Finding the American spirit on a Caribbean island

Welcome back from spring break, that special time when the college mind turns from thoughts… Welcome back from spring break, that special time when the college mind turns from thoughts of thermodynamics to the absorption of rum-shooters. Given a whole week free of the responsibility of getting up at noon, many of us shave our backs and hit the beach with the newest volume of Jewel poetry.

I’m no different, because my back is like a shag carpet and because Jewel is, like, the best. But I also had another mission this spring break: to find America. First, on a map. Then I wanted to find the spirit of America, wherever and whatever it may be.

That spirit is a bit indistinct lately, a mirage of heat waves rising over a long highway. It is limned in a newly streamlined Bill of Rights and a collective fear and loathing measured by colored-coded alerts, and in the fact that these things don’t matter. Maybe, I thought, America is best understood from the outside, like the dream holding meaning for only your court-appointed therapist or the third nipple obvious only in the mirror – a concept so great it could only be grasped with distance.

So I set out for the Bahamas, which some call the Birthplace of America, with 40 of my closest friends and enemies, seekers and sorority sisters, drunks and dreamers. We stopped in Florida, and I thought my search at an end when, at 2 a.m., I saw a limousine pull into Ye Olde Ice Cream Drive-Thru. Was this the American Dream: to be a hotshot insurance lawyer cavorting with supple, barely-legal nymphets in the wee hours of the morning? To say, “Who wants ice cream?” to a chorus of melodious giggles? Perhaps. But there was more. We pressed on.

Once in the Bahamas, my attorney developed an obsession with his theory of tourism as conquering force. He nurtured a great swelling pity for the servants of the American idle, but he was cured of this affliction after being bilked by a native taxi driver and left in the desert to survive on twigs and berries. He reverted to a belief in symbiosis, mutual parasitism – capitalism. After spotting the seventh KFC container beside the road, I had to agree. We got the beach and they got hot wings.

Then I beat up a dolphin. As part of the Ernest Hemingway cruise package, I went fist-to-fin with one of these pugilists of the deep. I don’t know if he let me win, but as I rose to the surface cradling a KO’d dolphin in my arms – my God, I’d never felt so alive. It was as though I’d kicked Nature herself to the curb.

For defeating Danny the Dolphin, I won a cardboard crown proclaiming me “King of the Beach” and a free T-shirt. The T-shirt was a clever play on the Budweiser brand, instead saying “Buttweiser: King of Rears” above several thong-clad women, viewed from the back. Vindication, I thought. They had recognized me as an American, understood my sophistication, my cleverness and my need for T-shirts only the Bahamas could provide. At three for $10, I bought two dozen, reading, “I partied my nuts off in the Bahamas.” See, there was a picture of two coconuts on it. I’ve got my Christmas shopping done – do you?

I felt like I’d conquered the island. The only thing to do was return to my shanty and sleep. Ha ha! No! It was time to get this party started! As a college student I work hard and puke harder – part A was accomplished. Now it was time to convince drunken girls to “lose” their pants in the name of freedom.

That didn’t go so well, but being slapped on your sunburned cheeks only hurts the first dozen times, until you go numb. But will any amount of rum or sparkling beads numb my broken heart? I don’t think so.

When I woke up in a puddle of my own sick, I was afraid I’d missed the story. I hadn’t found America, only chunks of something I didn’t remember eating. Was that the metaphor?

Then I realized I was covered by a towel. A towel with a screen-printed topless woman next to the words, “Bahamas: Sexy Dreams.” There it was, I thought, my talisman. I didn’t remember buying it, and maybe I didn’t. Maybe it just appeared, brought into existence by the search for meaning. It spoke of a people unsatisfied by regular towels, who improved them with – What else? – a pair of breasts and a place where dreams must always be sexy.

When I recounted my trip to my imaginary Canadian girlfriend, I could conclude only one thing: that America is all of these things. It’s trips to the ice cream stand via limousine, discarded fast food containers by the side of the road, wrestling a dolphin into submission and the freedom to have all these things. And erotic towels. Oh, erotic towels.

Jesse Hicks has extra clever T-shirts available. Place your bids at jhicks@pittnews.com.