Restless in the dewy grass of the hard ground, he was asleep. His
dreams registered what, numb, he hadn’t comprehended so well the
previous evening. His brain rehashed those images surreal and slow:
Vanont slipping them a thousand baht; the decision on the sidewalk to
go to the whores; Kumpee saying that he, Jatupon, was a ladyboy and
couldn’t go with them as if he had wanted to go with them (He might
have wanted to go but not with them and not with that thousand baht);
his numb malevolent smile at their laughter; being handed some loose
change to go home with; and then getting on a bus randomly, handing the
ticket tearer ten baht and pretending to be mute and dumb when asked
his destination since there was none. He hadn’t even said goodbye to
his brothers and all of those years together. He just contemptuously
smiled at their contempt and disappeared. One day he would be in
America. In time, he told himself, in time. Being the cockroach had
passed in time. He had lived in the world as that of an insect all
those years. These family members didn’t even have to ferret out his
miserable little existence to stomp on him daily. It hadn’t been much
of a sport just to see him scurry around in the same space within his
pain and yet it had been their main preoccupation. Bad as it was, it
had passed without the necessity to kill himself. He just said to
himself that it would pass and it had. He was no ladyboy. Maybe his
serious intensity made his limbs rigid and his movements circumspect
and gauche. Maybe it was strange that he rarely walked with his
brothers but instead walked behind them. Undoubtedly he had been the
sexual recipient. Still that didn’t make him into a ladyboy nor did it
make him gay. He was liberated. He was a changing creation. Past
actions did not have to define him. The word, ladyboy, for once did not
hurt him deeply since he was undergoing the metamorphosis of manhood.
Manhood was indefinable since it could be anything one slipped off and
slipped on at will during times that were critical junctures, as he
knew this was. If he were to go back to Kazem or scurry over to the
senator so begrudging innate inclinations to help him, he would be a
man but a dependent one with childish yearnings to be shaped by others.
He told himself he would smell like the fetid one, he would let the
sagging elasticity completely peel off his underwear embarrassingly,
and he would eat stray cats in the park but he would not sacrifice his
newly discovered integrity for the sake of comfort.
In the early light of morning he woke up with maximum determination
despite the lack of solid sleep and seeing that his new home was on the
outskirts of a park. It was a grassy fringe that went behind the wall
and gate that enclosed the actual park. The sprinkling of rain was
falling onto him and he could smell the stink of his damp shirt as if
the metamorphosis to manhood had made him into the fetid one. Behind
the wall he heard the squeaking chains of empty swings being moved
slowly in the wind. Cars that infrequently passed the park were unreal
and eerie as descending ghosts. No sooner had he awakened than a
middle-aged woman in a red jacket rode up beside him on her bicycle.
“Fortune teller?” she asked.
“No,” said Jatupon.
“Don’t you want your fortune read?”
“No,” he said. He knew he didn’t have one.
“I teach English too.”
“No,” said Jatupon. “I don’t have anything for you.”
“Here. Give this to someone who needs it.” She gave him a business card
that was nothing but a sliver of paper with a computer printed,
reduced, and photocopied message of Thai on one side and English on the
other. In her palm she had a whole stack of these tiny square bits of
paper. As she rode away he read the English. “Nattanat near Lumpini
Park. (13:00-21:00) Office 3761/296 soi Yudee 9 Chan Road Tambon
Bangko, Kate Bangkolaem, BKK 10120 Thailand. Tel.02-673-1436 Time call
04.00 AM or after 10.00 PM Fortune Teller: I give you many gifts I am
teacher English teacher/ Thai language Ride big bicycle.” She was one
of the lucky ones. Occasionally she probably was able to find a
foreigner who wanted to learn Thai and each day she was able to give
some fortunes that allowed her to have her own little room and a
telephone. Thin as she was, she was able to live even if, in part, she
had to seek clients in the beggars themselves. He waited around for the
park to open. Slipping into numbness with nothing industrious to do,
his integrity was shaken. He didn’t want to be here. He could still go
back to Kazem, he told himself.
Kazem had always been “kind” in the respect that he had domineered over
him and protected him from harm except for times when he harmed him;
and this interestingly contradictory reality was what made their
relationship more sexy and beguiling the way a similar one might
beguile a battered woman in love to have more sex and children despite
her wish to leave him. Sex (heterosexual or homosexual, conventional or
incestuous) was a passion of frenzy based on pleasure bonding and
emotional dependency, an inordinate amount of semen and sperm needing
to be ejaculated especially after a few days of sexual abstinence, and
force and self-consumption in a hunger to defy aloneness in rhythmic
banging and basic hedonism. Kazem was strong and being a force that
could reckon with the world physically, he engendered in others an
instinct rife in interpreting powerful figures such as him as a prime
breeding experience. A kind individual could never elicit the same
response. For Jatupon a muscular presence that could harm him oozed not
only a pheromone but triggered in him a yearning to breed with a prime
specimen who asserted his will. If he had been a woman a baby of this
kind might well be created. It would be a baby who would become a man
well equipped to survive and be sexy enough to perpetuate another
generation of this kind and deep in the psyche of every human was that
wish to breed with the best physical specimens.
This being “in love” was an addictive rush and despite his mental
convictions, his body craved for the beloved. Still one night had
totally passed without him and there would be others. The time on the
ground had been uncomfortable but he knew he could be inured to it. He
could numb himself to survive and it wouldn’t be all that bad. This
wound Kazem had given him was a blackening of perspective as well as
the eye. It was the only gift he had really given him: the gift of
maturity.
He did not know what he was to do with the day. Was he to spend the
last of his baht on bags of breadcrumbs that, like an old man, he was
to spread out for his friends, the pigeons? He paid a couple baht at a
public bathroom. After relieving himself, he took a partial bath by
cleaning part of his upper body in a sink. Then he went into a booth
that had a faucet, which leaked water into an Asian style toilet.
Through effort he was able to catch some of the water before it went
into this urinal that was embedded into the floor. He was able to wash
off a bit of his lower extremities by these sprinkles. He didn’t want
to splash too much water or he might be fined or arrested.
Numb and wary how to proceed with the hours of the days, he did not
know what to do with himself or how others in his predicament wrestled
with their time. Was he supposed to meander along with nothing to guide
his walking? Was he supposed to follow behind those who seemed like
herds and those who seemed like flocks? If so, he told himself, it
should be with those who were homeless. By following them he could
learn how homeless people survived best and fulfill, at least in a
minuscule way, one’s innate need for society. He felt loose and
disconcerted. His thoughts insurrected him and it felt as if they were
towing away bits of his brain. The post office would open in a few
hours. He could make the long sojourn to his mailbox and see if he had
a letter from Noppawan Piggy but public transportation cost money so he
just needed to comfort himself with the ideas that she had presented to
him. She often said that everyone from ambassadors to beggars sewed
such petty lives for themselves. At least he thought those were her
exact words. She said something to that effect. Each time that he tried
to remember exactly what she had written to him, and what she had
spoken from the boat, it became different. It was distorted by the
impermanent neurological circuitry of the brain (so little did one
possess himself). The world was godless, love was a selfish realm, and
from what he knew of friendship, it was with people who used each other
to grow for a certain time or share similar attitudes in the hope of
not feeling alone when going through certain stages of life. He
wondered if even his friendship with Noppawan was evanescent as a whiff
of clouds. Why should she write to him, he thought to himself.
If there hadn’t been a bit of a thrill in becoming independent and
killing off past associations with family, he told himself, he would
commit suicide. He couldn’t really see much point in survival anyhow
with the inevitability of death biting at one’s heels. It was good to
kill off past family associations. His aunt, he thought, had invited a
boy of his realm into her domain only to find that he had too many
needs and wasn’t worth the trouble-the dog that needed to be sent back
to the pet store. He resented her and was pleased with his independent
stance at severing family from his mind. He tried to forget the comfort
of sleeping in his cell and never having to worry about having money
for meals and public toilets.
He slept intermittently on park benches throughout the day. To avoid
hunger and thirst he took a cup he found in the trash and begged
outside the park. He watched a blind old woman with a wooden attach�
case of lottery tickets, a jasmine rosary salesman with merchandise
looped around his arms like long bracelets who went from car to car, a
woman at a table stringing them for her own sales (even the mendicants
had to compete with each other to gain a mere sustenance), sidewalk
seamstresses with their antique foot pumped sewing machines, and a man
with a bicycle-pulled ice-cream cart who stood there scooping out a dip
for someone. A sock salesman at his table sat on a stool with his hand
poised under his chin when the rest of his life was faltering. They did
have such petty lives. They, no different than the rich, consumed food
and expended their kinetic energy and liquids in the bedroom in this
perennial trap that human instinct and physiognomy concocted. He put on
his sunglasses to blind himself from the motion around him and time
became stagnant as a traffic jam he was witnessing-the people finally
oozing out of trapped busses and around halted vehicles like leaking
oil. The hours passed somehow and again the park closed and he slept on
its fringes with many others.
The next morning taught him that breakfast could be waived if begging
from the previous evening had not gotten him the twenty baht required
for a meal but he needed to always keep some coins in his pockets so
that he could go into a public bathroom. Around 2:00 sidewalk
restaurant workers tended to need their own respite from drudgery and a
barter arrangement of a meal for an hour’s work could sustain him and
keep him from having to buy food. As non-preferable as it was, the
police did not badger one if he washed away his rotting layers of
stinking skin in the polluted canals or the Chao Phraya River so long
as he entered and exited with his underwear on. The waters did give him
a skin rash, after a few days of bathing in this manner, but this itch
around his thighs was bearable. Lucrative ventures came every now and
then when men wanted him. He, at such times, was sufficiently numb and
insouciant in manhood and he would go there and serve them safely
without letting the whining child within him clamor out. He performed,
was paid, and left never combining emotions with such a physical act.
These men would not be his deliverance. He had to force that idea into
his head and fight off his wish for a savior.
Within a month and a little bit of persistency against refusals, the
metropolitan authorities scheduled him for an interview as a money
taker on a city bus. He was scheduled with a score of others despite
his age. He might not have gotten any job at all let alone a better one
than what he was applying for had English not rescued him. They needed
someone knowledgeable of English in the information booth in an
air-conditioned cubicle at a skytrain station. He would not be wearing
the grungy blue suits of the money takers but white ones that looked
like a captain. The thought of it filled him with pride.
They gave him an advance so that he could buy this clothing, rent out a
cheap room, and not fast when it came to purchasing his lunches. They
didn’t give him a day off but outside of making change for the
customers that needed to be done quickly, the work was easy. It just
required a familiarity with major landmarks around each of the stops
and that he be able to direct foreigners where they needed to go.
National holidays (when he got them) were spent in the vicarious
borrowing of a personal life from a movie at a theatre. He didn’t
really know his coworkers. Since it was his first job, and a new one at
that, he kept quiet and focused on his work. He looked gauche and
foolish and he worked around them trying not to get into much contact.
They gossiped about others whom he didn’t know (perhaps himself as
well) and repeatedly asked how he knew English so well. Their tones
always became more caustic in addressing him; and when it came to
justifying his knowledge of English he would always vary his answers
fictitiously so as not to feel that he was buried in a rubble of
monotony. His introverted awkwardness was at variance with their
complacent self-assured movements, and he withdrew into a world of
shadows surreal as being sucked up into random scenes of a silent
picture show. He was friendless and alone. Outside of Noppawan, he
couldn’t even imagine anyone who really cared about him a little; but
he did not have time to go to his post office box and he feared that
she was lost to him forever. A solitary person usually needed to invent
a commiserating individual out there even if that person did not really
care; but he did not know anyone with whom to fool himself and he saw
that despite the Noppawan Doctrine against pettiness, he was securing a
petty life for himself like everyone else and the exhilaration from his
independence was waning.
As Vanont slipped 40 baht through the hole of the window, Jatupon
changed it, attempting to keep his eyes steady in a marginally sunken
poise of professionalism without any special recognition of the
customer wanting the change. The old man smiled at him warmly. “Where
have you been, my boy?” he asked.
Nawin Biadklang: it was a label, just a simple and different group of
words in which an entire metamorphosis took place. He was new and
glorious and the lost and forlorn being that was Jatupon had fallen
from him effortlessly like the stink of scathing skin that he had
showered away in the morning. Nawin Biadklang stood near the Hualampong
train station, watching the mosaic of light and shadow at his feet like
a child fully in the splendor of the present moment. He was drinking
milk at a newsstand and thinking about his recent meeting with Piggy in
the Siriaj Hospital Museum. He had asked her to go with him to Wonder
World Amusement Park but she wanted the silence away from the
meaningless of action. He turned to the headlines of the Bangkok Post
glancing at the cacophony of human relations.
He read that a very passive anti-war demonstration had occurred in
Pattaya. 10,000 Thai Moslems had prayed for peace. Well, he thought, it
was certainly gentler than placards and banners outside the American
Embassy in Bangkok, equating Bush as Satan; however it was probably
less effective. Was the God who allowed thousands of people to be
incinerated in fire and melting steel caring especially about the fate
of the Afghans from a meditation and a chant? He thought that it was no
wonder people tried to shut out larger issues than themselves and seek
comfort in the personal domain of their petty lives. He turned away
from the newspaper. Four filthy boys came to him forcefully. They
wanted milk from his grocery bag. They wanted the same as what he was
drinking while reading the horror of the daily news. He gave part of
what he had but he didn’t want to give out the rest. He was already
becoming coarse in his luck and he knew that he was guilty for
providing them with a nominal gratuity and shooing them away. He went
inside the building, looked for more food and magazines to take with
him on his trip, and then entered the train.
When the train began to move he went into a corridor connecting two
cars and rinsed his face in the sink. He looked into the mirror. Even
his reflection seemed different. His eyebrows seemed more bristly and
masculine. He wasn’t Jatuporn any longer. A good son must join the
monastery for a while to fulfill his mother’s wish to see her son take
on such holy head-shaven rites. A good son must fund the livelihood of
his middle-aged parents who wanted to be free from the hardship of
work. A good son must renovate and extend the house of his elderly
parents. A scenario of filial loyalty to serve the parents’ wishes
abounded in Thais’ simplistic notions of “good” behavior but tragedy
had freed him from it. Then abuse disabused him of fraternal loyalties.
Now he would be educated and find new compounds in his sunrises and
sunsets.
A train officer asked him to get his luggage out of the way of the
aisle. Jatupon put his suitcase onto the ceiling rack and sat down
watching the scenery go by-watching Bangkok zip past him and become the
vanishing point from which something different would emerge from his
experiences at Chaing Mai International School. He pulled the postcard
out of his pocket. He read the words again and again, “I got them to
allow me to come to Chaing Mai. I’ll transfer there. See you in a
week.” He smiled, slapped the postcard against his lower lip, and
watched the departure from Bangkok where the scenery became
increasingly green.
When he came home he opened the door onto plentiful space. His body
became stiff and cold. He needed to give directives to his legs in
order to move. The movements of his splayed legs when he walked were
like parting ice cycles even though the furnace was operating and it
was warm inside his apartment. Nearly everything movable by two hands
was gone, as well as most that would have required an additional mover.
Only the heaviest things remained although clavicles of hangers dangled
from the bedroom closet and pots and pans were loyal and steadfast. The
sofa remained. It had been difficult to get in. It was no wonder that
it hadn’t been budged. His socks and underwear had been knocked out of
the dresser before it was taken. He sighed. His canvases were gone and
from them his new leitmotif that was maturing beyond Patpong whores in
Bangkok to something more thoughtful and original. True, most of those
canvases had been of her so she must have thought that she was entitled
to them as well. She was the model and more who was seeking justice, he
told himself, and justice was equity. He hadn’t paid her so she was
seeking compensation. All relationships were a contract. All contracts
were based upon the two parties gaining some entitlement from the
agreement. Was there nothing better than this, he asked himself. There
wasn’t. He had thought that he was helping her, that he was
enlightening her, and that he was involved with her. A tear rolled down
his cheek. She thought that she was entitled to the canvasses too, he
repeatedly thought. She thought she was entitled to it all. Then, for a
second, his attitude changed about the stolen paintings and he was glad
that, at least, she had cared enough to take them. Then he knew that
she would shake sentiment from them no different than tossing out the
contents of his clothing from the dresser. She would sell even those
portraits of herself wherever she could.
He backed against an empty wall and slid down it squatting like a dog
ready to defecate. Then he pulled into himself in a fetal position. He
was Jatupon in his puddle of blood yearning for the love of the
violator. If love was mixing oneself into someone like vodka and cola,
he loved her. If it was a child crying over the loss of his favorite
toy, he was feeling that. Should a Thai newspaper reporter get a look
at him now, he thought, the nonchalant seducer of the souls of Patpong
girls would seem to him as a fraud. The reporter would be disillusioned
that this young man championed for his bit of hedonism had been an
illusion. His head throbbed. He needed love from anyone, sex with a
stranger, anything that would stop the pain in his head. With
difficulty he slowly removed his winter coat and gloves with the
awkwardness of a child.
Love, glue, or cocaine-it was all the same. It was all molecules of
smell and taste. It was a vertiginous freedom and insobriety of action
exempt of logic. It was the personal adventure in a world of impersonal
actions. It was admiring certain characteristics that were lacking in
oneself and it sometimes contained some degree of friendship and caring
or wanting to be cared about. Maybe it was a vulnerability of a human’s
weaker domain that wanted to merge with another being to seem to
himself as if he were less petty than what he really was or to record
himself permanently in the thoughts of another being.
It was all gone including those canvasses on French Quebec mannequins.
His evolution as an artist had been stunted. He wanted to cry but
beyond that one tear there was nothing. All he could do was moan and
pick up the telephone. He needed a connection. He needed Noppawan. Her
sister answered. “Nawin,” she said nervously, “she moved. She got a
different teaching position. She wanted a change. She doesn’t want to
see you-I’m not really sure why and I don’t think she means it
permanently. Well, I do understand why. She’s moving on. I don’t think
that she sees it as much of a marriage. Surely you understand that
point. I like you but—” He clicked off the telephone. He couldn’t help
himself. The void was sucking him into its black hole. He wanted to lie
on his bed. He was thankful to still have one. He wanted Kazem to
materialize and to copulate with him on that bed. He remembered then,
long ago, having his thoughts in a black hole and doubting if Kazem’s
love was real, seeing the abstraction of love in colors and design like
cubism, and how hungry he was in love with Kazem especially when
doubting that love. Nothing had changed. He loved Porn and Piggy each
in their own way as desperate as a clinging salamander in the rain.
He called Thai information. He asked the operator to search for Suthep,
the youngest and the one closest to his sympathies. At least he used to
be. Then he had her search for Kazem and even Kumpee. None of the three
had phone connections in their names. His aunt, if she were still
living, would be married to someone else. How would he be able to find
her again in this vast and mutable cosmos? He wouldn’t. The operator
gave him the number of Amorn Tuwayanonde. Maybe it was the same one
whom he had sometimes begged and played with as a boy-maybe the same
one who had grabbed his shoe instead of the ankle causing his dangling
body to fall from the window and into the warehouse triggering off the
burglar alarm. He dialed the number. A man answered. Nawin did not know
what to say so he hung up the telephone. The one he really wanted to
connect with was his uncle and he was dead. And yet they hadn’t really
had a relationship. It was strange that the man had paid for all of his
tuition and stay at the international school, all undergraduate and
graduate expenses, and yet had remained a stranger. He had been the
man’s son, in a way, and outside a couple times of staying at his home,
during Songkran, he had not known him. When he died he did not inherit
anything. He didn’t even want or expect anything. He was grateful for
the educational transformation that had been bestowed unto him. What
happened to the man’s money was anyone’s guess.
If only he could commune with him somehow to again thank him it would
solidify a meaningful connection in his barren heart. The cards
congratulating him on his first art exhibition at the art museum at
Silpakorn University and later, the temporary exhibit at the National
Gallery showed that he must have cared about him. He must have been
proud of him. “Congratulations on the showing.” That was all they had
said. Nawin guessed that the man had read about him in the newspapers
and knew of the exhibits that way. It was all strange.
On his knees he scurried through his socks while discarding his
underwear in a pile. Most of those socks that she had littered on the
floor were folded into each other as mates, but not all. He felt inside
each sock and when he couldn’t find anything he would throw it into
that pile like a dead fish. Within the toes of one pair he pulled out
four plastic bags of cocaine. It was his stash for periods of loss and
he monitored what he took according to the dictates of his third of a
teaspoon rule for self-rations. The Nawin rule stated that once every
three months if an emergency arose requiring exhilaration or thrust
away from the void, then he might administer the prescription. Such was
his doctoral degree of addiction and from this philosophical islet
inundations from void and addiction could not take him away. He sat on
the unmovable sofa and snorted the cocaine from one of its wooden
armrests. He could feel it like a Thai massage over his entire body and
the insouciance it brought to his thoughts.
He put on his winter coat and gloves and got in a taxi. He told the
taxi driver to take him to a go-go bar called “Foxy’s.” He had been
there several times before. He watched women twisting their bodies
around poles as if each movement of being a woman was centered on
waxing the shiny phallus. Tissue paper probably enlarged their bosoms
but he didn’t care. He would eat the juicy fruit and its wrappings no
different than any nigger his melon. He wanted to relieve himself in
one or more of them. Lost, he wanted to be lead by the hallucinations
of his mind. When one who was on break said her hellos and sat down on
his lap, he put his paws on all parts of her body. She told him that he
was a “naughty boy” and asked him where he was from. He told her. She
said that she liked Asian men since they were so small. He told her
that he wasn’t small. “I’ve seen them before. They are itsy bitsy
small.” She used her fingers as a measurement. It wasn’t what he cared
to hear and although he wanted to pierce her with his lengthy sword, he
left in disgust. He walked further down the street to a male go-go bar
that he had never been in before although his wistful eyes had scanned
it numerous times in the past month.
When he entered young men from their angles of the platform were
pulling on their genitalia within dark frothy briefs of an opaque
translucency that made the movements of their genitalia obvious. He
watched and waited not understanding why it was erotic. He watched and
waited for the midnight all-legal fuck show. He was tempted to take
these sly masturbators by force until what little was rational in his
brain contrived a belief that he was shackled against the wall waiting
to be attacked by them. That portion of the brain said to him, “Even if
you were to get out of your shackles and fetters it would be bad
manners to attack these men before they come to attack you.” He watched
their contortionist-twisting and the surreal images on the stage became
more like flames and smoke. The why-the reason that the movements were
erotic—eluded him. The why-the reason-that flames and smoke plumes made
these adonises erotic in a spinning room of gnarling metallic walls was
a mystery.
He wasn’t sure if it was a dismembered part of a woman, a transvestite,
or something amorphous and alien, but lips in the sky spoke to him. “Do
you want to take one home, honey?”
“I want all of them,” he said. She laughed.
“Do you have that much money?” she asked.
“Maybe for one,” he said. “I need one to fuck me and my girlfriend
throughout the night.”
“That will be double the price, but well worth it. We’ll see to that.
Satisfaction guaranteed. What’s your girlfriend’s name, honey?” asked
the lips.
“Foxy’s,” he said.
“Foxy’s, like the girl go-go bar across the street?”
“I don’t know her name,” he told the lips.
“You don’t know your girlfriend’s name?” guffawed the lips.
“I never checked the birth certificate.”
“Never checked the birth certificate! What a crazy mother fucker you
are!” The lips laughed hysterically.
“Do you have paint and canvases?”
“Do I have what?”
“I need paint. I’ll paint the fuck show on the walls. I’m a famous
artist in Thailand. Don’t you know?”
“No, is that so?”
“I have to draw when the fuck show begins.”
The lips laughed hysterically. She coughed from choking on her own
saliva. “Wanting to pay in paint?” she asked.
“Wanting to paint a fuck show,” he said. He looked through her mouth.
He could see down her throat into her entrails. Her brain was where her
stomach should have been.
“Where to?” asked the taxi driver. The voice again seemed like one he
could vaguely recall. A boy who had been on top in the fuck show (a boy
18 or 19 who was a snowman with a bit of a French complexion) was
seated next to him. He remembered paying top Canadian dollars for this
boy.
“Just keep going.”
“You said that 15 minutes ago but I need a destination.”
“Foxy’s” he said.
“We passed that long ago. It was right across the street from where you
were at,” said the taxi driver through his gray balding scalp.
“Okay, just take us out of the city. Someplace rural.”
“Okay, I’m now turning on a highway going north.”
“Do you still want me with your girlfriend?” asked the boy.
“I was going to pair you up with a girl: voyeurism. I’ve had second
thoughts.” He kissed the boy on his lips. He wanted to drain him of all
liquids including his breath.
The boy pulled back his face to come up for breath. “Where are we
going?”
“I don’t know, really. Maybe we should go to a hotel. I guess we can’t
do it in the backseat here, off of a road somewhere.”
“Yeah, the back seat of a taxi thing wouldn’t be too comfortable for
anyone.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“There’s a sign pointing out a Best Western,” he told Nawin. “Can you
take us to that hotel?” the boy asked the taxi driver.
“Excuse me. Is that the decision? Best Western?” asked the taxi driver.
“Yes,” said Nawin.
Turning to Nawin he interjected, “You aren’t a psycho, cannibal, or
anything, are you?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” said Nawin. He chuckled. “Don’t worry. I won’t cut
you up into pieces. I’m harmless, and I hope the same is true of you.”
“Sure, most of the time,” said the boy as he yawned.
“Jatupon, don’t be shocked! Look at me in the rear view mirror. Face
your fears,” said the taxi driver. Jatupon looked up. He was startled
but he wasn’t horrified. He saw that the mosquito was in the old man’s
form.
“I made a merger,” said the mosquito. “I bought out the stock of his
blood. With controlling stock I am the head of the company. I control
all movements.” He laughed. “How do I look?”
Nawin did not know what to say. “My God, I haven’t seen you in 12
years, my boy. You’ve grown up. You have money and nice clothes. Who’d
ever think we’d meet again and in Montreal of all places.”
Nawin laughed bitterly “Don’t use that word, Jatupon, with me. Okay? I
hate that word. You didn’t need to emerge. My lessens about life are
all my own, now.”
“Can you face life without clinging to anything?”
“It is the way of the Buddha”
“But is it your way?”
“Sure, why not? If I choose so I can do anything. If I choose, I can
swat you out of existence.”
“The only friend you’ve ever had?”
“Sure, why not? Just like with a gnat.” He slapped him on the head and
the mosquito seemed to shrink.
“Please don’t. Who will drive you then if you get rid of me? You killed
my ancestors in your buckets of laundry soap and slapped them into your
palms like a sport. I think that is enough.”
“I can get into another cab if I choose. I can stop the coke if I
choose. I don’t need women or anybody least of all you. But you know,
you aren’t so bad. You certainly aren’t scary any longer. Maybe I’ll
let you stay.”
“Gee, thanks.” The mosquito paused for a moment. “Why do you have this
go-go boy in here? Who is this boy? “ he asked.
“Someone I’m ready to fuck”
“I gathered that; and that the tenor of the conversation had turned
against back seat liaisons. I’m just puzzled by these changeable sexual
patterns, Jatupon. Something’s not right in your head.”
“Listen! Don’t use that name with me or I’ll take you by the fucking
neck and smash your face against the windshield”
“Okay, Nawin, calm down.”
“For that matter, I could roll down the window and let you fly out and
drive myself. I have an international driver’s license. Nawin is a big
boy, now, Mosquito.” He guffawed at the pest and slapped him on the
head. The mosquito/man hissed and stuck out its fangs. “You watch
yourself. You are in forces over your head. You’re not even in control
of yourself. Why did you get married? Why did you bring Porn here? Why
am I and this boy with you now? What forces drive you?”
“Hunger.”
“Porn?”
“Hunger.”
“Noppawan?”
“Union.”
“Hunger again. Hunger for stability.”
“Okay, hunger again. Women are a turn on”
“Are they? And here you are with a boy, Jatupon.”
“The name’s Nawin,” he shouted. Then he calmed down and laughed at
himself. “Yeah, it’s Jatupon; and you’re right, here I am with a boy.”
He laughed again. “Variety is the spice of life. That is an American
aphorism, Mosquito; and Nawin here is a full blooded American born in
the states.”
“I don’t see a Best Western. How far out on this road do you want to
go?”
Nawin looked at the boy next to him who had fallen asleep. “He looks
like a child-a hurt child trying in sleep to just figure out how to
make sense out of his situation, survive and not sell himself out too
fully. I should be saving kids like this-even in Canada kids can be
trashed.”
“Will you save him before or after you fuck him?”
“Maybe I ought to just go home. This guy on top or bottom isn’t going
to stop me from hurting or from being hungry. It just propels me
quicker to the next hunger.” He smiled. “I think I can get a grip on me
completely. I really do. Having people plug up my pain is the glue that
I disgorge into my nostrils, the caulk and the repainting that hides
the broken facade. I don’t want to be a wrinkled black thing like you
and still picking up prostitutes. Piggy had the right idea. I might as
well start the habit sooner than later.”
“She’s left you. She’s gone now.”
“It’s okay. Maybe she needs some time to grow away from being a
Biadklang. Maybe she needs to get rid of my name completely. I can be
alone. I need a relationship with myself anyhow. Maybe I’ll see her
again and maybe not. Anyhow, there’s some Aristotle and Plato I want to
read-a textbook on tenebrism I need to get through for my Caravaggio
class. I’ll have to begin my doctoral thesis shortly.”
“Hollow ideas.”
“To the impetuousness of human feelings, hollow; but not to the mind.
There the theory of forms is sensed as eternal. Take me home. Drop this
kid off wherever he wants first.”