My Knife

by Jos

  She barged into Joaquín’s room. “Get out!” she screamed at Susan.

  She then yelled at Joaquín : “What the fuck were you gonna do!?”

  He replied: “What the fuck do you mean!? I already did what I was gonna do.”

  She stood up on the bed and went all Billy Kidman on Joaquín: she jumped in the air, spun around 360°, and landed her chest on the side of Joaquín’s face, nearly squeezing his brain out through his ear. “That hurt, coño,” Joaquín cried. Susan, horrified by the brutal Lucha Libre she’d just witnessed and at getting barged in after enjoying hours of cuddling, began crying. “Never call me again!” she screamed at Joaquín and barged out of the room.

  Joaquín just stood there, butt-naked, holding his ear in pain. “You don’t barge into my house and hit me. Get the fuck out!” he shouted. She protested: “Where was I supposed to go? You left me alone at Molly’s.”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see you there, Joaquín uttered. “You have a job, money, and an apartment. Figure it out!” I always stayed out of it. I already have enough high school drama in my life.

  They didn’t speak for weeks. He didn’t think their relationship was serious enough that he should be restricted from fucking other women when she was around, much less have her just barge drunkenly into his house whenever she pleased. At around that time, he started reading Girls of Riyadh. He decided to get back with her after reading a quote, “don’t always be with the one you love, rather the one that loves you.” It was something along the lines of that, but the general feel I got from the way he phrased it was that he had never been with a girl who loved him as much and was as dedicated to him as she was.

  It’s possible that it could have worked in the long run, but they came from different worlds. Joaquín always arrogantly said, “I grew up on my own in Washington Heights and still made it to an ivy.” He lived under his father’s shadow, a man who worked seven days a week until his death to support five children, all the while refusing to accept a handout. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, boy!” he’d always command before whipping out his favorite development tool. She, on the other hand, was the privileged Irish daughter who never had to worry about anything. She never knew scarcity, didn’t know hardship, and wouldn’t consider the consequences of shelling out a grand for a dress. That they even got along was probably just because they were both hunters, though he a lazy one.

  Those are sometimes opposing subtypes of energy. She was almost designed to flourish in a city that never sleeps and a culture that overlooks such “personality traits.” The expat world has an almost magical way of bringing the most idiosyncratic and eccentric personalities together. He was fated to meet her, for she helped him know himself better.

  I would like to imagine that they’d be having awesome sex in some far off corner of the world. I’ve never met a more open couple. I don’t know how the conversation came up, but when they learned that I was into voyeurism, they immediately invited me to watch them make love. Joaquín had his room decked out with a kick ass stereo and mood lights. Before the loving even began, he pressed a button, the lights came on, and his romance playlist started. The dude knew music. He had over fifty thousand songs on his computer which he had collected from people he had met during his travels throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. We were treated to everything from bachata to bossa nova to sevillanas. If it set the mood for loving, you bet it was on his list.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and she on his lap as they kissed passionately for what seemed like a sweet eternity. He slipped his right hand into her blouse, and instantly pulled off her top and bra. He then gently rolled her onto the bed and continued kissing her as they both faced each other in the fetal position. He slowly caressed her breast with one hand. The other drifted from her back to her belt buckle as he took off her pants. Her nipples hardened. Then, slowly, very slowly, he kissed his way down to her swollen, vajazzled pussy. His long, pierced tongue moved in every direction and speed she desired. It’s almost as if he could read her. She came viciously and moaned wildly. She could not handle the level of pleasure and tried to push his head away from her.

  Eventually, when he could resist no longer, he gently crawled on top of her. He growled like a tiger and penetrated her. She moaned rhythmically as he started off slowly, getting louder as the speed of his thrusting increased. They hugged tightly. Their sounds were synchronized. She could no longer resist the pleasure and begged him to come into her. He growled again and released all his manly energy. They finally quieted down, heaving from exhaustion next to each other in bed and cuddling in a way that proved to me they were in love. All the while I masturbated discreetly. They had been kind enough to allow me the pleasure of watching them whenever my boo Smith wasn’t around. Even if they had to wake me in the middle of the night, I could not resist watching them become one in the motions of love. If having sex like they did were a crime, I would gladly have provided them aid and shelter as fugitives.

  She did not disappear with them, sadly. I guess things were not meant to work out in the end. The authorities claimed that in her grief, she locked herself in her room and forgot to turn off her fan. The fan sucked all the oxygen out of the room and she suffocated in her sleep. Her bloated body was found a few days later in a pile of pupú. Fan death had claimed yet another unfortunate victim on the Korean peninsula.

  His Roommate

  Yeah, you already know a bit about me, Helena. My father, Marco Velázquez, was a Spanish hick, drunk, and malapaga; my mom a wealthy Haitian living in a cushy part of Jarabacoa, or “the land of eternal spring,” as she used to call it. I lived in Quisqueya until I was six and my mother got fed up with my father’s alcoholism and gambling. The motherfucker drank and gambled away her savings. But she had loved him too much and refused to stop him until it was too late.

  Going from being the town princess to la hija del pollero was devastating. The Italian leather shoes I wore my second year of pre-school were the same ones I had worn the previous year. The situation got so bad that my mom couldn’t afford a new pair. I wish I could have made up for it with my face, but my mom always reminded me: “Look at your nose and your hair, just like mine. Why couldn’t you look more fine like your father?” I grew up bitter. I guess you could say I have developed a few complexities due to my life’s “mishaps.” Perhaps that’s why being skinny and beautiful is such an obsession to me; I dream of the day when I marry a rich man and regain my former glory. Yeah, I starve myself every so often, but what aspiring model doesn’t?

  My mom still had a few grand stashed away and one day, without telling my father, moved me, her only child, to Washington Heights, a Dominican colony in northern Manhattan. I didn’t have a hard time adjusting. All the expensive pre-schools I attended as a kid had already taught me enough about La Gran Apple to get around without an issue. But of course, I always had to deal with the tígueres dealing on the street corner. As soon as I started growing breasts at 12 they couldn’t get enough of me. But I learned to use it to my advantage: I would always get whatever I wanted from whichever one I was pretending to date that particular month.

  I appreciate Chubs, especially. The motherfucker was hustlin’ away everyday outside of Pancho’s bodega just so he could get a shape-up, a fresh white tee, and bring me a “gift” when I let him visit me on Saturdays. He was a hustler in his own way, too. I learned from guys like Chubs that all is fair when it comes to making a buck, and that’s all I needed in the Heights.

  But the Heights is not where I wanted to end up, even though guys like Chubs would always make my life easy. Instead, I concentrated on school. I was a mediocre student, didn’t excel, but what I did was enough to get by. At a school in the ghetto, that’s usually more than enough. My homework was always typed, I never cut class, kept to myself, dressed modestly, sat in the back and never opened my mouth. I also went to a technical high school so I could hang out with the guys, which was always less of a headache. I already had enough drama i
n my life. I didn’t need the whole bag of shit that comes with having a clique of ghetto-ass campensinas as friends.

  Unlike many of the güajiras on my block, I wasn’t pregnant by age 16 and even got accepted to five good colleges. I ended up getting an almost full ride to Fordham University across the bridge in The Bronx. Almost. I still had to hustle like a motherfucker. During my first year I sold blood plasma on a bi-weekly basis. I was so damn skinny that I had to wear sand bags around my ankles to make the minimum weight. But it was a good way to make 500 bucks a month.

  I was an innocent freshman, but by sophomore year I had already started dealing weed and happy pills on the side to the rich gringuitos in my dorm. All I had to do was invite Chubs from the Heights over to my dorm. Door-to-door delivery, fuck, that was easy money. I even saved enough to go back to the DR for a summer trip.

  I went back to Jarabacoa. My neighbors hardly recognized me, but congratulated me for whitening myself in Nueva Yol. I spent two months looking for my father, whom I hadn’t heard from since my mom and I fled the DR 16 years prior. I learned that he had been killed. Some bookie gave him a machetazo and sliced off a piece of his head over some bad cockfighting debt. When I visited his grave, I had no tears to shed. To me he was just a memory, one of a man who would come home drunk every night and fight with my mom. I never developed any affection for him as a kid, but some part of me had hoped that he had cleaned himself up and was willing to spend quality time with his daughter. What a fool I was, expecting him to change.

  After graduating Fordham I left New York in my dust and followed the money to South Korea. There I could stash away enough cash to pay for my plastic surgeries in the best country to get them. I don’t wanna be recognized if I ever go back to NYC. Clearly, I don’t discuss my obsession with getting surgeries with anyone. I admit the pressure to be rich and beautiful got to me, but I don’t see anything wrong with doing whatever it takes.

  Whatever it Takes

  “North or South?” my mom asked when I told her I was going to Korea. “South, Ma,” I replied. “Ah, with the comunistas? I can’t believe this, my daughter, a communist! If your grandfather found out he’d have a heart attack.”

  “Well, just don’t tell him, Ma.”

  Everyone said I was crazy. But money has a way of making me go places I wouldn’t normally go. I spent a year squatting in the sticks near the North Korean border, which wasn’t so bad. But the city girl in me prodded me to move to central Seoul. The cheapest place I could find was a cozy dump in Haebangchon, smack center of the best spots for a Tuesday night rage.

  The place was so cheap it was crawling with telarañas, but as long as I could live as I pleased, I didn’t really mind. I needed a roommate and Joaquín del Monte was my best bet. I had only known him for over a month, but we shared a similar background. We were both New York hustlers with the Dominican don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. We shared the mindset, “you gotta do what you gotta do to eat.” Hell, the dude had even sold crack, and later bootleg CDs to pay off some private debts after his father suffered a heart attack in Pancho’s bodega just before De La Hoya knocked out Vargas in the 11th. We both grew up just a few blocks from Pancho’s, but it was in South Korea where we were destined to meet. Not only that, we both ran with the Funday crowd from the ‘Dog, so I knew he wouldn’t be above attending Monday morning absinthe parties.

  We spent our first two months in a drunken haze. I truly remember very little of what happened. We’d always hear an African couple arguing next door, and a group of Russians shouting angrily at the TV over their football matches. We’d blast our radio any time we wanted and no one ever complained. We went out seven days a week. The only time we weren’t completely hammered was when we were in school, and even then not so much. We took to using cough drops to mask the smell of soju on our breaths and spring mist to hide the stench on our skin. Eventually they just assumed that we had lazy eyes, not that they would have cared anyway. I like the way Fat Jimmy paraphrased a YouTube video: “Alcoholism in Korea was one of those fictional words, much akin to aardvark and contract.”

  Fictional or not, our drinking habits were expensive. When we finally realized we had to calm down to save money, we moved most of our drinking indoors. Getting smashed on the cheap was what we did every weeknight, with no exception. Hell, I would keep a beer in the school fridge and down it as soon as I finished my last class. I kept drinking on the subway and by the time I got home for dinner, Joaquín and I were both already in a semi-drunken haze. Word got around that we knew how to party and the freaks who knew us invited themselves to drinks at our place on Mondays. In less than a month we had more than a frat. We had a multinational team of individuals with a good amount of disposable income, a nightly thirst for booze, and a strong connection to their identities.

  Arian

  Arian wasn’t always around. He was probably the most paranoid in the group about getting caught smoking. I wouldn’t say he was medically paranoid. He was just very cautious, but immense caution was warranted given his family background.

  Like Joaquín and I, Arian, who was born “somewhere in Kosovo,” also hopped from country to country during his youth. Unlike us, however, Arian was forced to flee. After his father ran into some troubles with el verdugo Slobodan Milošević, Arian walked into his house to find him “suicided” – the old man shot himself in the head with his revolver, not once, but twice. His mother had a mysterious car accident on her way back from work; apparently her brakes malfunctioned on a cliff she never used to take.

  Arian’s jamona aunt dispensed of some family assets in the former Netherlands Antilles and took him out of Pristina faster than a spooked vira lata. Where did they end up after Pristina? In the Dominican Republic! They flew into Punta Cana and, knowing that a few pesos could take them a long, long way in Quisqueya, they asked some of the workers at their resort about the best way to make it to American territory. They learned that they needed to take a yola to Puerto Rico.

  Arian’s aunt’s cojones were such that el cuco would check under his bed for her at night. After paying a couple of Dominican coyotes to take them on a rickety dinghy across shark infested water for thirty hours, Arian and his aunt made it to American territory. Hey, fuck, I have a cousin who took a yola. All Dominicans do. This guy was Dominican in that way. They were smart enough to throw their passports to the sharks. Even though everyone on the yola was apprehended just as they landed on the beach, good ole’ Arian and his aunt were able to apply for asylum. They moved to Alabama and Arian quickly assimilated to the culture. Hell, he even has fond memories of his yola trip. His aunt made the whole thing out to be a chapter from the Epic of Gilgamesh while on the ride to Borinquen. I can only imagine the looks on the faces of forty Dominicans in a dinghy listening to an old woman talking in Albanian to her tiny child for twenty-seven hours.

  Given his parents’ tragic “accidents,” Arian was naturally the one always on the lookout for General Ojdanić trying to catch us smoking. He never came over if there were too many of us smoking at any time. Always made sure the door was locked to the teeth. “Just because you hang out with someone in a bar, doesn’t mean you can instantly trust them just ‘cause they’re foreigners,” he wisely pointed out once. I’m surprised the motherfucker didn’t bring over an extra lock just for the fuck of it.

  Though his life stories were interesting, he was always the most mysterious of the bunch. All we really knew about him was that he was a “devoted sinner” and given his strong, good looks, was known for pleasing the ladies. Women loved him; they would say they were his conkies and he would treat them like actual concubines. It makes sense, his family being conservative, that he wouldn’t reveal or publicize his lifestyle. The dude was more discreet than the pope. When his aunt came to visit, he didn’t go out drinking and only smoked on his roof after she had gone to sleep. For three months. That’s what I call devotion. His whole life, his aunt had told him how his parents were martyrs of the then unborn Kosovar Repub
lic.

  Though he lived under the shadow of martyrdom, he always said, “Screw it! I like to drink and sleep around. When I’m hung over I just try to forget that I’m doing something I hate, ‘cause I gotta get paid!” In the end, though he could put up the veneer of conservatism, he was a hustler just like the rest of us. But that’s life--scratch or get scratched. He didn’t disappear. It makes sense; I feel he wouldn’t have been receptive to becoming an international fugitive. He had too much attachment to his aunt and his former homeland. The rest of us didn’t have much of a connection to former relatives or nations. We were more of a family to each other than our blood. Moreover, the rest of us didn’t care much for borders, real, or imagined.

  Part Deux: Genesis

  The Sunday Funday Crew: Before Joaquín and I Moved in Together

  To understand why Joaquín, Smith, Bubba, Muirne, O’Connor, and Fat Jimmy disappeared, I must first understand the mystery behind others not disappearing. And that mystery, like many others in Itaewon, begins in a certain Welsh establishment.

  It used to be that if you were bored on a Sunday, you would make your way to Itaewon, head over to the bottom of Hooker Hill, and pass a transgender bar. Go up a narrow staircase while stepping past used rubbers, spice spliffs, solidified ejaculate, the occasional tampon, abandoned underwear, and that pungent smell of fermenting fish, and you’d find yourself in a place called the Wolfdog. I don’t know how I found out about the Wolfdog, but it was where alcoholics went every Sunday. Most people in other parts of the world look forward to Friday or Saturday night. In Korea, I looked forward to Sunday. All Sunday.

  The kind of shit that went down at the Wolfdog would shock the panties off Shaniqua, the overweight lady in fishnets and a miniskirt who propositions all the young men inside the reggae bar at the bottom of Hooker Hill. Yep, the ‘Dog was that kind of joint for a while. My good friend Vinnie, who’s now safely back in Canada, was often seen fucking his Cantonese babe in the staircase. The first week I went to the ‘Dog, I stood between them and the bartenders and enjoyed the show while he gave her what he described as “The Ol’ Downtown China Brown.”