How Lux Cargo Met Kim

 

Bananas.

 

Bananas, you say? Yes, I could use one right about now, too.

 

That reminds me of back when I used the alias "Lux Cargo." How I miss those silvery days, tracing the circumference of the Ring of Fire in my yacht, The Lux Cargo Jr. (I named it after myself).  Most pleasurable were my excursions to Fiji and Tonga, where, if one drops anchor in the green-crystal shallows, beautiful women in skirts woven of kelp will wade out with fruit platters.  These women are uniformly tourists from the Midwest who pay good money to do this, and they are slathered in sunscreen, but dang they look fine in their shell necklaces.  They will place macaws on your head and give you pineapple slices soaked in rum. "You are welcome in our huts any time, Lux Cargo!" they would exclaim to me.

 

Fiji and Tonga are much pleasanter than the Aleutians, where the women paddle out in kayaks and offer you platters of sliced whale blubber. Some people really go for that, though.

 

Those were the best five years of my life, if you don't count any of the last ten. How would I ever forget my long conversations over games of go with the 110-year-old Okinawans? Losing money like mad betting on the kickboxing matches in Singapore's back alleys? Being brought to tears as whale calves gently nudged the hull of The Lux Cargo Jr. off the coast of Kamchatka?

 

I never saw those jagged rocks until it was too late. I was distracted by a macaw that was trying to land on my head. Have you seen those birds? Having one land on you is like being slugged by a fifty pound bag of Skittles. I don't blame the bird, though, as the weather conditions were deteriorating and The Lux Cargo Jr. was very inviting place to land, even after the Patagonions had rubbed off all the gold plating on the fixtures to use in their own blasphemous ceremonies.

 

I finally washed ashore, barely held afloat by three mostly empty Windex bottles, in the coastal banana swamps of Talara. After resting, I jiggered up a catamaran from coconuts and bananas (Peruvian bananas are friggin' huge!)  Unfortunately, the coconut banana catamaran was as unseaworthy was it was delicious. After I finished that off, I assembled a giant banana outrigger.

 

You wouldn't believe the looks and guffaws I got from the engineers of the locks on the Panama Canal, nor the hoots and hollers from those on the Mississippi River as I sailed home.  I can assure you, though, that there are Polaroid photos of me and my mega-banana outrigger tacked up in every deckhouse, tackle shop, and fluorescent-light-lit Army Corps of Engineers office between New Orleans and Memphis, where my craft was nibbled into oblivion by grass carp.

 

I hitched the rest of the way home with an awesomely hot trucker named Kim.  That's how we met.  After she dropped off her freight at Target, I took her to dinner.