SEX IN HOTELS, EPISODE 3: GOLDENEYE, JAMAICA
Some years ago, Garage magazine commissioned me to write a series of "sex in hotels," with the hotels chosen by a super high-end travel concierge. Eeek! I had no idea what to write. My dear friend Joan Juliet Buck gave me the key with a simple question: Who is having this sex? Which gave me the second question: why are they there, in this particular hotel?
This piece is one of five. If you’d like to read the other four (the Standard, New York; Blake’s, London; the Fasano, Rio de Janeiro; and the Amangalla, Sri Lanka), subscribe to my Substack and you’ll find them there.
Your eye pressed to the space between the wooden louvers that shutter the Ian Fleming Villa, you watch them: the woman as voluptuous as warm honey, the old man, thin-chested, chicken-legged, his luxuriant beard an obscene explosion of virility. She buries her face in it, then her breasts, expertly drawing her lithe body along his, careful not to rest her weight on his frail bones.
You have arranged this woman for him. You are paying her to shag this prudish autocrat, this holier-than-thou atheist, to death. You will watch him die, then you will call the world to witness him: caught in flagrante delicto with a prostitute, and worse, in flagrante delicto with a super-luxury, uber-capitalist hotel: GoldenEye in Jamaica, where Ian Fleming created James Bond. How perfect: your apotheosis. Beyond the palm trees, gentle waves curl onto gleaming white sand. It reminds you of the place where you spent your honeymoon.
The Agency insisted that you retire decades ago, but that changed nothing: the purpose of your life is his death. For 50 years, he has been untouchable; no amount of exploding cigars or swampy invasions could fell him. Your lives are braided together; you have lived for him, nearly died because of him. If he had escaped into death without your hand sending him there, your life would have been a meaningless joke.
She rides him, fierce as a Valkyrie. Wagner’s music surges into your brain with the force of a tsunami. He cannot survive this onslaught: he is gasping, groaning, turning pale. You, too, are gasping, moving unconsciously with her rhythm, straining for the moment of completion: your joint, final ecstasy.
You will never know that this old man is not really Fidel Castro, or that your children arranged this as a final present for you—and for themselves. Tomorrow, with tears and ostentatious grief, they will gather to read your last will and testament, secure in the knowledge that you died happy.
