Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  ‘Go now!’ I snap, feeling fierce but also a heel.

  ‘Please, thank you — thank you please,’ he pleads, with another kowtow.

  I try to give him the bum’s rush for the door but though he’s only a slight lad he proves to have a knack for making himself leaden. I can’t even drag him out of the bedroom, let alone the front door. I want to laugh at the comedy of it — at the sulky hooker holding out for his fee, and me at a loss.

  ‘Zhikang — you — must — go,’ I spell out.

  ‘I call police!’ he cries, meaning that he wants me to think he’ll tell the police he’s been abducted and sexually assaulted by a pervert foreigner.

  I shrug my shoulders. Picking up the phone, he punches a few numbers. He glowers at me. He slams down the phone, furious at his bluff having been called. Why should I fret about blackmail? The worst that could happen would be that I’d get told to pack up and clear out — that I’d have to head off home to the clean peace of Pines Beach.

  ‘Three hundred,’ he says.

  Okay, we now seem to have proof of the money boy hypothesis. Proof which, oddly enough, makes me feel a new flowering of pity. Poor little sod. What a life, hooking his way through the clubs of this town. I wish I could give him all the loot he wants and more. However, my own cash really is in short supply and I can’t very well spare even the hundred dropped onto the desk.

  ‘No money, Zhikang.’

  He gets angry. He lurches about. I feel edgy because maybe he’ll smash something — maybe he’ll attack my computer.

  ‘Two hundred, and I go!’ he yelps.

  My pity for the kid, plus my growing sense that it’s getting late and that I want to carry on with my day, cause me to grab another hundred and thrust at him the two red notes. He takes the paper warily. He stands in front of me, clutching those crinkled scraps. We eyeball each other. Now, suddenly, I just want to melt. The poor boy. What a bastard of a life he’s been landed with. I lead him to the door. At the door, having put on his shoes, he throws his arms around me and clings to me again, like that baby possum with its fluffy mum — fingertips digging into my biceps, head cocked against my neck, kisses pattering onto my skin.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispers.

  I shove him out. I shut the door.

  All those guys fuck me during these restless days. I don’t fuck any of them, by the way. Not once do I fuck. Why not? I wonder, obscurely. Years ago when first I started fooling around with blokes what I wanted was to fuck, not to be fucked. I was a top. Now it seems I’ve become a bottom. Jay did it to me, somehow. Somehow since that very first night at the river village, when he asked if he could fuck me, my whole body wants nothing but to be fucked by a boy. None of these guys is a boy. Zhikang is the youngest, but he’s twenty-two years old. All the others are in their late twenties or early thirties. Old! The sickening truth of the matter is that any guy older than my own beautiful boy now seems to me too worn, too haggard, lacking that special salty sweetness, sweet saltiness, those shiny brown eyes, that creamy coffee skin, his gloss, his lust, his innocence.

  Carmen looks happy when I catch sight of her swinging through the glass doors of Dante. She wears a fluffy sweater which has been tinted tangerine. Her hair this week has gone orange. She looks not only happy but like a plump pot of marmalade, or —

  ‘Hey, you look like a marmalade cat,’ I say after we’ve smooched and she’s plopped herself down at our table in the window.

  ‘Scarcely surprising, since I’m so besotted with my fluffy bundle of pussy cuteness. Where’s the sugar got to?’

  ‘Here, hiding behind the menu. Coffee won’t come in a hurry, by the way. They’re busy.’

  ‘Mm, well, I’ll just nibble some sugar as an entrée. Are cats cool or aren’t they?’

  I think about cats. Flossy has thrived since she came home to my sis from the pet hospital. My sis has thrived, too. I watch as she begins to munch her way through a straw of raw sugar. I think about Jay. Will my boy thrive? Will I? Carmen, with all her old gusto, looks out the window and scopes the shoppers on the street while crunching through those sweet crystals and thinking, no doubt, about the imminent yumminess of a hot mocha and a chunk of richly creamy chocolate cheesecake.

  ‘Cats may or may not be cool, for all I know. Right now can’t think about anything but that boy I threw away.’

  ‘You didn’t throw him away. You opened a door for him, right?’

  ‘Yep, like a dimwit, when clearly I should have kept him stuck in my web.’

  ‘Mixed metaphor.’

  ‘Okay, I should’ve locked him inside the door and swallowed the key.’

  ‘Get yourself a cat.’

  ‘Well, one of the things I got off on with my boy was his smooth bod, and cats do tend to be furry.’

  She grins, showing big strong healthy choppers. At the same time she runs a quick expert eye over the shoes, stockings, skirt and top of a woman who’s just stepped across to the counter — a woman dressed anally, with a too careful correctness. Carmen, shaking her head, turns back. Her grin widens into a broad beam.

  ‘Fur rules! Dad’s dead and cats are cool.’

  Jay runs into me on one blindingly bright morning in the month of May. Seeing me standing below the skytrain station, waiting to cross a Y intersection, he waves. I’ve just straightened my spine after stooping to pick a pansy — a yellow one. Yellow and purple pansies are flowering in scrappy beds between slabs of concrete. I’m holding the little bloom close to my nose so I can smell its weak scent blended with the smell of diesel, of petrol, and the background bouquet of shit from the nearby sewage ponds. Traffic roars to the east, north, south — and overhead on an elevated expressway. A commuter train roars even higher in the sky, atop mighty stereotyped pylons. Posters pasted onto the base of some of the pylons show mugshots of women and men who’ve been shoved in the slammer for selling dope and failing to pay the right bribe to the cops. The punishment for their crime is execution.

  ‘Always am wondering about Matt!’ says Jay in English when I ask him how he’s going and, though he’s poking fun at himself, his words make me want to grind my teeth with jealous rage.

  ‘Why are you wondering about Matt? Aren’t things going well between you two guys?’

  Jay laughs.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not — depends what means the word well.’

  How weird that we were once twined together, twisted into each other, one body into the other body, yet now we’re just these mouths making — or not making — words. How does he look today? Clearly he feels some sort of sadness. His sadness is lightweight, however, no more than a thin film of feeling layered onto air. Not like my grief. My grief is a grim black pudding made from the blood of how many knifed breasts, how many wrung necks? Too many.

  ‘Okay, for example, are things going well sexually?’

  ‘Sex! I am begin to hate sex — and cocks.’

  Coming from left field, as so often with this guy. Which makes me aware once more of why I became so besotted with the cute callous bastard. No, that’s not fair. Jay’s never been callous, just young.

  ‘Cocks! Why?’

  ‘Oh well — cocks, they’re just cocks.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Knitting his brow, he looks at a group of soothsayers over the way.

  ‘Horses have cocks. Monkeys have cocks. Almost all mammals have cocks.’

  ‘All mammals, don’t they?’

  Shabby little folk, the soothsayers with their astrological wheels and cards of augury. They hunch over folding stools, two pylons along from a clutch of seamstresses. Seamstresses whose heads look like balls of oily black twine, rising and falling over wheels of their own — the spinning wheels of treadle sewing machines, dragged out onto the pavement daily. A transistor alongside one seamstress trills with the tinny lyrics of a pop song from Hong Kong.

  ‘Matt is a good guy but the problem is, am I compromise myself by take the first offer instead of waiting for a best guy?’

&nb
sp; ‘Well, one option would be to drop him and look for another guy.’

  ‘But I still have another option, I can give it up all.’

  ‘Nope, that’s a non-option. That’s sleep, not life. Don’t think so much.’

  He laughs a bit desperately.

  ‘That is the first time ever you tell me not to think, Manfred. Always until now you tell me to think.’

  I look at him, feeling lost.

  Jay stares at a crossing nearby. Words have broken out between two men. One is the crossing-keeper, small and slight, crumpled yet pompous, inside a uniform of military green. A whistle hangs on a string around his neck. The other man is a big solid bloke in a purple T who, having stepped out onto the street in spite of red lights, has found himself yanked back by the crossing-keeper. Their words grow warmer. A crowd of gawpers begins to gather around the blokes. Shanghainese like watching a stoush.

  ‘Hey, how are your other classes going lately?’ I ask. ‘You’re still doing great in my class.’

  ‘Very busy from assignments and essays. I try to better my —’

  Sourly, I note that he asks me nothing about myself.

  As he talks my heart keeps bumping. I can’t stop myself from making my left thigh brush against his right thigh. A firm, supple, muscled thigh that feels like meat.

  ‘What did you just say?’ I mumble, having logged out and just now logged back in.

  ‘Dying young can be a happy ending, that’s what I say.’

  Left field once more, leaving me to work out that he’s talking about a student on our campus who topped himself the other day.

  ‘Young men commit suicide only when they’re feeling very low. How can that be a happy ending?’

  He looks at me gravely.

  ‘We all die, so why not die young? A guy who dies young can live a life longer than most of ninety-years-olds in this world. Most people died already when they lost of their curiosity. They just struggling to go nowhere, why live anyway?’

  Knitting his brow more tightly than before, he looks at the crowd which grows thicker and thicker around the two yelling blokes.

  ‘Jay, I don’t quite understand you.’

  ‘I talk too much useless things now. I even don’t know if I can understand myself. Just forget it. I better go now, I must to library.’

  The two blokes have begun to biff each other.

  Liar, you’re not going to the library, I tell myself, my thoughts bitter. You just want to get away from me. I swallow hard. Why not speak out? Why not make myself feel still more hurt? Why not keep pressing with my fingernails onto the raw sore? Not that I really need to speak out. Make no mistake, the worst is known already — yet of course one little kid in me, longing for love, wants to think that I’ve made a mistake.

  ‘You mean you’ve got a date to meet Matt, right?’ I say with what must look like a ghastly grin.

  Jay seems stumped.

  ‘Matt is at Singapore, for business. He always sending me texts just to say hello.’

  How can I keep him here with me? I can’t! I can feel him slipping away.

  Now the two guys are trying to throttle each other. Their teeth are clenched. Their eyes are goggling.

  Please don’t slip away, Jay.

  The crossing-keeper, having got a good grip around the throat of the other guy, doesn’t know what to do next. You can’t really throttle someone for ignoring a red light, can you? The grip loosens. Jostling, shoving, the two men shamble back and forth while around them the crowd keeps thickening, the watchers keep watching. A small woman of about forty, in a white tailored outfit, makes up her mind to bawl out the big bloke for disobeying the crossing-keeper.

  ‘It’s bloody unfair to the poor bastard!’ she yells in Mandarin.

  A cyclist, a young man, also puts in his tuppence worth by shouting at the big bloke in Shanghainese.

  ‘Troublemaker!’

  Often at nights when I’m alone, alone in the Foreign Experts, my mind spins round and round with brooding, barren brooding, about the man Matt. I can hardly breathe for rage. I want to murder Matt. No — no, I don’t. I don’t want to murder Matt. I want to murder Jay. Little fucker. That’s what I keep thinking. Those are my unspoken words. Fucking little fucker. Though of course the fucker in question isn’t little at all. He’s tall. His tallness is part of his power. Oh christ. Oh fuck. Why must he be so tall? Why must he be so quick and clever, and so hot, and so fucking wonderful?

  Oh fucking cunty christ.

  I want to scream, to scream and scream and scream — I want to scream all kinds of doltish words. Stop doing this to me — stop hurting me, leave me alone, stop it, stop it!

  Yes, well. The plot’s now been lost. Irony has left the building.

  Worse still, the verb think seems to have ducked out for a fag, too. No hope of thinking my way through anything these days. Outwardly you’ll see me trotting back and forth between classes, or standing in front of my students while reefing off in a style meant to seem scholarly, or seated on my bright red sofa under a greasily fluttery red ribbon, yet inwardly I’m seething, my mind has done a runner, it’s bolted from the world of the here and now and scorched down thronged streets and fetched up at the sleek door of a smart apartment in the French Concession where a young Yank groans gratefully while giving up his throat, his arse, to a cock — a thick cock, a dark cock, a dark thickness, a thick darkness. A cock shafting his arse, not my arse. A cock I want to worship, to serve, to slaver over, to yield myself to, always, endlessly.

  What, I wonder, is this hunger for a cock?

  Certainly a cock won’t feed my hunger. It’s a hunger too deep to be fed by a purse of skin swollen briefly by blood.

  Yet my brain keeps unscrolling a scene from a porn film starring Jay. Jay fucking Matt. Matt, who’s young, who gives my boy the hots. Not like me. No, not me. I give Jay the colds. What’s gone wrong with my brain? Why has it shrunk into nothing more than a loveless blob of pulp grovelling inside my skull? I feel myself writhing. I feel myself squirming. I feel my abdomen filled with wind, with cramps. I want to spew. My brain keeps screening a scene in which two ripe arsecheeks, the colour of caramel, can be seen pumping rhythmically. Jay, fucking in the classic missionary way. Matt lies belly down. You can see — thanks to the camera angle — Jay’s balls. Jay’s got big juicy balls. You can watch them now, bouncing up and down, swinging back and forth, while he pumps. Matt groans, needless to say. He moans while the dark cock parts the white arse.

  Cut to a shot of Jay’s mouth, his eyes.

  Jay looks intent, stern. I know that look well. I’d kill for that look. A look as austere as a monk. The look of a young man who feels the whole world at the ends of his nerves while forcing two buttocks to yield, tighten, yield, tighten, yield once more, to his plunges. I want to kill Jay. Killing the boy would get the pain out of the way. Or killing myself.

  Murder is marginally saner than suicide, mind you.

  You agree with me, right?

  The crowd at the crossing keeps packing tighter, while the air turns blue with curses. A couple more crossing-keepers come running around a corner, whistles shrilling. Flinging themselves forward, the newcomers grab hold of the big bloke in the purple T.

  You do agree with me about murder?

  Jay slips away. The big bloke takes on everybody. He shouts at the two newcomers. He flails about.

  Carmen has left a few words on the voicemail, I find when I get back to the Foreign Experts.

  ‘Made up my mind today to become celibate and devote myself to opening a home for lost cats. Lots of lost cats in Shanghai. Cats are so much cuddlier than chaps.’

  INSPECTOR MAO STILL hasn’t turned up with the handcuffs. Nearly four weeks have gone by since the night I did Jay in. The city swelters with the heat of midsummer. I’m seated alone with a beer inside the Foreign Experts, looking up at the louvred vent of the air conditioner, where the red ribbon of threadbare nylon can be seen to waver, wave, as always. My body has just dropp
ed, limp, on top of the red sofa after a trip to the bathroom basin, where the thin red worms are still thriving. Dishwashing detergent and boiling water haven’t killed the worms. Nor has a bottle of ammonia bought at the Sincere Daily Stop. I’ve given up. I’m living with them, now, teaching myself not to freak out at the sight of their writhing but instead to welcome them as my guests. Yesterday, grabbing a magnifying glass from my desk, I stooped over the bathroom basin and did my best to study their wriggly little ways.

  A faint wavering. A frail waving.

  Red ribbons waving while wetly white, meaty, tripey lobes of my brain tell my body to run away, to hide, to dive — to dive down below, below swelling water, below those waves cleanly cracking on the sands of Pines Beach.

  Okay, shut your trap, brain!

  I’m not running away. I’ll stay. Now, wearing nothing but shorts, seated on the couch thinking about things, I pick at my legs.

  Always in summer when I sit with a book or a coffee or simply my thoughts, while wearing shorts, my fingers find my legs fair game. Warts — the warts that crop up more and more all over you, as you get older, the warts the doctors call senile warts — get picked absentmindedly during these fingertip safaris. Which is not a good thing given that they bleed and grow back worse than before.

  I’m not running away. I’m staying, since all I want to do now is think back to my days with Jay.

  You already know what words were put to me by the stocky cop. Words about whereabouts. Words spoken while the flatfoot held a ballpoint in his fist and scratched characters onto a piece of thin greyish paper, gritty with the ash from his Double Happiness.

  ‘Of course you can account for your movements on the night during which the young man disappeared?’

  You already know my answer, too.

  ‘I was with friends at a bar downtown till about eleven —’