yacht.
Ricardo, with intravenous drips spiraling to bedside monitors, looked pale but was sitting propped up with pillows. The last thing I was expecting was for him to tell me he didn’t want to go home to Spain. He began his explanation as I swung a chair closer to his bed.
“My family live in Sax, the Alicante region of Spain. Mama and Papa are both in their seventies,” Ricardo said. “They moved away from Alicante when I left home. In Sax, they have a nice home. Five bedrooms, a swimming pool, and acres of land with olive and fruit trees, peaches, plums, pears, also nut trees, pistachios, walnuts, hazelnut, and almonds,” he said.
“Sounds idyllic, Ricardo.”
“You’d think so, and honestly, it is a beautiful area. That said, it wasn’t a choice to move from Alicante. My family felt forced to move after I got into trouble with the police. It is not a safe place for me to return,” he said, his voice weakening. “I was twenty-three years old and had nothing left after my family sought to give me every advantage. I knew I had to get away, begin again somewhere outside Spain.”
“I don’t understand, Ricardo. Not safe?”
“I got mixed up with gang members. It had to do with drugs. I was hiding dozens of boxes of illegal medicines in Papa’s workshop behind a workbench. He hadn’t used the place in years. Illegal medicines are big business in Alicante, this was selling illicit drugs against erectile dysfunction,” he explained.
I must have snickered. Ricardo reacted. “Laugh away,” he said, “ but the revenue was 3 million euros a month.”
That got my attention. “Jesus, Ricardo. That’s not good. I feel your predicament. But, look, I can’t leave you here,” I said. “What the hell happened out there anyway, that someone would stab you?”
He shrugged embarrassingly. “I went into a ‘sexy’ dance club and got talking to a dancer. She was friendly, we had drinks…and…”
I felt I knew what was coming next. “Don’t tell me. Your self-control was blown away on the Philippine winds, right?”
“I didn’t think she was that sort. She and a couple of her friends came over. One started coming on to me. She was not at all pretty. Chunky, in fact, wobbling on a pair of heels, and, you know, well, skin like peanut butter. But then another swooped in with wide smiles, Spanish. She kissed my cheek, having pushed the chunky girl away. This girl was pretty enough to stop any man in his tracks, skip. Even so, hardly the kind you’d think would have me jumped?”
“Well, you won’t open that jar again,” I said.
“Seriously, skip, she was lovely. I thought to myself she could’ve been a model. They all spoke Spanish and fanned themselves gracefully in the heat. I ordered drinks, and we danced. On the dance floor, she hitched up her skirt, not all the way, but seductively, in a very Spanish way.”
Steve, Ricardo, and I had arrived in Manilla during a week-long festival of drinking parties and fireworks. We witnessed the celebrations on our first night in Manilla before Steve and I headed out of the restaurant back to our hotel rooms around 10:30 pm.
Ricardo continued. “I returned her smiles on the dance floor, grinning like Quasimodo in comparison, and managed to stay engaged with her on the dance floor. I felt quite proud of myself for that. The party soon moved to the street, tables moved to make a new dance floor. An hour into the revelry, I saw her cross over the road. She hadn’t given me her name. I asked her friends where she was going, no-one seemed to know. I wanted to bound after her and catch her arm. In a strange mix of awkwardness and misplaced pride, I followed her,” he said, his mind remembering every moment of the evening. “Mama and Papa really did raise me better, skip. Sometimes men are just dumb,” he said resigned to his folly.
“What happened after you followed her, do you remember?”
Ricardo asked me to rearrange his pillows. He had come through a difficult surgery. “Yes, I remember very well,” he went on. “When I caught up, she was talking to a lanky Filipino. The guy looked smart, tailored, wearing sunglasses. It was after midnight, the parties were really getting going. All the office-type girls were heading home. She pushed away from him, telling him to leave, that she had everything under control. He did what she asked and left.”
Ricardo took a drink of water. His throat still tender from having tubes inserted.
“The thing is, skip, she still seemed winnable and that’s all I needed. I had come down with a hazardous crush on the woman. I hoped to find out more about her on the dance floor, a horribly misguided move on my part. I was going for it, for her, and followed her back to the club. I hit the dance floor like a seal skating on ice, aiming for it to look like Dirty Dancing but failed miserably. Still, I wiggled and waggled in what I felt was an irresistible dance. Turns out it was very much resistible. After another dance or two, she left the dance floor. Later, I noticed her hanging out close to another woman. They were kissing. I mean really kissing. I thought I was seeing things, drunk, imagining, but I wasn’t. She was face-sucking another woman.”
“She was a gay woman?” I ventured.
“Maybe. Perhaps she is attracted to both sexes. So, I thought, okay, if she did happen to be a lesbian that is why she had rebuffed my advances. It hadn’t been my cringe dance moves or painful pick-up line. So I felt, in some way, better about failing to have her find me attractive.”
I smiled inwardly. “I’m sure that was difficult for you, Ricardo,” I said. “You need to pretend to yourself that you’re not that attractive to some women. It will save you a lot of disappointment later. So what happened after that?”
Ricardo found an acknowledging smile in his discomfort. “Ah, well, this is where it gets a little embarrassing. After a couple more drinks, I left the dance club with the chunky girl. You know, with the peanut butter skin. We stopped in an ally for a bit of fun, nothing serious. That was when the heat of the knife carved into me. I felt it go in all the way, a white heat, and when she withdrew it, my blood spat out into the ally. My legs gave way and I slumped to the ground. I felt her hands searching me. The lights went out about then.”
Manilla is not a place you want to examine too closely. Its reality will mar any idealized image one might have.
“Holy crap, so it was the woman who stabbed you? The police know this, right? She shouldn’t be difficult to find the way you described her to me,” I said.
We were interrupted by a nurse. “I need to take his vitals, please. It will take only ten minutes; you can return then.”
I left Ricardo telling him I would return the following day. I could tell he was visibly tiring. I didn’t feel responsible for Ricardo. I liked him. He was young, foolish, brave, full of exuberance. Right now, he was vulnerable. I wasn’t going to leave Ricardo the way I had left Suzie.
That evening in the restaurant I retold Ricardo’s story to Steve.
“So what are you going to do? It seems like he cannot go back to Spain. Do you think he’ll return to Hong Kong?” He asked.
Steve had spent the afternoon talking to yacht brokers. On the table was a contract for the sale of the yacht. I was going to lose a bundle of money for a quick sale. I don’t know why I thought Ricardo was an idiot. That title that fell nicely on my shoulders for sure.
“He cannot go back to Hong Kong in his condition, Steve. But I do have an idea.”
Whenever I tell Steve I have an idea, his eyes widen. “Oh no, really? I can’t wait for this. What is it?”
“Greenpeace,” I said, rotating my wine glass on the white table cloth.
“What do you mean, Greenpeace?” He said. Steve had sweated and labored all day to find a quick solution to my problem.
“Ricardo is a good yachtsman, he has a lot of seaman skills. He’s young, strong, I think he’d do well in Greenpeace. What do you think?”
Steve picked up on my wording. “I’d say his lack of semen skills brought him a bag of trouble,” he answered, wittily. Then became serious. “Have you suggested this to him?” He asked.
“Funny, haha,” I mused sarcastically. “No, I thought maybe you could do that. I think we both know he’s a good guy, Steve. Misguided, maybe,” I noted.
Steve placed both palms on the table and leaned in a little. “Don’t you think one misguided friend is enough, Greg?” He said, a wry smile crossing his lips. Then he sat back. “I have a question for you,” he said, changing the subject, collecting up the paperwork into his shirt pocket. “Did you call, Jenny?”
Jenny. I knew immediately I wasn’t going to open up to Steve about the American woman I’d been introduced to in London. Still, I had wondered several times whether Jenny could appreciate me in the way that I would appreciate her. In only a few hours together in London, and a chat over the phone. I felt respected by her words. She was honest. I felt her trust quality. She is a good human being, or my instincts have gone astray. I liked her tremendously, I knew that, but that wasn’t for Steve to know anything about. I had a sincere interest in wondering if I have a quality that she could get close to and believe in.
I picked up the menu. “I did not,” I said.
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