Lava Lamp Hand Grenades

A Story by Jody Rowe

The Indian Sea frothed onto the beach like a rabid animal, ripping those lazy tourists by the dreads into its tide and freeing them at the last second to swim hands over head for their lives back to the glossy barefoot-beaten sand. Being in the state we were, Jake and I pumped our fists ecstatically from the boardwalk for their cause. But what if they don’t make it? I asked in a shriek that turned whisper. Jake through his fruit shaped shades looked at me as if I had just pulled down his pants and revealed his true sex. I don’t know, he said, his jaw agape. We shared a fit a of giggles as a Turbaned man still saying “hello” over and over again tried so gallantly to usher us into his rickshaw.

The night before while the beam from the lighthouse endlessly swung over our heads as if baptising us we managed to court an old man into selling us hashish. Tips for travellers: while German surfers on holiday ought to know where to find drugs, they only want to talk about the mushrooms they ingested during an all night trance-off in Goa. All ended well though, and a particularly sacred Kovalom night came over us like a crystal sheet. Even the bowlegged street dogs trotting in the floodlights of the bars seemed enlightened and illuminated, as if on route on some cosmic mission.

Presently, Jake and I calmed down by drinking Fantas on lounge chairs. Two French girls in sundresses tiptoed along the receding surf and talked above the hiss and sigh, cigarettes ensnared in their fingers. It helped that I couldn’t understand their conversation. Whatever they said was incoherently sexy, pleasantly doomed to background noise.

Was it that the one on the right just caught my eye? I turned to Jake but his shades only gave the allusion of wakefulness. There it was again. An inaudible giggle even, or maybe my hopes alluded me. Either way, a confidence in me propped up my shoulders and pushed my gaze to her peeling shoulders. A strong desire to lay face down until skin cancer ran its course overcame me but I couldn’t move until they were out of sight. Then I managed only to stretch my lips and suckle on the Fanta straw.

“Jake.”

No movement, only, “yeah?”

“I’m going to shag a French girl tonight.”

“Hah, shag, that’s a funny word man.”

Though I was slightly distracted by how humorous indeed the word was, I felt compelled to move forward.
“Dude, this was the dream.”
“I know, sitting here stoned on the f*****g Indian Ocean.”
“No it was more than that, remember? To experience everything all at once, to get lost in ancient temples, to meditate on the ma Ganga, to explore Rikishesh...”
Jake raised a solitary hand, “to get stoned at the Indian Ocean.”
“....yes, and to shag French girls.”
A silence and then a wash of laughter that drew more eyes than we felt comfortable with.
“But seriously” I continued quieter “we’ve hit a rut, and I’m doing something about it.”

Jake turned to me for the first time. “A rut? And you’re going to shag a French girl to get us out of it?”

“Exactly.” I said and leaned back until the plastic strands of the lounge chair left red stripes on my shoulders.

...

The sun boiled in a ethereal mess over the green waters, a waning wink that I took as reassurance. And I needed a hell of a lot of it. My high had worn off but the desire for this girl had only increased. Where would she be tonight? How could I find her? Was she even French?
Sitting on the second floor of an open bar with a breeze raising the tiny hairs on my knuckles I found myself analyzing the lyrics to Barbie Girl. Jake was in the corner sifting through a dusty binder of CDs, attempting to dissuade the bartender from playing the Aqua song over and over again which had been happening for a good twenty minutes. Words like “plastic” stood out in sharp contrast with “imagination”, but the way Barbie said them both so sensuously created a space where they blurred together. It made me feel queasy. I pushed the garlic naan away from me and tried to focus on the French girl. I had named her Rose.
Rose and I met in the stunning cliche of moonlight. I had spotted her from the bar and immediately felt the propulsive shake of palpitations I had grown so used to on the trip. Jake, with a somewhat lazy metaphor, referred to them as “life-gasms”, intimating their importance almost hourly. Two weeks ago we spent the night on a beige houseboat in the backwaters of Kerala, drinking Kingfisher and waging war on prehistoric cockroaches. The moon curved in a phosphorescent glow and when we parked Jake pushed me with a euphoric thrust into the dank rice patties. Those spiritual quakes shot like lighting across my chest as we ran across the endless fields, clenching glistening beer bottles like lava lamp hand grenades.
“Life-gasm” maybe is an apt term after all.