Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Back in the living room, Xonia gave a roll call of Russian names. Jenyas and Natashas and Annas. Sandi listened politely, taking a seat on one of the sofas, sipping from a champagne flute she was offered. The Russians nodded at her, appraising her with quick up and down looks as if calculating what portion of tonight’s proceeds this newcomer might be entitled to. There was murmuring of “Chinoise,” and then the girls went back to their banter in Russian, pointedly ignoring Sandi.

  “He’s a gentleman,” Xonia said from behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Nothing to fear, darling, nothing to fear.”

  Sitting naked in the house’s frigid air gave her goose bumps. The banker went on with his spanking and spitting, pausing occasionally to check his own erection and stroke himself. He seemed to not even notice the rest of the girls waiting on the sofa; in his single-mindedness he reminded Sandi, somehow, of Mickey and his relentless studying toward a goal. A rack was rolled in. Then a black table like a pommel horse on which the sub lay face down with a padded mask over her eyes and her arms and legs strapped and spread. One by one the Russians took their turns, standing for a moment while the Englishman would dig a key ring from his pocket and motion for Xonia to unlock the chastity belt. Their pubes were always darker than the dyed top hair, Sandi noticed, and depilated to thin little strips like follicled racing stripes. Xonia would apply a pair of nipple clamps and a dog collar. Sandi could tell the clamps weren’t that tight by the girls’ indifferent reactions to their placement. Breathing heavily from his exertions, the Englishman would do a quick once-over of the girl in question, asking her name and then order her into the black pommel horse where Xonia would strap her down, making sure the restraints were tight.

  There was a production line aspect to the whole affair, an industrialization of sadomasochism that left Sandi feeling uneasy. The Englishman, his wispy, dirty-blond hair now bobbing with each thwack, was the foreman of this assembly line of abuse. The decibel level of the women’s gasps was his quality control. The red welts on their bottoms his finished products. When each girl was let out of the restraints, gingerly rubbing her bottom as she walked back to the sofas, he would pause to admire his handiwork. “Thank you, master,” each girl would sigh in accented English. And they would quickly wet a finger in their mouths, dip it into the cokey on the table and then apply some of the powder to their stinging posteriors to numb the pain. When they sat back down, it was on their knees rather than backsides.

  It soon became apparent that Sandi was to be the last. Each of the Russians was being called up in succession. There was still time to withdraw, Sandi figured. She could pull Xonia aside and demand the key to her belt. By now, however, she began to feel competitive with these dismissive Russians. She hated the idea that she would seem weak compared to them, that by taking her leave she would confirm to them her inferiority. She’d never encountered this before, this sort of overt racism in the BDSM world. If anything, because Chinese doms were so rare, she had always been treated exceptionally well, and because of her looks been able to charge even more than her gweilo counterparts. In Sydney, of course, she’d been an exotic, and accorded the appropriate amount of respect. She had relished that feeling of being different but superior, so unlike the sensation she had in Hong Kong of being yet another statistic in the great masses of Cantonese. And again, she thought about the money that would ease her ultimate flight. If that meant a few minutes of discomfort at the hands of this obsessive Englishman, then she figured she could stand a little pain.

  The fear she felt, that she had detected earlier in herself, was the cold fear of the inevitable, that this machine of abuse was relentlessly working its way toward her, that she would be taken in and fed down the conveyer belts toward the paddle and spit out, damaged but much, much richer. Perhaps this would be the end of her career. She could take her money, move to Sydney and start anew, away from the BDSM scene, get a normal job, do something in the straight world, become a bartender or waitress, commence a regular life. There would be a certain logic to that as well. And it would be fresh and adventurous and even that life’s banalities would seem exciting and challenging to her, occurring in that far-away, dry climate among a taller, more expansive race of men and women. She could marry one of those gweilos with their tooty voices and huge feet. She’d never thought about that before: raising a family Down Under. Kids who would grow up and know wide streets and spacious rooms and fine weather and clean beaches. She imagined it as being a way to make everything right with her life, to erase the unfairness of being born a girl instead of a boy, to free the next generations from the tyranny of her own. That possibility, of changing not just the locale but the content of her life, now added to the trepidation inspired by this den of clinical punishment. This house, with its whores and john and violence all in the name of commerce, its hierarchy of gweilos and Chinese, its presumption that pain could be bought and sold like a commodity, it represented everything that was wrong about Hong Kong. The city demanded this pain from its inhabitants in the form of tiny apartments and dead-end lives, and in return you received a wage, some small salary for your hurt and suffering. Wasn’t that why her parents were so eager to have Mickey go overseas? They too understood this but had never actually put words to those thoughts. As she watched the spanking, she came to see that this was Hong Kong in microcosm, everything about the place reduced to one night of suffering. The girls kept on plowing through the cokey and drinking. Sandi, despite Xonia’s imploring, turned down the drugs. She guessed that would only draw her in deeper, make her even more complicit in this whole affair.

  A crescendo of sorts had been reached. The last of the Russians had been duly thwacked. The Englishman had worked up a tremendous sweat so that his sallow skin now glistened. His penis now stood at a jaunty sixty-degree angle as he turned around, breaking open a pack of pills and swallowing one with some water. “I’m ready now,” he said with his back to the sofa.

  Xonia crooked her index finger back and forth toward Sandi, and Sandi took her place in front of the Englishman. Just as Xonia undid the chastity belt, the Englishman turned around and exhaled. Sandi caught his rank, sour-dairy breath full on her face as she saw his reddened, fatigued, stoned eyes. They didn’t even seem like eyes, but rather like two clumps of eye-shaped wax stuck into his sockets. The pupils were dilated yet dull. The jaundiced, yellowy whites marbled with veins. She’d seen these sorts of eyes before, on the boys who stood by the wall. When they were stoned, after they’d been in the water all day, their eyes had a similar pointless cruelty. Then he said exactly what the boys would always say, “You whore.”

  He looked her up and down, his bitter breath coming faster. “You hairy little Chinese whore.”

  Sandi didn’t wax herself to the extreme degree of the Russian women, and so by contrast her mons seemed positively hirsute compared to her predecessors. “Clamp her. Strap her in.” And Sandi’s breasts were clamped, pinching her nipples so that they stung a little bit. If this was as bad as it got, she could take it. Think of the money. Think of her future. She was splayed on the pommel horse, a mask placed over her face, arms and legs strapped down by the heavy buckles. The world was black now. She could still smell the Englishman’s breath, could hear his exhalations accelerate as he arranged himself behind her. She had the sensation of falling, sliding down and into some sort of machine of terror. This was real fear, not the playacting kind she drew out of her customers at the shop. This was out of control.

  As the spanking began, at first a vibrating stinging that emanated from her buttocks and up her sides, and then an emanating round, burning sensation that seemed to jump from her rear to her head, making her skull ache each time the paddle connected, she tried to hold firm to the positive images in her mind. Sydney. Her future. A beach somewhere. A long, sandy cove where it was always sunny, bright, breezy. A day that went on forever. But the pain soon pushed everything else out. She would never do this again. Never. This was it.

  Then, miraculously
, the Englishman paused in his paddling.

  “Strap one on, mistress,” Sandi heard him say.

  And then lips on her ears. “I’ll pick a small one,” Xonia whispered. “It’ll be lubed. Just relax.”

  “No,” Sandi said. No one had given her a safe word and she had forgotten to ask for one. She listened as buckles were unclasped. The Englishman was breathing heavily.

  “Fuck that little Chinese ass.”

  “What’s the safe word?” Sandi asked.

  There wasn’t one. She lay there, exposed, strapped down, as vulnerable as an abandoned sand castle on a beach full of malicious boys. There is a realm of panic and fear that goes beyond reason and emotion. She cried and pleaded. Stop this, please, Xonia, stop this. She would have licked boots to escape from this. She knew what was coming, she’d seen the movies. She had never let anyone do that to her. And as much as she’d ever thought about it, it was to decide she would never, ever do that.

  There was some shuffling about behind her, and the prodding head of something at her rectum, and then a painful sliding sensation, a sharp stabbing that felt neither pleasurable nor painful but simply violating, something going in where stuff should only go out.

  “Just keep breathing, darling,” Xonia whispered from behind. “If you relax it’s easier. Think of the money.”

  She detected the rest of the girls going quiet and watching. Sandi tried to keep perfectly still as Xonia worked the dildo in and out. Xonia, despite being complicit in Sandi’s betrayal, was trying to be gentle, choosing a slim phallus, lubing it, easing it in. She had herself, at different times, been the receiving end.

  Hold on, Sandi told herself. It will finish. Someday, at some point, this feeling will stop and I’ll be out of here, away from these people, gone from this city, free.

  “Pull out, mistress,” the Englishman said. “She needs to know her master.”

  The sounds of a condom package being peeled open. She felt his damp legs on the inside of her thighs as he took up position behind her. He would be much bigger than the dildo Xonia had used. She heard the Russian girls laughing now. This, apparently, was turning out to be a good joke.

  Sandi screamed and began fighting against the restraints, panicking, bucking against the leather. A plug like a belted squash ball was stuck in her mouth and buckled behind her neck. She couldn’t scream. She concentrated on breathing through her nose. She tried to think about the money.

  Now she hung around with the boys on the wall. She wore baggy T-shirts and long Bermuda shorts and whenever the crushed-up grapefruit soda can with the smoldering chunk of hash was passed around she took greedy hits from it, bogarting the pipe so long that one of the boys would eventually grab it from her. She had become the beach wench. The “Shek O” grinder, one of the boys called her.

  Mickey had left for college in Vancouver. Now it was only her. When her parents passed by the wall, her mother on her way to do the shopping and her father on his way back from work, they’d avert their eyes rather than look at Sandi. Not because she was an embarrassment, but because she was always so angry with them. But was it really their fault? If Mickey had won a scholarship, generous financial aid, this would have been different. But there were so many bright students in Hong Kong, in China, in all of Asia, that the universities told them they would welcome Mickey, but he would have to pay his own way. Did they really have a choice? Where else could they find the money but in Sandi’s account? And rather than ask her, they’d simply told Mickey to transfer the money from Sandi’s account to her parents’, and from theirs to the university’s.

  One morning, Sandi had logged on to check her balance. Nothing.

  She pulled on a pair of jeans and walked to the beach and waited by the wall. It was spring. The boys were just getting back from the morning swell.

  BABY

  Philip Huang

  Such a warm night, not a wisp of fog. This is not now, this is 1972. All over the city, windows are being opened or left open and sounds drift out: music, water running, the tiny clinking of dishes you might mistake for the twinkling of stars overhead. In San Francisco’s Mission District, above a bookstore, a little apartment begins its vigil over Valencia Street. Now a bit of breeze gets caught in its curtains, hiding and fussing, hiding and fussing like a toddler in its mother’s skirt, so that from the street it looks like a bashful sort of flirtation and, alternately, the fluttering gaze of someone falling toward sleep, a little nap you didn’t plan for but don’t object to either.

  On this pleasant night, in this little apartment on Valencia Street, the shower is running and the story has already begun.

  When he opened the bathroom door, steam rushed all around him and Baby felt like he was stepping off a spaceship into a dreamy, alien atmosphere: a cloud of moist, feeble thoughts through which the dark voice of a candle throbbed and retreated, throbbed and retreated.

  He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  “Happy birthday,” a voice says.

  PHILIP HUANG’s work has appeared in Queer PAPI Porn and Take Out, and he was the winner of the 2000 Poz/Artery Poetry Contest. He gives countless thanks to the writers in his life—Tim Arevalo, Tyne Balance, Joel Tan, Napoleon Lustre—and dedicates this story to all those who write because they have to, even if they don’t want to. He was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1975.

  “I’m twenty,” Baby says. “God. Twenty. Twenty, I’m twenty,” he practiced saying.

  Above him, Baby heard a match being lit, then the sucking in of breath.

  A hand offered him a joint and Baby toked deeply.

  “I got a problem,” he said. “I’ve fallen in love.”

  “Uh-oh,” said the voice wearily. “What’s the name of this man? Geronimo? Egg Foo-Young?”

  Baby giggled and smoke burst from his nostrils. “Look what you made me do. Stop talking about him,” he said, and yawned and stretched. “You don’t know nothing about love.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. I do. And you do?”

  “Oh yes. Ooh, yes, yes, yes.”

  “What’s he do to you that’s so special?” A palm ran down Baby’s chest. “Bet I could make you forget him altogether.” A mouth closed over Baby’s mouth and Baby felt the bed sink away beneath him.

  When he opened his eyes, he looked at Samuel for a long minute, suddenly stoned.

  “This is the decade it’s all going to happen,” he told Samuel.

  “What’s going to happen?” Samuel asked, earnestly. “Tell me.”

  Baby thought about it. “Oh. Just everything.”

  “Everything,” Samuel repeated, and the two of them stared up at the ceiling happily.

  His mind a train, and in that moment of smoke and tonnage and screaming iron, no matter how brief, he might believe he might be lifted up and away, up and away—

  Baby fell on top of Samuel, whose back felt hot and cooked.

  Still here. Train come and gone.

  He traded stares with the pimple at the base of Samuel’s neck.

  “I’m going in the kitchen,” Baby declared absently.

  Samuel nodded into the pillow.

  What a comforting word. Yes, of course, I’m going in the kitchen. A kitchen, a hearth. A home. The rest could be imagined so long as you had a kitchen.

  But there really wasn’t a kitchen, as in a separate room. There was a living room, a square of wood floor the size of two parking spaces, two tall, narrow windows, an old brown sofa, and, in one corner, a fridge and a squat stove, like two giant sucked caramels. Baby padded quickly across the wood floor and pulled a bottle of rum from the freezer.

  Back at the home, they had a mess hall. All stainless steel, like those tables where you cut dead people up. Everybody called it “the home,” but that was wishful thinking if he’d ever heard one. He saw what happened to those boys who got picked up by foster families, heard the stories when they ended up back in the home meaner than ever.

  He was si
xteen when they turned him out. He had packed up some of his clothes and navigated through the crowd of boys smoking on the steps (“Good-bye, good-bye!” they had called, slapping hands) and then walked to a diner a little ways into town and sat down at the counter next to a trucker who was wiping a plate with a piece of toast. “You must’ve been hungry,” Baby had said. (Was this how men talked to each other?) “Still am,” the man had replied.

  And just like that, a ride out of town.

  And just like that, a ride out of any town.

  And invariably, when the day’s driving had been done and the truck pulled into some desolate eave, a hand would clap behind Baby’s neck.

  “Now. How’s about some company for the night?” they’d ask, not really asking.

  Well, blow jobs could mean company, too, Baby supposed. A company that hired anyone who applied. Anyone at all.

  One town, then another, some no more than a gas station and few stands of pies or produce. Some no more than a sign on the side of the road: Rushfield, Golden Rod, Bear Creek, Fairfield. After Fairfield, Modesto.

  Modesto, the name of a humble magician.

  They (Baby and a trucker nicknamed, improbably, Isotope) had arrived in Modesto near midnight, and Baby hopped off and walked across a gravel lot toward the john while the truck was filled up for the last leg of the run toward the Bay. The john was a little concrete deal set before a huge expanse of darkness, and for the single yellow bug light dangling from its eave, Baby couldn’t see where he was headed. He didn’t have to piss that badly, but he was aching for a little of the snort the last trucker had given him. As he walked closer to the john, he began to make out the lean knife of a figure spliced into the cone of light, so thin it might be a girl, propped against one wall of the john, smoking a cigarette with a careful indifference that Baby immediately recognized. He walked slower, trying to see if the figure would look up. It didn’t. There was a danger, Baby fingered the blade in his pocket, but he knew it wasn’t that sort of danger. He passed the figure, and still it didn’t look up. Baby rounded the corner and went into the john. It was surprisingly clean inside, and smelt of bleach and lime. A bright white place, humming with light. He thought of the figure outside. The dark slit of it.