Chapter 31

The roadside motel we’d booked proudly proclaimed, on its front signage, that all rooms have “Color TV.” In the lobby, which had a 1970s gestalt and faint smell of secondhand cigarette smoke, it was cold as an icebox. A blasting central AC vent hummed loudly from the ceiling.

A leathery lady with a cragged face checked us in, and, annoyingly, we had to share a room. Fortunately, there was one with twin beds, otherwise we’d have done rock-paper-scissors for the couch, floor, or bathtub.

The hotel was surprisingly full. Not with other east coast refugees, either, but with Europeans.

More Europeans! Florida was full of them. This time, though, no Austrians or Italians. It was Dutch and Germans. (The travel company that booked the Dutch and Germans together on the same tour group might have chosen more wisely. One Dutch Karen I mistook for a German flipped out on me at the breakfast buffet. Her face crimsoning, she was enraged I thought her to be German. That WW2 bad blood still hasn’t died down totally, I guess... )

Though I was still “with” the Austrian, in a long-distance relationship, I wasn’t quite sure we’d ever see each other again, and I happened upon a few more European lovelies.

Was it wrong to chase after women if in a relationship, long-distance or not? Yes, sure, but with a potentially catastrophic hurricane a possibility to hit us, inching closer on the radar every news day, I wasn’t thinking much of tomorrow or of anyone on another continent who I might never see again. I was focused on the moment. Crappy of me, yes, but the swirling blob of death on the television was encroaching and disrupting my moral compass...

There were three of them, in that crew of European girls. Nasdaq and I met them at the breakfast buffet (and we fortunately didn’t mistake them for Dutch, though I’m not sure if they’d have been offended as the Dutch Karen.)

One of them was a pretty brunette, with an hourglass figure, who looked a tad like a younger Shania Twain. Another was a model skinny blond, sporting a super cute, tight little ass, and the last was a gangly tall blond with a sharp face and big bird nose.

The brunette was the best looking of the three; she was nice, but shy, hard to pry from her shell.

The tall blond neither I nor Nasdaq had any interest in, but the shorter, skinny blond, with the ass, was hot, and outgoing, easy to talk with, though her English wasn’t too great (and at the time my German vocabulary didn’t exceed more than three words).

Like so many other occasions, I chased the wrong girl, and courted the more outgoing blond, leaving Nasdaq to try his luck with the brunette, with whom he’d taken a fancy.

Like I said, it was a crappy thing to do, and I guess I’m a bad guy for pursuing the blond, since I technically had a girlfriend, but I wasn’t convinced I’d see her again, although she’d been talking of coming back to spend Christmas with me.

With that storm approaching, we were receiving daily doses of fear and paranoia from the news. Every day, newscasters in suits and smug smirks would update us on the progression of the hurricane, throwing their arms up at the screen, bestowing the terrifying multi-colored mass, the swirling harbinger, the creeping blob of death on the radar.

The news would often then show looped video footage of hurricane destruction. The storm being a most unwelcome houseguest, totaling Caribbean islands, causing biblical floods; the blustery beast raging, ripping roofs off buildings, and flinging cars in the air like an angry child throwing toys. Every day, we’d flip on our Color TV and, gasping and awing, we’d watch the storm, with its whirling winds of devastation, hurtling towards our Florida peninsula. The storm stalking us like a deranged serial killer.

And I’ll admit that, if these were my final days, I was seeking the company of a beautiful young woman.

The blond and I spent a lot of time together, walking on the beach, talking. But when I worked up the nerve to kiss her, us standing side by side on the beach, under a drizzly, windy, starless sky, as I went in, she turned her cheek, rejected my advance, and suddenly told me that she had a boyfriend and rushed off back to her room.