by Paul Theroux
“What are you talking about?”
“That whorehouse of yours,” said Yardley. “You were asking for it. Any of us could have told you that. Right, Smelly?”
“Right,” said Smale.
“So you’re saying I deserved it.”
“What do you think?”
I said, “I was making a few bucks.”
“Where is it now?” Yardley nudged Frogget.
“None of your business,” I said.
“Jack thinks he’s different,” Yardley said. “But the trouble is, he’s just the same as us, living in this piss hole, sweating in a towkay’s shop. Face facts, Jack, you’re the bleeding same.”
“Really?” I said, wondering myself if it was true, and deciding it was not.
“Except for that writing on his arms,” said Coony.
Macpherson, an occasional drinker at the Bandung, came through the door. He said, “Good evening.”
“Hey, Mac, look at this,” Yardley said. He grabbed my arm and spoke confidentially. “This is nothing compared to what they do to some blokes. You learned your lesson. From now on, stick with us—we’ll stand by you, Jack. And just to show you I mean what I say, the first thing we’ll do is get that put right.”
“What’s it supposed to say?” asked Macpherson.
Mr. Tan cleared his throat.
Weeks later, Yardley found a Chinese tattooist who said he knew how to remove them. We met at the Bandung one evening and he looked as if he meant business. He was carrying a doctor’s black valise. But he never opened it; he took one look at the tattoos, read a few columns, and was out the door.
“Look at him go,” said Smale. “Like a shot off a shovel.”
“A Chink won’t touch that,” said Coony.
“So we’ll find a Malay,” said Yardley.
The Malay’s name was Pinky, and his tattoo parlor was in a kampong out near the airport. He was not hopeful about removing them, though he said he knew the acid treatment. But no matter how much acid he rubbed in, he said, I would still be left with a faint but legible impression. And grafting took years.
“Why don’t you just cut your arms off and make the best of a bad job?” said Smale.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked Pinky.
“Can make into something else,” said Pinky. “Fella come in. He tattoo say ‘I Love Mary’ but he no like. So I put a little this and that, sails, what. Make a ship, for a sample.”
“I get it,” I said. He could obliterate the curse but not remove it.
“He puts a different tattoo over it, apparently,” said Yates.
“Only the one on the bottom stays the same,” said Frogget.
“It’s better than leaving them like they are,” said Yardley.
The walls of Pinky’s parlor were covered with sample tattoos. Many were the same design in various sizes. Death Before Dishonor, Indian chiefs, skulls, eagles and horses, Sweet-Sour, Cut Here, tigers and crucifixes, Mother, bluebirds, American flags, and Union Jacks. Behind Pinky, on a shelf, were many bottles of antiseptic, Dettol, gauze, aspirin, and rows and rows of needles.
“You’ll have a hard job making those into ships,” said Yates, tapping my blue curses.
“Do you fancy a dagger?” asked Smale. “Or what about the old Stars and Stripes?”
“That’s right,” said Coony. “Jack’s a Yank. He should have an American flag on his arm.”
“Fifty American flags is more like it,” said Smale.
“Hey, Yatesie,” said Coony, pointing to the design reading Mother, “here’s one for you.”
My arms were on Pinky’s table. “Chinese crackter,” he said. “I make into flowers.”
So I agreed. But on each wrist the wide single column—Remove This and Die—was too closely printed to make into separate flowers. Pinky suggested stalks for the blossoms on my forearms. I had a better idea. I selected from the convenient symbology on the wall: a dripping dagger on my left wrist, a crucifix on my right.
I went back to Hing’s. I was thankful to climb onto my stool and pick up where I’d left off: vegetables for the Vidia, stirrup pumps for the Joseph B. Watson, new cargo nets for the Peshawar. It was as if I had never been away. But what counted as an event for the fellers at the Bandung and gave the year I was tattooed the same importance they had attached to the year Ogham left and the year the bees flew through the windows—an importance overshadowing race riots, bombings, Kennedy’s death, and the threat of an Indonesian invasion—went uncommented upon by Hing. Gopi said, “Sorry mister.”
Hing’s lack of interest in anything but his unvarying business made him doubt the remarkable. He refused to be amazed by my survival or by the motley blue pictures that now covered my arms. He did not greet me when I came back. He refused to see me as I passed through the doorway. It was his way of not recognizing my long absence: no explanation was necessary. Though he was my own age, his years were circular, ending where they began. He turned the tissue leaves of a calendar that could have been blank. His was the Chinese mastery of disappointment: he wouldn’t be woken to taste it, he wouldn’t be hurt. Some days I envied him.
I moved into the low sooty semidetached house on Moulmein Green, an uninteresting affair which the washing on the line in front gave the appearance of an old becalmed boat. My aged amah found me and turned up with a bundle of my clothes and two of the cats. She wouldn’t say what happened to the others; she reported that no one had been injured in the fire at Dunroamin. My tattoos intrigued her and when her mahjong partners came over she asked me if they could have a look. My kidnaping and tatoos raised her status in the neighborhood. Now and then, for pleasure I had a flutter at the Turf Club, and it was about this time that I persuaded Gopi to be fitted for the brace, but that came to nothing. I slept much more, and on weekends sometimes slept throughout the day, waking occasionally in a sweat and saying out loud, It’s still Sunday, and then dozing and waking and saying it again.
I did no hustling. Every evening I drank at the Bandung and I became as predictable in my reminiscences as the other fellers; the re-creation of what had gone, a continual rehearsal of the past in anecdotes, old tales sometimes falsified to make the listener relax, made the present bearable. I told delighted strangers about “Kinda hot,” the Richard Everett, Dunroamin, and my tattooing. “And if you don’t believe it, look at this—”
My fortunes were back to zero, but as I have said, it was desolation of this sort that gave me more hope than little spurts of success. However uncongenial poverty was, to my mind it was like the explicit promise of a tremendous ripening. I hadn’t regretted a thing. But there was something that mattered more than this, to which I was the only witness. My stories glamorized the terror and often I brooded over my capture to look for errors or omissions. I had proved my resoluteness by surviving the torment without denying what I had done—my house, my girls—and at no moment had I gone down on my knees and said a prayer. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I ought to be forgiven. Forgiveness wasn’t necessary. I had nothing to live down. The charitable loan shark, pitched overboard by his furious debtors, had swum to shore.
9
“YOU DON’T know me,” said the foxy voice at the other end of the phone. “But I met a good pal of yours in Honolulu and he—well—”
“What’s the feller’s name?” I asked.
He told me.
“Never heard of him,” I said. “He’s supposed to be a friend of mine?”
“Right. He was in Singapore a few years ago.”
“You don’t say! His name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “What business was he in? Where did he live?”
“I can’t talk here,” he said. “I’m in an office. There’s some people.”
“Wait,” I said. “What about this feller that knows me? Did he have a message for me or something like that?” Brace yourself. I’ve got some fantastic news for you. Ready? Here goes . . . I braced myself.
“Maybe you don’t remember him,” he said.
“I guess he was only in Singapore one night.”
“Oh.”
“But that was enough. You know?”
“Look—”
“He, um, recommended you. Highly. You get what I’m driving at?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“I can’t talk here,” he said. “What are you doing for lunch?”
“Sorry. I can’t talk here either,” I said. How did he like it?
“A drink then, around six. Say yes.”
“You’re wasting your time,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink. What do you say?”
“Where are you staying?”
“Something called the Cockpit Hotel.”
“I know where it is,” I said. “I’ll be over at six. For a drink, okay? See you in the bar.”
“How will I recognize you?”
I almost laughed.
“So-and-so told me to look you up.” He was the first of many. He didn’t want much, only to buy me a drink and ask me vulgarly sincere questions: “What’s it really like?” and “Do you think you’ll ever go back?” I used to say anything that came into my head, like “I love lunchmeat,” or “Sell me your shoes.”
“What made you stop pimping?” a feller would ask.
“I ran out of string,” I’d say.
“How long are you going to stay in Singapore?”
“As long as my citronella holds out.”
“What do you do for kicks?”
“That reminds me of a story. Seems there was this feller—”
In previous years the same fellers would have wanted to visit a Chinese massage parlor; now they wanted to see me. The motive had not changed: just for the experience. And evidently stories circulated about me on the tourist grapevine: I had been deported from the States; I was a pederast; I had a wife and kids somewhere; I was working on a book; I was a top-level spy, a hunted man, a rubber planter, an informer, a nut case. The fellers guilelessly confided this gossip and promised they wouldn’t tell a soul. And one feller said he had looked me up because “Let’s face it, Flowers, you’re an institution.”
I didn’t encourage them. If they wanted a girl I suggested a social escort who, after a tour of the city—harbor sights, Mount Faber, Tiger Balm Gardens, Chinese temples, War Memorial, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral—would amateurishly offer “intimacy,” as they called it. Politics hadn’t stopped prostitution; it had complicated it, taken the fun out of it, and made it assume disguises. The houses had moved to the suburbs—Mr. Sim operated on Tanjong Rhu, in an innocuous-looking bungalow near the Swimming Club. Many had gone to Johore Bahru, over the Causeway, and all paid heavily for secret-society protection. There were two brothels in town, Madam Lum’s, behind the supermarket, and Joe’s in Bristol Chambers, across from the Gurkha’s sentry box on Oxley Rise: they were characterless apartments, unpersuasively decorated, and they relied on taxi drivers to bring them fellers.
Oddly enough, the fellers who looked me up were seldom interested in girls. They were tourists who fancied themselves adventurers, bold explorers, and they had two opposing wishes: to be the very first persons to reach that faraway place, and to be seen arriving. They thought it was quite a feat to fly to Singapore, but they needed a reliable native witness to verify their arrival. I was that witness, and the routine was always the same—a drink, a stroll around the seedier parts of town; then a picture—posed with me and snapped by the Indian with the box camera on the Esplanade. All these fellers did in Singapore was talk, remarking on the discomfort of their hotels, the heat, the smells, their fear of contracting malaria. And when I told my heavily embroidered tales they said, “Flowers, you’re as bad as me!” Sometimes, with wealthy ones, I wanted to lean across the table and plead, “Get me out of here!” But that was the voice of idleness, the one that screamed prayers at the Turf Club and hectored the fruit machines for a jackpot. I did my best to suppress it and listened to the travelers chuntering on about their experiences. I wish I had a nickel for every feller who told me the story about how he had picked up a pretty girl and taken her back to his hotel, only to find (“I was flabbergasted”) that she was really a feller in a swishy dress; or the story, favorite of the fantasist, beginning, “I used to know this nympho—”
For me these were not productive years. The longer I stayed at Hing’s the more I participated in the fellers’ conversations at the Bandung: “My towkay says—” The Sunday curry was the only event in the week I viewed with any pleasure. Though Singapore was awash with tourists, and, for the first time, American soldiers on leave from Vietnam, I did very little hustling. The attitude toward sex was changing in the States and I found it hard in Singapore to keep pace with the changes; the new attitudes arrived with the tourists. Fellers were interested in exhibitions of one sort or another, Cantonese girls hanging in back rooms like fruit bats and squealing “Fucky, fucky” to each other, sullen displays of gray anatomy on trestle tables; off the Rochore Canal Road there were squalid rooms where a dozen tourists sat around a double bed, like interns in a clinic, and applauded cucumber buggeries. The feller who said “I do it with mirrors” or that he was in love with a slip of a girl meant just that; and one joker implored me to get a young Chinese boy to (I think I’ve got this right) stand over him and, as he put it, “do number two—oh lots of it—all over me.”
“Now, you’re going to think I’m old-fashioned,” I said to this dink. “And I know nobody’s perfect. But—”
I could see nothing voluptuous about being recumbent under a Chinese and shat upon, something I went through, in a sense, every day at Hing’s. I would fall into conversation with a tourist and hear myself saying, “That’s where I draw the line.” My notion of sex, call me old-fashioned, was a satisfying and slightly masked and moist surprise, unhurried, private, imaginative, and inexpensive, as close to passion as possible; neither businesslike nor over-coy, maintaining the illusion of desire with groans of proof, celebrating fantasy, a happy act the price kept in perspective: give and take, no lies about love.
The anonymous savagery of the new pornography might have had something to do with the change in the tourists’ attitude. I had always considered myself a reasonable judge of pornography, but I was out of my depth with the stuff that came in on the freighters and was good-naturedly handed over to me by the mates responsible for the provisioning. It was as unappealing as a pair of empty rubber gloves. I refused to sell it, though I still sold decks of photographic playing cards. I didn’t know what to do with the new cruel sort; I had too much of it to burn discreetly, and someone would have found it if I had thrown it in a trash barrel. I kept it at the Bandung, behind the bar. At the Bandung I was able to confirm that I was not alone in finding it grotesque.
“It’s useless,” said Yardley. “They don’t have expressions on their faces.”
“She got something on her face,” said Frogget. “Sickening, ain’t it?”
“That’s what I always look at first,” said Smale. “Their faces.”
“Do you suppose,” said Yates, selecting a picture, “that she expects that bulb to light up if she does that with it?”
“Maybe she blew a fuse,” said Frogget.
“Yeah,” said Smale, “here she is blowing a fuse.”
“’orrible,” said Coony. “A girl and a mule. Look at that.”
“Let’s see,” said Yates. “No, that’s no mule. It’s a donkey, what you call an ass.”
“Oh, that’s an ass,” I said. “Oh, yes. Broo-hoo-hoo!”
“Do herself a damage,” said Smale.
“’orrible,” said Coony.
“This one’s all blokes,” said Yardley. “All sort of connected up. I wonder why that one’s wearing red socks.”
“Are there names for this sort of thing?” asked Yates.
“I’d call that one ‘The Bowling-Hold,’” said Frogget.
“Hey, Wally, come here,” said Yardley.
“Leave him alone,” I said.<
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“See what he does,” said Yardley.
Wallace Thumboo came over, grinning; he glanced down at the pictures, then looked away, into space.
“What do you think of that, Wally old boy?”
“Nice,” said Wally. He looked at the ceiling.
“Cut it out,” I said. “He doesn’t like them. I don’t blame you, Wally. They’re awful, aren’t they?”
“Little bit,” he said, and screwed up his face, making it plead.
“You said they were nice, you lying sod!” Yardley shouted. Wally wrung his hands. Yardley turned to me. “You’re a bloody hypocrite, Jack.”
“These photographs are shocking,” said Yates. “What kind of people—”
“And he’s the one who sells this rubbish!” said Yardley.
“Not this stuff,” I said. “The other stuff, but only if they ask.”
Edwin Shuck asked. He phoned me one morning at Hing’s and said, “You don’t know me—”
“Yes, I do,” I said, snappishly. I had wanted for a long time to put one of these yo-yos in his place, and this was the day to do it: out in the van a consignment of frozen meat for the Strode was going soft in the sun. Little Hing was double-parked on Beach Road and beeping the horn. The Strode had a right to refuse the meat if it wasn’t frozen solid, which meant we would have to sell it cheap to a hotel kitchen. “You met a horny feller somewhere who said he was a pal of mine, right?” I accused. “And he told you to look me up, right? You don’t want to take too much of my time, just have a drink, right? And after that—”
“Not so fast,” he said.
“Friend,” I said, “the only thing I don’t know about you is your name.”
“Why don’t we have lunch? Then I can tell you my name.”
“I’m busy.”
“After work.”