groaned and bitched, and threatened to sue the airline. “The soldiers outside,” continued the captain. “Are going to hose down the aircraft, it seems that we may be contagious.”
The word caused the expected pandemonium amongst the passengers. The flight attendant shushed them. “Listen, this is important.”
He continued. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about; it’s only a precaution and the locals are following the instructions from our government. It seems there has been a kind of chemical incident and they are being prudent and recalling all airplanes back to Miami International, where they will check us out and give us the all clear. Thank you.”
The mumbling and complaints got worse, when the tannoy crackled once more, “One more thing,” the captain said. “On a more serious note, the local authorities have said any attempt to alight from the aircraft will be met with the, erm, utmost force.” The passengers took the latest news with righteous indignation. “Sit tight, we’re already refueling and naturally we have priority to take off, so we’ll be out of here in a jiffy. Thank you.”
Luke observed the local militia looking like spacemen in their biohazard suits.
Armed and trigger-happy spacemen.
10:15 AM
Kelvin Copnik awoke and stirred in his Key West penthouse apartment. He smiled broadly at the person asleep next to him - a pick-up at a Miami nightclub who’d agreed to come all the way back with him. Kelvin smiled, looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows down onto the town at the southernmost tip of mainland USA, ninety miles to Cuba, which oddly made him closer geographically to Havana than Miami.
He loved the Key West life-style, what with the applauding of the wondrous sunsets that were plentiful, to the seven-toed cats at Earnest Hemingway’s home, and to the laid-back live-and-let-live attitude of the locals. He rolled to his side to gaze at his latest conquest, long shapely legs, shaggy blonde hair . . . and beard.
Kelvin, or to call him by his Miami alter ego’s name, Big Mary, was the queen of the Fairy Grotto, a gay Miami drag show, where he was the star act. He blew in the man’s ear while trying to remember the dude’s name, Dave, Daniel, or Danny. Something like that, anyhow, they were all the same to him. Big Mary loved the gay scene and its promiscuous life-style although nowhere near the early '80s heights.
During the 1980s heyday of the bathhouses some guys would have anything up to ten encounters per night. The bathhouses catered for all tastes what with the notorious glory holes, where you could be the giver; oral, accepting a penis pushed through the hole cut into the WC cubicle partition or the receiver, where you put your erect penis through the gap to be fellated anonymously by a giver. It meant that anyone could get or receive a blowjob, meaning that there was even a place for the fat, misshapen or downright ugly; that they too could a have a full and promiscuous sex life. There was even talk of a sub-culture for the unattractive. Still today, some guys hunting bears, they adored their men covered in hair, or chubby chasers, whose tastes led to the corpulent, there was even a part of the bathhouse designated pig-alley, for the truly foul and unattractive.
Not that any of these groups would have interested Big Mary, and this was before the days of AIDS. Big Mary had made it a point to learn all the statistics concerning the AIDS epidemic. Better forewarned he’d thought. Although the western media ignored the Aids problem, it still had a terrible effect in Africa, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, where one in twenty adults had contracted HIV and over seven hundred children were dying from the disease each day!
Mind you, that was through their mother’s breast-milk not their lifestyle choice. In fact, sixty-nine percent of adults suffering with the HIV virus lived in the sub-Saharan area. It was incredible that the western
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