Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. —MELVILLE, Moby-Dick Dex got into it like everyone else—for the girls. A license for pussy. Beautiful girls and ones tending toward plain, tall and short, fat and skinny, smart and slow, with every combination in between, and they had all become inexplicably available. Rock music was the last refuge of the misfit, which Dex considered himself at age sixteen; ditto, the unathletic. Musical ability was a ticket out for guys who were pale and thin-chested, smoked pot and skipped classes. Grow your hair, get some tattoos, and start learning to play that guitar that you cradled at first mostly as a prop, and magically, everything that formerly labeled you as a loser—lack of social skills, lack of education, lack of a good future—converted to cool. You didn’t even have to wash regularly. Dex had lost count of the number of days they had been on the island. Northward of two months, he guessed, but he didn’t want to know.
