Posted 4/6/2009

DEATH IN THE CABANA

I am naked, lying on the floor of my poolside cabana. I have been here a week and no one has discovered me. I mean, no one other than a cockroach.

The landscaping firm was here yesterday, trimming trees and cutting the grass. One of the workers was cutting the grass not 15 feet away from my glass door. I jumped up and down so hard the towel around my waist came off. There I was, a panicky 265 pounds of whitish blubber bounding up and down, frantically waving my arms. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but the fellow just stared down at the mower and the grass and kept moving.

That's what we get from hiring Mexicans. They work too hard and never goof off on the job. If we still hired good American workers, the guy would have stopped working to light up a cigarette. He would have taken a deep puff, exhaled and looked around. It is a smoker's ritual. He undoubtedly would have seen me. And I wouldn't still be in here.

How could I forget that the cabana locked from the outside and can't be opened from the inside?

How could my wife forget that I was still in the shower and lock the cabana as she left?

At first I thought she would remember and come down to unlock the sliding door. But as the hours of the first day slipped away, a fear began to grip me. What if she hadn't forgotten I was in the shower? What if she had deliberately locked me in?

Fortunately the cabana has a bathroom with shower, wash basin and toilet. So I won't die of thirst like some poor fool out in the desert. But there's no refrigerator and therefore no food. I'm drinking lots of water and going to the bathroom a lot. I keep thinking how proud of me my urologist would be. The death I face is clearly not going to come at the hand of kidney stones.

I wish I'd have brought my cell phone, but I've been using this cabana for 20 years and have never called anyone from here in all that time. We normally come to the cabana, undress, get into our swimsuits, swim laps for a half hour, return to the cabana, shower, dress and leave for breakfast. I've never been locked in before. Actually, I've never even heard of anyone being locked his cabana before.

. . . . .

It is the eleventh day of my captivity and it is now clear to me that my wife intended to lock me in. It was a deliberate act. And all because of that silly argument we had that morning about the Bible. The Book of Genesis, to be precise.

She'd been going on about a lot of women's equal rights stuff and I was getting tired of hearing it all the time. So I laid into her, advancing an argument about the innate inferiority of women. An inferiority that is clearly based upon the Holy Scriptures.

I said, "Woman is clearly inferior to man. Just look at the Bible. Take Genesis, the story about the Garden of Eden. God put man into the Garden, then cast about to find man a helper. Did he think of a woman? No. He first brought to Adam the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field. I think he even brought in snakes and insects. It was only after Adam rejected these as a helper that God thought of woman.

"So he created one out of Adam's rib. But the point is, God placed a higher value on the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky than he did on woman. Even the snake was a higher priority. And in some nations, that feeling still persists. In India, the farmer rates his ox more highly than his wife. Even those Hindus understand the ways of the world. Man is superior. Period. End of story."

Well, she didn't say anything, but her lips were so pursed they made a straight line. We went to the pool, her not saying a word. As usual, she took her shower first and left the cabana first. When I had finished and dressed, I tried to open the sliding door, but it held fast. Locked from the outside.

. . . . .

It is two weeks now and my flesh is beginning to hang grotesquely as the fat disappears from my body. But I am not as hungry as I was the first week. I read somewhere that the body shuts down its calorie-burning machinery in these kinds of circumstances.

The Mexican lawn guy has been here a second time. But he didn't even respond to my pounding on the glass. Actually, the Mexicans are all deaf since they use leaf blowers and power tools every day, but never seem to wear noise suppressors. Or maybe the whites that own the landscaping companies refuse to issue them.

I thought of breaking the glass, but then remembered that all glass has been converted to the "impact resistant" variety. The legislators don't want coconuts blowing through windows during hurricane season. The glass is strong enough to resist a coconut flying 40 miles an hour. I don't even have a coconut, let alone the strength to throw it fast enough.

. . . . .

This is the seventeenth day of my imprisonment and I am resigned to dying. I have decided that I will be discovered sooner or later. If it's later, I want to present a decent looking corpse. So I put on my best swimming trunks and terrycloth top. I solemnly and carefully arrange myself on the floor, face up. I try to fix a pleasant smile on my face.

Just as I close my eyes, the sliding door rattles open.

I blink and look up.

It is the bug man, come to spray for cockroaches other tiny invaders.

He yells something in Spanish.

And I wake up. I am in my bed, drowning in sweat.

. . . . .

It was just a dream, but I have never again argued about women's rights with my wife.

And when I read the Bible these days, I tend to skip Genesis.

(click here for a printable version of this article)