I'm fifteen years old, and I'm hot. Being "hot" can mean that members of the opposite sex find me attractive, that I make females quiver with desire. Unfortunately, that's just not the way it works. I'm at the height of my skin and bones phase- 5'11" and exactly 123 pounds. I am also discovering one of the Hahn family's proudest traditions- acne. At the age of fifteen I'm shy, awkward, greasy, and pimply.
      By, "I'm hot," I mean my ass is sweating. This is an entirely new sensation. At fifteen, I've only really had my sweat glands for a couple of years, and I just found out that ass sweat existed. I'm just now realizing that I'll have to deal with this sensation for the rest of my life.
      It's not enough that my ass is sweating. It's not enough that I'm fifteen and I have zits and I'm too quiet and too weird to find a place in high school society, I have to be tortured by something far worse. I'm being dragged through the most evil punishment ever devised for a teenager. I'm on a family vacation.
      Every year, tens of thousands of American tourists go to the Bahamas. They bet in the casinos, the play on the beaches, and they shop in the outlet stores, but it's like they keep their eyes closed the entire time. They all miss what only a bitter, sweaty fifteen year old can pick up.
      The roadside alternates- slum, jungle, ghetto, jungle, concrete and iron rubble, jungle, slum. At the end of the road, Americans get out of their rental cars and pretend that the people who live in the Bahamas don't exist unless they work for the casino.
      The casinos are huge, pink temples to the American dollar. They're entirely self-contained, with their own hotels, restaurants, beaches, and shopping- no white person will have to see how real Bahamians live unless they're on their way to or from the airport. Full-page ads in Time and Newsweek, don't contain a single black face.
      We make the mistake of leaving the casino fantasy land. Across the bridge, downtown Nassau- we look into crystal blue water washing over the sand. . . well, washing over the broken conch shells that obscure the sand. . . well, the rum bottles burying the broken conch shells obscuring the sand. There are so many bottles. . .
      "Hello, we love you!" We were three middle-class white teenagers, and an old, scary black man had just told us he loved us. We tried not to scream as we ran away.
      It wasn't until later that I finally got it. The truth is, they do love us. It's the kind of love that you usually only see on Jerry Springer.
      I can see it now- America with flabby, tattooed arms and a tooth count of maybe four under par. The Bahamas- a jealous mistress, blond with black roots and sagging cleavage, screaming insults at our other Caribbean lovers. The inevitable hair-pulling brawl ensues, but is awkwardly edited out of the broadcast. Then, Jerry's final, patronizing thought.
      I can't believe that no one who lives in the islands sees it. Somewhere, someone should be spreading the truth.
      "We don't need them. The foods that they consider delicacies grow on our trees and wash up on our beaches. We have each other, we have our freedom, yet we choose to live as servants in what should be our paradise. Any one of these white tourists would kill for what we had before they came. We would be better off without them or their money."
      Where are the revolutionaries? The instigators? The great leaders? They're busy parking cars, making beds, and serving drinks to sweaty-assed Americans and their sweaty-assed teenage children.

"Fellating America for Sustenance" IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED, TRANSMITTED, PRINTED OR PERFORMED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

"Fellating America for Sustenance" debuted January 28, 2000, performed by Adam Hahn, Willie Barbour, James Erwin.

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