“No, absolutely not.”
“Come on,” she wheedles. “We can get matching ones. It’ll be perfect.”
“Oh what the hell.”
The saleslady barely looks at us as we approach the counter with the shirts. Sam clears her throat until the woman looks up. “We’d like to buy these please.”
The clerk, who looks barely eighteen, sighs deeply and drags herself over to the cash register. She rings up our shirts without smiling. Handing over the money, Sam says, “You may not like cruise ship passengers, but they’re the reason you have a job.”
“Yeah,” the clerk replies. “Well, they leave trash everywhere. This island was beautiful before the cruise ships started coming.”
“Cruise ships have been coming to this island since 1980. What year were you born?”
The young woman slams the change down on the counter and turns away from us. Sam calls after her, “I don’t think it’s cruise ship passengers throwing old refrigerators and used tires back in the bush.”
“Come on.” I pulled at her sleeve and we leave the store. “Why do you have to do that?”
Pulling off her Hawaiian shirt, she slips her new cock shirt on instead. Following suit, I do the same. Now we not only look like tourists, we look like idiot tourists. We wander back into the crowd and head for the main boardwalk. Sam is still fuming.
“Seriously, dude. What is wrong with you?”
She grimaces. “I just hate that bitchy attitude. If you work in customer service, you better damn well act as if you care about customers.”
“Well, she’s a teenager. They don’t care about anything.”
“I just hate that snootiness. Like she’s doing us a favor to take care of our purchase. I don’t get why cruise ship passengers ever come back here after getting that kind of attitude.”
“They probably don’t.”
She opens her mouth to answer me, but is interrupted by a large hairy man in a “Cocks on vacation” shirt. He slings an arm around her and leans in close, whispering, “Hey, we have the same shirt. Great minds, right?”
“Uh huh,” she responds. “Great.”
Maneuvering out from under his arm, she rolls her eyes at me. Laughing, I show him my shirt. “It looks like we’re all soul mates.”
“Oh yeah,” he yells. “Totally!”
He turns his head and yells back over his shoulder. “Hey, Bob! I found us our double dates.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam mutters to me. “Only us.”
“How drunk does a man have to be to hit on us?” I ask, laughing again.
“Well, I mean, we are sexy bitches.”
“That part is a given. But we do look like dykes.”
Bob has reached us and is grinning like an idiot. He’s wearing tiny jogging shorts and a nylon tank top worthy of Richard Simmons. Trying to be subtle, I glance down at his feet and press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud at the obligatory black socks and sandals. He holds out his hand and I shake it.
“I’m Bob,” he says. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dana, this is Sam, and we’re leaving.”
“Aw, come on,” says the original guy. “We want to hang out with you.”
“I mean, it’s kind of fate,” Bob says.
“Because of our shirts?” Sam is trying to look annoyed but I can tell she’s having a good time.
“Yes. So come hang with us. It’ll be fun.”
“Look, guys,” Sam says, grinning. “We’re not interested. We’re lesbians.”
“Please, girlfriend,” says the original guy, waving a beefy hand around. “Do you think I can’t recognize a couple of dykes when I see them? We’re the gays.”
Snickering, I take a second look at them. “Sorry, guys. I would never have guessed you as gay in a million years.”
Bob puts his hand on his hip and cocks is chest forward. “Why is that?”
“Because you’re dressed like slobs,” Sam says.
“I’m dressed like Richard Simmons, for Liza’s sake,” Bob declares. “How could that not clue you in?”
“Anyway,” the other man says, “we’re on vacation. We can look as slobby as we want.”
The big guy, whose name turns out to be Manny is excited to find out that we’re locals and insists that we take them to a local gay place.
“There really aren’t any particularly gay places around here,” Sam says. “I mean, there is one gay bar on the island, but we’d have to leave the boardwalk to go to it.”
“There won’t be anything going on there at ten o’clock in the morning anyway.”