a sixty sixth story...'dafoe'

We were throwing white crystal salt balls into the turquoise sea off the Alfalfa peninsula.  These days it’s a seedy place; the arcane marble pontoon covered in mean looking gulls, mangy vultures, sometimes swarming flocks of white ocean bats you want to avoid – there are bird carcasses strewn everywhere.  We, in our navy blue suits, complete with golden trim, we were recruiting.  A pimp’s press gang.  Off the Alfalfa peninsula, the frigates, cruiser ships come in, drop anchor, and the sailor boys and girls strut up and down the varnished wooden decks: the boys flexing their vaselined muscles, the girls showing off their long, tan, shiny legs, pointy breasts, breasts that under their tight uniforms remind me somehow of small gun turrets.  I hurl another crystal salt ball down onto one of the decks below trying to catch the crew’s attention and at last a tall, fair skinned young sailor picks up.  I beckon to him.  Soon he climbs the gangway and is ready to sign on.   They’re always nervous at first.  My boss, Dafoe, wants ambidextrous new recruits – don’t ask me why – so he asks that they be able to sign their names with both hands, and in time, learn to forge his signature – with both hands.  My boss, Dafoe, has a movie home sunk into the marsh reeds around the bay.  Like something Corbusier would have designed, like the Villa Savoye, all open plan, fluid lines, free standing walls.  But Dafoe prefers to keep himself to himself these days.  In truth he’s become a shell of a man.  And he’s prone to darker and darker moods.  When these come you better ensure you have the Chinese servant Jom drop all the blinds, in case the Jap tourists with their cameras and prying gook eyes should see in.  He’ll then call on me to gather his harem, and I will do: the American, who’s been on a virtual pleasure cruise for five years (hasn’t removed her red sequined headphones, star glasses for as long as I can recall), and a couple of Jap girls, tourists Dafoe bagged, kidnapped when he found them snooping around his botanic aqua garden.  The Jap girls are his sex slaves, and go about their business albeit reluctantly.  Dafoe is a shell of man since his op.  Where his penis used to be there’s just a hole, uses sterilised corks shaped into dildos for contraception, and also penetration – he has one of his Jap girls bring them from a nitrous oxide refrigerator .  Dafoe, his moods, he can scare the life out of me – his features become hard and set, his face becomes a skull mask, his irises turn black and his voice drops to a low death rattle.  Of late he’s taken to trimming the skin on his eyelids with a pair of surgical scissors since he thinks his eyes will become hoods, and he blind should he not.  He’s crazy, and his moods – sex (or his version thereof) is the only release from their terrible stranglehold.  And this is when the Jap girls have to go about their business.  When they begin, I tend to take my leave if at all possible, out the back door, through the botanic aqua garden, out of the marsh reeds and back toward the relative normality of the old port town.