HOW TO DO THE WRONG THING RIGHT
Memorial Day Weekend’s just around the corner, summertime’s unofficial start. The itch of everyone suddenly craving to escape for a fun vacation this year is near deafeningly palpable! Travel is on everyone’s mind — somewhere, anywhere, just get me outta here! Biden’s promise of 100 million fully vaccinated in the U.S. has been fulfilled, twice over, no less. So one would think that traveling the world over might now — for the fully-inoculated, certainly —be entirely their oyster to pick from. One would be dead wrong.
Even if your tropical island dream vacation plans this summer take you to a “welcoming” nation, here’s the ugly, raw truth about your vaccination card: For traveling abroad, it counts for less than even nothing. Zilch! Go ahead and have it laminated if you like. It’s worth as much as the vacuum-sealed plastic you’ll spend to protect it in. But there exists no national data base in regards to who has or hasn’t been inoculated. Hell, any 12-year-old can Xerox perfectly that tatty paper rectangle’s fraudulence. And anybody with the power to grant access through swinging airport doors couldn’t give one flying duck about your so-called “Proof of Vaccination.”
OK, serenely now, let’s everybody just swill a long, tall draught of our Sex-on-the-Beach and get right to it, shall we?
Dear Howard: I want to go traveling overseas this summer — a faraway beach, somewhere exotic with plumaged birds and suckling pigs roasted in graves with banana leaves. I’m done pacing around, stuck Covid-bound here in Texas. I wanna hit someplace friendly and aspersions-free where I can openly dig a bulging bikini on a wild isle of dudes by a palm tree in the sand!
So, what’s the deal this summer with traveling internationally? Are proof of vaccinations now a requirement? I don’t trust them vaccines. But, still, I wanna get around. I’m thinkin’ big, like Tahiti, Bora Bora . . . Raiatea, even! There’s gotta be some backwater jewel that has sparkling, untainted beaches, not pawn shops and stripper poles and sandy beaches glittering with spent shell casings. I can’t do another Redneck Riviera same-old/same-old. I even saved up my stimulus check money! Just toss a dart for me over toward the Indian Ocean somewhere and tell me where she sticks. Just once in my life, I wanna be Thong-Tan Thor!
Dear Thor, The Island Sex God: I can’t speak for the Society Islands or the Seychelles, but as it just so happens, I did actually spend a month last week in The Maldives, which I believe may be in your hand grenades-&-horseshoes’ range of Indian Ocean options. Advertised as the ideal “Vaccine Tourist Destination,” this bare-inches-above-sea-level nation is comprised of a coral-reef archipelago chain of over 1,200 islands located three degrees above the equator and surrounded by nothing but endless sea. The Maldives are ideally located to contract nothing. And everybody this summer is looking to travel anywhere other than where they’ve spent their last year cooped-up, rushing toward nowhere. The Maldives is ideally situated to contract absolutely nothing infectious by anyone. Let’s go there!
But, wait. There’s a catch to traveling to a place where three days, two jumbo jets, one seaplane and a bouncing speedboat are needed just to get there. In this new world order, no matter whether you’re traveling steerage and staying in a one-star sex hostel, or whether you’re roughing it via a Qatar Airlines’ First-Class Cabin, followed by a 24/7 personal butler on your five-star island resort, the answer to any question asked of said staffer will always be a smilingly emphatic, “No!” Nodding affirmatively, with a graciously lilting bow, endearingly pressing his palm against his heart,
“No, I’m afraid is not possible at the moment.” Immediately, there follows the requisite faux frown, replete with now sagging palm upon his heart. Aridly, he whispers the slammed gate that assuages any possible scintilla of personal
integrity, responsibility, fault or blame: “COVID.”
But why can’t we join another couple for dinner at their table tonight whom we met today at The Whale Bar, where nobody is even allowed except guests here of your hotel, all of whom have been thoroughly vaccinated already, only then to be force-tested, yet again, 72 hours prior to our arrival here on this bleached coral clod? Because only family members may sit together at the same table.
But we have zero family members with us; that was the whole point of coming here! We’re sick of our family members. We came here to mingle again, finally, with total strangers—totally vaccinated strangers!
At the risk of being labeled a politically-incorrect racist xenophobe, or worse, I’m nevertheless gonna send up this trial balloon of advice for any of you out there still planning a same-sex couple’s vacation this summer to an institutionally acolyte part of our world: Don’t even think about it. They have ways of retaliation toward forwardism, far slyer than just, oh, Doha Stadium’s regular, run-of-the-mill public stonings for those layover passengers caught to be engaging in Mile-High-Club antics, or whose luggage contain even a molecule of fabric in a shade other than mortuary. If nothing else, COVID has taught extremists how better to prioritize their hatreds. They’ve learned the long game. After all, why murder a poor fellow just for guzzling a long rope of jizz from a big happy penis when extortion/blackmail can provide both a steadily reliable stream of money on the side and suck the very life out of the deviant’s soul, simultaneously!
On the surface, sure, everything looked so Fantasy Island meets Finding Nemo, yet one never shook the feeling that something just wasn’t quite, well, sane. Case in point: My dear friend Tasha, and I met an erudite gay couple who’d jetted over for a quick holiday from Abu Dhabi, where they resided as “roommates” in one of the city’s premier hotel residences. The elder of the two — when faced with the sudden decree that every guest would now have to take yet another COVID test within 72 hours prior to their scheduled departures, suggested that every test would return with a false positive forcing us all to stay another 14 days. Happily his accusations didn’t play out. In fact, within a sea of otherwise unanimously negative test results, only one guest on the island’s entire registrar received a positive. (I’ll give you three guesses who, and the first two don’t count.)
So take your unrevealed thrills where you can find them, bois, and enjoy your summer, wherever your paradisical, teetering-tottering stumbles may take you. Yes, here’s to you, Rona: Bottom’s up . . . BITCH!
—Howard Lewis Russell
Got a question about forbidden love, jungle lust, tropical taboos or anything else Howard can offer his torpid take on? Email him at AskHoward@dallasvoice.com