Puthy Amid the Stingers
A man wearing a Panama Hat reminisces.
“You think you’re hard men, with those, oh, so sharp blades swaying in your exhausted hands? Want to know what real puthy means?”
“Let me explain, with a recollection dear to my heart,” the grizzled figure continues in opulent BBC English.
The man sitting on a stone ledge of an overgrown temple in the southeast Yucatán Peninsula is wearing immaculate tropical whites and an Arturo Panama Hat.
We discover him cool as a cucumber, nursing a Bacardi cola as we finish macheting our way through the last hundred yards of vines, soaking wet.
“Although of a firm, even somewhat stocky figure, she was pleasing to the male’s eye but less to his sensitivities; to be specific, she was romantically pithy, almost unceremonious in her approach to mating.
Yet whenever she provoked the proverbial ball to roll, she invariably revealed a marked lack of consistency and girded up her loins to escape down the nearest 6th Arrondissement alley.”
The ancient sighs and, with its highball glass, beckons our tottering band with dread-parched throats closer.
“It took me ages to finally corner her, and she succeeded in landing a couple of genuine stingers with her ever-present baseball bat. How’s that for puthy!”
Before draining its drink, the demon that looks like an old man grins.
“Bonne santé to the good old times!”
*Puthy is Sanskrit for bravery or purity.
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