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Island Paradise – Part 2: Chapter 01

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Island Paradise

In Two Parts

By Joshua Ryan

PART 2

 

Chapter 1: A Great Place for the Whole Family

Hey, what’s goin on?  I’m not an interruption–I’m Joel, and it’s my turn to talk.

You don’t know me yet, so I’m wondering how to introduce myself.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Just think of me as the Boy Next Door.

You know the type.  I’m sorta tall, and sorta blond, and I was sorta popular in school.  Picture me raking leaves in the front yard, wearing a red flannel shirt, with a light blue tee underneath it.  I was never behind any white picket fence, but my family lived in a pretty good neighborhood and I went to a pretty good school, which means there was zero crime and only a couple fistfights out behind the gym.  Lack of tradition, lol!

Anyway, I went out for sports and was good in English and real good in math.  Dan—he’s my older brother—went to law school, so my parents thought I should go to med school.  The summer after my junior year in high school, my dad’s friend Dr. Lowery got me a volunteer gig at the hospital, which meant following the doctors and nurses around while they did their things.  When they were with a patient I had to say—“Hi, I’m Joel, I’m a volunteer, just learning stuff”—and the patients were always nice about that.  The nurses and doctors weren’t always nice to each other, but they were nice to me.  I wondered how I would feel if people actually weren’t that nice.  Maybe it would be more interesting!  Don’t ask me whether I wanted to be a doctor.  I don’t think I did, but I guess it was as good as anything.

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 25

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 25: The Experiment Can Be Considered a Success

In a second the twins were dragging me out.  “Roger!” I shouted, but his expression of calm benignity never changed.  The door slammed.  I was back in the passageway, being propelled toward a room at the distant end.  If that was “the room,” then I was the “it.”

Champ and Chimp dragged me in, and Roger followed.

“Put the slap on the wall,” he said.  “And fluff.”

“Sir thank you sir.”  They moored my cuffs to a ring on the wall.  Then they stripped out of their browns and began to kiss and grope each other, groping and sweating and grinding and making each other hard, so hard that if their boots hadn’t anchored them to the floor they could have climbed to the sky on each other’s dicks.  Were they fighting or making love?  It didn’t matter.  They were two volcanoes, ready to erupt.  Then spotlights came on.  The windowless room was boiling with light.  And there were other lights—little red lights in the corners of the room.  Roger was filming this!  The lights seemed to set the boys off even more.  Molten mountains, beasts in a colosseum . . . .

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 24

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 24: Room at the Top

Each of them took an arm and moved me out of the building.  At the end of the little street there was a stone wall with a barred gate, big enough for a truck.  Next to it was a little barred gate, big enough for slappies on foot.  They had the key to that gate, of course.

The gate led to another world.  Ahead was a gracefully curving drive lined with dark old trees, and a pathway bordered by tropical flowers and bushes.  Beyond, a great sweep of lawn and a cream-colored mansion spreading lazily across a hill.  When I turned my head, I could barely see the wall behind me.  It was almost invisible behind the lush flowering plants.  “Eyes front!” I was told.

I saw wide glass doors from the house onto a terrace–but I wasn’t going toward the terrace.  I was turning off onto a narrow trail that led through the bushes to a set of bare concrete steps going down to a basement.  There was a blank steel door at the bottom, and my guards had a key to that too.

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 23

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 23: Your Next Career Move

I don’t know how many times I got punished during the next few months—so many times that I felt incomplete, at the end of the day, if I hadn’t been slapped around or casually put across the knee of a waiter to get my butt spanked.  They loved to do that.  And it was true—I was a bad busboy.  I was surly.  I stumbled.  I broke things.  Like any other servant, I deserved to be punished.

Then one morning I was lined up with the other slaps to spend 12 more hours pulling dirty plates into the kitchen, when Dev caught me by the arm and said, “Not you. You been sold.”

“Sold?”

“Yeah, I know, mon.  Who’d wanta buy you?  But the truck is comin.”

So that’s it, I thought.  The fields.  The fields where I’ll spend the rest of my life chopping dirt.

“Report to Boss Derek’s desk,” he said, with no attempt at the usual camp.  “Good luck, mon.”  You’ve really fucked up, I thought, when Dev wishes you good luck.

I shuffled to the desk, and there was Boss Derek, looking angry that he had to spend time dealing with me.  “Bend down,” he said, and he took the King George dog tag off my collar and did something with his laptop to unlimit my distances.  It was like being drummed out of the Foreign Legion.  Then he said something weird.  “You don’t know how lucky you are, slappie.”

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 22

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 22: There Are Many Interesting Jobs in Food Services

Terry was the busboy who trained me to be like him.  The biggest things I had to learn were:

  1. ALWAYS keep your boots clean and your shirt buttoned all the way up. That’s how people can tell you’re a servant at the King George Hotel.
  2. Keep your eyes on the floor and your dunce cap firmly on your head.
  3. Be invisible. You are nothing, get used to it.
  4. Wait till the guest is finished with a dish, then snatch it fast.
  5. Say Sir at the start and finish of anything you need to say to a freeman.
  6. Waiters are freemen. Always obey the waiter.
  7. Speak only when spoken to. If you start talking, you will be punished.
  8. If you take a tip, you will be punished.
  9. If you violate any rule, you will be punished.
  10. If anybody thinks you violated a rule, you will be punished.
  11. Any food remaining on a plate and any liquor remaining in a glass will be reported to Ned, the boss slap in the kitchen, for recycling to the basement.

And number 12:  Be grateful that you’ve got this job.  A lot of slappies don’t have it so good.

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 21

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 21:  Spare the Rod and Spoil the Slappie

Then came the day when I returned to the housekeeping room on the fifth floor, and my hand couldn’t find the stash I’d hidden behind the wallboard.  I knew I was in bad trouble.  I was scared to even look at my other hiding places.  At the end of my shift, I found Boss Derek waiting for me at his desk.  Seated behind that old dinged-up piece of discarded furniture, wearing his brown slappie suit with his hotel tag dangling from his collar, he looked like a total putz, despite the distinguished haircut.  But he also had total power.

“Found this,” he said, opening a drawer, pulling out a wad of cash and laying it on the desk.

“What’s that?” I said.  It was just a formality.  I knew I was caught.

“Don’t waste my time,” he said, putting the wad back in his drawer.  I could imagine what was going to happen to that.  That and all the other stuff he’d found, exactly where he knew it was.  His snitches would have seen to that.  It would be pointless to bring up all the bills I’d passed up the chain to him.  He wouldn’t bother to deny it.  It was clear that somewhere I’d crossed a line.  No matter how much he’d made from me, I’d gotten too big.  I’d have to be made small.  And being a sadist is entertaining in itself.  “Hit the Frame,” he said.

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 20

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 20: Opportunities for Success in Uniformed Service

I’m leaving out a lot of stuff about the “guests.”  The kids that trip you in the hall.  The people that open their doors and see you and squirm and slither away as far as they can get, hoping not to catch your disease.  The old gentlemen who like to tell you jokes.  “Hey boy—how many slappies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  Don’t know?  Well, what DO you know?  Ha ha ha ha ha!  I heard that one on the tour today.”  The young ladies who check in for their bachelorette party, four to a room, and totter off to shop for their bridesmaids’ dresses, leaving their puke on the couch.  The boyfriends muscling them past the ugly slappies that would otherwise want to rape them.  The annual guests who’ve learned that if Housekeeping turns up at an inconvenient time they can always say “Corner,” and the slap will have to find the nearest one and stand there facing it until the guests are ready to leave their room.

It was good that during those first days I had Dave to keep me standing at attention with my hands behind my back, anytime there might be trouble.  And to teach me a lot more things than how to change a hotel bed.  He went way beyond what hotel management calls Guest Relations.

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Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 19

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By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 19: Headgear that Says It All

Twenty slaps can make a huge racket when they’re reluctantly waking up, and that’s what was happening next morning, when my shift was getting ready to start.  They were rushing around in their undershorts, pissing and shitting, washing their faces and pits, and taking the hair off their faces with the little electric razors attached to the wall next to the john.  A quick jump into uniform, and at 5 am sharp (!) one of the security slaps unlocked the door of the barracks.  Everybody piled out.  Oatmeal and sausage and coffee were hitting the table.  The oatmeal was sticky and cold, and the sausage was mainly grease, but the coffee had such a kick that right away you were completely awake.  Then a door opened, stools scrunched back, and we lined up for Boss Derek’s inspection.  “Lace up those boots.”  “Yes boss.”  “Use the comb.”  “Yes boss.”  “Button that shirt, all the way up–where do you think you’re working?”  “Yes boss, ver’ sorry boss.”  “Lose that attitude.”  “Yes boss, ver’ ver’ sorry boss.”  Having readied us for the rest of our day, he sat down at his desk, and a security slap unlocked the big barred door at the end of the room.

“Follow me,” Dave said. “I’m you trainer.”

Continue reading Island Paradise – Part 1: Chapter 19 →