I’m all lost in the Supermarket
-The Clash

1.1

Obsession is the imprint of a signet ring but the ring has been lost or stolen. The imprint pressed into the hot wax of your mind never cools, never solidifies into a clear symbol. It is a constant source of warm agitation. This unfocused cipher sears like the brand of a royal slave.

There is absolutely no interest in finding the source of an obsession. That is the difference between fetish and obsession -one is a perpetual focus on someone or something. The other is an act, a desire to repeat an ultimate pleasure, a tasty Eucharist. There is no mystery to solve, only the repetition of the crime because fetish is serial. Obsession is eternal, transcending but never transcendent, looping.

I am obsessed.

White boys do nothing for me. If a white boy hits on me I enjoy the respite, a conversation without sexual tension because I am completely uninterested. If anything it provides me an opportunity to socially erect a hunter’s blind: I can be seen by any Asian in the bar talking to someone that doesn’t represent him, as if I am possibly democratic in my taste, so that when I do talk to them it will be based on pure interest and not race, not obsession.

They always ask. After just a few minutes of conversation, or maybe an hour, if I’ve gone with other Asians. They always ask and so much depends on my answer. They want to know if I see them or if I’ve simply filtered the room through my obsession and they wound up in the pan. My answer varies. Sometimes I lie. I have this long, egalitarian monologue about having dated a whole assortment of men, black, white, Asian, girls even, which is almost true, though I exaggerate the sincerity of my interest in the individual over looks or type. Sometimes, with enough whisky sours in me, I just say yes. Sometimes I ask them about their last three white boyfriends, just to let them know that, though we have different stops, we are traveling down the same line.

On the train I see the girl from my neighborhood again. Actually I always see her as she sees me. I like her haircut, similar close cut and bad bleach job, though too much gel pasting a thick curl to her forehead, like some comic book flapper. I hate the books she reads on the subway but I like it when I see her on the street. I like how she drags her laundry bag by the nylon string far behind her down the filthy sidewalk, like she’s carrying a decade of grudges to sling at last year’s faded cardboard Santa in the cracked window of the Duane Reade drugstore.

She gets off at Spring Street so I wait one more stop to get off. I’ve seen enough of her.

I get off at the Canal Street stop and walk around. I buy a cheap pair of sunglasses, haggling the vendor down five dollars because I’m living off credit cards, because this is the end of the month, the end of the world and he’ll need the money. And because I have to talk to someone, even if it’s a meaningless exchange. Even a meaningless exchange is still practice. Later I’ll practice on the bartender. After that I’ll be ready, possibly for a boy at Stag. I go for tourists.

I’m at Stag Bar early tonight. Tourists often come early as well, I reassure myself. They already went to the Empire State Building. They went to Macy’s. They are too suspicious to check their shopping bags at the coat check but after three Long Island Ice Teas they let me into their hotel room, let me turn them over, stamp their passport and ask how long are you planning to stay?

I see a tourist. Japanese in a business suit with a crisp Louis Vitton bag standing at attention beside his drink. I stand next to him without eye contact. He needs to get used to my presence so that when I speak it will seem natural, as if we had already spoken. I sit down next to him and tap out a cigarette, offer him the pack, he shyly shakes his head no, but doesn’t look away so we talk. I’m disappointed to find out he’s from San Francisco. He’s only in town for two nights on business. No accent; I can’t stand Asian Americans for that very distinction, Asian American, the halving, the either ready assimilation or the rebellion against removes something genuine, the very accent I require. I like tourists because they’re specifically looking for something local and duty free and I bleach my hair just for them. He’s from California. Most likely ABC, American Born Chinese, not Japanese (the Louis Vitton threw me off). He’s already drunk and leans on me as we talk. I order another drink, knowing if I go home with him this early I’ll be back here in two hours.

The tourist tells me he’s a lawyer and comes to New York all of the time, that this is his favorite bar, that the bartenders know him, that they are friends of his. I smile my encrypted smile, as in don’t tell me the bartender is your friend when he’s trapped behind that bar. He’s a shaved polar bear with a jock strap in a liquor bottle cage of ice, kept alive on tips, meaning he has to listen, smile, be polite, what I’m doing now for free. No, not actually free, I want to go back to your room with you, enlarge my collection of little hotel soaps after splitting your ass open while pinning you to the thin, cheap sheets by your sweaty forearms.

I don’t think I can do the tourist. He says too much I understand. I need to decipher, to dip into him and read a language I’ll never fully comprehend. I excuse myself to the bathroom and go to the upstairs bar.

Stag Bar is the largest bar in Chelsea. Dark, cruisy -a Chelsea staple. Always busy, I prefer weeknights. On the weekends they charge a cover. Besides, everyone goes out on the weekends. On the weekdays you get tourists winding up they’re trip, desperate for the encounter they’ve demurred over for five days. And the regulars. Guys who just go out compulsively, circling the large, horseshoe bar as if it were a racetrack. I know enough to just sit still, look bored, drink slow. I don’t want to slur at ten o’clock, when Stag has a change in shifts. The older, tired alcoholics with loosened ties and briefcases usually head home as the younger crowd comes in from the gym, showered, tight shirts, ready to dance.

The dark interior is wrapped in black tile, the illuminated bar surrounded by minimalist barstools, little metallic perches. The basement bar is cramped and muted. The bathrooms and coat check and payphones are all downstairs, leaving the upstairs more spacious, with a large dance floor and more elaborate lighting. The basement bar is supposed to offer an intimate atmosphere when really it’s just more utilitarian. The entire bar possesses the architecture of a bleak, subterranean airport. The dance floor a runway where interconnecting flights mingle while downstairs you get to business: piss, score whatever drug, cramped cruising baggage claim: take him home, peek inside and see if there’s anything you wished belonged to you.

Tuesday night is pretty dead. I usually meet my friend Cricket here on Thursdays. Both of us prefer to go out on the weeknights. We say that the weekend starts Thursday. We’ll go out every night, then Monday again, here, where Bloody Mary’s are half-price all night at the downstairs bar. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are usually good nights to sleep twelve hours or do laundry or whatever. Tonight I’m out because I went home and didn’t want to be home. Drinking too fast I’ll never make Stag’s late shift, so I decide to walk down to Eighth Street, grab something at Gray’s Papaya and walk around the West Village then come back.

I eat against the fence around the red brick library across from Gray’s Papaya. Two hotdogs and a coke for three dollars, plus the pretzels I ate at Stag, I should be able to keep drinking and not throw up at work tomorrow. It’s just late enough that the streets are filled with women who rushed home to change and are now back out, stomping toward restaurants with one-syllable names and menus without prices next to the entrée’s. They swarm past me as if I was an inanimate obstacle, a lamppost or mailbox. Self-absorption is on a galactic scale in this city. Once, while wading through the throng at Grand Central, I heard some graduate student tour guide explain that the celestial atlas impressed into the ceiling is actually backwards, stating that historians believe the architect had looked down at a map of the stars while sketching the design, rather than holding the map aloft for an accurate reference point. One of the tourists snapped a photograph of heaven as the graduate student repeated his spiel in Japanese.

I think the opposite is true, that Mr. Graduate Student and his historians had their sense of scale reversed. Grand Central is a microscope, a concave lens through which New York views the rest of the universe, looking down. One million pedestrians rush to work across the roof of the world every day, oblivious to the pinprick stars, motes of winking, florescent bacteria beneath their contempt.

1. 2

Back at Stag the crowd is thin. Nothing for me. I don’t feel like waiting for the dance floor to fill up so I decide to head up town, to the Next Bardo. I never go on a weekday. It’s one of my rules. I only go twice a month, one Friday and one Saturday, never back to back. Next Bardo is the only gay Asian dance club in the city and I don’t want to be a regular, a known quality. The Next Bardo is only busy on the weekends, when a swarm of young Asians, salted with Caucasian admirers, dance to top forty under Radio Shack strobe lights. Weeknights are sparsely populated with old rice queens and a few dissolute Asian prostitutes, all leaning over the railing as an Asian stripper gyrates around bad pop. With two levels, the bar by the entrance looking down on the dance floor, the hungrier of the weekday rice queens hold court, usually around a stripper on a plywood dais, feeding his white Calvin Klein underwear crumpled dollars, patting his crotch with each deposit.

Rice queens, mostly white men, some my age, many older. I despise the older ones. What they lack in looks and posture they have in money and real estate. My hatred toward the rice queens my age is more honest, sporting. Toward them I feel a jealousy on which I can stretch, exercise against, taking note of their appearance and style. The old men are both an obstacle and the low water mark of a calcium deficient descent I am still far from reaching.

I take the A train up to Columbus Circle, buy a forty ounce and walk across the park. It would have been quicker to take the N or the R train, but I’m trying to pace myself, if I arrive too early I will have to contend with the disdainful looks and whispered asides of the old queens ensconced at the bar. Without the benefit of a pretty stripper or the usual prostitutes to absorb their attention they’ll fall into a nearly scientific debate among themselves, racial gourmands comparing boys of various nationalities as connoisseurs would compare vintages of wine.

The park at night always seems cooler in temperature than the rest of the city. The blue shadows of the trees help keep the temperature down. I’m not afraid to cross the park at night, it’s the best way to finish my beer without getting a ticket, and I feel it’s relatively safe as long as I keep 59th Street in view. Besides, anyone you might come across will instinctually think you are as fucked up as they are and, hence, not want to fuck with you. I would never go into the park at night up by my neighborhood. At night the blue shadows of the north side of the park expand further, deeper, painting the park a more feral forest, indigo, enticing black boys with box cutters and perfect teeth to skate all night round and round burning shopping carts, no sound but the sweaty aria of rollerblades scraping broken concrete.

1.3

It’s maybe ten o’clock when I walk in. Every head turns, but I’m not appropriate game so they resume their conversations. The old men pull on their beers, a few have left their stools to lean against the railing in anticipation of the first go-go boy, just now about to go on. The Next Bardo is darker than Stag Bar, the drinks smaller, more expensive, served in plastic cups. I take a seat at the bar and order a whiskey sour. The only Asians are the night’s strippers, most already in their underwear, saddling barstools at the opposite end of the bar. They note my status as anomaly. They know every old man in the bar, but I am not a welcome distraction as much as an interloper, an unknown quality. The first sip I realize I’m too drunk. An aborted night as one addiction supercedes another. I’ll have two drinks, watch the go-go boys and go home.

Another drink. There’s a go-go boy in gyration downstairs but I’m too drunk to lean against the railing. A middle-aged man in a suit sits next to me. I give him my shoulder. Both elbows on the damp bar, my chin practically rests on my glass. The middle-aged man leaves. I make sure he doesn’t go to the bathroom so I can (I don’t want him to think I followed him in). At the urinal my piss ignites the smell of ammonia from the mothballs nesting in the corroded basin. The smell turns my head. At the urinal next to me is a young Asian guy. He’s not pissing, just standing there, dick out. It’s the tourist from Stag. You’re late, I say. Surprised, he drops a goofy, hammock grin at me, showing every tooth.

If he’s quiet, maybe we can do this.

We walk, staggering, weaving toward the 59th Street Bridge. Before we can catch a cab I search for a van or truck, something high enough to get behind. I have to piss again. Finding a tight space between two delivery vans I put my hands against the battered doors as if I were being arrested. He mock-frisks me, one hand on my belly, the other kneading my cock erect, causing my stream of piss to start in harsh spurts. He acts as if my dick is an out-of-control firehouse and sprays the van’s bumper wildly. I push off the doors so I don’t get wet, propelling backwards into his laughing embrace, pissing my lap as his mouth swallows my ear. We collapse onto the other bumper. The universe rapidly compresses until only the alley created by these two vans remains, hot from our bodies and breath. The tourist frees his own cock and begins humping my ass while jerking me off. I wipe up warm piss from my belly and smear it across my forehead. He guides my wet forefinger in his mouth, biting my knuckle as his cum jets up under my un-tucked shirt across my spine. I lay against him in the street between two parked cars, beating off as he continues to pant and lick my neck. Eyes closed, mouth open, my blue shadow burns white out onto the asphalt. I pull up my jeans and look around to see if anyone’s watching. Our breathing slows, inflating the world back into an immense, unnecessary space, the heat between us cools, replaced by the artificial light of his cigarette. I light one too, twin fireflies dance out of our dark mouths. We kiss. His tongue is sour with the brine of alcohol and urine. The space between cars is now too large for words. Heat dispelled, we are both cold -wet from bathing in each other but surely not cleansed. He tries to clutch my shoulder and kiss me again but I quickly rise and waive down a cab, overly conscious of the taste in my mouth, the wet smear up my back and across my stomach, a sweet and lonely cider from the midnight harvest of a rare crop.

1.4

I wake up unfinished.

I’m that famous portrait of George Washington. The head is there, but on a pillar of negative, shoulders eaten by white space. A rude new live form, groping, unnamed. I smoke a Marlboro Light when I wake up. Coffee’s required, but what brand? (Café Bustelo). Pouring definition into myself, inhaling identity usually I can fill out the white spaces. Not this morning. I can’t breathe through my nose. In the shower I cough up thick tendrils of snot encapsulating meaty dots of black blood. My dick and calves hurt. There is no headache, however. My skull is a piece of china separated from the set, worthless when alone. Tylenol Extra Strength, another name brand, washed down with tap water. Some of the whiteness filters away. I need more to fill out the portrait. I have to walk down the same street and eat at the same diner. Buy cigarettes and newspaper at the usual stand. God. Hopefully I will be recognized by someone who knows me, someone who will use my name and loudly invoke the colored brush strokes that are me, mine. This will happen at work. Someone will say my name and begin the ritual of existence, say my name as an incantation to relax me, fill me and calm me. By lunch I’ll have gathered enough sense of self to notice that I am wearing the same pants I had on last night, a slug’s trail of semen smears the knee.

A suicidal work ethic pervades this office. Rumors of massive severance pay have gained a sexual allure. When I hear the sum of $15,000, purportedly given last year to some minor homunculus in IT to slouch out the building I began to drool as much as the project managers. I imagine a sandbox of cocaine, volleyball net strung across, guarded by naked Filipino referees, diamond whistles bouncing off their shiny chests. I can’t count above fifteen thousand any more, the daydream figure is so alluring as to act as roadblock to any other fantasy (lottery, inheritance). The office gossip is a constant whirlwind of excited paranoia -the eye of the storm is centered on who will be fired next. Everyone comes in late and works at a perpetually slower pace. Two-hour lunches are spent mulling over fifteen-thousand dollar shopping sprees, renovated kitchens and hair transplants.

I temped here for a year before I was awarded fulltime status. I didn’t even know the name of the company those first few months. I wasn’t even sure of the nature of our business, just that I had found daytime refuge in an obvious labyrinth of cubicles walled off with cardboard boxes filed with files and loose papers. I sign things and make calls and photocopy everything and stretch two hours of work into eight. I make the right noises to the right people and cruise the Internet when no one’s looking, take two-hour lunches where I and anyone from among the small battalion of personal assistants shop, breathlessly discuss fifteen thousand reasons why we need, have to have, a new shirt from the French Connection.

These boys have whittled my tongue. Now I often speak without articles. Hand me scissors. Let’s go lunch. My dexterity and speed with chopsticks has increased to the point where I could do ice sculpture. I have gained an encyclopedic knowledge of Hong Kong movies as well. My film collection is segregated by leading man -if the lead and supporting actor are both favorites, I make a judgment call. Very few of my videos are not Chinese. The exceptions are mostly Japanese. These I’ve borrowed from the library and copied. I love Tetsuo: Iron Man, of course, the sequel not so much. The actor/director Beat Takeshi is another matter. A middle-aged Japanese Clint Eastwood, he plays either a cop driven over the edge or a Yakusa driven over the edge, the edge usually not too far away. Some of his characters are gay, though I would probably seek out his films anyway. He kills the cutest guys.

1.5

My only friend outside acquaintances at work is Cricket. We met, of course, at Stag. As diminutive and frenetic as his nickname implies, Cricket was a one-night stand that I ran into again at Stag the following night. Rather than adopt the droll, Chelsea stance of ignoring each other we immediately laughed and hit the dance floor. Whatever sexual chemistry existed the night before had exhausted, left us friends. We’ve been in the clubs ever since. Cricket is Filipino and has been in the city since a child, where his petite frame, humming with frenetic energy, accented by huge, bug-eyed black-framed glasses with green-tinted lenses, earned him his nickname. Cricket taught me how to shop on a temp’s salary, Daffy’s, not Macy’s, Century 21 on Saturday, never during the week. He cut me my first line of coke. He’s resigned to the fact that I will never have his natural sense of style, but was willing to be seen with me after the appropriate number of shopping excursions (he was appalled that I only owned three pairs of shoes). If we can’t pick anyone up and, too wired to sleep after the clubs close, we crash at his studio in Woodside and watch movies while plowing through powdered donuts and gallon jugs of orange juice. His apartment is literally a closet, for he has installed clothing racks on every wall, alphabetized first by color, then designer or store. Cricket stated firmly that once married he would have a walk-in closet twice this size. When I suggested that he could automate it to revolve like at the dry-cleaners, he looked at me silently, as if recognizing in me someone who could finally appreciate the totality of his vision. Then and there our bond became final.

My apartment is a custom’s house of entropy. I’m betting the third law of thermal dynamics didn’t really fully materialize until the advent of New York City, where the murk of coverless paperbacks and discarded furniture move in a galactic swirl from curb to apartment to curb to apartment toward the black hole of the Fresh Kills landfill. Hope for eternity compacts somewhere in Staten Island. Great. I’ve pulled all of my furniture off the street -a brutalized elementary school desk, the hideous couch. On the wall a Parker Brothers patented Ouija board still potent with the cosmic dust of a thousand and one credit card chopped lines of coke. My bookshelves are stuffed with paperbacks and bootlegged videotapes. In the bathroom there are piles of Cricket’s second-hand fashion magazines. My bed is surrounded by dirty clothes. Mounds of jeans and shirts greased with the fingerprints of a night out, a night living, desperate, sweaty proof that I am alive, too busy to clean, make order. So really my apartment is the vacuum swirling around a mass of entropy. I am even less than I thought. The wind in the whorl and not the shell itself.

1.6

Scoring drugs at Port Authority is so touristy, but I go with Cricket for the flavor and Port Authority tastes like a stale Menthol cigarette, all exaggerated artificiality, the opposite of health. A honeycomb of exasperation where the beleaguered masses are coughed out of tinfoil buses and onto the streets, a place where the disoriented and newly immigrated are not yearning to be free so much as safe. Port Authority symbolizes the right to make the wrong decisions about life and account for them in public, so numerous are the homeless prophets, bored hookers and, of course, petty drug dealers. Another thing I learned from Cricket was how to buy weed on Eighth Avenue. You have to pick the one guy who just couldn’t physically be an undercover cop, someone too short, maybe cross-eyed or with major missing teeth. If you can luck out and get a combination of disabilities or something with a limp, even better. The little bags of weed they slip you after a brisk flurry of haggling and street-wise showmanship contain brown, weak pot or intense bud which leads you to seek out that same magic-bearing mulatto midget again and again, hoping for near impossible consistency on streets that flow with more veracity than any river, the silt in the doorways and on curbs the opposite of rich soil. Here only toxicity survives.

Harder shit is more easily procured, with reliable dealers, office hours and strict codes of conduct. For ecstasy and K we go to certain clubs where, at a certain hour, nondescript young men, the kind of guys you would expect to work at Kinko’s, appear and are immediately besieged by club kids replicating the floor of the Stock Exchange with all the grand-mal urgency of a Bull market. For coke we go to Cherry. That’s the name of a woman, not a bar, though she has the extensive clientele most bars crave, and a few of which wearily allow her presence, knowing that, though we may clog their bathrooms, we’ll also buy drinks as we await her arrival. A baby-faced, rotund woman, Cherry is of indeterminable age and race. When she smiles she looks twenty, when she frowns, forty. And it’s never good when she frowns at you. Drug dealers shake everyone’s hand twice. She instinctively knows the Braille of two twenties and a ten- and in your handshake good-bye will palm back the necessary baggie. I normally go with Cricket when we score, though he’s introduced me enough times for my face to take hold in her memory, so I’m free to approach her alone.

1.7

You would think someone with my obsession would love Chinatown but I don’t. There is a mystery to Chinatown that I can’t penetrate. An exposed ant colony that shuns the facile grid of Midtown and Chelsea, the streets lack the relaxed meandering of the Village. Unreadable signs hack at the limited sky between buildings. There are no bars, no places for me to connect. For months I was sure that there must be something, an underground crossroads in a basement bar, some tearoom where I could ease into the chaotic life of Chinatown. And I looked hard. I’d get off the subway at Canal and walk over to Mott, then down into the serpentine streets but it seemed I was always moving against the human tide. My only reprieve, shirtless youths playing handball in Roosevelt Park, always pushing hair out of their eyes, the lone blond streak in their bangs giving them that tiger menace. I’ve checked numerous guidebooks, questioning boys at the Next Bardo about where they go in Chinatown and they always looked puzzled. The answer was always the same, I come here. Stated so obviously, as to denigrate the question and propose another. Why, what are you looking for?

More. Would you believe I’m looking for even more?

One day after work I found a small, moldy karaoke bar. At one end of the bar a huddle of lawyers from the nearby courthouses worked their cigars and beers while at the other end two ancient Chinese men sat, hands folded identically across the knobs of their canes. They sat and watched the lawyers as the heads on their untouched pints silently dissipated. At first I thought they were regulars, stoically annoyed at their peaceful afternoon interrupted by drunken white devils. I sat and had a drink, thinking to kill a few hours before heading over to Stag Bar, though I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to have more than one drink here, this was not the crossroads I sought. The old man on the left stroked a long, gnarled strand of hair, thick as straw, which hung from a mole on his cheek. The old man on the right opened the tired leather satchel resting in his lap, removed a Chinese newspaper and spread it before him on the bar. The sour-faced bartender dried glasses with a greasy rag. As he finished and began to place the glasses beneath the bar, in one deft movement he removed a fat, worn envelope from his apron and placed it squarely in the seam of the newspaper. The old men drained their glasses in unison. The one on the right closed the newspaper, placed it back in the satchel and both left, bent over their canes, pushing the door open with such an utter lack of strength that the chimes above its hinge didn’t sound.

Business inside business, homes inside businesses inside homes. When you enter a restaurant in Chinatown, no matter if you were born and raised in Manhattan, if you’re not Chinese you’re a tourist. You are foreign and can only comprehend as much as a guest, a customer, there is no deeper connection available, no crossroads but a maze of overlapping bypasses without exits. No maps, just menus.

1.8

Rarely, I hang out at Caterpillar. Typical among old-school New York gay bars, the shape of your usual pub, everything brass and wood, with a few rainbow flags tossed around. The exception is karaoke, weekends in the basement. Down a spiral staircase, in a small, dark brick basement—in the corner a stage, cases of beer, covered in sheets, serve as tables, a small militia of Chinese and Filipino boys studiously review the song lists while sipping beer from bottles made luminous jade by the light of an omnipotent mirror ball. Only a few blocks from the Next Bardo, it was my habit to go to Caterpillar first (better bathrooms), have my first drink, do a few bumps, letting Bardo fill up before heading over. However, it’s worth sticking around the last Sunday of every month, when the basement fills up with drag queens, dead-set on putting on a full-length karaoke version of Ms. Saigon, replete with a little toy helicopter hung above the stage. The boys are quite serious as this is a contest. Whoever receives the most applause gets a green card.

The difference between Caterpillar and the Next Bardo is one of intent. One is a bar, the other a club. Caterpillar has a very Upper East Side atmosphere. The crowd is closed, impenetrable, while the Next Bardo is breakneck cruising. At Caterpillar the bartenders wear white dress shirts with neat bow ties. At the Next Bardo, briefs or G-strings. Each establishment has its allegiance as well. Very few Asians go to both, even though just a few blocks separate them. The rice queens are loyal as well, and can be considered separate species. At Caterpillar they are better dressed, or at least they dress their age, as taste is linked cordially to the display of wealth, though I’m dying to see one of those old queens in an ascot. They don’t cruise at Caterpillar. They wait, gargling their drinks over just how bad the Hamptons have become, and, as boys emerge from the basement, those so inclined may stand next to one of the older gentlemen and await the offer of a drink. This subtly solicitous behavior may not equal prostitution -some boys just want a shopping spree the next morning. There are those at Caterpillar, however, who charge. The difference between them and the Bardo boys who go for money is that they take credit cards.

Of the prostitutes that frequent Caterpillar my favorite are the adorable Pallbearers. Twin Chinese gym-bunnies, they dress identically -same cell-phones, which often ring in eerie unison, hair spiked in replicated blades. They pack their triangular torsos in matching clean black DKNY muscle shirts. Their clientele consists solely of the most fragile and dusty of the old rice queens that haunt the bars. Either they’ve pegged these old men as easy marks, those likely to pay the most, or, as I assume, men of deflated impotence who just want company and not sex, something from vivid life that will sleep over and in the morning, do one hundred push-ups in their orientalized apartments: rice-mat wall-hangings, bonsai on the coffee table, less a museum of their obsession than trinket offerings to their one-night stands and rentboys. These apartments are faux-temples of a reverse veneration, meant not to worship idols so much as idolize the worshipped.

At both establishments there is also the cult of untouchables awaiting similar perfection: sticky chink Narcissus gazing into a Martini glass of vodka and Blue Curacao the color and sweetness of Windex. They never smile and though physically and stylistically similar in flawlessness to the Pallbearers, they don’t see their looks as a commodity, just a natural superiority. I’m better suited for those as yet unaware of their beauty -fresh off the boat, for whom Armani and Kenneth Cole are foreign gods who have yet to demand cash tribute in exchange for black, imitation leather androgyny. These boys, hungry for love but knowing only the language of sex, will settle for that and directions to the subway in the morning. When I say fresh off the boat, I mean raw, the ones who swam to shore. I want to smell diesel fuel while picking seaweed out their hair. That’s my aphrodisiac.

Weekend. Back at the Next Bardo. I get there a little before eleven o’clock, to save two dollars on admission. The place is nearly empty. I sit at the bar and order a whiskey sour. Jason #2 sits next to me and we talk for a bit. He said he was waiting for a friend and that they were going to the Pound. He invites me along but I say no, I didn’t want to pay another cover. He and I had met one of the first times I came to the Next Bardo. Tall and thin, he has that perfect blend of overloaded fashion that only the Japanese can get away with, except he’s not Japanese. I guess he’s my type except his voice, his completely American fag diction, a gross lisp and weird valley girl accent. I guess he’s from California. I call him Jason #2 because I’ve already dated a guy named Jason. Actually, I’ve fucked a lot of guys named Jason. For some reason it’s a popular name. Guys get off the plane at JFK leaving their given names behind for something Western, something Hollywood, crisp as a new pair of jeans. We talk for a bit. To him I’m a familiar face, someone he can throw a loud hello at, asserting his territorial right to be here and set himself apart from the lonely souls. Jason #2 is my tour guide to the Next Bardo. He gives me the gossip of the bar, which bartenders are actually straight (usually the ones who flirt the most, same at Stag), points out some of the stranger old rice queens and describes their sexual habits as if hearsay and not personal experience. Last year Jason #2 taught me the lexicon of the Next Bardo. Sticky rice: Asians who are into Asians. Potato queens are Asians who like white guys. Won Ton are Chinese guys, Sushi Japanese, Kim Chi Korean.

So far it’s dead. Jason #2 and I are on our second drinks. I hope his friend arrives soon. Most of the old men have gone home. A few Asian boys drop quarters in video games. Some have tentatively begun to dance while a discouraged go-go boy takes the stage. Jason #2 looks around and loudly declares, it’s a fucking potato famine in here.

Well, good for me, I think. Cricket and I scored at Salo earlier, but I don’t want to do a bump until Jason #2 leaves. We’ve developed a sixth sense when it comes to Cherry and her sporadic perch. Though she does have appointed hours on certain nights, these are liberally maintained, as no drug dealer wants to be too reliable, for reliable means predictable, inviting heat. Her apparent randomness on weeknights has been penetrated by our combined psychic ability, honed by addiction, driven to beat the cover charge at Stag Bar and the Next Bardo. We strive for accuracy because waiting at Salo is depressing; the longer the wait the higher the risk of possible exposure to botulism or creepy conversation. Typically we split up after we score, I head uptown to the Next Bardo, Cricket rides with me for a few stops to go to the Pound, where he’ll enhance the blow with ecstasy, maintain the high with K, level it off with gin and tonics, hoping to fall into the arms of a sweaty Chelsea boy (Cricket won’t go home with anyone who lives in an outer borough, excepting Williamsburg, and then only the chic first two stops on the L train). My needs are different but no less specific. I don’t go to the Pound because it’s too big, too much of an event to meet anyone, and boys on ecstasy are unreliable, flighty. The bathhouses don’t interest me because none of them have an assured Asian contingent. Cricket doesn’t go because he’s afraid he’ll get Athlete’s Foot. And Chelsea clubs are manikin factories. We have Stag Bar, which is pure Chelsea but infamous enough to attract tourists, large enough that, even among the local clientele, there’s a guaranteed Asian presence. Cricket never comes to the Next Bardo with me. He doesn’t like other Asians, making the weak joke that it feels like a family reunion when really it’s a matter of focus. He wants his ass carved by a Chelsea boy and any bar above 23rd Street is a waste of time, practically Jersey.

Salo is one of those bars not listed in the phonebook. Salo doesn’t have a phone. Caught between gigantic warehouses in the middle of the Meatpacking district, Salo is one of those places where hustlers and drug addicts are nurtured, growing the necessary scales to survive the toxicity of Port Authority and Eleventh Avenue. Negatives define Salo. No phone. It doesn’t have a liquor license. No Dancing signs are posted everywhere. The clientele is neither gay nor straight. Salo only serves flat soda and rancid coffee. Every drink is five dollars. The floor underneath the tables is sticky with what I can only imagine is the placenta of excess, spilt liquor, cum and vomit. There’s a rarely manned pool table with mange in the corner. Without a liquor license they can stay open as long as they like which usually means opening at eleven, closing around noon. Five dollars gets you in. Cherry has a table here. So do a few hustlers pushed out of Time Square by Disney, still cute enough to limit their clientele, though in a few years or months they’ll be on the street, any passerby a potential trick. There are other people who sell other things here, but it is best not to know them. We never stay past half an hour, just long enough to shake Cherry’s hand (twice), do a bump in the bathroom, finish a soupy coke, another bump, then out past those customers who aren’t going to leave for another ten or twelve hours, and if they left early wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.

Jason #2 gives me one of those ghetto half-hug handshakes and tells me he’s got to run meet friends at the Pound. Sure. Finally. I hit a bathroom stall before Jason #2’s barstool stops spinning.

Back at the bar the music sounds better, fills the room. Only five minutes in the bathroom and suddenly more boys have crowded into the club. Their dancing is less tentative as alcohol and sweat dilute inhibition. I order another whiskey sour and lean against the railing; I recognize some of the faces, regulars, boys I hope don’t recognize me. The go-go boy is more comfortable now that the dance floor is more crowded. He straddles a silk cord and threads it through his nipple ring, toweling off to the beat. No smile, that universal look of boredom all strippers adopt when the erotic becomes rote. In the strobe light he appears to be frozen in a swan dive, as if falling in mid-air. The silk cord unravels in his hand.

I go downstairs and sit with my head next to one of the speakers until the bass has made my head numb. Detour to the bathroom. Another drink, a boy at the bar looks at me. I return his stare hard. He doesn’t move, but he doesn’t look away. I go to the edge of the dance floor, looking over my shoulder, so he knows to follow. He stands next to me and together we survey the crowd -predominantly Asian, a few Asian guys with their white boy friends, boys in white wife-beater shirts accentuating gym-derived muscles, cocaine enhanced waists. I tap my guy on the shoulder and nod toward the dance floor. He smiles, we slink in between the throbbing couples.

I play it casual, minimal eye contact. No touching. Let him move in. He does, casually hooking his thumbs into my belt loops. We draw close. I kiss his cheek and realize he’s wearing foundation. It’s like licking a chalkboard. Tasting his disguise, I inspect his body with my fingers, dropping my grip from his rounded shoulders down thin ribs to a tired gut straining against a too tight t-shirt. Heavy bangs hang over a receding hairline. Late forties, possibly early fifties. Very ABC. Most definitely Caucasian blood corrupts the usually delayed symptoms of aging that Asians seemingly enjoy. Bad blood breaking out of the skin, emerging as crow’s feet, mushrooming gardens of premature liver spots, cultivated, no doubt, by the ghosts of angry ancestors who probably encouraged his disgraceful homosexuality as the only suitable way to insure the end to a poisoned lineage. Playing the Boy, an Asian Puck, this granny, who could have a veritable husband among the old queens at the bar. Only he wants what I want and have. Not youth, that’s merely his garland. He wants play. He wants back in and on the dance floor, into the moment, my moment, highlighted by the red and black sunspots detonating behind my eyes as I lick the residue of cocaine from my wrist while waving bye-bye to my dusty chameleon suitor. I head toward the bathroom.

My little bag is empty, dust, so I split it at the seams, lick that, too, flushing the toilet for good measure though if it’s this crowded in the bathroom I’m sure most of us are doing the same thing. I walk out and realize that suddenly the night is over. The crowd has thinned. The dance floor is more like a doctor’s waiting room. Those old rice queens capable of staying up this late swoop down to pick up the boys who are purposefully too drunk to care who they go home with. Granny follows me as I circle the bar to see what the Draculas have left. I think to page Cricket and have him meet me at Salo, but I only have ten dollars left. Cab fare. On the ride home I let my head hang out the window so the buildings roll by fast and luminous, lonely keys on a loose piano.

1.9

Last year I almost had a boyfriend. Most of the guys I pick up at the Next Bardo play the typical emotional trump of a one-night stand. Pulling on jeans they frisk themselves: keys, wallet in place, out the door while I’m in the shower or a kiss good-bye on my forehead while I’m half asleep, before I can pick the whiskey-spun cobweb from my brain. These are the better-looking boys, young professionals, glasses folded neatly on my nightstand, the kind of boys who not only insist on a condom but, under the pretext of offering me a better fit, pull their ass open with their fingers so as to discreetly verify I had put one on or hadn’t taken it off. Boys that stumble out, red-skulled, leaving one sock behind, boys that couldn’t see past five hours in my bed would appear at Caterpillar the following weekend on the arm of some distinguished older man, black turtleneck meeting styled white hair in the very seal of refinement. They’ll stay on that arm for months, years, if invited, though not for the same reasons as the yet-to-unionize Pallbearers. There they hang within an inequality that is the shade of comfort. Leaving me in my bed, they escape the potential volatility of dating someone their own age, someone who’s expectations are not sifted through pious maturity, where everything passionate and unreasonable is strained out, leaving the roles of unguarded apprentice, circumspect saint. Stay with me and there is only risk, the risk of mutual attraction. Mutual everything. And there is potentially love, and love defined on the flint of such young bones is just as brittle, if not more, so wanting in the cut. I know this from staying in the shower too long, washing my hair twice or just leaning my forehead against the tiled bank of steam, hoping I’ve given you enough time to leave, knowing I’m not up to the challenge, either. One-night stands. One-way tickets. Both are about departure, not arrival.

Except Jason #1. Jason stayed. I couldn’t wake him up, actually. I’d wanted to see the new Beat Takeshi film playing in the Village that afternoon and had showered, turned the TV on loud and waited. I went back to bed to whisper hints. He whispered arousal and pulled my hands around his waist. He never once opened his eyes. When I woke up again it was dark out. We ordered Chinese food and, still wrapped in blankets, watched a movie on TV. There was half a bottle of cheap table wine in the fridge and we fucked again before the movie was over.

A week later I called Cricket and told him I was in love. Saying I was in love was an incantation, a spell I could cast on myself, Jason the cauldron of ingredients -his smell and accent, his dance and shuffling walk, the sweaters he wore always too small, high on his forearms, accentuating the dark lines of hair above his wrists. He was a waiter at an expensive, chic Indonesian restaurant in Greenwich Village, another one of those places with a one-syllable name. He demanded I eat dinner there every night he worked. Come before six. Before six you eat free, he declared, stamping his foot as exclamation point. Jason would bring me whatever he thought suited me, a salad one night, curry something the next. He watched my tongue when I talked, quietly mouthing my syntax, memorizing my opinions on fashion I had adopted from Cricket only months before. Gay life in Bali intrigued me, as did his travels in Asia, especially the bathhouses in Bangkok. I found some of his other stories dubious, tigers roaming his village at night, aunts taken by witch hunters, though I quickly learned not to question these stories (or suggest uncles make good witch hunters) for fear of inciting an hour-long pout or the retraction of the following evening’s six-o’clock dinner. He told me Asian Muslims (of which he was one) prefer not to suck cock, but not to worry, some things in life gay cannot avoid. He was the first person I’d met in New York to point out that I do not discuss my past, my childhood, my anything other than next weekend in comparison to the last, already half forgotten Saturday night.

Jason had found bathhouse sex immensely gratifying. He had a nonchalant eroticism attached to numbers and had countless stories. The more men he had in one night the better the night. I was jealous of his numbers, the seemingly never-ending exponential number of tricks. Sure that there was an attainable bliss somewhere behind the decimal point in the π of his sexual trysts, I felt that maybe he had already attained what I was looking for, a more instinctual regard for sex, an equality among thirsts. He had done what I wanted to do: washed the wound of appetite in a relentless waterfall of sweat and semen. What I mistook in him for apathy was really calm.

He sensed that my jealousy was bartered off my own desire. In his restaurant he saw my eyes follow some of the other wait staff. At night in bed I would tell him I loved him and he would say, with your lips, not heart. For three months I had a hand to hold while walking down Eighth Avenue. One of the few times I went with Cricket to the Pound Jason was there with friends and I didn’t know it. He saw me, high, kissing another boy on the dance floor. He didn’t protest, he didn’t say anything. The next night I went to his restaurant and after I had finished my meal he handed me a bill, a first. Under the total he wrote Good-bye followed by a cheerful exclamation point.

Besides Jason #1 the closest I got to a boyfriend was Foun, my migratory lover. I could never track the internal seasons that brought him to my bed, nor was I sure if his migration was from other beds, just that I would get a call, I come over? I always said yes. He would stay for a night, usually two, never more than three, roosting on my couch, wrapped in a blanket eating Cheerios out the box while watching Cops or the news when I’d get home from work. He always covered his eyes with one hand during any scene of particular violence, shouting too mush, too mush at the screen. With a sheepish salute he would leave and I wouldn’t hear from him again for a few weeks. Thankfully his arrivals usually anticipated my next sexual drought.

We met at Stag Bar. A thin Thai boy, Foun had a tenuous grasp on English, the way you would hold an angry snake. He was weary, perturbed by his linguistic misunderstandings, though he was able to twist and wind certain phrases to his own serpentine meaning. If I asked, Did have a car in Bangkok, he would reply Why not? If I asked, Do you want to go to Stag Bar tonight? He’d answer Why not?—raising an eyebrow for additional skepticism. My annoyance at the constant repetition of this phrase was replaced by a dawning understanding that here was an entire philosophy, not a curt dismissal. I started to use the phrase at work. Are you going to the meeting? Why not? I would reply. My boss would nod, think for a minute and walk away with absolutely no idea whether I would be there or not. This existential gem allowed me to deflect every question without an answer. No one can respond in kind. Foun’s phrase was no mere circumnavigation. This was the axis of my life revealed in two words. I’m not sure if a question mark is really called for, it so reverberates as a declaration, a perfect blend of futility and confrontation.

However many lovers and tricks had fought over the mineral rights to his ass was immaterial. Foun himself wasn’t even a witness to the crimes perpetrated against his body, either unconscious or too high to stop whatever had wrecked his asshole. Mercifully he wasn’t that loose, rather it was the sight of the hole, that fleshy holocaust between his legs. Not that he was wounded, but there was the appearance of excavation, as if something had been pulled out, and indeed, his internal texture was that of moist gristle. I asked him how in the hell this happened. Ecstasy too mush, ecstasy too mush ecstasy he moaned, then laughed at the blurry memories of an amyl nitrite merry-go-round, reaching for the bright butterscotch brass ring, so warm and welcoming you want to make a fist and push your whole arm through.

Flipping him over revealed a wide, tremendous cock. Always hard, he wore two pairs of underwear at all times just to conceal this constant erection. Slightly bowlegged as well, I couldn’t help but wonder if his incessant hard-on possibly caused minor hernia. Yet everyone knows Asians have small dicks. Though you would think that the cliché “the exception proves the rule” is relative, when you’re lying facedown in bed with that poorly lubed exception up your ass it can fucking hurt.

Foun looked tenuous as well, as if the clothes he was wearing were just purchased or maybe borrowed. His hair was always disheveled, without direction, thick and dark as midnight grass. When he was silent, watching people at the clubs or watching television, he would pucker his lips in serious pout, as if he questioned the validity of everything in front of him. Sleeping, he would curl up into an almost fetal position, roughly pulling at me as if I were just another blanket, guaranteed warmth, an added layer of protection. If he doubted anything I said (which was often) he would hold his eyelid open owl-wide with his fingers and repeat what I said in a mocking tone.

Foun was tenuous, as if dreaming he awoke on an island of mirrored spires wrapped around every language but his own, and that, on any given night, were he to go to sleep again, he might wake up back home, mother in the kitchen, boiling the coins he’d brought home, still too hot to touch, too filthy to use, yet valuable hostility nonetheless.

1.10

After the Next Bardo a few days of recovery, a few days stealing sandwiches from the refrigerator in the employee kitchen, McDonalds at night until my check clears. Then back at Stag with Cricket, flush with enough cash to run another week, pick up last week’s dry-cleaning. We usually go every Thursday. I like Thursdays. Everyone who just can’t wait one fucking minute more for the weekend goes out Thursdays. After we get there they start charging a cover. That’s new. Fuck. My Thursday nights are blown. I’ve got to come up with a new plan.

Cricket leaves me after we have two Long Island Ice Teas each. He sees someone heading downstairs he thinks he met at the Pound last Saturday. Even if they hadn’t met, it’s a classic Chelsea line.

This slim Asian on the dance floor watches me as I chat with Cricket. I’ve seen him here before. I go up and start dancing with him. Ripped jeans low on his hips, dirty white t-shirt draped over the ghosts of tattoos, safety pin through bottom lip. Some small talk, bitch about the new cover charge. He’s Vietnamese, no gross display of interest. Then hand on hip. Letting go only to cup his ass with my other hand, we kiss. He lets go of my tongue and I get hard while he eats my neck. The cool sliver of metal feels as if it’s pushing through my flesh. We disengage for a moment as he pulls an unlabeled bottle of poppers from his pocket. We both take deep hits. Face back on my neck his saliva mingling with my blood, absorbed through my sweat-opened pores, pumping into my blood until I begin to dissolve. I have to put all of my weight on the ground to keep from being consumed. He moves back to my mouth but I miss his warmth on my neck, suddenly exposed, bruising like a bitten apple. Pushing his head back into the cradle of my neck I press my crotch against his. I can feel the knife of his cock through his jeans. I put my hands on his jeans and try to push his pants off his hips. Stopping me with strong hands on my wrists, he looks me in the eyes. We pull each other toward the door. In the cab we’re a tangle of limbs and intrepid kisses. Expertly playing his safety pin across my teeth, my mouth a black bucket catching sparks.

In bed I have him face down. I pull his jeans and underwear roughly down to his absurdly huge Doc Martin boots. One hand up his shirt I trace the prominent swells of his spine. Leaning in I use my foot to push his pants past his boots, counting his earrings with my tongue. His hair is spindly, sharp and unwashed. He moans and tries to roll over but I hold him down with both hands, all of my weight on him. In the dark what light seeps in from outside illuminates the twin goldfish tattoos swimming across each trapezius muscle. His struggling intensifies until I let go completely and start to back off the bed on my knees. He rolls over, reaches past me and toward his discarded jeans, pulls the poppers out of his pocket, takes a long, luxurious hit, then lays back on his stomach, breathing heavy, waiting. I catch the bottle before it rolls off the bed and breathe in the full chemical stench. The corners of the room darken, his goldfish wink languidly. Pulling my shirt over my head creates a void without oxygen, red and black sunspots and I almost fall over getting my pants and shoes off. Heart pounding, I drop on top him, teeth out. Trying to suck the marrow from the red striped straw of his spine, settling for slight, sharp cries I eat my way down into his hairless ass, waist so skinny my thumbs nearly touch as I grasp his middle and roughly flip him over. He exhales, says something in Vietnamese I stifle with a brutal kiss. Chin to chin, within his eyes an emptiness surfaces, buoyed by amyl nitrite, floating an internal dislocation that allows me (read anyone) to do what ever I (we, battering multitudes) wish. For this boy appropriate sex is a citizen’s arrest. Crash-landing on my back as he makes his move with an almost comical growl—pushes my knees to my chest—bites hard on my big toe to stab at my ass with his tough little dick. I can tell he’s not going to get in. No lube, no aim. I let him troll roughly around my ass before I calm him with a hand on his throat. Two slight squeezes and he collapses into my arms.

Waking up, not in bed but on the living room floor. At some point we kicked over a pile of books whose pages have curled in a pool of spilt beer. The ashtray had been turned over and the room’s overcast with the smell of damp cigarette butts. He’s gone. He did place a blanket off the bed over me before going. First things first I look for my wallet. It’s still in last night’s jeans. Money intact. I look for the pack of Marlboro Lights I bought before we came upstairs. It’s gone. Bastard. I have to be at work in twenty minutes. I open the windows wide, hoping to banish some of the wet cigarette smell while I’m in the shower.

 

Read Part 2 of Pacific Rimming in Velvet Mafia Issue #16

© 2005 Tom Cardamone - Contributor's Bio