Who Am I – Part 1

“WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?” demanded the naked young Chinese hairdresser lying face down on the bed in the closet-size Kowloon-side hotel room, waiting for the older man to do something.

Through the large window over the bed, red-sailed junks could be seen alongside giant freighters of various flags, tugboats pulling heavily laden barges, and sundry smaller craft, all hustling here and there, crisscrossing the brightly lit harbor. Across the water, more lights blazed from a wall of high-rise towers spreading left and right and down to the edge of Hong Kong island. Bustling, free-spirited, the city had three years left as a British Crown colony before its handover to Communist China; and then what – boom, bust?

Looking down at the man on his bed, Monty was afraid. It was the tattoo. It had startled him when the sinewy young man, who’d picked him up at a gay bar barely half an hour earlier, pulled off his tight black T-shirt, revealing a vivid red and blue snake-like dragon covering his entire back. Looking at the tattoo now, Monty wondered what the hell he’d got himself into. Why had he brought the guy back to his hotel? He was pushy and gruff. His tone was nasty, threatening. He could be a gangster or a Triad member. Yes, Monty was afraid.

A year after he and Thomas split up (on the ides of March of all dates, it had been), he took his first big trip alone. Get away, friends kept telling him after the break-up. Go for a long vacation. Get back in touch with yourself – as if you have to get away from yourself to find yourself.

He’d chosen Asia: Hong Kong, Thailand and Bali in that order. He’d always wanted to go to Asia, to experience cultures totally different from his own, sample exotic foods, visit colorful temples – and, admittedly, to meet young men. Young guys in Asia, so he’d heard, were more open to older men.

The quarter-century with Thomas had vanished as if in a dream. He could hardly remember what their life together had been like, as if it had never happened – not in a tangible, whole sense. He could recall individual incidents: emigrating to Canada; watching Julia Child and Masterpiece Theatre; chatty dinner parties with a tight circle of cultured gay friends; building a successful career while Thomas pursued artistic projects at home; trips to Hawaii, New Mexico, down the West Coast; numerous little sexual escapades; growing dissatisfaction with the relationship. But it had left no overall impression, no leitmotif, as if a relationship should read like a novel. Twenty-five years seemed to have evaporated without a trace, without substance, meaning or memory.

And without the younger partner’s having matured. Now in his mid-40s, still lithe and youthful, and on his own for the first time – no family, no roommates, no partner – Monty felt as if he were finally becoming an adult. It hadn’t even occurred to him until now that he had needed to be on his own. It wasn’t just for Thomas’s sake that they had split up, which he had convinced himself was necessary so that his older partner could assert himself and get on with his own career. It was for himself, he now realized, that he had broken free: free so that he could grow up, live on his own unafraid and find himself.

But what to do about this naked sinister character lying on his bed? After quickly finishing up their awkward sex, the hairdresser fell asleep and Monty lay on his back, frozen in trepidation, waiting for morning to come. When at last it did, they dressed quickly and went to a nearby smoky cafe for congee and long crispy Chinese donuts. The food arrived fast and they ate fast.

“It’s really funny, I only went up to you at the bar on a dare,” the hairdresser announced, as he pushed forward his emptied bowl of rice gruel. “My buddies there had a bet with me. I bet them they could pick out any white guy there and I could pick him up. Anyone. Easy.”

Victorious, the hairdresser slapped down a twenty-dollar Hong Kong bill to pay for both of them and walked out without waiting for his change.

If sex had failed, at least in other respects Hong Kong satisfied Monty’s thirst for the exotic. The morning he arrived on an overnight flight from Vancouver, after checking in at his hotel he crossed the harbor to Central, on Hong Kong Island, on one of the creaky old green and white Star Ferries. The sky was clearer and bluer than it would be in later years, and the wind blew in his face as he stood looking at the crowded skyline on both sides of the hyperactive harbor.

From the terminal he walked through a hive of interlinking skywalks crowded with businessmen scurrying between gleaming office towers. Eventually he reached the twisted alleyway markets of old Sheung Wan. He breathed in the astringent sweet-and-sour smells, stopping to gaze at the side-by-side stalls selling odd kitchenwares and hardwares, live fish, peculiar vegetables and tropical fruits with strange names like mangosteen, rambutan, dragon fruit and soursop. In the afternoon he had high tea with cucumber sandwiches, biscuits and rose petal jelly at the palatial Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The following day he strolled through the city’s lush hillside parks and aviaries and rode the chain of covered escalators rising up the steep Mid-Levels hillside, where wealthy locals and highly paid expatriates lived in large apartments with views looking down through the city’s high-rise canyons across to the bay. The city buzzed with a vitality greater even than New York’s.

And it was totally foreign; it was China. At least that’s how Monty saw it back then. Fifteen years later, when he lived for a period in neighboring Guangdong Province, where humongous factories spewed pollution out over the entire Pearl River Delta region, he would cross the Mainland border as often as he could to visit friends in Hong Kong and escape from the too-exotic overdose of living in the real China.



AFTER A BUMPY THREE-HOUR evening flight from Hong Kong, Monty entered the frenzied arrivals hall at Bangkok’s old Don Mueang International Airport. Sweat poured down his face, as he pushed his way through the crowd. The air conditioning must have broken down, he figured. At the far end of the hall, he spotted a man from the upscale hotel he’d booked for three nights, holding a sign with his name written on it. When the man led him to a large open portal, he realized he hadn’t been outside at all nor had the air conditioning failed; the hall was open to the outdoors. He followed the man to a waiting, silver Mercedes, gladly accepting the cool damp face cloth offered to him as he stepped into the car through the back door.

Welcome to nighttime Bangkok: 90 degrees, 98 percent humidity, two-and-a-half hours to drive the 15 miles to the hotel, inching through smog-infested streets, surrounded by swarms of motorcycles dodging in and out through the snarled traffic, many carrying whole families of four or five adults and children clinging to one another, others heaped high with TVs, refrigerators, or crates of chickens. Scruffy beggars, oblivious to the traffic and the fumes, roamed through the streets, stopping to plead at every car window, while on the sides of the road lay disabled filthy children with twisted limbs and signs appealing for help.

At several points along the journey, compounds surrounded by high barbed-wire fences could be dimly made out through the dusky haze, their disheveled inhabitants wandering around in various states of undress; migrant workers, they looked more like inmates than paid laborers. Meanwhile sleek black limousines cruised alongside Monty’s car, carrying dark-suited Thai businessmen or politicians with well fed women, presumably wives or mistresses, dressed in colorful silks and clutching shiny red, silver and black bags marked Gucci, Vuitton, Valentino and the other names that denote separate and unequal.

If Hong Kong had felt exotic, Bangkok was like landing on another planet. Monty set out his first morning to explore the city by foot, risking heat stroke and ignoring the warning of friends who’d spent time in Thailand to stay no more than two or three days in the capital and get around by air-conditioned taxi. Walk no more than ten minutes, they’d cautioned, before stopping at a hotel or an air-conditioned shopping center (frigid in contrast to the street) or, in case of emergency, at any of the scores of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that dotted the city. (KFC seems to have perfected a particular concoction of flavors that captures the Asian palate.)

Grasping onto the map his hotel concierge had provided, he made his way through a maze of narrow streets down to the banks of the Chao Phraya. Accepting after twenty or so minutes that the advice he’d received was no idle threat, he paused and ordered the recommended glass of beer at the luxurious riverside Oriental Hotel, where fat Westerners lounged next to a large empty pool. From there he hopped aboard a longtail water taxi and got off at Wat Pho Temple and the Great Palace, saving his detailed tour of these sites for another day. From the palace grounds he ventured another long walk to the crowded serpentine alleys of the large Indian bazaar. Shops displaying mounds of multi-colored lentils and beans, bright yellow turmeric, black mustard seeds, cumin, cardamom and odiferous asafetida competed for attention with others packed to the ceiling with shimmering rolls of printed silk and cotton fabrics.

In the evening he was met by a friend from Canada who was living in Bangkok, teaching English. “I want to see Bangkok’s gay world,” Monty told him after they finished dinner at a restaurant curiously named Cabbages and Condoms. (Later he learned that its owner had named it in keeping with his advocacy of family planning and condom use.)

“Okay,” the Canadian friend answered. “But I warn you, watch out. The boys are really cute, and they’ll all flirt with you. But they’re all money boys.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not buying,” said Monty. “I just want to look.”

And why shouldn’t he look? He was, after all, traveling in Asia, taking his first trip alone, to “find himself,” as his friends back home had suggested. He should look everywhere and try everything. Or at least be tempted. There was so much of the world he didn’t know. Although he’d fooled around often enough during his long relationship with Thomas, he’d always felt uneasy about it, slightly inhibited, as if something were holding him back, some tie, some commitment, even though the two had an open relationship.

The famous open relationship – an excuse to screw around, or an acceptance of man’s natural instinct to be promiscuous? Men are like dogs, it’s said, inclined to smell every behind that passes by, wanting sex as often as possible and with as many mates as possible, even if the desire is repressed. Gay men are said to be especially promiscuous, open relationships being more the rule than the exception. Yet straight guys are always fucking around, as well. And not only with prostitutes or mistresses or their wife’s best friends: many of the men lurking in gay saunas and pawing younger guys, begging for sex, have wives waiting for them back home.

Now, Monty need no longer even bother about having an open relationship; he was having an open life, no strings attached, free to indulge in whatever he wanted, in whatever he could get. And how else could he find himself? He had to explore, and what better way to explore than sex? Sex with boys – boys over age, that is; preferably in their twenties or early thirties, still fresh, with dark open eyes and firm soft chests, smooth chests, not hairy like his. In other words, Asian boys.

Asia enticed him in its totality, the home of Buddhism. Ever since he’d met the Zen master back at college, when he was nineteen, he fancied himself a Buddhist at heart. The man had “blown him away,” had awaken something deep and unknown, something untouchable but powerful inside him: something spiritual, but not spiritual in the sense of other worldly. It was this world, the world of birth and death. Ever since he could remember, at least from the age of three when his mother and father grieved inconsolably over the loss each of a parent, he’d been terrified of death. What was life if there was death? If everything including all those one loved and above all one’s self was doomed to come to an end, what was the meaning of life? At moments throughout his life, often when awakening from a brief sleep, the reality of his inevitable impending end suddenly rose up and struck him with absolute terror. Perhaps sex, promiscuous sex, sex driven by a deep unfathomable, cellular instinct for reproduction, was a way of avoiding the ultimate reality that nagged at the pit of the stomach. Perhaps that’s why all men crave sex with doglike determination. No. No. No. Sex is natural, Monty would tell himself. Sex with men, with boys, is natural. Savor life now; deal with all that Buddhist shit later.

As he walked with his friend through the murky streets and lanes of Silom, the center of the city’s thriving sex trade, a Mecca not only for gay men, Monty found plenty to look at and much to be tempted by. Bright neon signs advertised establishments appealing to every taste – gay, straight, undecided. Touts practically dragged wide-eyed tourists off the street into strip clubs and bars. Young men and women, boys and girls really, and unbelievably beautiful transvestites openly offered themselves for sale, hovering around every foreigner, of whom there were many, and many ready to pay.

At one of the district’s more notorious gay bars, the two Canadians watched with amazement as a pair of young men moved from table to table, draping themselves over each in turn and fornicating inches away from the occupants’ gaping stares. When the pair reached his table, Monty at first pulled back but then looked down carefully, curious to see if the act was simulated. It wasn’t.

Next, a troop of slim bikini-clad boys paraded around a raised stage and coiled themselves seductively around floor-to-ceiling poles, each boy bearing a large tag with a number. White-suited “captains” skirted around the bar like sharks, ready to catch the eye of any customer and negotiate terms of sale. Mesmerized by the whole scene, as if in a spell, Monty did something he never would have imagined himself doing. He signaled one of the captains, who immediately sat down next to him, and purchased the favors of a particular boy who’d caught his attention, number five. At least he had the sense to inspect the boy’s ID and make certain he was of age.

Short, dark, with a beatific childlike smile and, oddly, wearing a small crucifix, number five quickly left the stage and returned moments later wearing jeans and a white shirt. He sat down next to Monty, nestled up close to him and gently took his hand. Continuing hand-in-hand, they left the bar and walked out into the crowded alleyways, the air smelling of exhaust fumes and grilled meats. A tall buxom girl in a tight red, fake leather mini-skirt walked in front of them. “You like girls?” asked the boy, who could speak only a few words of English. “No,” said Monty, shaking his head. “You?” The boy only smiled. Poor adorable boy, thought Monty, he must be from the countryside. Certainly poor. I hope he likes guys at least somewhat. Probably he’d like anything if the money were right. But he’s so sweet.

They stopped at an outdoor barbecue where he bought dinner for the boy. He ate quickly, as if he’d not eaten all day. When they reached Monty’s hotel, despite what he’d heard was customary practice at such establishments, the night manager refused entry to the boy, apologizing profusely and saying the hotel had had some trouble recently and had to be cautious. Frustrated, Monty and his new friend hopped on a three-wheel tuk-tuk, the driver of which knew, without being directed, which rent-by-the-hour hotel to take them to.

The tiny room they were assigned was outfitted with nothing more than a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling over a low bed covered with a yellowed sheet, probably not recently washed. Carefully crossing the partly flooded floor to an open bathroom, the two showered together, the boy gently scrubbing the man’s body. Returning to the bed, they began to cuddle and explore one another’s bodies. The boy was fascinated by Monty’s hairiness and told him the Thai word for each different type of body hair, softly touching each area in turn, except for the man’s head; Thai people have a taboo about having their heads touched.

In the end, Monty declined to go all the way, telling himself he still had some scruples. He gave the boy all the money he had in his wallet and put him on a taxi so he could go home safely. If Monty had been thinking clearly, he would have realized that the boy would probably ditch the taxi in order to save the money, and was now, in all likelihood, heading back to the bar, to another Monty, to another white man in search of himself.

GO TO PART 2

© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.