Memoirs of a Swine

Palm Beach prodigal son Johnny Yen is wearing out his welcome. After losing the best of his twenties in a five-year prison stint, he has been making up for lost time. Some think he'll find neither redemption nor a wife across the bridge on Downtown Clematis, but he is running out of places to look. Then he meets her, an heiress who, like him, walks to the beat of a different drum. She wants him to follow her to Antigua Guatemala, an up-and-coming destination hotspot, where he can reinvent himself, clean slate. Only before he can make up his mind, other women start vying for his heart. Are they angels in disguise, trying to stop him from another ill-fated adventure? Or crabs in a bag trying to drag him back down? He only has two weeks to decide.
Excerpt:
Normally, guys will take girls out on the same paint-by-numbers date. Pick her up, take her to a restaurant, chat for a while, take her home, have that awkward moment, and maybe kiss, and maybe be invited inside. The whole time, she is in control of what’ll happen later. There is nothing special about a date like that, so I change it up a bit. What I do is ask her to come pick me up, and when she comes over, I answer the door nude except for a towel.“Oh, hey, sorry, I’m not ready yet,” I say. “But come in.” Then I stop and make a face, the kind of face girls tend to make when they ask if you have a condom, and I ask “Would you mind taking off your shoes?” I gesture with a tilt of my head to the shoes sitting there by the door, and she always hesitates, then smiles uncertainly and slips her shoes off, looking at my washboard abs and the towel wrapped around me, and she comes into my territory feeling a little vulnerable and at an advantage at the same time.“I’ll just be a minute,” I say. “You want a glass of wine while you wait?” She makes a yes-no tilting of her head and says “Sure.”I lead her into the kitchen in my towel, her feeling the cold tiles underneath her bare feet and feeling at home in a stranger’s house, feeling the tingle of being with me in such a familiar and personal way before our first date even begins. We toast, watch each other over the rims of our glasses while we drink, and then she looks around the house and invariably asks me about one of my paintings. We end up in the room I use for my studio, which is right next to the bedroom. She is always amazed and never fails to give me a sly smile, biting her lower lip and telling me she wants me to draw her.“Really?” I ask.She nods. We never end up making it to dinner.

Before he became the Renaissance Man (owner-chef of a very popular restaurant, author of eighteen books, and successful Baroque artist) Alexander Ferrar was a hard-drinking, bar-fighting, heart-breaking prick. This is his story.