by Glenn Diaz
“Yes, it is.”
The infirmed faintness of the voice, the sharp breaths that divided the words told Alvin that it was another old man; this one without the grandpa warmth of Mr. Connelly, without the tenderness and the patience that the decades normally painted over erstwhile ragged spirits.
Mr. Livingston asked, “Where am I calling? Is this India?”
“No, sir.”
“What?”
“This is not India, sir.”
“Where is this?”
“UTelCo offices are located in Naperville, Illinois.”
Page 18 under “Disclosure of Location.”
Alvin had always uttered this sentence with machine-like instinct, that when he now paused and thought about the lie that it stoically offered, his true surroundings clarified itself to him, like a splash of vivid watercolor. He was suddenly aware of his tar-black headset, the citrusy smell of Karen’s perfume, this two o’clock silence. In an aging bungalow in San Juan, on the same street where the first shot of the Filipino-American War rang a hundred years ago, his mother was sleeping beside Sophia. Two train rides away was a brick medium-rise, on the third floor of which he used to report to every week, writing for a fledgling Village Voice -type broadsheet. After his shift, he would try to fit inside an already crowded elevator, exit through the skyscraper’s petite metal doors, and, once outside, take off his Nike windbreaker. The sun would be prickly on his arms and neck, his bald head; the asphalt on EDSA, where he would take a bus home, would swelter like a desert.
“Naperville, eh?” old Mr. Livingston said, taunting. “How’s the weather there?
31
I f you happened to pass by Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok a little past midnight, you might have seen a tiny motorcycle taxi carrying two guys. The driver had a reflectorized orange vest. The passenger, a Filipino tourist on his last night in the city, was in an understated but elegant mauve shirt. Trust that they got safely back to their destination, a lovely (Hilton-adjacent) hotel on Soi 52, that they had an all-around fun night and even made plans for the future, when the driver agreed to contact the passenger in the event that he found himself in Manila. Of course, both of them knew better than to believe in this promise. It was just something that people said, one of the empty, polite gestures that made life bearable. But who could say? At that moment, they could have meant it.
32
I would sometimes imagine a world-weary voice narrating my life, like Ellen Pompeo on Grey’s Anatomy or Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted , except not female and not so down in the dumps.
Before the guy arrived, I spent maybe an hour trying to calm the fuck down. It’s fine, Philip, it’s fine. You’re paying him, no pressure. It’s just a transaction. Viva capitalism. I tried out the different lighting options in the room to achieve that perfect combination of dark enough to make me look halfway decent but not too dark to make it obvious that I was hiding in the dark, like a sea monster with an eating problem. I cleaned up, too, took out all the takeaway cardboard boxes and empty bags of Lays. Then I opened a random Excel document on my laptop and put on some Miles Davis.
When the bell rang, I took a deep breath and rushed to the door. I counted to three and turned the knob. Stupid light from the corridor flooded the dark anteroom. “Hey—” I said, shielding my face. Then an awkward moment when I extended my hand and he bowed. An impasse. Were you supposed to bow? Was that a Thai thing? “Come in,” I might have said, or “Please, come in, please.” I had vague memories of a strong grip, so I must have shaken his hand, but maybe that would come later, his hands on my sides as he—
I was getting ahead of myself.
He looked exactly how he did in his videos, a little shorter, with a minor paunch, some acne scars, and an expression that seemed to be always on the brink of an apology (either that Thai smirk or a minor stroke). He had a real job now, he said—he drove one of them motorcycle taxis that plied the streets of Bangkok—but he still did his previous job from time to time. “I like sex,” he explained. Or maybe he said, “I loathe it.” Not sure.
All these preliminaries were explained with great effort. Except for his standard rate, which he knew in baht, US and Australian dollar, euro, yen, and maybe gold and silver. He sat at the foot of the bed and looked around, eyes vacant. I asked him about the red shirt rallies in Bangkok, making big hand gestures for placards and linking arms. “Yes,” he said. Then he looked down. I asked him where he lived (Soi 71) and where he was born (“the south”), then realized that it was the second time in five minutes that I had asked him those questions. “Hungry?” I asked, rubbing my tummy. Moments later he was downing a stale, overpriced sandwich from the hotel café, sprinkling crumbs on my sheets.
Watching him, I realized with some horror that I could only fall in love with guys who ate like a construction worker (maybe as people grew old libido and maternal instincts merged into one weird hybrid urge). When we put the food away, I felt the first tingle of desire, which to me always felt like a cross between hunger and constipation. “Must we begin?” I asked, feeling stupid the moment I said it. I just took off all my clothes and lay face down on the bed for the massage, largely for-show. I heard him go to the bathroom. He stayed there for some time, doing God knows what kind of The King and I ritual, which hopefully included brushing away all the curry and coriander. I had begun to doze off, the cold descending down my back, when I felt his weight bear down just above my butt. Caught by surprise, I felt warm air rush from my tummy. I didn’t quench soon enough. “Sorry!” I said. He tapped my butt twice, Morse Code for “I’ll let that one pass, you faggot, but don’t try it again.”
Then I heard the pop of a bottle opening and felt his hands on my right thigh. The warmth was nice; also how his semi-hard dick would semi-accidentally graze my thighs and lower back. The massage was ordinary otherwise. Nothing to write home about, as my Aussie boss would say. Then it was my turn to “work” when out of the corner of my eye I saw his free hand trying to quietly pop the bottle close. I noticed a tattoo on his thigh that resembled a lotus flower, and I spent two long minutes, my hand around his increasingly flaccid penis, trying to confirm if it was indeed a lotus flower (It fucking was).
Between the sheets, he produced little sound except a few involuntary grunts. “Shy type,” like serial killers when they weren’t deep frying your liver and dipping it in sriracha. A battery-operated toothbrush was more animated. My eyes were closed the entire time, and the few times I opened them to take a look, he was looking longingly out the window. When I came, the consummate professional looked at the runny puddle on my tummy and got up with a quick kiss to my forehead. How sweet. He pulled a wad of tissue from the side table and handed it to me. He hopped to the bathroom, bare butt jiggling. Tissue on hand, I hesitated wiping off my most expensive orgasm.
I would have cried if it wasn’t so funny.
I turned on the television and yelped.
“What?” he asked, returning from the bathroom.
I pointed to Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion on HBO.
He shook his head. I turned the TV off, embarrassed.
“Must be a difficult job,” I said. “Like, hard, you know? Difficult. Arduous. Gruelling.”
“No,” he said, towel-drying his hair.
I nodded. “Are your clients mostly foreigners—”
“Foreigners,” he said. “Chinese, Australians, Spanish, New Zealand, Negro once. Very big. Scary. Thai people, they go to the sauna—” He stopped, catching a reflection of himself in the dresser mirror. He tried to discreetly flex a bicep, hand curling to a fist, eyes shifting to the mirror, then to the bicep, then back to the mirror.
The best sex of my life, I recalled then, had been with hideous men in pitch-dark.
I stood up and pushed him to the door, grabbing his clothes on the way. “I pay good money and you fuck like a fucking corpse and now I’m trying to be nice and making small talk and you can’t last two seconds without looking at yourself in the
fucking mirror. Get out!”
He shook his head. “Don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “Fucking illiterate whore.”
“Money, money, pay,” he said when he was nearly out the door.
I went inside and picked up a white envelope on the side table. “And here,” I cried, “here I am trying to be all formal, putting this stupid money in this stupid envelope, and you know what, you don’t deserve this.” I took out the two hundred-dollar bills and flung it to his chest. “I’ll keep the envelope because you don’t deserve the envelope! You don’t deserve the envelope!”
Under the corridor lights, every shapely crevice of his body was visible. His clothes were in his arms in a ball.
I wanted to slowly slide down the wall, like cheated wives in 1990s Filipino melodramas, but there was a coat of aromatherapy oil on my back, so I did the next best thing and raided the minibar for a calming Coke and a bag of Lays.
Barely enough time had passed to properly mourn the exorbitant cost of my libido when I heard a knock at the door. Probably an innocent inquiry about the tiny matter of the naked prostitute stumbling to the lobby from my room. When I opened it, said prostitute was fully clothed, scratching his head and looking pitiful. He came closer, and I thought it was going to be the beginning of a Law and Order episode (Bangkok edition) so I tried to make a run for it and he had to grab me from behind, which made the whole thing even more delightful in a rape fetish kind of way.
The second time was performance level, like Cirque du Soleil meets Lion King . I kept my eyes open this time and throughout he was wincing in what I chose to see as reluctant pleasure. Once or twice, while thrusting, he asked, “You like? You like?” and I had to tell him I wasn’t a fan of rhetorical questions. He laughed.
When he tilted his head he had an angle in which he bore a striking resemblance to Ed Enriquez from high school, whom I had blamed for my turning gay. I knew the night’s charm would fade in the morning so I held on to that moment and tried to fossilize it in my head. Maybe in the future my brain would malfunction and reproduce actual false memories of sex with Ed. Years from now, when sex would have stopped being available to me, finally liberated from desire, I’d console myself. It was fun while it lasted. Remember that time with Ed Enriquez? Oh, it’s all blurry now, but yes, how lovely was that?
I always looked forward to the post-coitus game in which I tried to spot any hint of disgrace in the guy’s face. This one, my first foreigner, who sat next to me on the bed, just explored the cavity of one nostril with an index finger. No existential remorse here.
How mindboggling, all these. How he looked like someone you would sit next to in a jeep to Divisoria, but when he opened his mouth, that indecipherable chirping known as the Thai language would come out, and he couldn’t be more foreign. Days ago, my gorgeous chinito taxi driver from the airport tried to strike up a conversation and I had to shake my head and say, “No Thai, no Thai.” It was tragic, this cultural, civilizational divide, that when I told the driver, “But I can suck your dick if you want,” he just shook his head, smiling.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked the guy on my bed now, pointing to the ignored duvet cover crumpled around his feet.
He looked at me.
“Cold,” I repeated, hugging my arms and shivering.
“Oh, cold,” he said. “No, no.”
“You know, one of my worst fears? Getting a heart attack while masturbating. Imagine, one of your last actions on this earth is closing the internet browser?”
“Ha?”
“Do you think beauty fades?”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Very fat.”
“What?” I asked.
“Fast,” he said. “Slowly please.”
“You know I can almost picture you when you’re seventy years old and you’re hunched and your hair is gray and I’m sure there would still be a trace of this beauty that you have now. Don’t you agree?”
He laughed.
“You’re so cute, do you know that?”
He nodded, finally a word he recognized right away.
My grandmother, I said, who had lived with us in the old house for probably twenty years, died last month. In the weeks leading to it, I’d wake up at three in the morning and find her sitting on her bed doing nothing, just staring at the stacks of Newsweek and Time and National Geographic near her bed. She was a teacher. Always reading. I knew she was awake because her back was straight and not hunched like when she would nod off. I wanted to go to her room and talk to her, ask her what’s wrong, but she looked so at peace. “Old people tend to sleep less, right? They say it’s preparation for eternal slumber.”
“OK,” he said, nodding. He held up the spelunking index finger. “One more, you want?” That boyish smile.
“You have big hands,” I said. “Hands. Very big.”
He held them up, his eyes lit as if he was seeing them for the first time.
I asked him if he wanted to eat instead. “Food,” I said. “You know, Pad Thai, Tom Yum Goong.” A pause. “More Pad Thai, more Tom Yum Goong.”
We laughed. Or I did and he followed suit, trying to please me. We took his motorcycle and rode through Bangkok’s deserted streets. Sukhumvit was spared from the “unrest,” I heard, and we saw only one group of red shirt protesters idling by one intersection. They looked pretty harmless to me. I even smiled at them, and they laughed and nudged each other. Then I saw a scorched bus on its side down the road.
We turned right on Soi 38. The famous row of food stalls was deserted, but then it was past midnight. We found a spot by a cart on the left side of the road. A petite female attendant with blonde highlights took our orders. I told her what I liked—shrimp in yellow curry—while my companion parked his motorcycle nearby. When he re-joined me, the two of them talked for a bit, their voices loud and high-pitched, and every now and then they would turn to me, and I’d smile. He put a hand around my shoulders, which made the girl laugh.
When our food came, he again ate as if he’d just woken up from deep sleep, downing his bowl of spicy Thai noodles in less than five minutes. He burped and laughed and rubbed his flat tummy. I tapped my own tummy, which was far from flat, but he smiled just the same.
“You OK?” I asked, holding a thumbs-up sign.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.”
“Your grandmother, very sad.”
The female attendant came to clear our table.
He offered to take me back to my hotel. The ride lasted all but ten minutes; around us Bangkok’s boarded-up shops and sleazy massage parlors and unlit offices blurred past, including the Philippine Embassy, front walls adorned with uninviting posters of the Banaue Rice Terraces and El Nido and the Chocolate Hills.
When a moment made me heady with gladness, I’d always force myself to consciously remember it. To say, Philip, I want you to remember this. Stick it somewhere. Do not forget. This way, they would harden as memory even as I was experiencing them, like a physical souvenir I could keep close.
This had happened a few times: walking around España during sunset the day before my graduation, walking along the rice terraces in Banaue with Karen and Alvin after bathing in a secluded hot spring, eating empanada in Vigan’s town plaza with teenagers skateboarding in the background on my first vacation alone, listening to Eric sing “Landslide” in Red Box on our first date. During tough moments, I could always count on these memories for a little nudge, memories of thousand-year-old terraces and ancient Spanish towns, of nice boys and their big hands.
Oh what they taught me. Things numinous.
That was the world-weary voice-over taking over again for a second. That was not me.
33
I missed my flight the following day, like an idiot first-timer. A grave misunderstanding of military time, mostly mine. “At least the planes were flying,” said the airline lady. I booked the next flight and had five hours to kill, enough to go around the shops at Suvar
nabhumi three times and say no to the peddlers of Khao Niaow Ma Muang three times. I wished I knew enough Thai to tell them there was no way I was paying 180 baht for sticky rice and fucking mangoes.
It was almost ten o’clock when I stepped out of Ninoy Aquino into Manila’s welcoming embrace. Thirty-nine degrees. The city’s regular fever. Without warning, an absolutely mournful ballad played on the radio of the taxi. A song called “Bato sa Buhangin,” about a love that pinned its hope in the Afterlife. Maybe there, it said, the pebble could be together with the grain of sand. That kind of Tagalog melodramatic crap that didn’t make sense.
“Are you crying, sir?” the driver asked.
“No,” I said, wiping the side of my face.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said he had never ridden a plane in all his sixty-eight years. “My parents were coconut farmers in Bicol,” he said. “You know copra—” He told the speech often, I could tell, and for adding to my already many reasons for guilt and self-loathing, I decided right there and then against gratuities of any sort, foremost my attention. I went back to singing along, but he turned off the radio, so naturally I sang even louder.
Sa langit, may tagpuan din, at doo’y hihintayin itong bato sa buhangin—
From the expressway, we turned left on Leveriza to the labyrinth of side streets in the peripheries of Makati. The sweaty, hairy armpits of the business district’s perfumed, corseted body. From Buendia we took a right to scary Taft Avenue. An hour later, a block away from my building, the taxi was stalled by a sudden surge of people in two, three ambiguous lines passing right before us. Some of the kids would playfully bang the taxi’s hood. There were drums and xylophones and batons being twirled and, finally, teenagers in itchy-looking ball gowns and ill-fitting barong Tagalog. “Oh, it’s a Santacruzan,” I said, half-expecting an oblivious Thai face next to me (I missed him already). The driver sat back and stopped honking.
The marching queens turned out to be, well, queens. As expected, the driver made known his disgust. Faggots . “They almost fooled me—” he said, chuckling. I laughed with him, louder than him, gums-visible laughter, and when we pulled over in front of my building minutes later, I steadied my voice and fished a thousand-peso bill from my wallet. “I am a faggot, kuya,” I told him, “and I was supposed to give you this.” I tore the crisp bill into shreds and flung them to his lap. “Here,” I said, handing him two damp, crumpled hundred-peso notes. “Keep the change.” I slammed the door and waited by the curb, arms crossed for effect, until he left.