The sun beat down on the ship’s deck, but a steady breeze blew in from the open ocean just beyond the mangroves that outlined the cove. I didn’t dare to sunbathe in the nude. The village was far too small and insular. The locals learned my name after a single night out on the town, preferring to call me ‘Gruñón’ thinking I didn’t know the language, or that I didn’t already know I was a grumpy old man. The last thing I wanted was gossip whispered about the silver haired gringo with his dick out. There was enough to say about me: my drinking, my preference for being alone, how quiet I was compared to all the other white people who took to the village in bursts of laughter and debauchery. Instead of baring it all, I choose to pull my swim shorts around my legs, getting sun all the way up my thighs, just at the border of the gnarly hair around my cock that a year alone at sea had left wild. The sun browned my skin, especially at my lower back, leaving a bright line right at the crease of my clenched ass cheeks, my buttocks like two snow mounds ready to melt under the hot and glorious sun. After drifting into the cove one evening, I was left stunned by the glimmering lights of the village that hugged the shoreline. I docked at the marina and ventured out for a drink. Soon enough I got hooked on the Ron con parcha cocktails the marina owner mixed for his guests. I let him pour one after the other as he watched me closely, attempting to get a feel of who I was, what I desired from Puerto Rico. In the morning, as the sun shined upon this little slice of paradise, I’d come to learn that after two or three drinks the days blurred into constant rays, evaporating any thought or care that may have been on my mind before my arrival. After chasing away the worry of the life I left behind, I lost myself to the sun: my body splayed out on the catamaran’s netted trampoline, the scent of freshly fried empanadas at the tip of my nose, the grease from lunch still on my fingers, my body silver in sweat. I levitated in a trance, freeing my hands to coast over my once defined torso in those moments of brief delight where dream and reality muddled into hallucinatory pleasure. My fingertips danced over the rolling hills of my chest, getting lost in a grove of graying hair, feeling myself as if my hands were those of a stranger. Along the elastic waistline, they followed the bushy trail into the dark depths of my groin, wet and wild. My index finger drifted around the islands of freckles and moles just as I had been drifting from one port to the next, taking my time to explore the Caribbean, to capture all its sun, to drink…