Sunday, August 30, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost


Chants (and Rants) from Zilnon Kagyeling

I wake to the sound of cymbals crashing in the gompa upstairs, a man chants softly in the room next to mine, and my eyes open on the walls of Room #5 here at Zilnon Kagyeling Monastery. Sky blue walls are spotted with mildew, one window is busted, the window above the door must be propped open with a bottle. The fog has slipped under the door and into bed with me. It feels like happiness – and it smells damp.

Wonderful, I think. Lucky. Why can’t I make good choices more often?

Years and years ago, I often stayed at Zilnon Kagyeling. The first time it was very basic: two buildings, a small gompa, a few guest rooms. At Losar (New Year) they invited us into the gompa for a ceremony and afterwards fed us beautifully. There was an African-American nun staying here then, in three year retreat. She glowered at us and said we should all go away. She knew the value of what we were being given. She didn’t reckon we deserved it.

When I returned a few years later, Zilnon Kagyeling seemed like just a big guesthouse, with a few monks attached. White walls, hot showers, and rules. A dozen years later, the place is in disrepair, and most of the tourists have left. Now it seems like a boarding house for wayward monks. I feel very much at home.

I should not say wayward; I should say independent. Most of the monks I’ve known have been Gelugpa – and those Gelugpa always seem to be on a schedule.

Strange things used to happen at Zilnon Kagyeling. There’d be shouting and windows broken, and the next day someone would be walking around muttering about black magic. These are Nyingmapa monks, remember -- you don’t want to mess with them. They understand the nature of reality and they know how to manipulate it. They have a reputation for being magicians. This monastery is said to use tantric rituals to influence the weather, to make seasons turn, to prevent hail storms, et cetera.

All I can say is -- if these monks are doing rituals to make the rain come -- they are succeeding big time. If I were a little more brave, I might go upstairs and see if I could talk them into fifteen minutes of sunshine. My laundry is about to dissolve.

I sit in my little room and recite the mantra of Guru Rinpoche, who brought the dharma to Tibet and is especially revered by the Nyingmapa. I visualize his bulging eyes, his red tricorn hat, and his moustache like Salvador Dali’s. He is warm and tender and tough. Guru Rinpoche bears down on me like a rainbow.

Hopefully the monks will peek in my busted window, spy me slouched on my meditation bench in front of a Guru Rinpoche postcard, and put in a good word for me with the dharmakaya. This despite the fact that delusion, anger and desire (desire!) continue in me unabated, and my Buddhist Report Card clearly reads: Shows No Sign of Improvement.

On the other hand, an entire month has gone by, and I haven’t once wished I was dead.

Lucky, lucky, lucky life. Allowed to travel, allowed to write and to read. And my husband. Absolutely first-rate. What are the chances that someone so adorable would also have such an excellent heart? Why can’t I celebrate all these things – and accept that Tokyo is the price of them? Why?

Return to the breath. This moment. Now. This is what I am taught. Here in India, how easy it is come back. The present moment accosts me. Now insists. Speeding Maruti van, smell of cow shit, shoeshine boy, an old monk stumbling down the road clutching a fresh head of lettuce. India issues me continuous invitations, in the form of warm brown eyes and uneven pavement.

Returning to the present moment in Tokyo, I find myself alone. Even on a crowded train. Especially then. Who wants to be present in Tokyo? Who wants to be aware? Look around the Namboku Line, look on the platform at Meguro. See how we clutch our phones and stare dead-eyed into space. Who needs to be aware in Tokyo? The train will arrive at 8:11, exactly as if did the day before.

We are encouraged not to be aware. Drugged cattle are more easily transported. Should you happen to regain consciousness while riding on the train, you will find yourself staring at an advertisement for beer.

All day in Tokyo I move like a capsule through a tube. Like a ghost. If Tokyo were a picture, the caption would read: Let’s pretend none of this is going on.

Hopefully in time there will be monuments and museums to honor Tokyoites, who sacrificed their lives, and their children’s lives, to comfort, efficiency and convenience. Please disagree, if you like. But I have been watching for seven years -- and I do not intend to play dumb now.

The city of Tokyo is devoted singlemindedly to testing a hypothesis. It’s the largest experiment in the history of the world. The MacArthur Hypothesis, let’s call it – that happiness is achieved through ever-increasing amounts of technology, isolation, predictability and consumption.

Supposedly this hypothesis is now being tested all around the world. This is completely unnecessary. We in Tokyo have tested it already. We have taken it very, very far. And the results are clear. Happiness does not result. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work!

Generally it is enough to disprove a hypothesis a dozen times, or a hundred. But we go on and on. We disprove it 30 million times. And then we try again. And we are shocked when it does not work. How about more? More speed! More consumption! No matter how much it hurts, we go on, destroying our environment and wasting our lives, trying again, no matter what it costs us, no matter how much it hurts, like an alcoholic who is already coughing up blood, like an aging sex addict waiting to get fucked in the sling.

How can these monks believe that they can change the weather by waving a bell in the air! Then again, maybe I’m not one to judge. I come from a city where women believe they will be fulfilled by handbag.

As for the spectacularly dumb things I’ve done in pursuit of happiness – well, just scroll down.

I don’t have the answers obviously. (Actually, I was hoping we could work out the details together.) All I know is -- it’s time for something else.

Write in with suggestions, won’t you?

In the meantime, I’ll be here kneeling in front of a postcard, and trying to let the rainbow bear down on me.

Monday, August 24, 2009


A beautiful portrait of William Carlos Williams by Akemi Shinohara to go along with the essay "Cheerful, Lucky, Lost". William Carlos Williams, we love you!

And thank you, Akemi. It is an honor to be illustrated by you.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost

An Unseemly Love : Notes On Returning to Delhi

(Delhi, Aug 17.09)

From this rooftop the main bazaar appears a ruin. Or at least, the mud has won -- the details of the surrender are still being worked out. Meanwhile a gang of boys (blue, pink, orange, red shirts) have climbed to the highest crumbling rooftop and they are flying kites.

People told me, when I said I hadn’t seen Delhi in eleven years, that it had changed immensely. I’d hardly recognize the place. I braced myself accordingly, put my nostalgia on a leash. Well, I’m sure it has changed immensely and that everyone, out of regard for me and my fine feelings, worked overtime to put it back almost exactly as it was before, the last time I was here.

Of course, the sacred word internet is painted on every other wall and Pahar Ganj now sports more ATMs than chaiwallahs. The TVs are all flat screen and everyone who appears to eat regularly, and some who do not, is holding a cellphone and talking to it continuously in a loud authoritative voice. But to me it still seems the same Delhi, with new and glittery earrings. The new Metro must be truly significant. The middle-class may now teleport from place to place.

I was told auto-rickshaws had recently been banned. Cycle-rickshaws were banned some time ago. The streets are full of both. Last night I stumbled out of my hotel at midnight to find no one but the omelet-wallah and a man feeding his two camels. “Dude.” I said to myself. “I told you I was not making this shit up!” Camels, of course, are also banned.

Obsessing about camels, about cows and monkeys and elephants, about saris and sadhus – this is what foreigners do in India. We patronize, we exoticize, and we miss the point entirely. I am a recalcitrant repeat offender, shackled as I have been for almost twenty years with an unseemly love for India. Foreigners should come, and spend, and then go home again. It’s wrong for us to come back again and again, and involve ourselves, and pretend to appreciate things that are obviously beyond our comprehension.

The main bazaar looks as it did in 1991: as if a skinny cycle rickshaw wallah, stiffed on a fare, might bring down the entire district with a single well-aimed kick. In the rain the road is bubbling vat of brown mud. Even the elegant young ladies, who ordinarily walk around all day without a spot, as if defended by the god of hygiene, stand now at the edge of the street, peering out, figuring in advance exactly where they will step.

To tell the truth, it is quieter than I remember. The hassling seems less intense. I used to say “No thank you” 150 times between the gate of the railway station and my hotel. Now one refusal is often enough – what India is this! There was a time when, if I was accosted by a dreamy green-eyed Kashmiri carpet salesman, I’d laugh and wave and start to run. They’d pursue you for half a mile – until you had no choice but to go with them, drink six cups of tea, book a houseboat and buy a carpet. Now the merchants hardly try. Perhaps it just doesn’t work anymore: these travelers seem to move in sealed containers.

I have a fear -- maybe I’m paranoid -- but I worry people will think I love India because it’s spiritual. Let me make clear: I love India because I love Indians and this is where they live.

So often – crossing the street, peering from a rooftop, crammed onto a bus – a stranger meets my eye and shrugs and grins, as if to say, “It’s a madhouse isn’t it? But you and I will keep our sense of humor.”

And there is the way that questions are asked in a way that includes the correct answer: “You come to my shop yes you would like to buy something.” Last night, when I gazed longingly toward a South Indian snack shop, the cook just beamed at me and said, “Yes!”

Or this: today I went the ITDC office to book a city tour. The amiable young man wrote a ticket and passing it to me said, “Sir, I am asking you seriously -- if this tour is no good -- that you will not complain to me, sir – and that you will not let small money come between us -- because this is only one chicken, sir -- and I must eat this chicken every day.”

Reduced to a small puddle of language joy, I gazed at him adoringly. (The above is only a ham-handed approximation of his freewheeling spontaneous improvisation.)

“That was beautiful,” I said. He proudly raised his hand and we high-fived each other.

This afternoon, sitting on the rooftop at Sam’s Café, watching the boys fly kites, I came upon a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “Arrival at Santos”. Here’s a little of it:

. . . oh tourist
is this how this country is going to answer you

and you immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.

What I Found When I Was Lost

Days (With No Proper Container)

(Delhi. Aug. 19. 09)

This rat is obviously on a schedule. Every morning there he is, beside my table at the Appetite bakery, every day at the same time. Whenever he appears, I stand up, as though he were a prominent politician or religious personage. The rat darts straight up the wall – to work presumably – and all at once the foreigners start to chatter with each other, as though the rat has given us permission to speak.

*

The French tourists always want their breakfast served in a particular order. Every morning they explain this carefully. Never once do they succeed. They get it when it’s ready. But they do not think this is right.

*

I wanted to see Delhi’s new metro, so I chose a destination at random from the map. How about Mansarovar Park? Isn’t Mansarovar a sacred lake in Tibet? Or am I making that up? And “park” is always an attractive word, bringing to mind trees full of delicate flowers, and bushes full of pent-up marauding homosexuals. I am always in favor of parks.

Delhi’s new metro is exuberantly modern, except for the lighting, a flickering skim-milk gray blue, and the manners, which Delhiites brought with them from the bus. How many times have I wailed in Tokyo, “Why can’t they just act human?”

Well. Now I have my answer. No one lets anyone out or in, everyone pushes and shoves. Men sit serenely beneath the green ‘Ladies Only’ sign and do not even think of giving up their seats. Half the passengers have just this moment received an extremely important call. They shout. In Tokyo a man hurls himself into a seat – and at once turns his face to ‘off’. In Delhi a man grabs a seat and looks around smug and exultant, like a toddler who has just now mastered the potty.

*

At Manosarovar Park station, I did not find a park, much less a lake. Instead I found a busy village beneath the elevated train tracks, beneath a cool gray concrete roof, beside towering elephantine pillars. The place was strangely reminiscent of the vast temple complexes at Trichy and Thanjavur, somber somehow, worshipful. At the bottom of this was a paved road lined with cycle-rickshaws, charpoys, mounds of trash mulching in brown heaps, stands selling betel in shiny packets, walls built from the dirt and burlap or blue vinyl ceilings. Extreme poverty beneath a cathedral ceiling. The women tended small fires in pits; the men sprawled on charpoys woven from silver rope. Every minute or so a lorry barreled down the street, blanketing everyone with another coat of dust. If the residents of this village ever decide they need a motto, they could always use Thoreau. “We do not ride upon the train. The train rides upon us.”

*

Back at Connaught Place, I can’t handle it anymore and so I choose an a/c restaurant at random, climb two flights of steps, and find myself surrounded by Indians in enormous black cowboy hats. Mexican food in Delhi? Apparently so. I order some nachos. The servers glance nervously at my clipboard, afraid that I am writing a review. I ought to put it away, but I have to keep writing because every time I look up I start to giggle: big black cowboy hats, black western shirts and pants, red kerchief knotted at the neck, black cowboy boots with silver buckles!

*

This young man with the purple shirt and the long stick, who walks the way I’ve seen a fisherman steer a boat in shallow water. When I see his soft eyes and fledging beard at the window, I leave the café and stand in the street with him. I give him bills not coins. The tourists at the Apetite Café are annoyed with me. I am making the problem worse. As it is, we must keep our eyes on our plates lest we see grubby children touching their fingers to their lips as we savor another bite of hot buttered croissant. I can ignore the children. This man, however, is my kinsmen. We share the same defect. The withered leg I hate. I strap my leg into the brace and shove it in an elevated shoe. And I walk. He begs in the Main Bazaar; his dangling dead foot is his qualification. I see that he is beautiful -- and whole. We are brothers. I want to hold his face in my hands and kiss him.

*
If they ask,
I will say
I make
the days
experiments.

From these experiments, I make days.

*

An old woman in a soiled white dress pushes open the glass door and enters Café Coffee Day. “Good morning,” she addresses the room, as though she were a teacher and we were all assembled for class. “Is there going to be a sandwich today? Is there going to be coffee? I certainly hope so.” The old woman is smiling, her eyes are bright blue. She’s British, I think. Her diction is impeccable and her voice is as smooth as glass. She advances to the counter. She speaks but doesn’t look at anyone, as if she knows we are there but cannot see us. As if we are ghosts.

“I have, in my bag, water from a holy spring in Burma. It is absolutely precious but I have no proper container for it.” She waits at the counter, but she does not receive a coffee or a sandwich. The young Indian woman at the counter ignores her, sits there looking bored.

The old woman is now standing in the center of the room. “This woman does not want to be promoted. That is why she does not give me a sandwich. I have been robbed of everything and I am forced to beg. Which is a tradition in this country.” She speaks very carefully, as if this were a recitation and she has to get it perfectly right. The poems of Emily Dickinson would be ideal for this woman in a white dress, for this voice which is sweet and pure and entirely unnerving.

“She has been asked to feed me. The President of India asked all these restaurants to feed me. But she does not. Because she does not want to be promoted.” She walks back toward the glass door. “I am sorry but I cannot hear anything. Because of hypnotic suggestion that has been absolutely beautfully done. So I am very sorry but I cannot hear a word you say.”

When I paid my bill, I asked the lady at the counter how long the old woman had been coming to beg. “Oh it’s been about a year now.” Her voice was flat and bored. “She comes in every day.”

Saturday, August 15, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost


Breakfast at the Mali Restaurant

When I was 24 I threw myself in front of a train. Naturally, my timing and my aim were off. Sissy boy. Couldn’t hit a baseball, couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t hit a Light Rail train -- not even with myself.

The Light Rail was new in Denver -- and turned out to have excellent brakes. The conductor stopped the train and cussed me out. “What is it you are trying to do?” Frankly, it was more embarrassing than anything else. I stumbled back to my friend’s house and didn’t tell anyone. My clothes were soaked. I said I’d fallen in the snow. As suicides go, it wasn’t much, but, hey, it was an attempt.

The next day I decided that, since I was going to kill myself, I might as well go back to India first. I’d been going to India since I was 18, prostrating to swamis and lamas, reading novels, getting dysentery, and cruising the bamboo at Cubbon Park. I stumbled off to India and got hooked back into life. Whatever works, right?

More than a dozen years passed, several different lives and countries, but, despite setting records for sustained neuroses, I never seriously considered killing myself again – until about two weeks ago.

I live in Tokyo now, where the trains are very fast and doubtless would have done the trick, but thankfully I was trying to be modern, also painless, and so I googled ‘Ativan lethal dose’.

Do you know what you get when you do that? You get 15,000 online dealers trying to sell you Ativan. Which pretty much extinguishes any warm and fuzzy Ronald Reagan- type feelings I have toward capitalism. On the plus side, there were so many budding capitalists that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.

When I am lost to myself, when the demons have spirited me away, I sit in the corner drinking beer, writing little notes to myself on scraps of paper. Two weeks ago, the morning after a hopeless night, while tidying up the beer cans and the scraps, I found a little note that read: I’m not going to kill myself because I want to eat breakfast again at the Mali Restaurant.

“Dude.” I said to myself. “Nice idea.”

I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok and here I am, eating rice porridge with pork, suspended in a humid cloud of fish sauce, green onions and monoxide, sitting outside at the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok.

Now that my insanity has been firmly established, I would like to tell you my mystic theory of restaurants. I believe in soul mates basically. Not for romance, but for dining out. Each soul receives, at conception, the name of a restaurant and that restaurant is the soul’s destiny, where the soul and the stomach are perfectly satisfied. (It’s better if you pronounce this in your best Osho-faux guru accent.) For some souls it might be a sushi bar, for others a hot dog stand on a sunny corner. Some tragic souls never seek out their restaurant -- they keep going back to Panda Express at the Food Court.

I’ll leave it to Hollywood to work out all the dramatic implications.

Anyway, the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok is the restaurant of my soul, the very best restaurant in the world. The Mali Restaurant has excellent food, of course, Thai and Western both, all very reasonably priced. Inside it’s dark and cozy with cushions and photos and bric-a-brac. Outside there’s an intricate wooden verandah that’s glorious if you don’t mind the street noise. The management and the waitstaff greet you tenderly, as if your mother had called ahead and asked that they be especially sweet to you.

However I suspect that the Mali Restaurant’s principal attraction for me is its strange and occult power, a bit of benevolent witchcraft. At the Mali Restaurant it is impossible to feel afraid or hopeless.

I have fled to the Mali in the thick of a panic attack, or after a day at the baths when I could have torn out my eyes from self-loathing. Demons can’t get inside the door. Mine can’t anyway. I can’t explain it otherwise.

Naturally I have my theories about this.

The Mali Restaurant is run by two men, a couple, one American and one Thai. Of course they are ordinary men, with complaints, with aches and pains. They are ordinary and at the same time I think it can also be said that they are beautiful experiments in human goodness. Experiments may have unforeseen peripheral effects.

The American was a soldier in Vietnam and, from what I’ve overheard, is haunted still. I heard him say once that he keeps his room smelling like a French whorehouse so that the smell of corpses won’t revisit him. It could well be that, in constructing a refuge from his own fear, he has created a safe haven for everyone.

The other man, the Thai, has a compulsion for preserving life. At the market he will buy frogs and even goats to save them from being slaughtered. Eavesdropping as I ladle up rice soup with pork, I note that he does not speak like someone who woke up and decided to be virtuous, but rather like a man who cannot help himself. He cares especially for dogs. He saves dogs the way other men drink.

The leftovers from the Mali -- the unfinished lunches of embassy staff, the leavings of sex tourists with too big eyes -- all go to stray dogs. But it goes much further than this.

Driving one night three years ago, he saw ahead of him a truck full of dogs. And he knew these dogs had been kidnapped and were being taken up North where they would be slaughtered and served in a restaurant.

Very upsetting, isn’t it? I would feel outraged if I saw such a thing. And I could also be relied upon to not do a damn thing.

From what I understand, he forced the truck to the side of the road, threatened the kidnappers, convinced them that he was a legal authority, and took possession of the dogs. A happy hijacking, in other words. Robin Hood for dogs.

And he brought the dogs all home. Dozens and dozens of dogs. Thankfully the managers of the Mali have some land of their own. He now operates a dog shelter and works to stop dog trafficking.

Courage on such a scale is bound to have effects. Don’t you think? Unintended, peripheral effects. By which I mean to say that I am just another of the dogs. Another stray, or house pet that got lost. A lucky dog rescued at random on the way to its destruction, who instead winds up eating breakfast at the Mali Restaurant.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost

Cheerful, Lucky, Lost

I’m no slave to fashion, but I like to think I do all right. Understated, masculine – i.e. undershirt and muscles showing. Overall I think I’m just as cool as any guy could be who carries a clipboard everywhere he goes.

No use for me is found and so I wander taking notes. Each page dated, printed neatly, labelled Hinduism, Ginsberg, Winesburg, Ecology. Notes on the streets of Bangkok, on the round-faced woman selling chicken with rice, hair tucked into her white cap beneath the tattered green umbrella. Ice melts from the cart of the melon vendor and drips beside the bicycle wheels. The British tourists wear plaid shorts, have awe-inspiring calves. I spend too much time looking down, I know.

If anyone looks at me I duck, bow, and smile wincing with vast agonized longing. Quite a little production, really. Then I resume taking notes.

The visiting Italian ladies have blonde-streaked hair and look always as if they are squinting at something bright – and suspicious.

There is a certain cheerful kind of being lost that, loneliness and small anxiety notwithstanding, seems an enormous privilege. All day I wander the street, eating noodle soup, chugging milk on the stoop of Family Mart, the one near Soi Twilight (or Soi Boy) that’s always full of spiky-haired young men in tiny powder blue shorts and white tanktops who shiver in the a/c as they wait to buy hair gel or a Coca-Cola.

Wandering then down the road to the Sri Mariamma Temple where the goddess is taking her afternoon siesta behind the curtain and the brahmins wake up just long enough to apply tilak and receive donations. I love this temple because everyone comes here – Thai, Chinese, Indian, European – to offer a tray with a coconut, a garland of marigolds and a carton of milk. No one notices one more foreigner. Even a few Theravadin monks are here, not bowing to anything but taking a good long look.

I do not believe in anything – all hokum as far as I’m concerned – but when the curtain opens to reveal the goddess I prostrate along with the others, then slip a 100 baht to Lord Venkateshwara, whose job it is to preserve the universe. Think about it: a job more hopeless than Obama’s. Naturally, I check in with Ganesha, who handles beginnings and writers. I do not believe in anything. I hold out some slim hope that I may yet be found mistaken.

At the travel agent nearest the temple I stop in and speak with ‘Rani’, who clearly views her size as one more reason to dress impeccably. Her English is precise and aristocratic, her tone world-weary. She has the quality I look for in a travel agent: an air of being in charge of the universe. Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy plane tickets and that is close enough. In three minutes she has booked me a one-way ticket to my own heart.

Back up the road to Soi Twilight, where it is twilight now: the boys are just arriving, playing pool, and laughing at each other. Here at Dick’s Café, a few johns are already in attendance too, red-faced men who smoke staring at the ground and glower at everyone except the boy across the way – last night’s boy or last week’s boy and maybe tonight’s boy as well – who waves, blows kisses and makes funny faces.

The johns. Trim well-moisturized well-to-do white men with angry puckered faces: the products of forty years of gay liberation. A liberation that turned out to be primarily a training in consumption: lube, poppers, draperies, gym memberships, vacations. Most of all, we consume each other.

Who has the manifesto for some other path? Who is calling us away from gaydar and manhunt, from our voracious pornographic cave? Where are our mentors? I fear that we have killed them off with the meth, or the bare-backing craze, or else trained them for nothing better than pouty-faced old age, buying boys on Soi Twilight.

Squinting beneath the color lights, I take notes and dream along with Bill Morgan’s new biography of Ginsberg: I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It’s a great book -- though I fear it feeds my delusions of poetic grandeur. Most of all it makes me yearn for mentors and community. Some company, please.

Most of all, I love to read of William Carlos Williams and his open-hearted generosity even in broken-down old age. By 1956 Williams was going blind; Allen had to read his poems to him. Allen even showed up one night with his dad and Corso, Orlovsky and Kerouac. They got drunk and no doubt wore out their welcome with Mrs. Williams. Still, it appears the good doctor was charmed by them and wanted to hear what they had to say. William Carlos Williams, I love you.

Despite my obvious deficit in beliefs, purposes and social graces, tonight it is enough to be a quivering and observant fool, a fool half-hidden by the potted palm in the corner of Dick’s Café, keeping an eye on the johns and the boys in powder blue shorts, taking notes perpetually on my fool’s clipboard.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost

Return of Color

I prayed to God, God couldn’t be bothered. The Buddha remained Gone Beyond. Who showed up was Clarice Lispector (died, Brazil, 1977), wrapped in a shawl the green of dragonflies, looking utterly ferocious. She had no tolerance for self-pity. She took me by the wrist. She used her nails. The door was flung open. She led me out of the house, away from the alcohol and the collection of benzodapines. "You are going to the park," she said.

Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement. Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.

Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.

The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrified fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)

The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.

Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you me the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.

And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.

Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?

Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)

Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

What I Found When I Was Lost

Notes From Past The Tipping Point

Don’t expect more than fragments, don’t ask me to make sense of things. Something happened, I got broken somehow, I don’t know how. My tipping point was – back there a ways. Like the Gangetic dolphin, the Amundsen ice, the ladyslipper. (You see how I put on airs.) What’s left is to be company to each other. As I am alone here at the infamous Malaysia, the longest-running sleazy cheap hotel in Southeast Asia, you’ll excuse me if I write a little.

Being neurotic is like carrying a heavy bag on one shoulder. You get sore, walk funny, and appear somewhat ridiculous. At the same time, it’s not such a problem, being somewhat askew. Certainly one has plenty of company. It’s fine until you one day you go to hoist your bag and pain shoots you in the face. If only one could simply call into work and say , “I’m very sorry. My mind’s gone out.”

The mistake is the same one we make with the oceans. We think we can dump in anything and it will just disappear. But a mind is like a back, it can be broken, and a mind is like the ocean – lose your balance for too long and pretty soon you’re killing off the dolphins.

Back in New Hampshire I saw a red cardinal and was momentarily incapacitated. I live in Tokyo, understand. Our bird is the crow. So I have some capacity for wonder still, that’s good to know, but not for crows or, for that matter, for live fucking shows, of which I’ve seen too many.

I was reminded of this fact last night at Tawan, the muscle boy bar, when the men donned golden masks, poured on the hot wax, and fucked each other in tandem and acrobatically, spinning like old-fashioned TV antennas. There’s more art in an evening’s cabaret at a bar of boys for sale than in a century’s worth of certain literary magazines: the ladyboys in spangles, gauze and plumes, lip-syncing flawlessly and looking better than the stars themselves, the bruise-eyed comedienne done up to look the haggard slut, mocking the audience and crying for lost love, and, yes, the actual fucking.

Purists reserve the word art for sonnets, for prose poems and pottery. I invite naysayers to try it themselves, to learn an aerobic jazz dance gymnastics routine and then perform it naked, on stage, slathered in baby oil, with a big thick dick up their ass. I'm certain Michiko Kakutani agrees: respect should not be reserved exclusively for sonneteers.

Is anyone still shocked? Was anyone shocked to begin with? Is being shocked just how we reassure ourselves? These sins are all humdrum, even straight people now attend gay sin dens. The open air gay bars on Silom Soi 4 have more tourists than actual queers, like a tribal village overrun by bus tours. I do my best to glare at straight men’s crotches, to look threatening and ravenous -- it’s no use. Even if you grab some tourist’s ass he just smiles sheepishly and says, “Thanks man, I’m flattered.”

As for the depraved steroid leather fetish fucking shows, well, even women go to them. Actual biological women, who have never had a penis of their own. Last night a woman sat alone at the table beside mine. She was in her late-twenties, a little heavy maybe, but long-haired and pretty. She was no wild child, her skirt was long and her shoes sensible. A graduate of Vassar possibly, B.A.Women’s Studies, followed by a Masters in Development from Brown. I mean, she looked the sort who could be expected to disapprove. The sort of person who might well take time to explain to you the brutality inherent in Jell-O desserts, and how gay porn oppresses women. Yet here she was, sipping her Coca-Cola and watching the boys deep throat each other. She looked bored.

The men on stage couldn’t help but give her a little extra attention. Most of them are totally straight after all and here was an opportunity to reunite work with their own interests and passions. Certainly she was lucky to be seated in the third row and not up front for the final number when a drag queen sang “Come as you are” and the boys did, one after another. (I thought it very conscientious of the management to go around first and put coasters atop all glasses.)

The women fled eventually, but not before she was quite thoroughly nuzzled and I did hear one muscle boy say teasingly “No tip necessary!”

I am still impressed by red cardinals -- how is it that all human things have had their color drained from them? These are days I feel I could beat even Ms. Joan Didion for Disenchantment Overall. “It is possible to stay entirely too long at the party,” says Ms. Didion, and she presumably has not even been to ‘boots-only night’ at the sex club called Church in Amsterdam.

* * *

That was the end of the slightly fun part of the essay. What’s left are complaints and ennui. The optional part of the tour reserved for depressives seeking company.

All my life I’ve been an enthusiast. That man dropped suddenly dead -- now it all just seems hideously repetitive. I note that religious faith and spirituality keeled over at this same point. Funny to discover what actually kills off faith, which is neither tragedy nor ecology. (Or are these now classified as one and the same?) My faith died off because no use was found for me. Selfish and stupid, I know, but such is the case.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of education, edifying chats with Allen Ginsberg, the Dalai Lama and the Empress of Japan, preposterous amounts of world literature of every stripe, all dumped into me like tomatoes into a food processor. Every teacher I ever had went to special bother on my behalf, time which they could have better spent on video games, on nail care.

Of all the things one for which one could become estranged from God, what sinks the boat is that the body of truth, the dharmakaya, turns out to be a suck-ass career counselor. No use is found.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Out the door to Bangkok, hoping for new adventures and new words.
In the meantime, I am re-posting the "Three Coin Prose" essays from Bangkok in 2008.
Please stay tuned for more news from the Malaysia Hotel.

Three-Coin Prose

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2008)

In the lobby of the Malaysia Hotel, the Internet is coin-operated, 8 minutes for 10 baht, which is rather exorbitant. These messages, therefore, will not be too lengthy, just three coins long. If anything runs on, or gets too graphic, by all means skip it.

Despite the city's reputation, there are many hotels in Bangkok that are entirely decent and respectable. This is not one of them. The Malaysia Hotel deserves every well-oiled inch of its sleazy reputation. The sofa in front of reception is at all hours draped with hustlers. There is no charge for guests. Even single rooms have two beds because it is assumed you'll need them. The restaurant (poor, but get the Chinese broccoli with preserved pork) is open 24 hours and there are times I am the only person dining not accompanied by a gorgeous transgendered whore.

I do not purchase anyone. I do my push-ups and wait with bearded quivering lip for volunteers. I am 34--lately it seems I am waiting longer. Still, I prefer volunteers. I recognize this may be difficult to believe, considering my location, but, as anyone who knows me will attest, I have a tendency to confess everything, no matter how embarrassing or even shameful. If I start buying muscle boys I'll let you know.

I stay at the Malaysia Hotel because I am, like hornpout, most at home in murky, sleazy, bottom-dweller type environments. The Oriental is simply not my hotel, and neither is the Sofitel. There is no use in pretending I am rainbow trout.

Visitors to Soi Twilight


from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2008)

In Tokyo you can ride the train all day wearing a Santa hat and no one will even smile. The other extreme is Bangkok and what happens if you show up in Patpong wearing a Superman t-shirt.

"Superman!" shout a bevy of girls in white bikinis from the doorway. They catch my arm as I walk past, their shapely strong hands studded with kryptonite nails. I smile apologetically and extricate myself. "Sorry!" I mumble. "I'm gay."

And, in unison, the girls scream, "SUPERMAN IS GAY!"

The boys in Soi Twilight don't take it any more calmly. Hey, Superman! Yoo-hoo, Superman, over here! Rescue me Superman!

One confident lad reckons I belong to him. "Superman?" he asks, then beams, and aims a thumb at himself. "Superboy!"

Ordinarily, of course, I prefer to keep a low profile. I sit at Dick's Cafe and people-watch and keep an eye out just in case, you know, somebody needs to be rescued.

You may or may not consider the activities of Soi Twilight morally reprehensible--a dozen bars with fucking shows and young men with numbers on their underpants--but it has got to be one of the best places to people-watch in the universe.

I notice first the thirty-somethings, out on a lark with a gang of friends, off to see the fucking shows. Few of them are buying boys--or if they are they'll come back later, alone. We are the well-to-do white promiscuous horde. We've done everything else, we might as well do this too. In this group I place myself.

The first time I ever went to Soi Twilight was in the company of an Englishman named William, an admirably funny and compassionate sleazebag. He noted that in Soi Twilight there are those who stroll, laughing, smiling and looking around, and then there are the "businessmen" who walk as quickly as possible, eyes straight ahead, jaw clenched and William mimicked their internal dialogue in a quick peevish whisper: "I'm here on business, yes, very important business." As if the Swiss Embassy was at the other end of the alley and they simply had no choice but to walk down it.

When in fact what's at the end of the alley is a bar where boys swim buck naked in fish tanks.

"Very important business!" hissed William. "Highly confidential international business. I've got very pressing top-secret big business in my pants, in my pants, in my pants!"

Other visitors: there are the standard decent tourists and those who wish to appear as such. They've seen the Grand Palace, the Emerald Buddha, the Amulet Market, and now they must visit the alley of men for sale. Just for, you know, well-roundedness.

Particularly satisfying are the gleeful wives dragging reluctant husbands who have just this moment learned something new about the woman they married, as in: "I just sat through the Ping Pong show, buster, and now you are going to watch Men Get Fucked!"

There are packs of straight men who come to joke and mock and in every group of them there is one man shot through with undisguisable yearning. We'll be seeing him later.

Once I even saw a family, Scandinavian I think, who walked through holding hands with their young son and daughter. I had to get off my bar stool and peer down the street after them.

Now, I'm sure this doesn't happen every time, but this family moved inside a cloud of pacification. As they neared each bar the barkers, boys and doormen stopped shouting and hassling and stood smiling, as amiable and harmless as Disney characters, little white underpants not withstanding.

And now we come down to business. The preceding groups do not contribute much money to the soi. Money comes from men who are—I could say old. Most of them are old. I could say fat. Many of them are fat. Certainly I could say scowling. Their faces are remarkably sour. But this is not enough.

Watching them my mood turns. I am repulsed.

They have shrill voices, poor posture, comb-overs. Skin conditions. It is not enough, clearly, to be only old, or just fat. To only have just an unpleasant personality, or just bad teeth. These men are accidents involving multiple vehicles. These men are paying for sex. Certainly they will not be having it for free.

How effortless it is to condemn them, these nasty old queens, to go on condemning them—as I pray never to pile up enough negatives to be one of them—and meanwhile I condemn them, as I imagine they have been condemned all their lives.

(Because time is less an issue here than is generally supposed. I am confident that many repugnant old men were recently repugnant young men. They simply got tired of waiting and decided to go shopping instead.)

Among all of us who condemn them, I would like to call a meeting. I am calling for a meeting and asking for volunteers. Since buying sex is wrong, I would like to see a show of hands--

Who is willing to love them for free?

Who'll volunteer? To love for free?

Will you?

Hey, Superman, will you?


(March 16, 2008. Bangkok, Thailand)

Packaging

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2008)

The bar Banana, at the top of the street, is Soi Twilight's hassle-free zone. Sitting there, I watch visitors arrive, out on a lark or in a hurry. Others do not enter, but only stand peering down the soi--a net of little blue lights turns to extravagant neon fruit further on--and they are curious or horrified. They've already passed through the city of women. Now here is the alley of boys.

Across from Banana is Hotmail and the grinning bar man whose job it is to pull people in. He was here last year too--something has happened to him. His is not sick, not old or worn. Here's what it is: he has become processed, packaged. He is a product now, his smiles as uniform as citrus in Tokyo. I don't blame him. I hope the boy from a village up North is stowed away, inside, safe.

Last night, as the pretty boys patrolled and the johns mulled their choices for the night, a beggar arrived in Soi Twilight. A skinny young man in blue shirt and blue shorts, each of his limbs twisted thirty degrees in the wrong direction. He hobbled past the the boys with spiked hair and white tank tops, past the bar men in tight black shirts and began to beg from men sitting at the bar.

He turned and I saw, on the back of his left leg, a long red open wound. Surprised, I touched my own leg, my crippled leg in its white plastic case.

I try to remind myself often that, born in another country, I would have been a beggar boy, instead of -- a sturdy scrappy man with big arms and a big chest, carefully packaged in hopes you won't notice the limp.

I should have given to him. I meant to. He didn't get as far as me. I should have followed him, but I was stuck on my barstool, leaden with beer and manners.

The chipmunk-cheeked guy across the way had waved him off, not caring if he went or not. But now the manager was here, stocky buttoned down authority: not for sale. He barked, he pointed, he ordered him out of the soi.

The beggar limped away, obedient shuffling blue. At the top of the soi the beggar received a smile from one of the spike-haired boys who was bopping decorously along to bla dee ya hee, bla dee ya ha, bla dee ya hee, bla dee ya ha ha, and the beggar man, in response, did a quick crippled ecstatic jig clear across the entrance to the soi.

The Pied Piper Gangster Reunion

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok

A year later the same show: same cowboy, same hot wax, same horsehung guy wearing a monster mask, same buff little guy in a leather cop cap fucking the same girlie geisha boy--and it was incredibly acrobatic the way they did it, involving both a step-ladder and a trapeze, pounding away at every possible angle, keeping time with the music, both of them smiling broadly all the while like two proud twirlers heading up a parade.

Ideally there should be a heavy-duty bleach solution in a little bucket beside my hotel bed and at the end of the night I could leave my mind to soak in it and start the next day pure, with a high opinion of myself. As this is not possible, I must write.

In the back corner of Tawan, Bangkok's big muscle boy bar, there was the most preposterous gangster. Instead of watching the stage I kept turning around to look at him: a young man in a sports coat, his silk dress shirt half unbuttoned, wearing big sunglasses at one o'clock in the morning. The overall effect was not imposing, not like an actual gangster but instead like a seventh grader who'd told him mother, "No, I was a vampire last year, this year I want to be a pimp!"

The gangster had a muscle boy on either side of him. One was the biggest guy in the bar and the other--well, I'm not even allowed to look at him. Last year I looked, and even spoke to him, and I just barely escaped. Tattooed Burmese muscle man the size of a Volkswagen with the sweetest baby face you can imagine. Lord, protect me from what I want.

One of the managers sat at the gangster's table pouring his whiskey, making sure the ice was fresh. This is what the big spenders do at Tawan: they buy a bottle and share it with the boys. The gangster finally took off his shades. His eyes glinted and darted like little blue lights.

I didn't believe what I knew to be true. Everything was the same, even my Pied Piper Gangster at his troublemaker's table in the corner. His hand was on my shoulder. "When did you get back?" he said and asked me to join him for a whiskey.

I said I was glad he was still alive. "You know, I kept the gorilla. It's in a place of honor back home in Tokyo."

History of the Pied Piper Gangster, in brief: I met him a year ago, or rather I was one of innumerable people he collected in the course of the one long night. I followed him as he ranted at, entertained and infuriated every single person he came across. He had to speak to everyone, buy everything, give everything away, had to sing and praise himself and raise holy bedlam at every step.

At one point he'd seen an old woman selling toys. He shouted to her in Thai and haggled passionately before buying a large sad-faced stuffed gorilla which he hardly glanced at before passing it to me. "Here," he said and forgot about it.

The manager sat at his table partly because he spent so much money but mostly because he had an extraordinary gift for causing trouble every single minute. He smoked and smoking was forbidden. He refused to put it out. He groped anyone nearby, shouted orders to the stage in Thai, stood up, spun around, nearly knocked over a table, nearly got caught in a cum shot--it was the part of the show when the men line up on stage and diligently shoot a load.

He must have been an avatar of Loki--how else could he survive? He tumbled back at my side. "Stay with me," he said. "For free. I've got an extra room." I didn't need to say no; I just waited a minute.

How can such forces exist in equal concentration: fucked-up, holy, pathetic, kingly, radiant, hopeless. The brilliant conflagration of a young man destroying his life. For the love of God, Pied Piper, eat soup. Stay home.

The Pied Piper Gangster says hello to everyone but he never says goodnight. He lurched up. Muscle men held onto tables nearby. On his way to the door he spun around and around; he did everything but chant Hare Krishna and then he was gone.

Of Appearances

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2008)

How can you stay in Bangkok? After three days it is finished. There's nothing to see, nothing to do.

True, of course, but still I needed a haircut. I walked to Silom and asked a smiling lady in front of a foot massage place if she also did hair. "Sure I do!" she said and led to me to a chair.

Now there's a first time for everything and this may have been her first time to do hair. She snipped a little, at random it seemed, then stepped back to study the effect. Snipped a little more, stepped back. Laughed uproariously.

"Don't worry," I said, though she was not the one worried. "Just make sure it's short." She was so charming I knew I'd be powerless to complain even if she left me looking like I suffered from mange. I consoled myself that, realistically, there isn't much that can render me more funny-looking, or less.

She clipped another twenty minutes or so and proclaimed me a handsome man. Really it was not so bad. Especially the left side. The left side was really quite professional.

A few minutes later I was back on the street admiring myself in a mirrored window when a white guy interrupted me to ask for money. I gave him twenty baht, asked where he was from.

"I'm Thai," he said. "My Dad was white, so everybody thinks. . ." His skin was gaunt, his eyes sunken and red-rimmed. His English was perfect and spoken with a heavy German accent. He said he needed 300 baht for a bus ticket back to his village near the River Kwai. He had eyes green as green glass, same as another Thai man I'd met, the child of Thai mother and an American soldier, who was working as a bar boy in Pattaya. He'd hovered around the edges of the bar, skittish and uneasy, and did not join the other massage boys as they gossiped by the door on folding chairs. He seemed estranged from himself, a Thai man who looked 100% suburban New Jersey, a body that distanced him from his own family and countrymen, a body that now was up for sale.

"I hate this city," said this moment's green-eyed man. "It makes you sick." He continued walking down the street.

I stopped for a beer in Soi Twilight, which is an entirely different place, in the middle of the afternoon. A few tourists were sitting around, impatient for the night, looking extraordinarily sour-faced.

When I am in a pissy mood I make plans for a shrill and unpleasant book, which is to be titled The Gay Men's Guide to Mastering the Art of Unhappiness, because I believe we've brought unhappiness to whole new levels and straight women ought to come to us to be tutored in this, instead of hair and interior decorating. Has there ever been a group of people so good at making themselves and each other miserable?

Or, how about this, there could be a TV show with five gay guys and one straight guy. The gay guys would sit the straight guy down and explain to him why he was never ever going to be good enough.

You've got to have washboard abs and perfect pecs, you must get fifty dollar haircuts, you must have an enormous prick. You must have a very respectable job, you must be a success. You must be an original and also the same as everyone. Why are we even bothering to tell you all this? You are already too old. Save your money. Stay home. Maybe some day you can fly to Bangkok and buy someone pretty.

That said, there were two guys in the cafe who were having a really good time. (My theories are extraordinarily short-lived.) They were deaf and cussing each other out with tremendous merriment. This was an extraordinarily efficient process. I reckon they managed to curse each other 150 times within 30 seconds, a whirlwind of gestures that proceeded naturally to poking and slapping.

Can I ask a really ignorant question? Do deaf people get into more fights? Fighting words are already almost fighting.

The light outside was gentling now. It would be night but not soon enough. I had no idea what to do. That was a relief. I resolved to wander some more. As my master, Robert Walser, wrote, "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much."

Jupiter and Dream Boy #97

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2009)

"Are you going with me to my hotel? I just ask you. Because otherwise I must have #97."

We were sitting in Soi Twilight at the cafe opposite Dream Boy. He was talking fast, drinking his Singha, ignoring the young Thai man at his side. He'd determined that I was an innocent and nothing would dissuade him. He pledged to take me to the very most secret, most wicked places, which he named, one after another, and I had to tell him no, no, I'd been to those places already. And I was not going to Dream Boy, definitely not, even though Dream Boy had the best show, because the last time I went I wound up on stage stripped to my underpants as part of the comedy routine.

He was from Lithuania "a tiny microscopic country, you are from America, you have never heard of it, you do not even believe it exists" but now he lived in Switzerland. He was a small carefully tended man, perhaps 50. When he spoke of retirement, I said, "Oh, but that's a long time away for you." "I use many creams" he confided. He was delighted with me. I had much too much practice flattering middle-aged men.

We'd met at the Balcony on Soi 4, a place for straight people who want to go to a gay bar. From there we went to Soi Twilight, where the go-go boy bars are. He wanted to give me a tour but I'd been to every place he named. Finally he said, "How about Jupiter?"

I'd never been to Jupiter. He turned to the young Thai man beside him and said, "Take us to Jupiter." His name was Ook, supposedly. He'd sat with us all night and been more or less ignored. "He is very passive," the man from Lithuania explained. "In bed he will do nothing but his cock is like this--" and he indicated a place on his thigh above the kneecap. "I can introduce you if you like. It is no problem. Tonight he is just my friend."

Ook led the way to Jupiter and the man from Lithuania told me that the night before he'd had the best boy ever, one of the best anyway. "I was so tired from my flight. I went to the bar at midnight. I have known the mamasan there for a thousand years. 'Give me one with some meat on him and a big cock.' '#97' she said. And #97 it was."

Jupiter was obviously a big money place. The staff was floodlit outside the door: men in pink suits, a kathoy with hair like Diana Ross. He were led to a couch beside a glass tank where two naked men covered in soap suds slid artfully over each other. Their cocks had been pumped so much that they looked entirely unreal, like gigantic latex strap-ons. The man from Lithuania didn't wait long before going out for a smoke. Ook and I looked at each other; we both had the same small nervous laugh. We were already bored. Actually Ook looked as if he'd been bored for a number of years.

I've followed many middle-aged men desperate for talk as they toured Bangkok's nightlife. About this man there was one thing unique: he was paying for my drinks, which at bars like Jupiter are exorbitant. He kept me one side and Ook on the other and I was pretty sure we were both in the same department.

The audience at Jupiter was primarily Japanese and they looked every bit as humorless as they did back home in Tokyo while enduring their morning commute. The stage had two levels. The top-floor boys were bigger and better-looking. They stood in formation and, every twenty seconds or so, shifted position slightly. It was impossible to watch without thinking of rotisserie chicken. The Japanese snapped up boys in a remarkably short time. Five minutes after the show was through most of them were already gone. Once, in Darjeeling, I'd watched a busload of Japanese buy out a tea shop in just the same way.

In twenty years, when I can no longer bluff my way into being an object of desire, will I learn to look at these men the way johns must--to admire their bodies without looking in their eyes? How does a man bought for forty dollars--as they men are, as I have been--ever relearn his own true value?

Ook turned to me and asked, "Do you want to go out now?" I agreed vigorously. We fled Jupiter. The three of us returned to the cafe opposite Dream Boy, where the man from Lithuania learned that I was not available for sexual services that evening. So #97 it was. He hurried across the street and made his request to the doorman. #97 was still available; the bar fee was 400 baht.

#97 came downstairs a few minutes later, a sturdy young man in blue shirt and blue shorts, like a soccer player. It seems moralistic to report how forced his smile was but it can't be avoided. He was magnificently handsome; his smile was terrible to see. Nice to meet you he said and shook my hand. He and Ook carefully ignored each other. Ook had followed the man from Lithuania all night for nothing. All he'd gotten was free drinks, same as me.

The man from Lithuania said stay, stay, but I said I must sleep. It was almost one am anyway, the bars were about to close. "Why don't you take #97," suggested the man from Lithuania. "I can have him any night." #97 didn't understand but continued grinning. Ook sulked and slouched in his seat. I apologized and said good night and hurried past the colored lights and tired doormen out of Soi Twilight.

Evaporative Action

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Hunger Looks So Fun, At First

from Three Coin Prose: Bangkok (2008)

In the center of Babylon is a restaurant with glass walls: one side overlooks the courtyard and the other the pool, and everywhere there are tall palms, tile and glass, and gentlemen who make it to the gym not less than five days a week. As you sit with your Singha beer and plate of duck, perhaps feeling a little odd to be in such an elegant place wearing only a towel, you may read the slogan which is printed on the seat back: Twenty years of artistic endeavor beautifully disguised as a sauna.

Of all the sexual paradises gay men have devoted their lives to creating, the Babylon is perhaps the most exquisite. As the light fades, men gather in the courtyard to sip wine beneath the palms. If that is not enough for you, there’s also: a full gym surrounded by buck naked stone pharaohs with truly chiseled abs, a pool, more palms, another elegant bar, a coffee shop with fine desserts and classic movies, a huge wet area with steam, sauna and a honeycomb of tiled showers, the obligatory mile of dark mazes lined with cubicles, as well as a third bar hidden so deep in the guts of the place it’s unlikely you could get there or back without being fellated thrice, at least.

It is all very lovely—who looks at it?

OK, for ten minutes, maybe, when one first arrives. Maybe just after shooting a load. But mostly I’m just circling ravenously, elbowing my way through the dark corridors, chasing some Nordic-looking guy with three day stubble and a bulge in his towel. Fuckin’ a, he was here a minute ago, where the hell did he go?

At the end of the night my dick is sore and I feel like I’ve been duped. There is an honest bewilderment: it looked so fun. And yeah, maybe I got turned down a bunch of times, but other men grabbed my arm and dragged me off into a cubicle. Several of them were preposterously handsome. Bangkok attracts full-time sex fiends, graduates of gaydar with high honors. This is not the place for amateurs of promiscuity.

Still it seems that, at crucial moments, I was not there. Or it is as if, upon arrival in paradise, I am transformed into the most unpleasant person I have ever met.

If I was the only person doing this, well, I could institutionalize myself and the problem would be solved. But, looking around, it seems to me that I have never seen such a collection of glowering, stressed-out, miserable, sour faces as I see here, in this sexual paradise --entrance 260 baht, on weekends.

So much sunlight, so much glass, but most of the men are in the back corridors, in the dark, in the steam. We are at the baths, after all. And we have brought our shame with us from all the public toilets in the world.

Two hundred men nearly naked in this, the paradise of bathhouses, and it is remarkable, it is downright newsworthy, how miserable we make it. Into paradise we haul our dull old habituated stuck selves.

Something has gone wrong.

This is particularly sad since a lot men worked so hard to be here—hoarded vacation days, paid the gas surcharge, flew seventeen hours—all so they could stomp around all night with a pouty full-diaper face. Personally, since graduating high school, I have done approximately 300,000 sit-ups in hopes of meriting a friendly reception here. And so have a lot of other guys. This place is packed full of gorgeous forty-five year old men with washboard abs and the grimacing, bratty face of the most spoiled nine year old you’ve ever known, shoving forward for his share of the piñata.

“Dear God, I think, even if I am ugly, don’t let me have that awful look on my face.” But, of course, this place has mirrors everywhere and I can see—I’m working on it.

Some men worked to be here, others give their lives to build the place and keep it going. The lovely ladyboys at the front desk, the gym attendants in their white shorts, the invisible magnate who dreams up clever slogans. How disappointing for them to see that, in the end, they have provided us with only another arena for our despair.

The principal achievement of gay culture is the perfection of a global system for standardized promiscuity. Our network is better than Coca Cola’s and if you’ve got a big dick you can get laid in Greenland or Ghana in under fifteen minutes. This is our grand endeavor. Gaydar and Manhunt are our cathedrals, Ramrod is our opera, we have made statues of ourselves.

This place has been built, our vacations planned with everything in mind except an honest look at how desire works, how it becomes more demanding, more restrictive, the more that it is fed. This paradise is actually a gymnasium for the cultivation of ravenous hunger.

Not that I’ve learned this lesson. Fuck no. (Please here insert spooky hysterical laugh.) I show up here again and again. Because I know it’s a nightmare, I know it’s a drag but, but, but—it looks like it should work.

Two hundred men in towels, all clutching condoms and little packets of lube. This should be as easy as adding water to instant noodles. Right? Right?

Or how about what’s going on downtown: the boys on stage in little white underpants, each with a little red number. Right or wrong, it seems awfully straight-forward. I mean, it seems like it should work.

It’s like that Zen story: the guests are seated at the most sumptuous table and everything they could ever want is there. But, before they can get started, their arms are strapped to boards so that they cannot bring their spoons to their mouths. That’s where we’re at. As good as it looks, we might as well be trying to suck ourselves off.

Some nights there are the jackpot wins: Marco from Peru, Olivier from Toulouse, to say nothing of that Swiss porno Apollo. But a dull anxiety follows, because frankly there are very few years left when a god-ling such a Marco might chose me. (Maybe he only chose me because it was kind of dark?) Olivier looked rather disappointed, and, as for Apollo, well, I wake up with a dull ache missing him.

Satisfaction is satisfaction, blue ribbon, hunk angel. And at the same time it seems to me that satisfaction is the tent peg that keeps the circus of misery in town and intact. It’s just not very satisfying, satisfaction.

In the Zen story, one room starves while another, their arms similarly strapped, learn to reach across the table and feed each other.

And so I would like to send a little message out into all the gaydar and manhunt in-boxes, put a little card in the glossy magazines, stand on a street corner outside the boutique, outside the disco, and hand out little cards that read: is there something else we could be doing? Considering there are, like, only 24 golden lemurs left and 18,000 children who die from hunger every day? Considering we are destroying ourselves with truly 21st century efficiency and not even having that good of a time?

Here it is: an invitation to exit this paradise which, good as it looks, just doesn’t work.



(03.15.08, Bangkok)