Last August, me and some friends of mine decided that a lazy beach holiday would be the best way to clear our summer hazed-heads before heading back to study in September. As it turned out, I hadn’t considered that the Dominican Republic being a messy cocktail of black Caribbean and Hispanic culture would mean that the only thing the locals like to do more than down shots of local rum out of hooker’s cavities is to smoke wild weed and score coke on the beach. Bummer.
On the first night, we bumped into a couple guys in the lobby who were from Pennsylvania. Or Transylvania. IDK which, but they were Americans, not Romanian vampires. I hadn’t been informed that the hotel was all-inclusive, which isn’t normally ‘how we roll’ but being that we just wanted to chill out, I guess this was the done thing. I soon found out that what isn’t the done thing is to ask the bartender for a whole bottle of rum when he informs you that you don’t have to cross his palms with silver for ANYTHING on the bar except quick and personal service. But anyway, that’s what we did.
Things quickly escalated. By the end of the first bottle, we realised that we forgot to pack our good intentions and talk moved quickly from how these guys were secretly Jewish to the local dealers. Obviously, they were in the business of exploiting gullible white people, but if you made out like you knew what you were talking about they’d rip you off a little less horrendously. Apparently the guy to speak to was called ‘Peter Peter, Pumpkin Eater’ (which I think is a cruel name for anyone irrespective of race or profession), and he could get damn near anything ‘cos he was the boss of the whole strip of hotels backing onto the beach.
We were really excited to meet this Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater because, obviously, his name sent us into riotous fits of giggles after the Pennsylvanian Jews lit up a joint on the way to the local town, but apparently his opening hours were only when the sun was up because he ran his ‘candy shop’ through a cover business selling water sport experiences to tourists. We thought this was a really smart way to target a demographic, but it did mean that you had to find him first in the day as he couldn’t be seen on the hotels at night, and nobody gets his number.
We followed the American guys to town anyway, assuming they would know where the good clubs were ‘cos the short Israeli one was a successful DJ and the giant Ukrainian one looked like the techno viking. Instead, we had been inadvertently lured into a dingy red-lit hovel that bore a striking resemblance to the set of that scene in Hostel where the sketchy guy tells the gullible guys where the sketchy place is.
My friends were all immediately terrified by this place ‘cos they said it smelt faintly of desperation, which I thought was their imagination, but after they called a cab and ran a mile my new friends told me that the place was indeed a filthy brothel, and they made a sport of finding these horrible places because ‘that’s where you get the best hookers’. I waited in the hall while the Ukrainian mountain disappeared with a fatty (because, he told me, it was fat Friday, which I’m fairly positive isn’t a recognised Jewish holiday) and the DJ disappeared with a dainty girl who I hoped for the sake of his conscience was eighteen.
The bad vibes were coming thick and fast, and I was about to Jack-sparrow stagger off into the darkness with my bottle of rum when the little lithe hooker pushed the DJ out the door, buck naked, screaming in Spanish about a ‘grande monstruo’. Now I’ve never heard of a hooker turning down a big dick, nor have I heard of a well-endowed Jew, so I found this a little hard to believe. But I shit you not, this guy was the real son-of-Jacob deal, and there it was, the neatly circumcised ‘grande monstruo’ drooping between his short legs, sad-looking and rejected. After I stopped laughing, the techno Viking emerged with his pig to see this guy waiting in the lobby with me and all he had to say was ‘Really? Again?’
We left hastily before the girl’s pimp came to exact a macho mix of anti-Semitism and penis envy on the unfortunate DJ Hammer. We walked a dark and terrifying ‘shortcut’ that was parallel to the actual jungle, which made me think that the two had conspired with the local mosquito community to sell my blood in order fund their brothel-spotting shenanigans. Nevertheless, the night ended with more rum, night swimming and me spending 15 minutes trying to access my room with what was clearly labelled ‘towel card’.
