CHAPTER ONE

I need time for to play.

-Jimmy Buffett

It began with the postcard that slipped through Kyle Whitman’s mail slot along with some bills, junk mail and assorted art supply catalogs. The postcard, which landed on top of the pile (because the postman had read it), depicted a yellow kitty about to trounce a dandelion in a field of grass. There was no accompanying slogan.
     Kyle didn’t notice the mail as his face was a quarter inch away from an Ultralux 3000 daylight lamp. 10,000 lux of full spectrum light were replacing the lost rays of summer – or for that matter any rays – that come with living in Seattle. The recommended dosage was a one half hour sitting.
     Kyle had been in that position nearly ninety minutes.
     He had music on, coming from his laptop which streamed in reggae. He was not particularly fond of Reggae, but didn’t think Tom Waits would transport him to the Caribbean and frankly, he just didn’t get Jimmy Buffett.
     He put a pineapple wedge on the edge of his orange juice glass. And a maroon parasol. Sporting his Ritz-Carlton bathrobe stolen from an advertising awards show judging – hey, at least he didn’t order up any porn on the company dime. Okay, just one. Three times.
     His dog, Chief Brody, formerly Stephanie, a black and white Corgi (“Welsh Cardigan Corgi” his ex-girlfriend would correct him) lay on the floor next to him, giving that “knock yourself out” look only a Corgi could deliver.
     Kyle, trying his best to transport himself to a warmer, more exotic local, concentrated on a mental image of a lone palm tree swaying in the breeze on a small spit of land surrounded by bright green water.
     It was a familiar image, he thought to himself. Probably an image countless millions dreamt about in their cubicles, or waiting in line at the dry cleaners. An image you escape to. One so familiar yet so foreign.  Calm. Peace. An image of quiet bliss - just like the one on the Microsoft PowerPoint direct mailer he got in the mail yesterday.
     Kyle pushed his chair backwards, rapidly blinking his eyes while he flicked off the lamp. He looked at Chief Brody. “My brain just switched on. I’m done here,” he said. “Your turn.”
     Chief Brody regarded Kyle’s words with the blink of two soulful eyes. A four-year-old Corgi, with a limp and a tendency to release gas when hungry, that was Kyle’s legacy of a four year relationship gone south. That, plus the fact that the dog only responded to “Stephanie.”
     He met Gina at the last ad agency he worked at, Envisonary. She was an account coordinator who, in the tradition of account coordinators, was both attracted to and repelled by the creatives who worked in ad agencies.
     Kyle was an art director.
     With a stunningly uneven history of picking women, Kyle continued the stretch with Gina, going from drunken agency holiday party to a 2 bedroom house in lower Queen Anne in the span of six weeks.
     “It’ll be like a spread in Martha Stewart Living,” she told Kyle.
     Two months later, Gina quit her job to focus with another account coordinator on a start up, Urnland.com, the world’s first internet Urn retailer.
     “I’m branding urns,” she told Kyle while she pecked away at her Dell laptop, spearmint gum snapping. “Now that’s a case study waiting to be told.”
     To give Gina her due, she stuck with Urnland.com and over the next three years, growing it to a point that she could support herself. Time to leave Kyle.
     In classic Kyle Whitman mode, she gave all kinds of reasons for the departure (except the real one), none of which Kyle can remember. Except for two: “I’m partnered with the walking dead,” and “I feel like I’ve been screwing my father.”
     Intense psychotherapy or, better yet, a regimen of pharmaceuticals couldn’t explain away that one. True, he did own a wide assortment of plaid shirts. Didn’t the Beav’s dad too? Or was it the dad from “My Three Sons?”
     The worst of it all was the idea that she might be right. Not that Kyle knew how Gina’s dad had sex or that he had it with – well never mind – not that part. Rather, the part where she implied that he acted like a zombie with poor taste in clothes.
     A dull, plaid shirt wearing, advertising cog in a massive wheel of boredom.
     “Why didn’t you tell me we got mail?” Kyle asked Chief Brody has he headed over to the pile that lay before his door. The postcard with the yellow kitty stood out from the pile easy enough. Kyle picked it up and flipped it over. It was postmarked the British Virgin Isles. In a quickly scribbled hand:

This is the follow up to the phone call. Get your ass on a plane now and join me as one half of the premiere creative team of the Caribbean. As God is my witness you’ll get laid until your johnson falls off. Literally.
-Virginal

     Virgil Steadhouse, instigator of bad ideas, captain of the reckless abandon team, and practitioner of the severe, multi-layered practical joke, was also the proud owner of business cards introducing him as “Fuck Up, Esq.” Everyone has one of these in their lives. Some call them “Uncle.” Others, “Brother”. Kyle called his, “Partner” (in the creative team sense) and soon, “Best Friend.”
     They met at faceless ad agency number three when they were thrown together as a creative team: Kyle- pretty pictures. Virgil- pretty words. They got almost nothing done and had a grand time not doing it. In an industry laden with ironic detachment, Kyle and Virgil ran the company store.  They had zero ambition for awards and despised those that did, often placating themselves with the fact that award winning creatives usually had seriously ugly spouses.
     It could be true.
     The post card was SOP Virgil, except for one thing: “Literally.” It wasn’t right. It killed the whole vibe. Felt Borscht belt or comic number five on the “Laff Club” bill. Inauthentic Virgil. Why add “literal” to an already crude analogy? It belonged in the dung heap along with “Catch my drift,” “Get my meaning,” and “I shit you not.”
     “Your follow up sucks, Virg. Literally,” Kyle said, examining the little yellow kitten on the postcard.
     The phone call Virgil was referring to came a week ago. Virgil had taken a vacation to the Caribbean, some exclusive resort he’d read about in Esquire.  Virgil had wanted Kyle to go with him as a sort of “Relationships. Who needs ‘em?” romp through green waters and thong bikinis.
     Kyle passed. Said he didn’t feel much like experiencing rejection on multiple levels in a high-end resort in the tropics.
     “Gina’s dead,” Virgil told him. “Or soon will be.”
     “A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes,” Kyle had replied.
     “Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night,” Virgil said.
     That’s what good guy friends do, recite movie quotes (in this case “Casino”) to each other with the hopes of changing the subject.
     “Duder,” Virgil said. “Time to move past Gina.”
     “Get a disease,” he told Virgil. “And don’t forget to call, Sweet Meat.”
     “Get a large bottle of hand lotion,” Virgil said. “I like Aveeno. Back when I was a sad, lonely little ad guy. Like you.”
     So it was to Kyle’s surprise when he heard Virgil’s voice on the other end of the line two days later. Since when did Virgil nurture? He told Kyle that while bumming around the beach he met a girl whose father happened to own a marketing firm on the Caymans and was opening a division of it on the resort.
     “Cape of Good Louis Island, Kyle” Virgil said. “What an awesomely pimped out name for an island. It’s like the whole place should be decorated in crushed red velvet!”
     The marketing firm with the original moniker “Bahamian Marketing Partners, LLC” showed up exactly nowhere when Googled or Hoovered or Lexus Nexused. Kyle assumed it was a guy with a laptop and trust fund who had to do something, anything, to pass the drip drip drip of Caribbean time.
     But Virgil was insistent that the guy was bona fide.
     “He worked at some big shops back in the day,” Virgil said. “But never mind that. Look, he wants a fulltime creative team, living on the island, branding, selling, cross-promoting, direct mailing, emailing their asses off for 100k, full benefits, no set hours and – no creative director but him. What the fuck do you need? A road map? (“Barton Fink”)”
     “You smell that?’ Kyle asked.
     “Dude, don’t be an ass-“
     “I smell it. Bullshit,” Kyle continued. “It sounds incredible, even if the work totally sucked ass, which I have no doubt it will. So, in the tradition of wet blankets – what’s the catch?”
     “There is one thing,” Virgil said.
     “As there always is,” Kyle said. “Let’s have it.”
     “Yeahhh,” Virgil droned, “You have to get laid to the point of boredom. Help me out, Kyle. When’s the last time that happened to you? Look. There’s a ticket waiting for you at Seatac. You can even bring Chief Brody.”
     The next ten minutes were spent debating the legitimacy of the job, if it was a front for something else, if Kyle could really get laid – even a little, and if they’d like living in the Caribbean. And then Virgil called Kyle a pussy and Kyle said he’d think it over, but no promises. After they hung up Kyle realized his biggest questions about the job were about his having sex. It had gotten to that.
     And now the postcard.
     Kyle looked around his house. On a shelf next to a signed copy of  “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (the inscription read, “Thanks for the Vicodins, Russ.”) at a magic 8 ball, a gift from Gina. It had caused a big fight when she gave it to Kyle, who grew excited over the gift, thinking it was a magic 8 ball in Farsi or maybe a foul language version. Then disappointed because it was just a plain magic 8 ball.
     Kyle took it off the shelf .
     “Am I making a huge mistake by listening to Virgil and throwing away my dull, unoriginal life here for a fabulously fictitious one in a foreign land?”
     Kyle shook the ball vigorously, Chief Brody watching the proceedings with perked up ears. Kyle stopped shaking it and looked down at the blue bubbly water hole.
     “It is decidedly so,” the magic 8 ball revealed.
     The call to his Aunt Ernie (Ernestine if you’re feeling brave) was short. Kyle asked if she’d take Chief Brody for a while, to which she heartily said yes. Aunt Ernie had a connection with Chief Brody, which pissed Gina off to no end.
     “Anyone who names a fine dog like this “Stephanie,” is an idiot,” Aunt Ernie had once said.
     And that was that.
     Kyle returned home and decided all he really needed would fit in one piece of carry on luggage.