Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  A shower block suited not so much for erotic revelry as for a good strong delousing dose of Zyklon B.

  Union City is a place where clients come to unite, as you’ve guessed already. Guys come here to get their rocks off with other guys. Let’s see — am I game enough to try a shower? Naked youths stand, slender and brown, staring at each other frankly. Paunchy chaps my own age wallow about like sea cows. Paunchy chaps whose big yellow pots have been filled to the brim for too many years with too much beer and far too much pork. Chaps whose brains have been weighed down with guilt after decades of sneaking away from their wives on the sly.

  Okay, set down your little white towel. Keep clutching your sachet of liquid soap.

  Step into a shower.

  ‘You sweet,’ says one of the paunchy chaps in English.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say tightly, biting back a wish to treat him like one of my students and tell him he’s forgotten his verb.

  ‘Very hot in sauna,’ he adds enticingly. ‘I sweat very much whole the time in sauna.’

  Afterwards, having soaped and sluiced and then dried myself, and shaken off my friendly neighbour, I slip onto my hips a pair of baggy cotton shorts. Anyone can help himself to a pair of these shorts. Threadbare shorts, stacked loosely in a doorway, printed with a floral pattern faded away to a wraith of blossom by how many thousands and thousands of washings after how many numberless nights? I check out various rooms and corridors and stairways. Guys keep groping my arse and cock.

  At dawn a cab is carrying me home, raw from having been fucked by five different young men, three of them at one time in one room together.

  Jay turns up about midday. Groggily, dragging myself out of bed, I open the door. He holds me tight. We share a bath together. We drink green tea while sloshing about under the drips of Flying Angel. We watch mosquitoes trying to work their way through the fine wire mesh of the flyscreen so they can alight on our wet skin and suck our blood. Weird to see mosquitoes so early in spring. We climb out and dress ourselves. Jay sits frowning on the red sofa. He still hasn’t had a phone call from Matt.

  ‘I feel a bit lonely,’ he says. ‘I don’t have that feeling before, so it’s kinda scared.’

  ‘Scary, not scared. Before meaning —?’

  ‘Meaning any time in my life. I never feel lonely in my life before.’

  ‘Lucky you! Don’t worry. Matt will call you if he’s a decent guy, and from what you’ve told me he sounds decent.’

  Jay looks at me with an almost unmanning intensity.

  ‘He isn’t clever like you, Manfred.’

  I don’t want to hear that right now, needless to say. No, thank you. Don’t tell me anything that’ll make it harder for me to drop you. Yet nor do I like the way the youngster nowadays calls me more and more by my forename, less and less by the pet name of Daddy.

  ‘He’s got lots of other things going for him, sounds like.’

  We sit side by side on the red sofa. He asks what I’ve been up to lately. I give him a highly censored version of last night. Or, in other words, I tell him that I went to the bathhouse and met and was fucked by one young guy. Jay takes it quietly. Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he no longer cares what I do with other guys, so long as he can get it on again with his bloody Yank. We start watching the tele while drinking beer. We kiss, scrappily. Jay’s cellphone lets out a few chirpy bars of some squeaky little tune. He glances at its screen to check the number.

  ‘Matt!’ he says.

  Jumping up, he strides into the bedroom and closes the door. He talks. He jokes. He laughs.

  Once more, here’s me plotting murder.

  ‘You look like a very happy guy,’ I say when the door opens once more and out walks Jay.

  ‘Matt ask me to downtown for having dinner,’ he grins.

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

  ‘Cool,’ I say.

  The lad doesn’t waste words now. He’s soon out of my apartment, out of the Foreign Experts. I shuffle into the kitchen and get myself some food. I find it hard to swallow, thanks to the knot in my throat. A thick, twisted knot below which wells up bile. Faithless little bastard. He got over me fucking fast.

  Okay, calm down. You want it that way, right? You want him to be over you.

  Calming down, or at least trying, and trailing into the bathroom, I reach across to Flying Angel. My thought was that I’d have a shave. I stop myself. A black hair nestles in the bottom of the bathtub. A glossy, crinkly black hair. Not one of mine. Mine are no longer glossy, and never were black. One of the hairs from his thatch, that rich thatch in which nestles his cock. Christ. Grief now hits me in the guts. He wouldn’t care about this hair, of course — for him it’d be nothing. He won’t have known or been bothered that a hair from his thatch has been left behind in the bathtub — or maybe he might’ve thought fleetingly that he should sluice it down the plughole to keep the tub tidy. Yet for me, right now, it’s a wishbone, a wand. Bending tenderly, I pick it up between the tip of my finger and my thumb. Looking at it closely, I want to cry.

  So lonely.

  You’re thinking that maybe I’m losing the plot. That’s what you’re thinking right now, aren’t you?

  Let’s pause at this point in order to take note that I’m not. I can still follow the plot. I’ve not lost sight of irony. I know damn well that if he and I were to keep being lovers, that if he hadn’t been pushed away by me and told to find some other guy, then a year or two from now the sight of one of his hairs in the bathtub wouldn’t make me want to weep, wouldn’t make me feel anything — I’d feel nothing. Feeling nothing would be good. What I feel right now is too unbearably something. Here’s me dandling the little crinkly black hair across each of my white wrists, thrilled by its weak tickle, and longing, yearning for the guy. And now — yep! Now I pop it into my mouth, and roll the puny chain of dead protein — that’s what hair is, right? I roll it around on my tongue, and close my eyes, and think about Jay.

  Attack is the best form of defence, so out I go again looking for nooky. Nookable guys can be found easily in this town. I find guys in bars. I find guys in parks. I find guys in cyberspace. Qinding, a young rocket scientist from out of town, fucks me in the Hotel Westin. You know all about the Westin, don’t you? A white tower hyped, like so many retro Art Deco towers in this town, as a phoenix embodying what ads call the glamour and poise of Shanghai’s heyday. The heyday’s big here in Shanghai. A supposedly glam day between the two world wars. A day when sultry temptresses slid themselves into narrow frocks of tight brocade whose sides were slit to show silk-stockinged legs — temptresses who flicked ash-of-roses from the ends of tortoiseshell cigarette holders, and batted eyelids thick with kohl at gangsters and statesmen and movie magnates. A fake heyday, in other words. A weak yet sick dream whose bad script has now been nicked by commerce for recycling in slick schemes to make money. The top of the Westin sprouts what look like monstrous white tailfeathers — as though a race of extraterrestrial supermen has been playing interstellar badminton and batted a stray shuttlecock right across space to bury its nose inside the uppermost storeys.

  Well, it’s thought cool, the Westin. It’s ranked among the coolest watering holes in the city.

  Who else do I find in my quest for the nookworthy?

  Xing, a cute guy who does something in a finance corporation, fucks me suavely on the balcony of his upscale apartment to the west side of the city. Rick, a doctor, fucks me clumsily on the marble floor of his similarly upscale apartment to the east of the city. Yang, a tall architect, fucks me hard in my own bathroom under a cool spray from Flying Angel. Steven, toned and athletic and a police officer from another city, gives me a good frisking. Zhaolun, a gobsmackingly gorgeous guy with a shaved head who wears skintight ripped faded jeans and a diamond stud in the lobe of one ear, does the deed with all kinds of kinks for a week before we get bored.

  ‘I’m slim and handsome and my big thick cock can fuck you for hours,’ says some guy on my computer screen who calls himself Nat.r />
  ‘Hot!’

  ‘Yep, I am.’

  ‘Want to come to my apt?’

  ‘Very far to ur apt from my district.’

  Yes, that’s true — he’s way over on the other side of the city.

  ‘I can help pay for the taxi, okay?’

  ‘How much you pay?’

  ‘50 each way.’

  ‘I come to ur apt for 500.’

  ‘A lot of money. So u r a money boy?’

  ‘I am not a money boy! I am the famous TV star.’

  ‘So?’

  Well, he can’t be much of a star if he’s hustling for a few hundred yuan. Who cares, anyway? We clinch on two hundred. He says he’ll come within the hour. I don’t hold my breath. Yet well before the end of the hour a knock can be heard on my door. Swinging it open, what do I find? A pretty, soft young guy. We drop into the sack. His cock isn’t big and thick. He doesn’t fuck for hours. He cums almost straight away. Afterwards he wants to watch tele and talk about his work. Apparently he fronts two programmes on a channel called TV Young. We swap a quick peck while we’re saying goodbye. I tuck two hundred into his pocket.

  ‘Nice to meet!’ he lets out. ‘Hope we can be friend!’

  Hah! Very bloody likely.

  Coco, a graduate student in economics at a university on the other side of the city, is slim and a swimmer. His father is a machinery exporter. His mother manages a factory. A tall guy, he bleaches his hair blond and tops it with a cap of black leather. His trousers are baggy army fatigues, slung around the hip with lots of silvery chains. He looks good, well made, though when you check him out more coolly after your first flush of eagerness you find his features are really very ordinary. He talks a lot about his hometown, Harbin, and the north. He runs down Shanghai and the south.

  ‘Fuck the Shanghai people,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ I say with a short laugh.

  ‘Shanghai people are not honest. Only thing they care about is money. That’s wrong with Shanghai people. Shanghai people are pigs. Small people, small pig.’

  Coco loves to fuck rough. At the age of thirteen, he says, he was looking through the drawers of the bedside cabinet in his parents’ bedroom when he found some porn. Never before had he seen porn. A comic book, set at the time of the Second World War, showing a white woman who had married a Japanese being imprisoned in a concentration camp below the slopes of Fujiyama. A sergeant singles the white woman out for rape. He fucks her mouth. He fucks her arse. While doing so he abuses her verbally. Coco adds that ever since seeing that porn comic he has always wanted to rape a white man.

  ‘Okay — rape me.’

  He does.

  ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch!’ he says, quoting the Japanese sergeant.

  Who else fucks me during my weeks of loose nooky?

  Joe, a groggy young guy, comes fumbling in flares out of a cab after the two of us have met and drunk too much together at a bar. He quarrels with the cabbie about the fare. He tells me he’s hungry. He boils some noodles in my kitchen and chows them down, fucks me quickly and falls deep asleep. The night after that bad lay I meet Jun. A consultant of some sort, a lean young guy with big smiling eyes, he fucks me long and hard and afterwards lies in bed talking cheerily while smoking Double Happiness. One of his dreams, he tells me, is to retire young and go to live in Bangkok. He likes Bangkok. Laid back and friendly, he says. Not tight and mean like Shanghai.

  ‘My plan is to open a go-go bar staffed by cute boys,’ he adds in English, beaming with white teeth across the pillow.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, not wanting to know.

  ‘My evilish scheme is to sleep with a different one of the boys every night. Bangkok boys are babes.’

  ‘You’re a babe yourself, Jun,’ I try.

  He hardly even hears, and anyway I speak the rote words halfheartedly since my mind as always is on Jay.

  After joking a bit more about Bangkok, he gets serious.

  ‘I want to be frank with my wife about I go with guys, but we have the daughter, eight months old,’ he says, making me think for a tick about my own two girls, though my mind switches next, quick as a wink, to thinking about — well, more precisely, obsessing about — Jay. ‘I have a inborn feeling possibly my wife will let me freedom when our daughter is a young woman.’

  ‘Okay, take good care of your little girl. Do you want a shower now?’

  He looks at me sadly, which throws me a bit.

  ‘Are you don’t like have sex with me?’

  ‘You’re a nice guy.’

  ‘You don’t like have sex with me. Compare with you, I’m so nobody. You are a professor but I even haven’t study in university.’

  At a gay club the following night I take a break from the dance floor and throw myself down onto a padded bench in a kind of alcove. A slight, cute young guy with the face of a pixie stands jigging his hips to the music. A guy whose hair has been cut in a pudding-bowl shape, like a little boy. Our eyes meet. I give a faint smile. He smiles back. After a bit I jump up and ask him to dance. Stammering a reply, he proves to speak almost no English. I stumble to a stop with my broken bit of Mandarin. We start dancing. He moves okay — neat, tidy. We take a break. I drop my hand onto his shoulder and to my surprise he wraps his arm around my waist, tightly. Twenty minutes more and we’re in a taxi on our way back to the Foreign Experts. Not that I’m feeling too ardent. As we sit in the back seat and hold hands, and give little squeezes, my brain is ticking over methodically thinking — well, he’s no Jay. Also, now that we’ve quit the dim mystery of the nightclub and come out into the flashing lights of traffic his face has been shown to be scabbed badly with acne. Which doesn’t worry me, but still, plenty of acne-poxed pixies out there speak English. Why go to bed with this particular pixie?

  Also, somehow the sight of him lit up blotchily by the traffic makes me worry. He seems like the sort of lad who wants love. Zhikang is his name, he says.

  ‘Call me Fred,’ I mumble, throwing open my front door. ‘Okay, here we are.’

  ‘So big!’ he says with wide eyes.

  The pixie face is a picture as he checks out the number and size of my rooms by scooting quickly in and out of the doorways. I ask him where he lives. He tells me he rents a room in a barrack for white-collar workers. We’re soon in the sack. I reach out to stroke his hair, which, looked at more closely, seems somehow coarse.

  ‘Not touch,’ he says, gently fending away my fingers.

  ‘Oh — okay, sorry. Why not?’

  ‘It’s wet,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  I don’t really, since the night outside is dry.

  We start to kiss, and after a bit I happen to touch his hair, as you tend to do when you’re in a clinch.

  ‘It’s wet,’ he says again, reaching up and straightening it — and then the penny drops. The pixie isn’t saying it’s wet, he’s saying it’s wig, meaning —

  The poor boy’s bald, and wears a wig.

  The sex proves to be quite good, because he kisses a lot and loses himself in the fucking. Suddenly, though, after my pixie cums he starts to grip, to cling to me tight. I’m lying on top. He latches onto me with his hands, his elbows, his knees, no longer a pixie but a baby possum clinging to its mother. He shivers, too, with some strong emotion. As for me, I’m feeling tangled emotion myself — pity for the lad who seems to want to grab hold of somebody bigger and stronger, together with awareness of my own power, followed by panic about the fact that I don’t want to have that power.

  We fall asleep.

  Nine hours later I wake up. Zhikang’s still snoozing so I slope out of the bedroom and start my day. I shower, eat breakfast, set to work with my books. The pixie sleeps till midday. Creeping in, looking down at him, I note that his acne looks even worse in daylight. Quite spectacular encrustations, accretions of extinct and active craters, can be assayed around his jaw. Poor boy. I start to suck his cock. He wakes up, happily. He fucks me once more. Afterwards, showered and towelled, he sits lo
oking fresh, if blemished, on the bed and we swap a few words. He tells me he comes from Guangzhou.

  ‘Do you miss your family?’

  ‘Yes, I very miss my family.’

  ‘Do you have good friends in Shanghai?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have good friend, but not in Shanghai. He is in Guangzhou.’

  ‘Do you enjoy working as a clerk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you send money home to your family?’

  ‘Yes, because my father and mother is old. He is not work.’

  I spell out that now we need to say goodbye. He starts fumbling for words. The word sorry seems to feature repeatedly. He talks about doctor. We try a bit of Mandarin. I work out that he’s saying he wants to go and see a doctor and get treatment for his acne. Certainly a course of antibiotics should clear it up pretty smartly, so that makes sense.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I say, nodding energetically.

  Yet he still shows no sign of going. He seems to be waiting — and then it becomes clear he wants money for the doctor, wants me to give him money.

  ‘Please, thank you,’ he says, with a kowtow.

  Okay, I go and get one hundred. I hold it out. Zhikang looks at it with furrowed brow. I let the red note drop onto the desk. I’ve offended the guy. He stares at me with an angry pout. He doesn’t want money — he may be poor but he’s proud.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Not enough!’ mutters Zhikang.

  Quickly it develops that he does want money and that the cause of his anger is that I’m too tightfisted. He spells out what he wants. Four hundred and twenty. A sum precise enough to be plausible as the fee for a doctor, though a theory is now evolving in my mind that he’s really just a money boy. I try to tell him I can’t afford such a sum, since my monthly income is only four thousand. I write the numbers on paper. He’s angrier, scornful. He points at my chattels — my computer, my red stapler, my boots bought from Timberland. Clearly I’m rolling in lucre. I’m beginning to get angry myself, now. I feel taken in, tricked. I tell him more sternly that he’s got to go. He snaps out some sharp words in Cantonese. Next he gets stubborn and won’t speak. Next we feint and parry with scraps of English and Mandarin.