Part 1 of Pacific Rimming appeared in Velvet Mafia Issue #15

I’m all lost in the Supermarket
-The Clash

2.1

At lunch a small clutch of the personal assistants and I skate down Fifth Avenue, shopping bags full sail off our elbows. There’s a Chinese boy at Sephora I have a crush on. Whenever any of the girls from the office need eye liner I go with them, hoping to observe this boy, sullen complexion, weak, tapered chin, spindly arms drug-addict thin, completely disengaged eyes. Coma eyes. Definitely Chinese, most likely Hong Kong. I’ve gotten close enough to note a preference for Dolce & Gabbana. I imagine his accent is thick, that he rarely speaks and, when he does, painfully slow. Occasionally I see him getting lunch at Sbarro’s next to our office and try to get in line behind him.

Winter I switch trains, from the 6 to the E, which stops close to our building, otherwise I just walk the couple of blocks. In the winter I can spend every daylight hour inside, my only glimpse of stunted sunlight is when I smoke a cigarette. I smoke in the small public space between buildings, flattening myself against the walls of glass that draw the cold wind rather than shield me. Devoid of pedestrians, the tiny fountain turned off, drifts of impatient snow and frost accumulate, snaking back and forth, winding up to disintegrate in effervescent spirals. I’m out here all the time. If only the Sephora boy smoked I’d have him. I can’t believe he doesn’t smoke.

Jason’s the only boy I’ve been with who’d noticed I don’t talk about my past. Without any serious effort I can keep all of my conversations in the present tense as I have fully discounted my past. The best method is to talk about the clubs, of course, or movies. Though I never see movies outside my obsession I read all of the reviews so I can talk about them. Cricket has never asked about my past. He couldn’t care less. After all, he’s the chief tailor of my camouflage, dutifully stitching me a constant current of sequined nights the brilliance of which belie the frayed seam. Okay, one story. Coming home late from a high school football game I unlocked the door to find Dad waiting for me, arms crossed on the couch. The way he was sitting, the look, like he knows something, this was going to be bad. And that Sears linen suit. Dad kept his suit on when he was going to have something to say at dinner. Life got worse when I was in middle school and the local newspaper stopped printing an evening edition. He had nothing to read and Mother strictly forbade watching television while eating. In fact, with the exception of football games (state, not college) and the occasional State of the Union Address, Mom preferred we not watch television for upwards of an hour after we ate, as excitement interfered with digestion. With his suit on I knew when I sat down for dinner a lecture loomed. He wore the shorts and t-shirt he cut the grass in while teaching me how to drive, disappointed I had to learn on an automatic and not a stick, but he sold Cadillacs, and in Florida the old people bought and drove Cadillacs and old people did not drive stick. We had a brand new Cadillac every year in the drive. That night as I closed the door he slapped his thighs and leapt off the couch. Son, let’s have a drink. Shit. This isn’t going to be bad—this is going to be weird. Large hand spreading across my shoulder he steered me toward the family room—an equally large shellacked cypress clock was imbedded on the wood paneled wall above the mini-bar. It’s the second Friday night I’ve smelled beer on your breath son, if you’re going to drink, I think you should know how.

Shitshitshit.

Behind the bar, let’s start basic, rum and coke. Loosening his tie a bit, a practiced, get-ready gesture, one of his favorites, he poured us both a drink while explaining the difference between a tumbler and a fluted glass. He explained what a count was as we finished our drinks. I’d had two beers behind the bleachers with a group of kids I barely knew but knew that they always had beer and would share, knowing the larger their audience, the farther their reputations as kids who had beer would spread. Two beers and I had no trouble driving home. But finding my house among the swirling road of duplicate homes in our subdivision proved tricky. Luckily our fauna happened to be a bit different, thick yucca plants valiantly defended our mailbox. Otherwise the rows of similar white Formica embedded pastel walls and flat roofs seemed to wind off into the twilight, bending imperceptibly slow off the same asphalt conveyor belt which occasionally reached out to slap my axle with annoying yellow speed bumps. Buzzed, I was beginning to secretly think that I would enjoy this. Dad’s plan would backfire. The Long Island Iced Tea soon settled that. For amateurs, he declared. If you order this at a bar the bartender will know you’re cheap, ordering a strong drink to nurse all night—that you’re an amateur. Be cool. Walk in with class, order a gin and tonic or a Tom Collins, a gimlet, and tip big the first time so he’ll remember you. I began to think this was a practiced monologue. He certainly had the ice bucket ready, filled crisp and waiting. Half a Long Island Iced Tea was disrupting my stomach when he lined up three more glasses. As I nervously sniffed at what I guessed was the Tom Collins, I thought to myself actually, I stayed home last Friday night. Not that I was going to contradict him when he was on a roll. Now, drinks for women, vodka and cranberry, vodka and orange juice, called a Screwdriver, that’s okay for guys, too. For women, amaretto and cream is good, smooth, like a dessert. Whiskey’s a man’s drink. You’ll learn to have it on the rocks, though soda water or coke is fine. A whiskey sour, now, that’s a drink for faggots. And I threw up.

2.2

Caterpillar tonight. Bardo was last weekend, Stag last night. God knows not Salo. My left nasal cavity feels enlarged, raw, the scorched deck of an aircraft carrier. So with limited options Caterpillar is a good fit. Karaoke couldn’t interest me less, so I nurse my drink at the upstairs bar, squeezing in among various old queens and the occasional consort. At least the rice queens at Caterpillar dress their age. Though it’s not yet cold enough outside, an old man enters the bar wrapped in a long, sleek one-thousand-dollar Shanghai Tang leather jacket with Mandarin collar. Signaling the bartender with the small, sharp spotlight of a platinum pinkie ring, he hovers at the end of the bar as if it were a command center, very Cold War chic with shaved head, wire-rimmed glasses. One drink later and Colonel Klink is sitting next to me. He offers to buy me a shot but I decline, not to signal the disinterest I certainly feel -ignoring a free drink would be too dramatic a gesture. Simply I can’t imagine taking a shot when I’m having difficulty breathing. Without appearing rebuffed he keeps the small talk flowing at a casual level, thankfully dispensing with the worn tactic of asking nothing but questions. He’s either too cool to blatantly feign interest or actually does want conversation. Mentioning that Truman Capote once lived across the street he pauses, glass raised to arid lips and eyes me to see if I register the name. I’m not willing to endure whatever historical monologue he’s prepared to launch. Some of the older queens feel that the past lends them nobility; they drop names like royalty throwing coins to eager masses. Truman Capote I know. But to think anyone cares where you were when Judy Garland died is to assume too much significance for your cultural icons, especially as you dismiss ours. The difference is we know our icons are inflatable and count them as disposable. To have refused Montgomery Clift a cigarette at the Continental Baths is a twenty-four carat bon mot, for sure. Impressive, if such incidental proximity to celebrity didn’t accentuate your role in life’s permanent audience, your only power the ability to withhold applause. By now I’m not even listening. While he drones on I realize he’s not even looking at me, he’s looking over me. I know why Asian boys come to the old men and I’ve always assumed the old men were just there, fixed, like lamps, but in love with their moths. The Colonel’s playing cool. I’m distraction until his real interest surfaces—I’m the hunter’s blind. He’s operating on the principles of attraction. He’s not here because the boys want him. He’s here because he wants the boys. But if his attraction is reciprocal, where did it originate? Possibly the result of foreign wars. Imagine the scenarios. X-rated episodes of M*A*S*H where young, uncircumcised houseboys sheepishly complain of tight foreskin during erection and are fondled. Medical play ensues. Bare legs and forceps. Flecks of blood panic across latex gloves. The pumping hollow of a white gauze mask quickens as dual climax approaches. I interrupt and ask him to tell me, in one sentence (I don’t want a life story, certainly no more Judy) why he’s attracted to Asians. He looks at me and takes a long drink. He smiles and sets his glass down.

They look so mysterious, like cats.

Disappointment must have shown on my face. I wanted to hear how he would phrase one of my answers, see if his experience afforded him another angle I could adopt. The Colonel misreads my deflated look as probable condemnation. His smile never waivers, though, shaking his head in dismay, as if I had rebuffed a Rosetta stone that had taken him a lifetime to carve, he slides off his stool and heads down to karaoke. I order another whiskey sour and think about heading over to the Next Bardo. I should have taken that shot.

2.3

Back at Stag early so I don’t have to pay the Thursday night cover. When I run my errand though, the doorman will give me a wink and stamp my hand so I can get back in. That purple smudge never washes completely off, leaving a blurred advertisement of my desperation the next day for co-workers to snicker at. In the lower bar I have a martini before cruising over to Salo to stock up for the weekend. The martini is strong, chemical and heavy, a sweet oil spill clinging to a lone, beleaguered olive. The thick vermouth especially slows my drinking, which is why I sometimes order martinis. Since I’m going to Salo alone I don’t want to be too fucked up.

No one to look at so I look into my drink. Another martini later I look up and a Japanese boy is sitting opposite the bar from me. He’s drinking a martini too. He is beautiful. I watch his chest rise with every breath through his tight shirt. Perfect Japanese Boy breathes once for every two of my breaths. I try to slow my breathing, match his calm, but give up and light another cigarette. He is beautiful. If I didn’t have to get to Salo in an hour I would talk to him, or at least sit next to him and hope he talks to me. No. He’s out of my league. I’m not really in the martini class. My oasis is a less distinct well, having a thirst too constant to value the false restraints of refinement. I go upstairs, mingling in coach until take off.

Salo without Cricket seems different, somehow holds more corners. Darker possibilities lurk when you are alone in a place like that and it’s not the dead end we joke about, but a rare crossroads where vampires are resurrected in an unending midnight drought. You‘ve never been to that particular desert until you’ve seen heroin addicts play pool. An ancient pair of leather Christopher Street mummies poke at the table with their pool cues, performing a strange ballet that smoothes over the sands of time. They avoid sinking any balls, preferring to recreate the leisurely expansion of galactic bodies. Cricket and I prefer to come here together so we can focus on each other rather than where we are. Alone, not only are we vulnerable to conversation with freaks, without the other we are forced to look around, realize where we are and why. Of course any sense of trepidation is instantly short-circuited by the rising drone of addiction. Then the real worry becomes how long will I have to wait? What if I don’t score? Cherry is there by the bathroom door, hands clenched in abundant pockets. We greet each other in mock friendship, even a kiss on the cheek, though I doubt she knows my name. She’s ever so slightly caught off guard that I am not with Cricket. This is derived not from concern so much as disappointment as Cricket purchases twice the blow I do. In the stall I do two quick rounds off my wrist, closing my eyes tight against the raw light of the low hanging bulb. My heart beats a twitchy, electric jackal beat as I pull a cigarette from my breast pocket and push out of the bar, back toward Stag.

The Japanese boy is still there, sitting in the same spot. He’s on maybe his third drink and now he’s looking around. Back to my original seat I ask the bartender for a whiskey sour and curse myself for not hitting the bathrooms before ordering a drink. Now I have to wait, pay, tip, take a few sips. Grounded, I smile at the Japanese boy. He smiles back so I wave him over. He comes and with the slightest bow asks, where did you go?

To see a friend. I lean back to exhale and look him over—he’s too cogent after three drinks. Why do you ask?

I need your cigarette.

I pluck a cigarette out of the pack and offer him a light, he leans in, hand on my forearm. He exhales a slow stream of white smoke and thanks me.

My pleasure. Watch my drink—I have to go to the bathroom.

When I come back he returns his hand to my forearm and we drink in silence. The bump I did in the bathroom was too big. With great effort I refrain from grinding my teeth. I worry he will mistake my silence for disinterest, but cannot manufacture anything to say. He withdraws his hand from my forearm and asks me to go upstairs.

A cigarette calms me. He questions me about where to go in the city. I tell him about the various clubs and the bars in quick summation. I tell him that regardless, Stag is it. If there’s anything you’re looking for in this city you’ll find it here. Hope so, he replies, looking me in the eyes. Holding my hands in his he tugs me toward the dance floor.

2.4

When I wake up in the morning he is already awake, smoking a cigarette by the window, one hand on my thigh, looking at me, but not in me. He studies me as he might have reviewed subway maps unfolded across his lap on the plane, topography to navigate, a landscape that could change, though, rising beneath fingertips and tongue. We shower together. I call in sick and we go to Central Park. I tell him how I like to cross the park at night, how beautiful the park is at night, luminous in the snow. He tells me about going to watch the cherry trees blossom with his family, that it’s something of a national holiday. We walk close together, occasionally our knuckles brush against each other. Every time this happens he reaches over to squeeze my hand. This becomes his method of signaling me when he wants to change direction, has a question, or, at night, when a kiss is required.

He wasn’t interested in museums, just buildings. New buildings. No churches. He loves this architect Philip Johnson and hones in on every building he designed. Suddenly the fence of skyscrapers around Next Bardo separates into individual towers. Dutifully I take his picture before each one, slightly embarrassed, shown around my own city by a tourist. At Grand Central I repeat what the tour guide said about the reversal of constellations. I rather proudly state my idea that the opposite is true, that the city looks down on a small universe, that the city is so magnificent galaxies are our doormat. Surprised, he steps back and looks at me, looks in me, and at once I am petrified. He sees through me, senses a glossy personality clipped from magazines, films and overheard conversation. But he nods affirmatively, smiles, then in one quick movement squats and takes a picture of me, bewildered me, a band of manmade stars above.

We separate so he can go back to his hotel for a change of clothes and this is our first moment of awkwardness, knuckle to knuckle all day, forehead to forehead whispering on the train, now separating is somehow wrong, that, connection broken, when we arrive back at each other some interference will have arisen. Some fear, an unpronounced anxiety, will invade conversation, and dam our natural honesty. We separate badly, in public, near a subway entrance where people stream around us, block us. We deserve a quiet place, a private forest where, hands on one another’s hips, naked, forehead to forehead our voices blend imperceptibly with the light applause of breezy pines. Here we cheaply say, catch you later, see you later, among blaring car horns and construction noise and a weak handshake, business casual, deal struck, car sold.

I tap my foot nervously on the train back uptown, bound up the stairs to my apartment. Still feeling disconnected, I want to plug back in. I burn through the apartment, throw away the dishes in the sink and push dirty clothes into the closet. Old newspapers and shoes get shoved under the couch. Scooping up the deflated tendrils of used condoms from behind the bed I make a mental note to drop the sheets off at the laundry on the way to work tomorrow. Quick survey: not bad. I find a stale joint in an ashtray on the bookshelf. Smoking on the fire escape, from the street below distressed salsa spills out of stereos duct-taped to the bike handles of old Puerto Rican men weaving between impatient livery cabs. The sunset deals a calming, burnt tapestry over the Upper West Side, south of which Shinobu baths and dresses in a nondescript Midtown hotel room where he will never once spend the night.

Arriving back at my apartment in a neat khaki shirt, his hair has a fresh sheen of gel. We order Chinese. God knows I can’t take him to Salo, no need for the Next Bardo and Caterpillar. I decide on the Pound. When I tell him we were going to the biggest gay club in Manhattan he’s excited, but says this time no drug. Pausing, he looks down at the unmade bed and fingers one of the sheets. I’d like to have you without…your shroud, smiling to himself, proud in his dexterous use of English. There was nothing I could say so I rush in to kiss his cheek, flush with an untoward mix of emotion: shame and excitement. This new helix turns inside me, generating an uncertainty I like. On the way out I pull the tiny plastic bag from my breast pocket and tuck it beneath the book on the dresser before shutting the door to work the triple locks.

The Pound is just that, a sweaty box of typical NYC fags, fully domesticated, of course, but the place is always packed and such forced proximity turns them into shirtless, writhing, frenzied, masculine hydra, fed nothing but house music which, in Chelsea, could be considered the other testosterone. We arrive early and already the line is around the block. I can tell Shinobu is content to wait. For him the string of impatient Chelsea boys bouncing on their heels is as fascinating as the club itself. After thirty minutes and twenty dollars each, hands stamped, we are inside. The club’s atmosphere is urgent with flashing red lights, as if an ambulance had overturned behind the bar. The bartenders are identical in their sleeveless muscled torsos and shaved heads, shoveling ice with a militaristic rhythm. We get drinks and circle the dance floor, too sober to join the frenzy. Without coke or ecstasy I can see past the lights and curtains, the husk of the warehouse reveals itself as serving essentially the same service: a place of storage, containment. For a twenty-dollar cover and a thirty-dollar hit of ecstasy you will find whatever this treasure chest represents for you, as the looks of determination on these dancing boys prove. To Shinobu this is New York City and I want to see the city through his eyes. After another drink we dance close. When I see the open fascination across his face the Pound gains all the allure Stag had those first few times, when I finally had the courage to walk through those doors, doors that have always been there, opening to a secret ballroom which graces the entire world, as foreign and welcoming as returning home after a long, quiet war. The sensation returned and grew. We spin in each other’s arms, the helix ignited within me turning to a strong bolt of golden thread.

For one week he stayed with me. I resisted the urge to call in sick every day, but knew we needed time to catch our breath. He needed to take his own pictures. Still, he met me for lunch every afternoon at the fountain by my office. We’d walk up to Central Park and lay on the benches. He would shop in SoHo while I went back to work. For one week we were inseparable. He stayed every night with me, but kept his hotel room. I’d tell him to check out, to bring his bags here, save money, but, smiling at me, he’d say, No. That is my fire exit.

On the last night of his visit we come home early and drunk. At dinner neither of us spoke about his trip coming to an end. We talked about everything, about the people around us, films, Philip Johnson—everything was given an inflated levity. At Stag we drank fast. I thought returning to the place where we met would be fitting, draw a nice, defining circle around our time together, but the music was too loud, the place a bit empty. Again I saw Stag Bar as a weary airport, no gateway but an intersection where exhausted strangers touch each other by immediacy alone, nothing more, never getting to know one another. There’s not enough time.

Back home I go into the living room while he gets ready for bed. Shinobu sits on the edge of the bed in his underwear, smoking, as I come into the room. I stand naked on the bed and hand him a black magic marker. Write on me. He takes the marker, asks, Write what?

Just. Words. Your name. Anything. Just. I just don’t want to know what they mean. He thinks about it. Cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, he works. Hands behind my head I close my eyes. Saint Sebastian entered in reverse, the felt-tip marker the feathered end of a kinder, requested arrow. Deliberate black marks cross my chest and shoulders, dissecting my heart, sewing my ribs tight around the pieces. He draws wards to keep my eyes closed. I gasp as the ink paints a new place, the cusp of my armpit, slipping moist around my shoulder. When he starts a new character I can still feel the hum of the previous, shuddering as its fading echo reverberates under my skin. He stops writing and for a moment I feel I’ve been cut free, shaking and adrift in complete warm darkness. His sure hands form my back as he draws me into his mouth.

In the morning he leaves.

Already dressed he wakes me, pulls me up and kisses me, says Thank you. I say Stay. I try to pull him back to bed, hang heavy on his belt buckle, acting more loose and sleepy than I feel. Stay. He leaves. Leaves like I want them to, but this time I’m not left free. I’m bound with words I can’t understand.

I couldn’t possibly go back to sleep. Crouching in the shower’s heat, a tattered manuscript bleeds off my body. All of the words I thought to hold me together slip off to blend and lather nebulous around the drain, night without stars. I hang my head out of the shower and light a cigarette, lay it on the lip of the toilet to draw myself back into the steam of hot water. I cry. My tears spike the hot blackness pooling at my feet.

2.5

After Shinobu left I went to work and after work I went out hard. Cricket met me for happy hour at Stag and we drank whiskey sours until Cherry showed up. We got her to front us an eight ball, a first. We practically pried it out of her. I wanted the night to slip away into a larger night, a river of night undulating ripples slow and wide, as welcoming as the waters of Lethe, drifting pearls of cocaine to softly illuminate our floating repose.

By 2 A.M. Cricket loses his wallet.

3:30 A.M. Cricket gets into a cab with some guy while I throw up in the parking lot.

4 A. M. Cabs slowly surface at my upraised hand, slow, look then leave me in their yellowed wake.

Thirty minutes later I take the train home, hanging off one of the fingerprint-fogged poles. If I sit down I’ll wake up in the South Bronx again.

I was going for whatever was next. Next was necessary, vital. If I did not become consumed again I would be alone with thoughts of Shinobu. His absence only accentuated how deep a cavity I had become. We had stepped between seasons, found a fold in the calendar. Paper days were torn and discarded, but the ones that held his name bronzed over. Their permanence wore through the thin leafs of the present to emphasize how thin a surface I was scrawling a life on.

Next turned into more—weekends I started going to the Pound with Cricket. More: My first time at the Pound I had tried ecstasy and loved it. The second and third times I did it was so different I lost interest. A mild high replaced exhilaration, ending in nausea. Next time I was part of the couch, grinding my jaw, struggling not to tell strangers I really, really loved them. Drugs shouldn’t surprise you -I need to grow the same wings every time, bruise my shoulders on the cathedral’s marble ceiling in the exact same spot, otherwise I’ll never break through. Cocaine is powdered truth. It delivers where ecstasy has me wondering what’s dissolving in my belly, nirvana or an expired Sudafed. It fucking delivers –express, on electric train tracks tighter and tighter ‘round the Christmas tree until all the ornaments burst into the cool glitter of bliss. Usually the high is pretty even, but if it has that corrosive edge of crack, oh well. Give me a whiter than white Christmas.

I wasn’t breaking through at the Pound. I went for whatever was next when next was at the Next Bardo.

Whiskey sours at Next Bardo, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, avoiding Salo and Stag until my check clears. We owe Cherry a lot of cash. Two nights in a row, breaking my rule, humped over the bar with these fucking old men wagging their dollars at the go-go boys. These old men hate me. I can tell. They hate me for a variety of reasons. When they were my age they were married with a protracted philosophy of homosexuality as just a facet of their personality, a lust best and most ludicrously bolstered as an attribution of Greek philosophy, not an emotional state, not full desire but fragment. This fragment lodged in their heels, deformed their walk. It led them to highway rest stops, sucking trucker cock while wife knits in the car, engine running in tune with Paul Harvey’s radio monologue. They hate me because I have a better chance than they do at getting laid tonight. I know the samples behind the song the DJ is playing; I know the label on that boy’s shirt. I possess a million ways to start a conversation. I live in the landscape of youth in which they are envious invaders. They hate me because I hate them, shuddering at their sight because in them I see a future reflection in a mirror held up by the Pallbearers, an inevitably I cannot deny. I hate them. They are the last chapter of my life read aloud in a voice made hoarse teething on dry glass. I hate them.

Jason #2 comes in and gives me his typical backslap. I nod. He says I’ve got something for you. I put out my cigarette and follow him into the bathroom. We crowd into a stall. He pulls out a fat bag of coke secreted in a matchbox. This shit is different, grainy, almost a light orange. We both do some bumps than head back to the bar. This shit pulls my spine out. I’m suspicious Jason #2 is new to this. He watched me go first, imitating my movements too closely. This is something he’s held on to until the right guide came along. At the bar we barely touch our drinks though we hang on each other, new Siamese twins freshly linked, our bond a fluid high that encases us, makes us a living conspiracy. The music slows to a chant spread thin across waves of escalating silence. I can hear Jason #2 breathe and I hear his breathing stop. The go-go boy is still, a perfect statue. If we were to push him over he would crack and one thousand and one black butterflies would spill out to consume the silence. Their larvae pulsate beneath my eyelids, trying to grow wings. Back in the stall I sit Jason #2 down on the toilet and bend his head back as far as I can and do two huge bumps off of his neck. He does the same to me, licks the residue and continues to suck at my neck. The butterflies settle to unfold their fresh wings in a wide pattern of shifting darkness. Jason #2 is heavy and damp on my chest. I raise my head. He’s drooling. The initial ignition of a snore flutters across my shirt. One of his piercings is stuck in my shirt and I have a moment of panic, thinking we might actually be linked together forever. Trying to disentangle his head from my wet chest he wakes with such a start he propels backward—his earring taking a slice out of my shirt. His head cracks on the stall door. The stall door swings open. I look at Jason #2 and wonder if I have killed him, then look up at the two old men who apparently had been peering in at us between the cracks, now looking down at a moaning Jason #2, hair askew, a wounded sea urchin, then back at me, shirt torn, eyes wide at the thought of accidental homicide in the Next Bardo bathroom. They tuck their rubbery, sallow cocks back into their pants and shuffle out. Show over.

At work I describe this unique high to Cricket over the phone. My voice croaks, eyelids partially closed, two cheap movie-theater curtains, dusty velvet blinking up and down, searching for intermission. At the mention of the orange-brown color he tells me in an impressed hush it was cut with heroin.

2.6

I want Beat Takeshi to shoot me in the head three times.

I want to fuck Jet Li. I’d be happy if I could just fuck his name. What a great name. I have bought a lot of his films, bootlegs, bad copies poorly dubbed with bland, over-pronunciated efficiency. Romeo Must Die is the only one I’ve seen in the theater. They must put a lot of make-up on him in his Hong Kong flicks. In his American films I see the hint of acne scars. That slight map of pockmarks across his face is attractive, an additional track of shadow to an unknowable soul.

It’s not like I’d beat off to Good Morning Vietnam, but for the last two years I’ve only watched Asian films. Body Count: I’m watching kung-fu movies every night now. I’ll masturbate to porn after the films, as if they were the warm up act. I see Jet Li and Tony Leung and I don’t imagine them naked. I see them beating or shooting other men, I see them divine blood from the lips and chests of other men, then immediately I switch to grainy tapes of men fucking men, filling each other, filling mouths, pounding buttocks spread dangerously thin by sinewy hands cupping wishbone thighs. I see the same lightning behind these silhouettes of sex and violence on videotape. Lightning that emanates from a deaf heart, that cannot hear it’s own thunder, is lightning that strikes again and again, until the wet ash in my hand is the mortar of regret, and there never seems to be enough.

I have taken my obsession to the movies, but I’ve never seen myself in any of these films. Not that I would want to. No. I want to view them, but I would also like to see how they view me. Behind the questions some guys ask me there is sometimes this muted anger, a slight derision. And this anger is mixed with desire to fuck or be fucked by only white guys. Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing A.I.D.’s in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks. I haven’t seen this anger yet in a film. Maybe I wouldn’t want to. The look behind their eyes is a third language and I don’t want to find or make a Rosetta stone for; in every translation some essence is necessarily lost, as meaning but rarely tone and never nuance is re-conveyed. With language the vernacular is the hot skin while mathematical conjugation the bone, the cool perfection. I want unsolvable mysteries, mysteries at the bottom of the sea and if I hold my breath I still won’t be able to make it back to the surface alive. And that’s fine because I hate the surface. I hate light. I hate light and what it does, the exposure, all that fucking truth. Desire is being submerged and crushed by the blue cloth of the sea and somehow such a crush hurts to the point where it feels like a breathless caress.

That’s all my eyes say to a boy. Meet me at the bottom of the ocean.

I want Beat Takeshi to shoot me in the head three times, severing my skull from my body with an Edo-period samurai sword.

Leslie Cheung lifts this moist bowling ball and, eyeing the pins, a dozen Charlie Chan’s eager to bow, takes deliberate aim.

2.7

Credit Card bills, Credit Card offers, coupons and flyers -I hadn’t bothered to check my mail in almost a week.

A postcard from Shinobu.

FUCK.

Having burned through several weeks to cauterize his visit I do not deserve this fresh cut. I e-mailed him the morning he left. Typing out how I felt while he was here, how I felt when he left, writing whatever I could to make him come back. Two days later his reply arrived mangled, in a mean code of symbols, squares, zeros and lines. Everything was lost in the translation. I angrily deleted his e-mail. Best if our week together were nothing more than a cigarette tossed out a car window, a bright explosion in the night rapidly left behind. And now this. Upstairs, in my apartment I look at the postcard. A picture of a classic Japanese painting of falling cherry blossoms flirting in the wind. I held it out before me, about to rip it in half, determined not to read it, but I could see it was a single sentence and prayed that it was a polite thank you, a summation of that week as a fond but already distant memory for him. Finally, something I could understand. Shinobu had already left change on my dresser, Japanese coins, some missing an octagonal center, others silver, with a temple on one side. I carry his coins in my right pocket, kept separate from my keys, change and subway tokens. Eventually, after decades in my pocket, between my fingers, they will wear smooth, like sea glass, until the characters and numbers are gone, temples more an impression, a destination behind miles of silver fog. The single sentence on the back of the postcard is clear, written in strong, deliberate script, almost drawn. I wish I were writing this on you.

2.8

Tonight has to be the night. It’s been over a month since he left and I have not been able to talk to a boy. Now a small boy who looks like Jason #1 sits next to me. I’m almost nervous, rubbing my hands across my thighs. Before I can introduce myself a middle-aged man approaches him and starts the usual banter. A large potbelly distorts his sleeveless Buffy the Vampire Slayer T-shirt, giving Buffy huge thighs and a tiny head. The boy who looks like Jason #1 looks to me intently. I light a cigarette and interrupt to offer him one, sliding between him and the middle-aged guy. After Fat Buffy walks away and has engaged a luckless Filipino lad in a coral necklace I excuse myself to the bathroom for a bump. The boy who looks like Jason #1 tells me he’s from Sri Lanka, where he’s married (Sri Lanka, a new addition to my sexual geography—I didn’t know it was a country, I thought it was a place). Supporting a family of five back home, here he is the cook for a wealthy family from India. We talk an hour. The thick broth of his accent fuses every word, draws me in closer. I was trying to taste him. The more he talks the less he looks like Jason #1. His skin is darker, more coffee, with thicker lips. When I excuse myself again he follows me into the bathroom and we kiss. Unbuttoning his shirt I discover a dark swath of hair patterned across his chest. I twist the hair of one nipple while gripping the back of his head. We kiss until someone comes into the bathroom. Retrieving our coats we leave to hail a cab.

His apartment is a dark, poorly furnished studio cluttered with luggage and clothes and a mattress on the floor. He hastily explains that, since he cooks most every meal for the rich family, he rarely stays here, hasn’t had time to unpack much less make it a home. We pull off our clothes while struggling to uncork a bottle of champagne. Any champagne not soaking into the bed is Frenched back and forth between us—an urgent sea foam flecking our cheeks. Falling onto the mattress, wrestling into each other, I am in his ass before I meant to be up there, before I have a chance to don a condom. For a moment I relax, exalt in the massage of internal warmth but his hole has no grip, no friction. I am pouring myself into an expanding funnel, a rain barrel for whatever comes down the gutter. Pushing myself off I tell him we should wear condoms, he says no, that you can only get A.I.D.’s if someone cums inside you. I tell him that’s ridiculous and ask for more champagne. As he opens the refrigerator door the tiny internal bulb fills the room with light that shines off the brass teakettle of his erection and puckish belly.

2.9

At the office I make sculpture with tape, a two-inch brontosaurus slouches toward my keyboard. The first of many miniature sticky pterodactyls is in the works (I envision a mobile circling over my desk) when the phone rings. It’s Cricket. I listen and ask him to repeat what he said, begging him to tell me that this wasn’t a joke. I swear my help. I am here for you, I say, as immediately my thoughts turn to my own health. How soon could my doctor see me? Better I go to that free clinic in the Village. They don’t make you sign that form informing the government if you’re positive. He says he will be okay. I am here for you, I repeat. Fear is the original contagion and I have it. He can tell. He tries to calm me but knows he has to put me away, that what he’s dealing with is so fresh, so red raw. Look, I’ve got to go now, there’s some other people I should call. Don’t worry. The doctor said I probably got this long after we hooked up, okay? I just thought you should know. He hangs up and I launch out of my seat. I want out.

Pacing the dry fountain I look up. The sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue. My office building and its bland twin, reflecting sky reflect nothing. The plaza is nearly empty. In one corner two pigeons peck the ground near a homeless man sleeping on the pavement. I light a cigarette as the boy from Sephora walks by.

3.0

The first of the month I don’t answer the door. It’s Carlos, knocking for the rent. I’ve got twenty dollars until my next check, and still that won’t be enough. Another cash advance off one of my credit cards. Until then I’ll have to leave for work early -he usually takes the trash out in the morning around the same time I go to work. I only see Carlos when he comes by for rent or when I’m walking a trick out the door. If I hook up twice that month, I’ll see Carlos both mornings. He says hello whenever I’m alone, but when I’m with a trick he ignores us so pointedly it’s more uncomfortable than any condemnation. He must think I’m running an underground railroad. Maybe this morning he’s knocking to see if I can help some of his cousins from South America cross the border.

The bank is lit way too brightly. The implication of such lighting is we should take these transactions as seriously as a medical procedure and everyone in line complies. When it’s my turn I hand the pimply girl behind the thick Plexiglas my credit card and withdrawal slip. She turns her back to me to swipe the card, returns to tell me it was rejected for that amount, like my credit is chancy, a game, craps maybe, I should just aim lower. I aim low, initial the change and she tries again. Not even fifty dollars left. Sorry, she says, tilting her head, smile flat-lining to indicate her apology is actually a dismissal. She waves the next customer over before my wallet is back in my pocket. At lunch I’ll try another card at another branch.

I go through five more cards and glean two hundred dollars. That was the sum total available. I call every card that afternoon and try to wrangle increases in my line of credit. That line is frayed. I find on two cards I’ve already surpassed my limit and have been paying down only the penalties and fines for several months. Two hundred and my check for rent is covered, barely.

Snow falls in the afternoon and continues through the evening. Cricket wants to meet at one of the nicer Chelsea bars, I said sure but go to Stag instead. The bartender gives me a whiskey sour without even asking. I tap out a cigarette. The movement recalls the night I met Shinobu. Reaching across an ocean I gave him a cigarette. I’m even sitting in the same seat. I exhale his smoke. I love old films where they show people smoking in movie theaters. The smoke slowly rising from the audience bleeds into the path of the projected picture, revealing the source of an illusion while adding a new, shadowy dimension. There’s an old movie theater below Gramercy Park that still has ashtrays built into the back of all the seats, rusty little brass clams, empty but willing.

Feeling empty I run down to Gray’s Papaya and get two dogs and a coke. Empty, not hungry, but I couldn’t think what else to do. Everything has an interchangeable taste—cigarettes and wet pizza, whiskey sours, cocaine. Outside snow accumulates. Central Park’s reservoir will turn to frozen milk. Already the dusted roofs of parked cars are white sand dunes. I head back to Stag, snow lightly massing on my shoulders.

At Stag I run into Foun. He berates me for drinking so early, pinches my arm and tell me to join a gym. I ask what he’s doing tonight. Looking boyfriend, white trash, well hung. He sips his White Russian noisily through the stir straw and looks around the room. Foun harbors a serious attraction to Ketamine. After a mild high K erodes time, too much and you are abandoned in a K hole. This mineshaft spirals downward, a rich darkness with a pink nougat center, a prenatal nothingness wrapped around a potential heart attack. I woke up late one night to find every light in my apartment turned on. Foun was fully dressed, perched on a chair he had pulled into the middle of the living room, arms heavy at his sides, mouth open, bottom lip glistening with saliva. He apparently had woken up, done a bump, forgotten he had done one, did another, etcetera. I led him back to the bed, cooing that it was time to sleep. He came through enough to say he couldn’t sleep. Claiming they were sleeping pills I popped some aspirin in him and pushed him under the covers.

Near midnight the bar swells with boys. We do some bumps of K in a bathroom stall and head upstairs to scan the dance floor. One long Madonna song later we are back in the stalls, frosting our minds with animal tranquilizer, washing down the acrid taste in our throats with thick White Russians. My lower jaw is unhinged, hangs like a swing off a tree. Foun just laughs but without sound and puts his head on the bar. My White Russian tastes like a mink coat. I want to pour it over Foun’s shoulders, to see if he’ll grow fur.

In Central Park a perfect swath of snow interrupted by my fall shows two black scars at my knees, roughly tilled earth marks my collapse. If I stay still long enough the falling snow will erase this upheaval, smooth over the stain, sealing the red crack darkening my left knee. A scarecrow’s dream. A white dream of snow sewing me serenely to the ground. Dreams of whiteness pervaded my adolescence. At first I thought I had not dreamed -that I possessed a unique memory of absence. As the dreams continued I began to sense an uneasy passage of time, a minute claustrophobia, as if I were too close to what might encase me to sense any form, a vast silky sheet suspended above me as I hovered over a dead white sea. The dreams continued through college and ended abruptly when I moved to New York. At school the mood, the passage of time within the dream, had an additional trepidation. There was an impending rush toward the whiteness as, the moment before I woke, the peripheral of what I sensed, its horizon, might suddenly be known. The shape was surfacing. Always I awoke abruptly, as the very edges were almost clear, woke so they would not cut me. In the park my arms are outstretched—accruing snow fills the folds of my jacket, lightly packing the cubby between my collar and neck. I don’t remember leaving Stag. Did I say goodbye to Foun or was he here with me, face down, already buried in the snow? I remember buying cigarettes in a bodega before crossing the park toward Next Bardo. Did I get lost? Tired? I fell. I tripped and fell, then lost myself in the mess of impact; my palm prints immediately began to recede in white pointillism. I had never seen such patience. The fog of my breath rises. I look up into an obliterated sky, a funnel of falling snow. The impending rush returns, turning me as all horizons became clear and I know. I know my dream. The edges take definition. It’s not a giant lake of snow; a suffocating sheet does not besiege me. As white as a single cascading blossom, the curvature of my own skull, serene, large and foolish as a hot air balloon, finally comes into view.

3.1

An early blizzard blanketed the city. I couldn’t even call in—the phone was dead; I had forgotten to pay the bill. Excited weathermen bounced across the television, waving their arms like generals before weary troops. I went out earlier for coffee and a paper, limping across the empty street, a few children sledding down its center on damp squares of cardboard. I slipped on some ice and hit the same knee on the curb, slightly reopening last night’s cut. With Ketamine I have no idea know how long I knelt in the snow last night, thirty seconds, an hour. Silence finally shook me to my feet. Central Park at night is a Great Big Hush. On the way out of the park I think I fell a couple of times, searching for streetlights through the broken spears of leafless trees. Emerging wet and cold, I think I was in the Upper West Side, I remember the red smear atop the Essex building. I must have hailed a cab. The alarm shook me out of bed at seven. A ruined pair of jeans coiled in the bathroom, wet, bloodied, black with still frozen dirt. The heat had been on when I came home. It must have been stifling as I opened the windows before crashing. Luckily no snow had drifted in, though the cold temperature hovered near the window, giving my apartment the sickly, panting atmosphere of a ruined green house. Knuckles chilblained, pink—my knee smarts but doesn’t look too bad. I put on a Band-Aid after I showered and went back to bed. Later this afternoon, if the snow lets up, I’ll go back out and pick up some Kung Fu videos. The weathermen begrudgingly admitted the storm will likely end early this evening. Tomorrow I’ll be back at work.

With nothing to do last night I watched movies, smoked out the window, watching the dwindling snow, and went to bed early. At work I was nearly alone in the office. Most of the staff lives in the outer boroughs or Jersey and they know snow supplies them with the ready-made excuse of train delays. Usually everyone, management included, makes it in just in time for lunch. Alone, the office has this weird hum I never notice when other people are here, as if it’s whistling to itself. On the way in I had my apartment key copied downstairs. Most of the businesses were still shuttered, but in this little niche right off the subway entrance sits an old man the color of tobacco behind a stack of newspapers. He copies keys, repairs shoes, sells umbrellas, and proudly flaunts a weathered petition stating that Staten Island should secede from New York City. Back in the office I take a two-day air envelope from the mailroom and copy Shinobu’s address onto the mailing slip. After forging my boss’ signature I drop the fresh copy of my key into the envelope and seal it. I think for a moment, rip the envelope back open and scrawl on a piece of paper, I want to be your fire exit.

3.2

I’m not bored. I’m not horny or thirsty. I’m not anything. I go out because it’s all I know how to do, leaving my apartment out of habit alone, stomping though piles of plowed snow to the train, destination chosen randomly, as the conductor announces the stops on the 6 train I hear Rambles, this stop Rambles. Caterpillar next, Caterpillar next. This is the number 6 downtown express to the Next Bardo. Next Bardo Express. Mind the gap.

At Caterpillar, before I have my coat off there’s Foun. He plies me with K. I refuse but buy him a drink, embarrassed that I don’t remember if I left him in the bar or in the park. He wants to see the boys sing so we take our drinks downstairs. In the darkness on the couch beside the karaoke machine I relent and do some bumps of K. I close my eyes. The mirror ball casts a net of light and shadow around us. I look around. There’s Colonel Clink talking to the Vietnamese boy I had awhile ago. One of the go-go boys from the Next Bardo is standing at the bar. Fully clothed he looks uncomfortable, wrapped like an unwarranted gift. One of the Pallbearers is here, laughing heartily, arms around a powdery-looking old man with an oxygen tube hanging from bristly nostrils. Familiar faces swirl in and out of the crowd. There’s Sephora boy, smoking! Trying to shake off this fog I sit up and review my incestuous Jury Pool. In a moment of synchronistic clarity Foun too, sits up and pats my hand. I know, I know, he crows. Too mush, too mush.

3.3 The Last Stop

Later. Summer. I’ve settled into the Next Bardo. This is pretty much it. To avoid Cherry I’ve pretty much kept to the Next Bardo. At first I thought maybe if I outlasted these old rice queens I could go home with one of the strippers at the end of the night. And I did. Now I just come here when I want to drink, not on the weekends, though. Too crowded. And I have better uses for my money. Though it’s sweltering out I’m in long sleeves. I always wear oxford shirts now, buttoned tightly at the wrist. I’m out of cigarettes but don’t want to ask anyone here for one. Without the coke I smoke twice as much, so I might as well get a pack. Outside one of the Pallbearers is leaning against a street lamp, one arm above him grasping the pole to better flex his bicep while the other hand holds his shirt up to reveal golden abs. Something must have happened to one of the Pallbearers. All summer I’ve only seen the one now and it makes me uneasy. I bet Colonel Klink killed one of them. I can see Pallbearer #1 waking up in the Colonel’s apartment among blood-soaked sheets, frightfully checking himself for wounds, realizing he’s unharmed, searching the unfamiliar apartment for his brother. Corpse in the kitchen, spread out across the linoleum, chairs stacked on the table to make room for red revelry separated at the sternum. Divided boy. Pallbearer #1 standing in the doorway, similarly divided from his brother, his mirror, his strength, ladled out across the floor, partially devoured by the naked old man sitting cross-legged among gnawed ribs, blood smeared across his cheeks. Pallbearer #1 flees, but not before pulling on his black Versace jeans while grabbing the money left on the dresser. Yeah. Colonel Klink killed one of them. That or he went off to college.

Past midnight and it’s still hot out. By the time I find an open bodega I’m drenched with sweat. The man behind the counter eyes the rich, black lines slashing through my wet shirt as he rings me up. They cover both arms and parts of my chest. Next paycheck I’ll go and get my back worked on. The fat guy at the tattoo parlor smirked at first when I came in and told him what I wanted. I pointed to the Chinese characters thumb-tacked to the wall, gave him all my cash and told him to give me as many as he could until the money ran out. He couldn’t believe I didn’t care which ones, didn’t want to simply spell out my name like his usual customers. I’ve been back enough times he takes me seriously now. Occasionally he’ll laugh while he works on me—probably he’s written something he thinks is funny or rude across my skin, graffiti smeared with blood and sweat he’ll mop up with a coarse paper towel. I couldn’t care less. This is sheet music for my own deaf touch.

I pay for my cigarettes and leave. Coming back from the bodega Pallbearer #1 is still there. He notices me staring, yawns and checks his beeper. I go back inside.

 

© 2005 Tom Cardamone - Contributor's Bio