Island Gone Wild!

With the ever-notorious and often nefarious Put-in-Bay being featured so prominently in the local news of late, I thought it might be fun to post a section of my first novel SO SHELLY that features the village. In this chapter, the strikingly-innocent narrator (Keats) makes his first visit to P-I-B accompanied by the somewhat already world-weary Gordon Byron. Be forewarned, the language is a bit crass in an attempt to capture the often uncouth behavior of the people and bawdy atmosphere of the place.

“I had never visited the island, but the stories of the bacchanalian revelry that take place there during the boating season are legendary throughout the lower Great Lakes. (There are only two seasons on the islands: boating season and preparing for boating season.) South Bass is New Orleans at Mardi Gras, Spring Break on South Padre, Las Vegas, Sodom and Gomorrah, Caligula’s Rome, the sultry Greek Islands, and Dodge City in amalgam and in the form of two E-shaped docks and the three-block strip of bars in downtown Put-In-Bay. For Gordon, the happiest place on Earth . . . or so I supposed.

Me? I was scared shitless.

As I stood on the dock waiting for Gordon to stow away the Corsair, he reached into the captain’s bin again; this time, he pulled out his notorious human skull drinking cup, which I’d heard about but had never seen, and a handful of purple, gold, and green strands of cheap, plastic beads, which he threw to me.

“What are these for?” I asked.

“They don’t flash ‘em for free, Junior,” was his cryptic answer.

I soon discovered the beads’ function as we walked the docks, pushing our way through the filled-to-capacity public marina. Powerboats ranging from fourteen to fifty-plus feet (many of which bore the Byron Boats logo) were jammed inside the steel docks. They rafted off one another three and four deep as we neared land. Each boat was a floating frat house/strip club. The men outnumbered the ladies by at least three-to-one, but the women that were there seemed to be enjoying the odds and encouraging the attention. During our trek from where we tied off furthermost to the dock master’s small, wooden booth/office on shore, I saw my first set of boobs on a real topless woman – that is, the woman was real, not the boobs. I’d learned to discern the difference by the time I reached shore and depleted my supply of beads.

Gordon never slowed down or turned his head to look, even when a “girl-gone-wild,” craving his attention, called out to him: “Hey, Cutie. I’ll show you for free,” or “Take a look, Sugar,” or invited him to “party.” He couldn’t have been more disinterested.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, confused.

“They disgust me. I hate this place.”

But, we were in his element. Weren’t we?

“These people have no class, Keats. No style. They’re barbarians. The women are sluts.They pay ten grand on a credit card for a boob job; then, to get their money’s worth, they flash them in the face of any pecker head who’ll trade them a set of fucking fifty cent beads. It’s pathetic.” Gordon looked over my shoulder at the flotilla behind me. “And, these guys, what assholes,” he paused to absorb the beer-bellied, baseball-capped, board-shorted scene. These losers’ idea of seduction is slipping one of these already half-drunk whores a rufie, waiting for her to start feeling woozy, then offering, all gentlemanlike, to walk her back to her boat or her hotel or wherever, where she passes out and the ball-less piece-of-shit generates enough self-confidence to pull out his pencil dick and fuck the corpse. It’s sick. There’s no talent here.”

I think that that was what really bothered Gordon – it wasn’t the lack of morality but the lack of artistry. But by the time Gordon had finished his diatribe, I wanted to rush back to the docks and collect all the beads I had given away and throw a towel around each one of the bikini-topped women.”

Re-reading and posting that was fun and sad at the same time. Does it sound familiar to anyone? If interested, SO SHELLY is available in paperback and ereader formats.