It is written on the body that there are five things that
make a man happy. There is food and there is drink. 
There is work and there is friendship and then there is 
love. Papa thought he had it all on this holiday in the 
islands until he looked across the bedroom at the girl
with the long black hair. Written on her naked body was 
but a single question  -- 'Papa, did you bring the Hard Stuff?'

Then there was the good weather. He tried to tell her about 
the winds and the big hurricane he had known, the one they
called El Grande Hurricane, but she said that sounded like 
a girl's drink back at Harry's Bar & American Grill and it made
her sad. That was not the hard stuff she wanted. He knew 
what she meant and she did not mean the liquid poison that
can make the words flow and she did not mean the white 
powder that can make strong men dance in borrowed shoes
and she did not mean the weeds that are smuggled by old 
men across the river and in through the sea.  She meant the 
little pills that can make a man a real man again, and again, 
and again. He could not answer her because in his heart he
was still a young man, a man who could face the blank white 
page, the wild bull and the girls who were wilder still, all in 
the same night, and out-perform the bull.

"I will cook the good fish that I have caught," he said, leaving 
her desire trailing like a matador's red cape in the dirt after
the fight. "We will have candlelight and it will be a fine meal, 
just like at Harry's in the days before the Problem." 

"You forgot it, Papa," she said quietly. "You forgot to bring the
Hard Stuff," she said with the disappointed voice of a woman
who knows what she wants and even though she says she 
loves you on Wednesday, she can easily disappear by Thursday, 
slipping between the pages of your calendar like a paper clip gone
astray in the random diary that is your life. 

Only God knows  why a man does the things he does in the face
of fear, if there is a God, and if that God keeps up with modern 
medicine.  It would have been easy enough to bring it, a simple
gesture of something resembling love. There could have been
laughter and lust  languishing under the palm trees. Instead, 
there is fine food and cold drinks and there are always friends 
and later there will be the words that are the work. With any
luck, there will be another day when the love also rises.