…And you said, "write something about beers and breakwater." Sure, I said with a laugh, not knowing what a breakwater was even though we were looking at one, sitting on one. I knew everything I needed to know about beer and nothing about the other. The other where we spent our late afternoons after working on that slave ship. Up in the early morning, officers and crew alike, to work in the sun, the oppressive sun, to chip paint (to chip the corrosion under the paint). Oh, the old bitch of a ship appropriately named the Motor Vessel Serenity. Anything and everything but serenity.

There we sat on the high wall looking down at the scattered rocks, dumped to protect the port, with a cooler full of beer. Ice cold Polar beer in eight ounce green bottles, the "national" beer of Venezuela. The sun was taking its sweet time to set over the airport, over to our left, and the sky was melting into night with crazy explosions of oranges, purples and pinks. I was uninterested, for once, in the darkening of the sky. I was thinking of the chicken place in the Dominican Republic (Rio Haina, not Puerta Plata) where we terrorized our taxista.

I swayed my shoulders to the salsa or rumba or meringue, I can never tell the difference, they all sound the same to me. The chicken was the best part; I'd never ordered a whole chicken before. I'll take one whole chicken, please. Poor, sleepy taxi driver that milked us for three meals plus his exorbitant fees. We'd forced him to endure us, but he deserved our jokes and our laughing, even if we were drunk. Our waiter, the black Santa named Holy, had befriended us also, though he still charged us full price for everything. "Where's my discount?" I prodded. Yo quiero mi descuento! The battle cry for the night.

Holy has said he liked sports, played baseball in college even. The glory days of youth vanquished by your comment that the only thing he played was Jacks. The real player, from the minor leagues, was the old cowboy preaching something or other about revolution. When he looked at me in his diatribe, I was startled. I am the white devil to them, I represent luxury and oppression. He was the devil though, with his face full of deep lines and his shit brown eyes protruding from underneath the brim of his hat. The hat he said he found in a dumpster somewhere in Houston, Texas. Everyone there has been to America, wants to go to America, or has family in America.

I told you the story about the guy that offered me two thousand dollars to help stow him away. Does this ship go to Nueva York? No, I told him, never, now please leave the gangway. I wasn't going to have the knowledge of an illegal alien on my conscience, knowing he was out there on my streets committing some crime, mishandling his falsely obtained welfare checks. America, my sweet, dear mother, you've too many mouths to feed as it is. If only our big brother hadn't made such a state of our home.

The story ends when you say that Zorba, regal and loyal Zorba, would make a good cabaret dancer for the old cowboy. Standing, his two front paws in the air, you imitate the jig he'd do if a dog were so inclined to learn it. I suggested you repeat "Mighty magical Milo sings serendipitous salsa songs" five times in a row. You wouldn't do it so I knew you couldn't do it. Who could after that many beers?

Promise showed up with the welders from the ship and wanted to take us to a discotheque. "Manila Bar," he said, "the girls I know." All that meant was that he received a commission. Promise the pilot who guided weary seamen to the arms of las putas. Promise the friend who was able to get his hands on anything you wanted or needed. I didn't want to leave, the night was too rich as it was and I didn't know what I'd do with the Christmas lights I bought. I wasn't going to loose the only touch of festivity that I could have in that dark cell of mine. We went though I didn't want to. I have such distaste for those places, those meat markets that turn young women into ladies of the night. I didn't want to leave because I'd also never seen a black Santa or a black cowboy before.

I saw the fat girl from Puerta Plata that didn't want me because she found out I was yet another slave on the ship. A whore judging me for working hard, I could never get over the ironical humor in that. I was relieved to have her turn her attention to one of the officers, it relieved me of trying to understand her pathetic English. I didn't even recognize her…what nine months of being a whore will do to a woman's appearance. She had aged five years. I told you how she rolled her eyes when she found out my number one duty was chipping rust. I told you in front of her so she'd feel humiliated after you told her what I'd be one day. No, really I didn't care if she were humiliated, I wanted her to see that it was base and vain. Vanity will get you nowhere. I always want people to learn from their faults.

The Greeks said I was jealous that night when she went with the second engineer, but I couldn't have cared less. I have a beautiful fiancée waiting dutifully for me at home, what need do I have of a whore? I made her a promise and I keep my promises. Of course, they don't understand this, not a one of them. To try and explain it is wasted breath, words lost in the air. The girls in the bars aren't much better at understanding this. The concept of commitment is lost to them, they are of the here and now and think only of what can be done to help them along. I believe in the eternal, the everlasting.

Puerta Plata, I'd almost forgotten how much trouble we had gotten in that trip. It was my first trip, my second port, I'd been on the ship maybe two weeks. We went to the carnival and watched their parade, danced in the streets with everyone else, drank cheap rum. Their parades, I thought, would not go over well in the States, not even in New Orleans. The scantily clad girls in coconut bras and string panties, tied up like slaves and white conquistadors mastering the whole show. Unbelievable. We were plastered by the time we got back to the ship, about twenty minutes before the ship was supposed to leave for our next port of call. After watching the live music on the stage, sitting on the grass of the old fort, we went with some of the other seamen we met with to a club. I remember the captain yelling and yelling, in Greek, in Spanish, and in the end, I lost half my pay that month. What did I know, I had just arrived.

We ended that night, that long night on our very last night in Dominicana, at yet another chicken place with six more people that we started with (the welders, the mess boys, two stevedores). I was convinced that the Dominicans only know how to cook chicken because it was all we ever ate. Chicken and yuca. What is yuca anyway?

Apparently, the Dominicans also knew how to pay off the crew so they could stow themselves away in a forgotten room. When we left, we left with twelve of them, twelve happy, black faces that thought they finally had a chance to go to the Promised Land. We found them as we were outside of the port so their happiness was short lived. Perhaps one hour of hope. The immigrant's hope of America, what is it now, I wonder? The old dream regurgitated where the streets are lined with gold, where good Lady Liberty smiles down upon you, where opportunity is around every corner? No, America no longer welcomes the huddled masses yearning to breathe the sacred air of liberty. She is cruel, hardened, disagreeable.

The captain said , "Oh my God (the "g" sounding like an extended "h"), we have such terrible luck. This is a terrible life." I could see the wear and distress in his face. He looked tired, more than I had ever seen him. I was jubilant despite that everyone else was either morose or comatose. When someone would spring another story of bad news (always referred to as bad luck), I could only smile. I smiled as though I had some secret knowledge of happiness, that no matter what went wrong, I could go on whistling Dixie and give a wholesome rebel yell every now and then. I was on my way home.

To amuse myself while we waited for the launch to pick up our stowaways who were begging not to be sent back, I began telling them lies about my motherland. Well, lies mixed with what I knew was the truth. The most heinous was that if they had indeed made it to the States, immigration had made it a custom to shoot illegals on sight if necessary. No, they opposed, not in America. Yes, I reiterated and then made up a story I claimed to have seen with my own eyes. One night along the Mexican border, Marines were patrolling for wetbacks trying to cross over in California. The Mexicans come in droves, I told them, so the Marines were needed to stop them. As my story went, I saw over two hundred Mexicans gunned down on the border, men, women, and children. The people in America had thought justice had been done and the Mexican government was happy to be rid of them so no one protested.

It wasn't enough, this lie, they wanted to know more. I furthered my illustration by explaining how racist my country was. To the gringos, you're just another nigger; to the blacks, you're just another foreign nigger. The latinos wouldn't like you any better because you speak Spanish. No, not at all, because in America, to them, you're just a nigger that speaks Spanish. "You see," I said to you, "America really is like this. It's full of hatred. We need somebody to hate, it's healthy, so we hate the new immigrants who are different because it is easy to hate people unlike yourself." You objected to this, but it is still a sad truth. You called me a racista but I countered by telling you that I was a realist. After all, one doesn't have to believe in a system to recognize it.

Off went the stowaways to be punished in their own country and off we went to the States to pick up corn. Bad luck all around…I ended up missing Thanksgiving by a day, by mere hours. Every time I'd hear the engine go out, I knew it meant a tighter schedule for my hopes and expectations. The first time I ever heard the engines blow was near Punta Salsipuedes in the Pacific. Fear coursed through me for a moment. We're stuck, we'll drift out here until we start dying and have to eat one another. Zorba will be the first to go. I don't want to eat my dog. But then the engine kicked back up and we were chugging along safe and sound. Well, as safe as you could be with seven patched holes in the sides and bottom of the ship in the middle of rough seas.

That was the then and there, in La Guiara, where you'd finish your beer and run off with the woman you found in the disco. The thirty year old with the fifteen-year-old daughter. You could never decide who was the better looking and I thought for sure your sick mind would eventually end up with the fifteen year old. I'd stay on, finish what was left of the beer, and make my way to one of the American hotels in Caribe so I could observe my compatriots from a barstool. There were no expatriates there, only businessmen and flight attendants. I am not like them, so comfortably American and uptight though all of them would claim to be otherwise.

I see myself as an expatriate when I am in other countries, when I am not subdued by the neurosis of commercialism. I am as tragically un-American as most Americans are tragically ultra-American. With their loud voices, the distinctly definable accents and mannerisms, the loud clothes, they identify themselves to the world. I cannot be like them, it is not possible, I am a citizen of the world. I immerse myself with locals and find my friends there. I don't come here to bond with my countrymen, or even to drink with them, I come because there is a sweet, old Swedish lady that owns a gift shop. I don't buy from her, she's much too expensive, but she's wonderful to talk to.

But I'm rambling like I always do. This was supposed to be about beers and breakwater and it's turned out to be about neither. Yet, who writes seriously about either? To me, it's a scene; it's a backdrop to life with a cold prop in my hand. Good times are made up of friends and conversation; it doesn't matter where you are.