Yerba Buena

I watch the muddler plunge into the highball, and I can smell the lime as it releases its juices.  San Francisco was once known as Yerba Buena, I think, as I sit at a bar with the same name.  In San Francisco, the California Current keeps mermaids on the beaches.  Here, in San Juan, they haven’t wished for legs in years.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and the portentous hour approaches.  The bartender offers entrance for a cover of thirty-five dollars; I opt for an open air stool and saline on the wind.  Windy it is–although I can’t hear them above the house band belting out some ballad in Spanish, I know the palm fronds are frolicking above, and that the kicked-up waves are stomping back down with gusto.

San Juan, I say to myself aloud, and the eight mojitos of the past three hours grease the edges of the word.  It’s a melodic effect, and the singsong name oozes from my crooked mouth like slurred, unsteady notes from a drowning clarinet.  I repeat it.  San Juan, I say, and begin to laugh.

The redhead next to me is wearing a flimsy cotton tank top over a bikini.  I’ve been ignoring her for two hours, now, since she sat down with her boyfriend.  Just some snippets of conversation–staying at La Concha, she wants to sit on the beach all day tomorrow, he wants to go see the old Spanish forts because there’s no point in staying around their hotel room.  This last bit was followed by a brief period of intense conversation sublimated by the music, and then him leaving to "clear his head."  Clear his head.  Have another mojito. Ha.  And I laugh again.

She’s staring at me now, and I realize how it looks.  A man, alone on New Year’s Eve, laughing to himself.  I look her in the eye and repeat it–San Juan, with extra phlegm on the J–and begin to giggle.  She stands, removes her phone from her pocket, and leaves.  The bartender glances at the clock–11:53–and then says to me, Hey, man, I think maybe you’ve had enough.  I laugh a fourth time.  To have enough?  I pay my bill and head for the beach.
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The tide is out.  The polished moon hangs low on a swaying black rope from a towering black tree, and the firecrackers spit fleeting fireflies into the balmy night.  My sandals are in the bush, one hanging from a branch, kicked off haphazardly while I struggled to keep my compromised balance.

I sit heavily in the wet sand, and let the fiercer waves reach the crevices between my toes.  Someone lights a bottle rocket, and it whistles from the resort behind into the sea beyond.  My clothes smell like the sixth floor of the Comfort Inn San Juan, like fifteen years of smokers puffing away in Puerto Rican Purgatory, and I feel like I’m the fire.  The excuses of youth and the promises of the future have met, I know, and they did so in secret years ago.

It’s time to do, and not be done.  To create, and know that creation beforehand.  I kiss the sand beneath me, and thank god for solid ground.

Puerto Rico

New York:

England:

Moscow: