I wonder who first came up with the idea of a bar on the beach. Probably someone who got busted for drinking on a public beach. I don’t know why wearing a bikini makes rum taste better but it does. It just does. If you get drunk enough you don’t even care that there’s sand in your crack. Which there is. There just is.
Beach bars come in three types in Madripoor as far as I’ve been able to gather so far. You have your tourist joints on the west side by the bridge. You have places that are similar but are for locals further down, and then you have your spots in lowtown that probably started out as normal bars and then erosion made them a bar on the beach. Which gives me hope that this entire stinking island will wash away some day. No offense.
The place I was at today was sort of in-between the first two. It’s hard to say because there weren’t many people there. Possibly because it was ten in the morning. It was halfway decked out like a Hawaiian place but the bartender was Aussie. I regaled him with tales of my encounters with his countryman in the red power armor suit but he didn’t think it was funny at all. I thought Australians were supposed to be boisterous and fun-loving. Alvin Purple lied to me.
Since the bartender wasn’t interested in my hilarious and well-told anecdotes, I turned my back on him and watched the ocean while I drank, a time honored tradition. Watching the waves roll in can be calming if you don’t look at the dirty foam at the beach were all the garbage is washing up. Crushing a dozen glasses of ranch water is pretty calming too. They call it something different of course and it’s made with lemongrass instead of lime juice, but I know ranch water when I taste it. It’s a light bubbly version of the classic margarita without being as sweet. I’m sweet enough as is.
I was mildly hypnotized by the rhythm of the water as I watched a floating lump and wondered what it was. A dead walrus? A crate of hot pants that fell off a freighter? A bunch of dead bodies tied together by the testicles? They do that here you know. Another reason I’m glad I don’t have testicles. I don’t even see how you could walk with those things clanging around.
I was distracted enough thinking about testicle-walking that it didn’t really register right away when the mound grew a long neck out of it – I saw it but I didn’t see it you know? When the little head at the end of the long neck turned towards me and I saw eyeballs is when I really took notice. I’m not ashamed to admit that I jumped out of my chair and maybe screamed a little. I grabbed one of the few other patrons.
“Holy shit, are you seeing this?!” He plucked his shirt out of my grasp finickyily. Is that a word? He did it with finickiness. “Do you see that man? Can you understand me? Do you speak French?!”
He squinted out at the water “Elasmosaurus.”
I grabbed at him again unconsciously “What? What does that mean?”
He nodded at the water “That’s what that is, elasmosaurus, it’s a kind of plesiosaurus.”
I won’t lie, my jaw dropped “What? Like dinosaurs?!”
“Uh, I think they’re aquatic reptiles rather than dinosaurs but I’ve never been clear on what the difference is. Something about the hip bones? I don’t know, I’m no dinosaur biologist.”
“You mean archeologist?”
He shook his head “No, that would be for fossils, that’s a living thing there. So biologist I think is right. Yeah.”
I gestured so wildly I spilled some of my drink and had to slurp it off my hand “It’s the Loch Ness Monster! Why are you not freaking out?!” I looked around at the few people there “Why is everyone not freaking out!?”
He flicked some droplets of tequila off his shirt “They’re rare, but you see them in his part of the bay sometimes. They don’t come close to shore so it’s safe.” He smiled faintly “It is pretty cool when you think about it I suppose.”
I spun around looking for someone else who was going nuts “I don’t . . . I can’t . . . why . . .” I flung one arm towards the water “What the fuck?! Dinosaurs went extinct billions of years ago right? What is going on?”
“They still around in the Savage Lands.”
I finally managed to sit back down and watched the long-necked beast paddling around in the water “I’m going to assume you don’t mean the gay bar in downtown Chicago.”
“In Antarctica there’s a lost world with dinosaurs, they call it the Savage Lands.”
I gawked at him “How would you know that?”
He crossed his arms smugly “I went there once. I worked on a ship that went to the Savage Lands. A rich man in Sao Paulo hired us to go there and bring him back a deinonychus. Try to bring him back a deinonychus anyhow. The thing got sick and died on the way back.”
“So you’re telling me that you went to a secret dinosaur world in Antarctica and captured a dinosaur?”
He seemed irritated “I didn’t say that I captured it myself, I was just working on a ship that went there and I saw it.”
I slammed my hand down on the bar, although not very hard since I have the strength of twenty strong men and I didn’t want to smash it to bits “Bullshit! I can accept a lot of crazy shit that goes on here but there is not a dinosaur land in the fucking South Pole! It makes no sense! If there was, everyone would know about it! Everyone!”
He shrugged and turned back to the bar “You asked, I told you.”
In a world where crazy stuff is commonplace, it’s always interesting to find the things that still freak people out.