The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  “Hot mother today, huh?”

  Dex wasn’t swaying after all; he was trembling. He wadded another piece of paper and fed it into the flames as if he were performing an ancient sacrifice.

  “What you got there?” Richard prodded.

  “Illusion,” Dex said.

  * * *

  All his long career as a musician he had been hoarding these inspirations, trapping them down on paper or recording them on tape, scrawling words on his own arms, on receipts, cocktail napkins, paper towels in grubby nightclub bathrooms. Once he even used a Sharpie on a groupie’s back, a single phrase down her spine, and took her to his hotel to copy it down in his spiral notebook because there was no agony like losing these whiffs of magic (he’d gladly write them in his own blood if he had to). He lived under the constant worry that the source that gave so freely might turn capricious. It was like being the worst kind of junkie—the kind no one wanted to cure. Maybe—he was going slow here—just maybe he would decide to never write another song again. It was conceivable. Could he be happy just being a regular guy? Maybe he would stay on this island, away from the temptations of civilization. Was he strong enough to give it all up? Nah, he could never give it up. He loved the music too much. Or did he?

  In a daze, he looked over at Richard, who had saved his life. This last week he had hardly talked to the guy, although Wende and he had grown thick as thieves. But now that they were alone together, Dex realized he missed being around his band, around other dudes. Loren wasn’t the hanging-around type, and Cooked was always busy.

  “Compadre!” Dex leaned over and hugged him.

  “You okay?” Richard squeaked, the strength of Dex’s vise-hug emptying the air out of his lungs.

  With his thin, ropy arms and legs, his dyed-black hair sticking up at all angles, the black-and-blue bruiselike effect of his tattoos, Dex didn’t look healthy in daylight.

  “I’m glad you were here for this.”

  “Me, too. That a new song you’re singing?”

  Dex shook his head. “A chant from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo.”

  They both watched the last ball of paper crumble up and turn black.

  “You feel like playing some volleyball?” Richard asked.

  “Sounds good.” Dex stood up and dusted off sand. “I’ll herbalista us up some smoke.”

  “Okay,” Richard said.

  “That’s my man! Let’s doade.”

  * * *

  When Dex started playing in the early ’80s, it had been fun. He played lead guitar and performed vocals at every dive in LA, joined any band that would have him, traveled around the country broke and high, and loved every single swarmy last minute of it. He was already a seasoned journeyman musician when Prospero came together in Robby’s garage. The band members found themselves with a hit single nine months later and then came the record contract. It had never let up since.

  All the attendant ills of the business hadn’t really affected Dex because he’d already been around long enough to be inured to them. His refuge was the music, playing it, writing it, recording it. The perks of the lifestyle were … interesting. It was crazy to land in a town and a few hours later have prime women willing to bed you. That very availability, combined with the boredom of the road, made short-term relationships easy. Women used him for their bucket lists. Did a rock star: check. Long-term relationships, on the other hand, were next to impossible, which didn’t prevent him from marrying a few of these women—among them Robby’s sister, a compound disaster when Robby then caught Dex cheating on her while on the road. A few of the wives thought they could outsmart the business by touring with the band, but the relentlessness of touring and the endless supply of those bucket-list women eventually wore them down. Dex survived because he was nurtured by the music. Each time onstage energized him. Until recently.

  The band was like family. Dex’s closest relationships were with its members, but over the years strains began to show. Usually it was a band member’s perception that he wasn’t getting his due. He would talk of going on his own. Girlfriends fed the fire; wives threw gasoline on it. The music went from being a pure thing to just a way of paying bills. That was getting more difficult, too. Robby, an accounting major before he dropped out of USC to join the band, had gone over the books and found that they were earning less on each album, less on each tour.

  “Maybe we’ve peaked,” he said. “Ten years ago. And no one told us.”

  Dex was, as usual, so buried in writing songs for their current album he hardly registered Robby’s concern. “We’re still earning fine.”

  “Don’t you notice at concerts, they always want us to play ‘best of’?”

  “It’s just a natural cycle.”

  “Yeah, downward. We’re jumping the shark.”

  But what if that was part of the cycle of progression? Dex now wondered. You couldn’t stay at the top of the mountain forever—newer, younger bands were constantly coming up. Maybe one had to resign oneself to the fact that eventually everything—countries, governments, houses, lovers, bands—begins a long, inevitable slide toward obsolescence, which made it no less lovable to those who had been along for the ride. Otherwise, why did Aerosmith still tour?

  Even though the groupies were still fine backstage and at the hotels (notwithstanding that he himself didn’t partake as regularly as he used to—he needed sleep, had to finish a song, or just wanted to veg out and watch the play-offs), when he looked out at the first row or two at concerts (all you could see with the glaring lights), he was confronted by a sea of middle age. Thickening waists, guys with gray hair or none at all. The women were still beauties, but they weren’t hot teenagers anymore: they were the mothers of those teenagers. Maybe some of those very teenagers had been conceived while listening to Prospero songs. The circularity made Dex dizzy. He then had the mortifying thought that those middle-aged people in the audience were his age—or, rather, he was their age, and if they had aged gracefully, if they looked fulfilled and happy grooving out there in the audience to music they remembered from their youth, then wasn’t Dex the one who was age-inappropriate? He was still living like a teenager, albeit a rich, indulged one. What was age-appropriate for a rock star, anyway? The rock ’n’ roll persona was a uniform; one conformed by nonconformance. There were exceptions, but they proved the rule. Blues guys—Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley—didn’t have this problem. Perfectly acceptable to be a fat old grandfather and still able to get down with the blues. Dex’s nightmare was to watch those commercials late at night where they featured the “Best of a Decade” music—a whole parade of one-hit wonders, a slew of “Whatever happened to…?” Would there come a day when Prospero took its place on a Best of the ’80s or ’90s with the others? Their only salvation might be that, by then, downloading and pirating would have made those commercials obsolete.

  Dex had a secret fantasy of changing his name, disguising himself, and going to play blues anonymously. It was one thing to be old; it was another to be a has-been.

  Fact was, as much as the fans purported to love you, they didn’t forgive you for being mortal. They looked at Dex like, “What happened to you?” As if he were to blame for time’s ravages. Did they look in their own mirrors? But they had a point. Rock ’n’ roll was about youth forever, and so, too, should be its players.

  * * *

  Dex stood inside his darkened fare, scrambling in his suitcase for the stash of pakalolo that he had scored off Cooked. His swim trunks were sandy, so he pulled them off, to put on a clean pair of shorts. As he hopped around, trying to get his leg through, he bumped into a chair, and his foot, jammed inside the shorts, got stuck. Down he went in a great heap on the ground. Lying there he caught a glimpse of his sad self in the mirror and gave himself THE LOOK. This was his regular method of self-examination, used before each and every concert to ground himself, and now he was severely questioning what he had just done by burning the song. He
knew he was a little bit of an egomaniac—it came with the job—but what he had just done was plain-and-simple stupid.

  Outside, Richard gave a delicate cough. “You okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better if I tried.”

  It came down to this: live with the music, including the pain of the business that surrounded it and enabled it, or give it all up. He had enough money if he was careful. This stunt out on the sand had been an offering in that direction. He had felt freer and happier than in a long time, until the last piece of paper became ash, and then the void yawned open. What had he done? Throwing back a gift like it was a spoiled fish? What if the universe now revenged itself on him? Reneged? Withheld? Went constipated? Glued its knees together like a pissed-off old girlfriend?

  “Dex?” Richard called.

  Dex opened the door and walked out on the lanai. Richard sat on the stairs, gazing out at the water, wondering what his escaped wife was up to in town. When he turned and saw all of Dex, he went pale. Why was he wearing no clothes? His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  “I think I’ve just messed up bad,” Dex wailed.

  * * *

  Wende kind of felt bad for Dex, but not enough to not do what she was planning with Cooked. Dex had been alive for a lot longer than she had. In the decade before she was even born and while she was growing up, how many women had he been with? How many would come after her? As far as she was concerned, she was owed a day off. Her loyalty toward him consisted of keeping the details of their relationship private, publicly allowing him to appear as the stud, but it did not extend to her remaining a muse, a.k.a. nursemaid, to his moodiness, insecurity, overdrinking, and overindulging in drugs, most notably weed, and underperforming in bed due to all of the above. Let Richard babysit for a few hours.

  The sole benefit of the island was that there was no one else he was likely to try to sleep with—although Ann was hot, she definitely would not go for him—but Wende didn’t care about that anymore. Let him find someone else. Guys like him needed inexperienced, naïve girls like her former self who didn’t know enough to make demands, who were dazzled by all the flash. For a while. And then needed to be replaced.

  It was good walking down the street with someone her own age, someone not famous, someone Polynesian. Would this technically qualify as going native? They held hands and ate ice-cream cones and giggled. Tourists gave them dirty looks.

  Cooked had been eyeing her for the last two months, but only since the almost-drowning incident yesterday had that interest ignited her curiosity. Dex was so caught up in his creativity/destruction music crisis he didn’t notice the balance had shifted on the boat—granted he had been unconscious for part of the time. Playing his song the night before, he didn’t see that Wende paid no attention and instead beat out a rhythm of lust on Cooked’s drums. Dex should have heeded the fact that back in their fare for the night, she had shaved and depilated and made herself satiny ready, and then turned her back on him for a full night’s rest.

  Cooked went into the town’s single grocery store, owned by friends, and borrowed a Vespa. Wende climbed on back, winding her arms around his muscled stomach. Ten minutes later, they were at his family’s village. Where the first town existed to cater to tourists and European tour workers, hotel staff, etc., this place was strictly local. Along the beach, piles of trash smoldered in the sun and were pushed back and forth in the waves. Empty cans, diapers, broken junk. When they walked through the trees, Wende’s eyes grew large at the sight of neatly planted rows of marijuana as tall as she was. It reminded her of Christmas tree farms in Idaho. A handmade sign read, WELCOME TO PARADISE.

  “That’s our best cash crop. Spending money,” Cooked said.

  He introduced her to about twenty women from his immediate clan who were working on various projects around the compound. His mother kissed her on the cheek, greeting her in French, which Wende did not speak. Then Cooked led her to his bedroom and closed the door. He dropped his shorts.

  “They all know we’re in here!”

  “It’s okay. It’s cool, lady.”

  “Wende.”

  “Windy.”

  “With an ‘e.’”

  Cooked’s English-language skills were not advanced so she tried not to be critical. His single bed had dirty sheets; the room was a pigsty. He was basically a twenty-something teenager like herself. He also wasn’t terribly romantic. They smoked a joint, and he got down to business. Apparently, kissing wasn’t big in their culture, but he was young and indefatigable.

  Afterward, bed-rumpled, glowing, they came out into the kitchen, and two dozen adults and children smiled and giggled at the lovebirds. Within minutes she was a member of the family.

  Wende didn’t want to be so creepy, imperialistic, or colonialistic as to ask Cooked if this was an everyday occurrence—bringing home a popa’a tourist for a little afternoon nookie. She wasn’t going to turn mushy—was she special? No, the whole clan seemed genuine in their kindness and in their lack of surprise.

  Cooked’s mother opened up some cans of Punu Pu’atoro and fried the corned beef up with onions, then served it with roasted breadfruit, coconut bread, and po’e, baked papaya in banana leaves. Afterward, Cooked led her back to his bedroom, where they started all over again.

  Wiped out, Wende fell asleep squashed against the wall and woke up when the late-afternoon sun glared through the window. “Hey, we need to go! Poor Ann.”

  Cooked grunted and tongued her knee.

  It was when Wende was reaching under his desk for her shorts that she saw the pictures of the babies with horrendous birth defects, some of an unidentifiable jellyfish-like appearance.

  “What is this—?”

  “I must confess to you,” Cooked said solemnly. “I am a revolutionary.”

  Wende had not traveled enough to understand the faked, tabula rasa quality of the resort compared with real island life. Her whole life was tabula rasa, and she was dying to experience the authentic. Traveling made her feel like an anthropologist. Wherever she went, she tried to picture living there. What would her life look like in Cooked’s village? It was certainly poor, dirty, and chaotic, but it was alive in ways that the resort could never be.

  Cooked had grown up hearing the adults talk about injustice. His own father had been lured from their village to Papeete with the promise of high pay in construction work on military and government buildings. The whole family moved with him, leaving their large hut that they’d built themselves on family land, to live in a subsidized apartment in a bad part of town. For the first time in their lives, they did not know their neighbors.

  Cooked remembered how ashamed he was when he saw his mom and dad smiling, scraping, and humbling themselves in front of the French. Only in the privacy of their apartment could they pretend to talk back. There they boasted; they preened. So it was natural when Cooked became a teenager that he’d admired the gangs that formed, that took power through fear. They had renamed him from his birth name, Vane, to Cooked, legacy of a long campaign of oppression. But Cooked didn’t want to terrorize his own neighborhood. He admired the activists that were fighting the outsiders.

  “My parents were servants. I’m a servant. Will my children and their children be servants also?” He told Wende about the dual ravages of economic inequality and the aftereffects of decades of nuclear testing on his family. His brother Teina was on his way to becoming a minor thug. “Instead I want to lead a revolution.”

  Wende’s eyes were wide open. This was, bar none, the best date she had ever been on.

  “We’re wage slaves. We protest, wave signs, and are ignored. I want to wake them up. I want them to start paying attention.”

  His sense of purpose excited her more than his lovemaking, and as he told her his plans, all she could think was Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes.

  The truth was Wende had been attracted physically to Cooked but had found him boring until this moment. Suddenly he transformed before her eyes from a Polynesian Justin Bieber t
o a Polynesian Che Guevara. She pulled him back down on the bed one last time. Revolutionaries could be sexy! She’d had no idea.

  * * *

  She said good-bye to Cooked’s bedridden aunt, Etini, who had leukemia. Although there was government health care, it was hard to access. The island had only a primitive clinic with basic services. Staying in Papeete was expensive and lonely. Being sent to France for advanced therapy was unthinkable. Etini was too ill to work. A class-action lawsuit for the poisoning had been stalled in the courts for years as the victims died off. How did the resort and tourists look from Etini’s window? All of it made Wende even angrier with her current stupid, frivolous life. Sacrilegious thought: Did the world really need another pop song?

  As little as Cooked’s family had, comparatively, they seemed more content than the resort’s guests. Or was that a Gauguinesque projection, wishful thinking by dissatisfied, exploiting colonists? The clichéd dream of the happy native? She’d given gladly when Cooked asked to borrow some cash before they left. In full view of everyone he gave all five twenties to his mama with a kiss. Wasn’t that kind of sharing, giving to those in need, what it was all about? Maybe her mother’s commune idyll had rubbed off on her?

  Wende hummed “Road to Nowhere” (her favorite song from the retro ’80s music scene that she obviously liked—for example, her crush on Prospero—but which drove Dex crazy), and buried her face in Cooked’s warm shoulder on the ride back to town.

  * * *

  If Richard had told his friends back home that he was hanging out with Dex Cooper, he would have been envied, but the reality was something else.

  Dex brought out a supersize spliff, which they smoked down to a nub; they started in on alcohol next.

  “Maybe we should get some exercise?” Richard asked, realizing he sounded way too goody-two-shoes.

  They proceeded to lazily lob the volleyball back and forth in the saunalike temperature. Titi came out and watched them, grinning, estimating they’d suffer from heatstroke within minutes, and went back inside. Soon they were stretched out under a palm.