A towel girl at the first Club Med, Comrade Joe the First's Wife -- or Comrade Joe the Only's step-aunt, if you prefer, or just plain CJFW for brevity's sake -- was born in southern France just after that noble nation's third military catastrophe in the past 75 years.

Papa was a petty local bureaucrat with the Vichy government. A paper-pusher. A filer. Despite his pitiful protests, Papa was hung as a Nazi collaborator just as soon as the French found someone else to surrender to in late 1944.

Their world turned upside down, CJFW and her half-wit mother, Giselle, fled to Casablanca due to mama's belief that Humphrey Bogart lived there. Despite the disappointment, mama soon took up with a saloonkeeper named Phil who was decidedly unlike Richard Blaine.

When Comrade Joe the First's future wife became ripe enough for step-papa to eye with non-parental affection, mama unceremoniously shipped her off to live with relatives in Haiti, said relatives being the owner-operators of a Port-au-Prince brothel and laundry.

There, she was soon spending her time washing sheets and avoiding being trapped between them. This unlucky upbringing did little to give Comrade Joe the First's Wife a positive outlook on life in general or the masculine sex in particular.

At the age of seventeen, fed up with her current state of affairs, this determined young lady emptied her relatives' cash-box, hitched a ride on a raft of inner-tubes headed anywhere, and wound up in Martinique, where she talked her way into a housekeeping job with the infant Club Med organization.

She rose swiftly through the ranks until an audit revealed significant variances between her accounting practices and the Club’s. Jumping the first boat out, she wound up broke and stranded in Joetown a few days after Comrade Joe the First’s ascendance to power.

This lithe little lady immediately attracted the new leader’s eye by beating the bejezus out of his befuddled bodyguards and enflamed his affections with her own unique interpretation of the "Australian crawl."

Alas, now, "post-coup," she spends her days shooting palm crabs with a target pistol and plotting her husband's return to power.

"Mark'a my words. Some day, we be back on top!" she vows.

Home | Back