SESIÓN PRIVADA
C
lose one eye and block out the stand of tattered palms with your thumb, and the tiny San Pedro airport, battered by horizontal sheets of rain, has some of the gray, hardscrabble charm of the Scottish coast. But unless you are featuring the gray, hardscrabble charms of the Girls of the Scottish Coast, this is about the last thing you want for a
Playboy
shoot. You certainly don't send a still photographer, videographer and crew, and three centerfolds to equatorial Belize looking for weather like this. And
Sesión Privada
, the Latin American Playboy TV program that is due to start shooting the next day, is at least partly about weather. In addition to featuring “the unrivaled beauty and sensuality of Latin and Brazilian women,” the show also highlights some of the prime tourist destinations of our neighbors to the south.
Sesión Privada
is a combination of lingering views of nude female flesh interspersed with slow pans of the Caribbean landscape. Apparently those shots of white sand, lapping waves, and swaying palm trees all provide some necessary downtime for the average viewer. According to the producer, men can look at naked women for just so long. This is news to me. I don't mean that snidely, it is simply news to me. I don't look at naked women.
Past
Sesións
have been filmed in places like Fortaleza, Brazil, and Tobago. This episode will be shot on Cayo Espanto, an exclusive resort off the Belize barrier reef. Cayo Espanto is a private island with just five secluded villas, each of which goes for about $1,300 a night. Guests range from the merely filthy rich to the seriously affluent: sports-team owners, friends of the George and Barbara Bushes, and the like.
Any unfettered display of hedonism is on hold until the stormy lowering skies clear up. So far, only the photographer and I have made it. The three lucky women who will be featured, the winner and two runners-up of a
Playboy
beauty contest held the previous night in Acapulco, have yet to arrive. The photographer is an almost ridiculously handsome Finn—tan skin, silver-blond hair, and ice-blue eyes. He resembles one of those cyborgs from the movies, developed in a secret mountain enclave laboratory who, as his wrappings are taken off, is introduced by the evil genius who created him with a portentous “Gentlemen, may I present, the Perfect Killing Machine!”
We are escorted to the nearby San Pedro boat slip by one of Cayo Espanto's staff, who radios ahead with our drink orders. The downpour has turned the town of San Pedro into a bog of muddy destitution. Or at least a very good imitation of it. I am assured repeatedly that what I am seeing is not abject poverty so much as the aftermath of the devastation of Hurricane Keith, which blew through in October 2000. The improvised, ramshackle nature of the town is only the result of the houses that were reassembled from the salvaged lumber.
By contrast, Cayo Espanto, a five-minute boat ride across not unpleasantly sulfur-scented water, is a scant three acres of immaculately raked white sand and evenly spaced palm trees. It is a serene and lovely antidote to the debris-strewn urbanity of San Pedro. That I should feel such relief calls up its own uneasiness, which is only amplified by the eight staff members who have come to greet our arrival. They might easily take shelter from the rain under one of the two palm-thatched
palapas
at the end of the dock, but are instead obediently lined up in the drizzle like the von Trapp children being disciplined. The long dock is edged on both sides with conch shells, their furled pink openings facing out. Appropriate for the weekend photo shoot, like a landing strip at Georgia O'Keeffe International Airport. Incoming vaginas!
A young man holds an umbrella over my head and escorts me to my villa, the Casa Olita, or Little Wave House. This is Obed, my personal houseman. Obed will spend the next twenty-four hours at my beck and call, announcing his presence with a dulcet “hello” a deferential ten feet from the louvered doors of my private house.
Let me say that Cayo Espanto is really beautiful and everyone with whom I came in contact there was endlessly solicitous and very nice. A few days prior to my arrival, I had been sent a three-page questionnaire about my likes and dislikes in food, bedding, activities, do I prefer to be spoiled with attention or to be left alone, etc. If you have a large gunnysack of disposable income and you are looking for pampering and relaxation, you simply cannot find a better place than this tropical paradise.
It's just that I am not big on pampering and relaxation. I can't help feeling that the world's laziest coal miner is probably in greater need of a vacation like this than the most dogged CEO. As for myself, I haven't put in anything resembling an honest day's work in years so I am uncomfortable, to say the least, with being given a servant.
The playmates arrive later in the afternoon. I walk down to the dock to greet them, taking my place in line with the staff. The girls have no idea who I am, but as I am the only one holding a notebook and not wearing a uniform, all three ladies see fit to kiss me hello on both cheeks. We have no real common language so they settle on telling me just their names and countries of origin. They are Alejandra from Venezuela, the contest winner, and her two runners up: Vanessa from Argentina, and from Brazil, Patricia, or Patty for short, which in her own liquid-mouthed pronunciation of it sounds like the word “party” said by a lugubrious Brit. They are very sweet and seem quite pretty, but at twenty-three, twenty-three, and twenty-one years of age, respectively, and not yet sporting their
Playboy
makeup, they also seem ridiculously young. Exhausted from their long trip, they go off to bed, leaving me behind to have my full Cayo Espanto experience.
An experience best shared by two, it must be said. Everything is designed for coupled isolation here: the pair of teak deck chairs at the end of my long private dock, the intimate dining table at the foot of my king-size bed. The five villas of the island are invisible one from the other. The reality TV show
Temptation Island
filmed its “dream date” sequence on Cayo Espanto for a reason.
But I am not on a dream date, indeed as I almost never am. Rather, I am Charles Foster Kane in the final reel, standing by myself looking out at the ocean from beside my personal splash pool. My very good supper is a meal for one, eaten while staring out at the black sea. At one point, in the palmy shadows just off of my veranda, a man in full mariachi regalia plays guitar and sings two plaintive songs just for me. I don't speak Spanish, but I'm pretty sure the chorus of one of them is, “David, you will die alone.” The mosquito netting is prepared around my bed and I retire, the aging tycoon lulled to sleep by the rhythmic pumping, pumping of his oil wells.
I wake at sunrise with my usual need to pee that graduates to desperate as I try to find my way out from under the mosquito netting, a ninety-second procedure to untangle myself from what must conservatively be forty yards of fabric. The rain is gone and the day has dawned cloudless and blue, the ocean an expanse of celadon. It is
Playboy
weather. At only 8:00 a.m., the sun is already beating down like a bell clapper and the temperature is climbing steadily. I make my way a hundred yards across the sand over to where the girls are staying.
All is happy industry here at the Casa Aurora (House of the Rising Sun,
heh heh
)
.
The ladies have made themselves at home. Clearly someone is studying English, but it seems like the classic Playmate stereotype when I spy the two books on the small coffee table:
Pinocchio and the Whale
and
I Love Boats!
The music blares, Vanessa is tanning and doing her nails on the deck, Patty is having her hair done. Alejandra is going through possible outfits with the producer and photographer. The entire wardrobe for a two-day shoot involving three women could fit into your average dopp kit. The bed is a flimsy profusion of marabou-trimmed panties, bras, and see-through tops.
Alejandra is included in the deliberations as she tries on various ensembles. “This is it?” she asks, rather disappointed in the cream thong and sheer cream crop top. “It's too simple.” She's right, actually. Even I can see that there is something a little austere and athletic about the getup. More J. Crew than
Playboy.
Finally settling on a black thong and a bra with looping arcs of hanging jet beads, Alejandra looks like a Victorian lampshade. A Victorian lampshade with enormous knockers. Impressive rack notwithstanding, however, Alejandra has the virtually hairless, slim-hipped build of a twelve-year-old boy.
Thoughts of twelve-year-old boys aren't really out of place. Their hormonal spirit is the guiding aesthetic force behind
Sesión Privada.
The show is predicated on that horny preteen-male belief that, even better than seeing a naked woman,
being
a naked woman would be the best thing in the whole world. One's
privada
moments would involve little more than standing in front of a mirror, gazing at the intoxicating proximity of your hot, nude, nude, totally nude lady self.
Patty is the first to demonstrate, as she stands wearing a see-through top and thong in the striped sunlight on the deck of a villa, undulating pre-orgasmically to no apparent stimulus. She looks into the camera, her beryl-green eyes closed to fiery slits. There is no come-hither in her gaze. No one else need ever show up. Holding on, Samson-like, to the louvered doors, she arches her back and throws her blond mane.
“Ah, the
Playboy
hair toss. Never seen
that
before,” says the producer.
I take refuge in the shade. Obed appears with an iced towel for me to put against the back of my neck. Small lizards skitter back and forth while a hermit crab makes achingly slow progress across the sand. I strike up a conversation with the hair-and-makeup guy. He tells me about the competition these women have won. It was just a garden-variety beauty contest with one glaring difference.
“Okay,” he murmurs conspiratorially, pitching his voice somewhat lower and leaning in, “these are not girls from the United States. They don't wax, they don't tweeze, they don't pluck. I was
exhausted
.”
In truth, I'm not sure that bushier eyebrows or unmodified treasure trails would have changed anything, really. Hairy or smooth, the antics are fairly banal. It's a pretty uncomplex transaction.
Vanessa's pictorial is still more writhing, only this time on the bed under the billowing mosquito netting. The director stops her and she takes five, relaxing in her last position, on her knees and elbows. It looks more medical than erotic. The crew confers about her moves. The video-camera man demonstrates what they want. Sinking to his knees, he twists his torso and drags his open palms slowly up his chest to his head where they rub slow circles through a hypothetical jungle of tousled hair. Vanessa laughs and beckons him onto the bed to do it for the camera. Perhaps this is just the nature of soft-core, but the girls' hands are kept so primly far away from their genitals that all of their crypto-masturbatory back arching and moaning for no apparent reason starts to look a little mentally unbalanced, frankly. Unless, of course, it's actually the appointments of this private villa that's doing it for them, although I doubt it. While I have known people who do get a little moist over high-quality linens or superior window treatments, they are not, in a word, women.
By 2:00, I am as desperate as Dustin Hoffman in
Papillon
to escape the island. I am not built for this heat and sunlight, and truth be told, I am a little bored. I had thought that this experience would be an eye-opener, would provide me with lots of new information. As a homosexual delivered by cesarean section, I have spent my life at a double remove. But images like the ones playing out in front of me are so ubiquitous, so much a part of every deodorant ad and bra commercial, that there are no real surprises here.
I procure a boat ride over to San Pedro. Germán, the man who drives me, takes the aquatic equivalent of backroads to town, winding the boat through narrow channels overgrown with snarls of mangrove trees on either side. We pass by modest houses on stilts, ingenious patchwork constructions of mismatched materials. An entire family, from grandparents to infants, are enjoying the sunny weather by swimming in the water in front of their house, an abandoned refrigerator cheerfully bobbing in the water beside them. They wave hello as we go by.
I will be picked up and returned to Cayo Espanto in time for supper. I walk the main drag. A hurricane can do a lot to a place, granted, but last I checked, it cannot rip the macadam off a road. Small trucks drive by, as well as a number of golf carts, the latter invariably driven by white vacationers. There are shops selling lighters, T-shirts, some carvings. Apparently there is a vibrant nightlife where tourists make their pub crawls from plywood bar to plywood bar. As I pass a garbage can, an iguana suddenly rears up out of it and motionlessly regards me.
Everywhere I go, be it the airport in Belize City or the small shops of San Pedro, everyone I speak to keeps on assuring me how happy Belizians are. In a “Dos and Don'ts” tourist pamphlet I pick up, I am told to go out and enjoy the town; that the San Pedranos are extremely pleased that I am there. I hope that's the case, that happiness does reign here. I encounter nothing but smiling faces. But the repeated insistence of this monolithic pronouncement about their national character makes it seem suspect.
Just before 6:00, making my way back to the debris-strewn jetty, a local man whom I have never met stops me in the street to tell me Germán and my boat are waiting. I am known after having been in town for all of four hours. We skim along the water back to the private island, the mariachi from the night before sitting beside me, already wearing his bedizened costume.
THE SUN GOES
down giving way to a clear Caribbean night awash in stars. Belize apparently sits just underneath the path of many satellites. We can see them skittering back and forth across the sky. A group dinner has been set up outside, underneath an enormous umbrella of palm fronds. The chef is roasting an entire pig in a covered pit. Occasional wisps of smoke curl up through the sand, like vain attempts at escape by the spirit of the butchered animal.