98 Wounds

by Justin Chin

  “Ah, I remember that day we did ‘Destiny,’ good day that was, an inspired day that was,” Adam reminisces. “Then that Destiny’s Child shows up and makes it all soppy, screws it all up for everyone.”

  “They were better as a four-piece, better harmonies, rounder sound,” the midget chimes in. And he’s totally correct, too.

  “Sally the Psychic said it would work out, but it hasn’t. Why would she give me faulty advice on an Arbitron-rated Best for Easy Listening Lite Rock station, the radio station that everyone at work can agree on? I’m hopelessly smitten by this guy. I have detailed fantasies about us: it started quite simply, romantic vacations, camping trips, matching tattoos, a night at the opera, but last night I found myself dreaming about us in Supermarket Sweep. He was running down the aisles with the wobbly shopping cart under perfect control in his gorgeous tattooed arms, and I was screaming product names at him. Lysol Linen-Fresh Disinfectant, Ray-O-Vac 12-Pak, Deep Woods Off!, Tide with Bleach, Springfield Chicken Chunk Pot-Pies, Snicker’s, for god’s sake, Snicker’s. I don’t even use half of those things and I don’t know whether he does or not. I long to hear his voice, even over the static of the phone line, but he has call forwarding so I can’t even call to hear his voice on the answering machine message. I hunt for his name on the Internet everyday and bookmark every instance of it. I look at his name in the phonebook just to pass the time. I hide behind parked cars and municipal trash bins so that I can just look at him.”

  “I think you’re looking for Stalker or Obsessed or Unrealistically romantic or Romantique, if you please,” Adam says.

  “And every time I see him, every time I watch him move, I think I feel some crusty cosmic fingernail poking at my very insides. I have no word for what I’m going through. I don’t know what I am, he is, or how to sleep or wake. I need a word for this condition that I’ve found myself in.”

  Adam looks flummoxed. He looks defeated. “Wow, that is a difficult one. If only because the condition is imaginary, unrealistic, too idealized, and that, my dear friend, can be called by any name and it would still make no difference or sense.”

  The midget shaking his head slowly in resignation has tucked his notebook away and has powered his laptop off.

  Happiness is not the remedy for unhappiness.

  Oops.

  King

  When the dumping occurs, friends rally around. They look doleful in solidarity, they tread lightly, they offer sentimental platitudes intended to uplift, to raise hope, to soothe. Better to have lost in love, then never…, they say, You deserve better…, they declare, It’s his loss…, It was never meant to be…

  Yes, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But there is also jellyfish and mercury poisoning. Go fish.

  The guy I was dating sent me an e-mail telling me that his life was too busy to have to factor me into the equation of work and school and family and friends and obligations. We can still hang out, he writes. The e-mail contained an attachment, an unwieldy ten megabyte image file which I think is a picture of him, but it’s all pixilated into swirly bits of a million and two colors, as if the Shiseido make-up counter exploded in his face. Apparently someone still had time to break in his new bong and play with Photoshop for eight hours.

  It’s as if the very last dinosaur or the last mammoth – or in my case, the very last dodo bird – suddenly looked up and realized that evolution had kicked in. Something had kicked in, someone had pressed play on the button marked TIME, Do not pass GO, do not collect two bits, and I had spent way too many years snuggled in the tattered nest with these other bewitching fowl and not honing my survival skills.

  Someone had shaken the snow globe. This is not where I got off the bus at all. When did it slip away from me? Was I not paying attention? How did I not feel the plate tectonics?

  One day, I walk through the pounding circus of my city and it creepily dawns on me. I feel like the creature from long ago, the coelacanth swimming in the lagoon of spangly reef fish. How did it all become so puzzling? Where did my city and its dwellers go?

  Some weeks later, I venture out again, and once more, the rug had been pulled out from under me, the room rearranged, and the understudies have all taken over. Who’s been playing musical chairs in my absence?

  It’s not as if I can re-live that past even if it were to suddenly resurrect in a new body, or a different time, or another place. Nothing escapes the fusillade, does it? One day, as it always does, it happens. The center, already soft, shaky and chewy, just cannot hold any more poop.

  One morning, I just could not put up with having one more crackhead camped out on the front stairs, swaying his head in the smoke-ring clouds billowing from his crack pipe which looks suspiciously like my truck’s radio antenna, not another protracted spell of wheezing and coughing and hacking up sputum all over the take-out menus. One day I wake up and I realize I can no longer climb Meat Mountain at Hahn’s Hibachi. I can make a valiant attempt but the best I can muster is Base Camp Five, the Kal-Bi Super Combo Special; which is neither Super nor Special since it only contains two animal species whereas “super” calls for a minimum of four, and “special” calls for six, at least.

  Some weeks ago, someone defecated on the side of my apartment building, and then some animal pooped right squarely on top of the pile of shit. I’m guessing a cat, though a raccoon might also be possible. A squishy hazelnut brown patty on top of the choco-brown curled pile. At one time, I would have thought this was so damn cool; I would have taken Polaroids of it and showed everyone the sculptural effects, I would have postulated about the theories of abjection in art and culture. But now, I just want any one of my neighbors to wash that damn thing away before someone else poops on the existing totem. No one washed the poop away. And yes, the next day, there was another layer to the totem. And the day after, another.

  Still, nothing familiar stirred in me. Not even a shitstack could prod a nostalgic ping out of me. I was gone.

  I have less patience to suffer fools willingly anymore. This makes dating in the city a sheer challenge. Matters are not helped by my underdeveloped social skills and inept grooming sensibilities.

  It’s been years since I’ve mustered the balls or the heck to go out to the discotheque, and it’s not even called that anymore. Not since dancing got so damn complicated and I inevitably end up looking like the lost Solid Gold dancer, the one who’s escaped from the island where they’ve been banished. (It’s an island like Dr. Moreau’s and every Solid Gold dancer has a miniature version of his or herself who lives on a small column doing Debbie Allenesque Solid Gold jazz dances to power ballads only they and their intended victims can hear in their heads.) I always feel disconcerted in bars. I never mastered the art of street cruising, or even the intricate techniques of flirtation in its minor and major scales and arpeggios. Being a soggy ball of crankiness and wearing my heart on my sleeve as if some emo bomb just exploded certainly does not help things. And in all honesty, in most of my waking life, I’m just crushed by a terrifying discomfort of being in my own skin whenever I am in public.

  And then, there’s booty. And then there is booty. When the time comes, and it will for everyone I’m certain, when you have to choose between sex and dignity, go with dignity. Unless, of course, – and here you get to fill in the blank with whatever you want.

  I confess. I don’t have sexual fantasies any more, not like I did when I was a pup. And such terribly elaborate and dirty ones they used to be, too. These days, I seem to have a lot of domestic fantasies. In 78 percent of those fantasies, the object of my affection is an ex-boyfriend. In almost all of those fantasies, he’s wearing much better clothes than he does in real life. In one version of that daydream, we raise kids together; in one, we have a farm or a sprawling mansion; in another, we care for elderly parents; and in another, I die á la Ali McGraw in Love Story or Elsa the Lion in Born Free; and in yet another, we plan our big gay wedding. In one version of that wedding, I’ve concocted a snowstorm of gardenia petals inside th
e church as a surprise; in another, Tony Bennett sings at the reception. And in yet another, Shakira performs. She was so blond.

  There used to be an old disco stomper, “So Many Men, So Little Time.” Now, it’s So Many Issues, So Little Time. I used to make fun of people with issues. Ha ha, I said. But now, I have them, I have issues. I have whole subscriptions. And I have arthritis. I have a pile of bills to pay, obligations to fulfill. I have a liver that is slowly turning to mush. I have my weaknesses whose hungers must be fed. I have all this chaos in my veins. I have half a tank of gas but I’m sure it’s enough to get me to where I want to go.

  At the end of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the heroine who has lost all hope of knowing herself, of finding love or even settling, crumples onto the floor and wails, “I’ve tried so hard, but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.”

  I am a useless person and I am content to lay in bed with the cat watching nine continuous hours of the Food Network or the Top Chef marathon on Bravo. And I’d say things to her like “Omigawd, Decat, did you see that? They’ve just marinated the sesame seeds and stuffed them into the asparagus, which they’ve lightly blanched and seasoned with the oils from crushed lemongrass and infused with just a tiny drop of mirin; then they’ve stuffed all that into a snapper which has been rubbed with handfuls of minced Korean ginger root and drizzled ever so lightly with light soy sauce and just three drops of that 75-year-old balsamic; then all of that is stuffed into a game hen whose cavity has been brushed with truffle oil and powdered liberally with Ras el Hanout, and then the whole thing is wrapped with slices of pancetta and its all going to salt-bake in a big hole in the backyard filled with red hot Bolivian lava rocks and salt from the Caspian Sea. Oh no! They’re going to sous-vide the whole thing in someone’s bathroom sink apparently, what a twist! Isn’t that clever?”

  Then I’d grab the cat’s head and make her nod as if she was saying, “Yes! Yes! That is ingenious, I wouldn’t have thought of doing that to snapper because I don’t have opposable thumbs, can I have my Science Diet Lo-Cal kibble now?”

  My dear mom has a plan for me. It worked for my brother and so she thinks it might just work for me. Go With God! is the plan. On the eve of his wedding, my brother told me that Mom was always tormented by the idea that he might marry a bimbo. She decided to fast and pray for a week in supplication so that God would find a good wife for him.

  I was the best man at my brother’s wedding, I love my sister-in-law, I simply adore my little nieces to whom I am the wacky uncle who buys them amazing books and scads of completely impractical but absolutely fabulous presents.

  I love my mom, she is so beyond PFLAG already. She’s going to fast and pray to God, that’s with a capital G, the Big Man as seen in the pages of the Holy Bible, Jehovah, Yahweh — the same God that Baptist conventioneers pray to in order to save the known Earth from wooly shit-stabbing perverts — and she’s going to beseech Him to find me a partner. “I truly believe that God has a good man in store for you,” she tells me. “And you know what would be nice?” she says, “It’d be so much better if you fasted and prayed at the same time with me!” Okay, that I can surely do.

  Five days later, Mom calls and asks how my fasting and praying is going; she has been steadfast in her faith. At that moment when she called, I was sitting with a box of Popeye’s Fried Chicken in my lap, watching Mixed Martial Arts on cable.

  I like fried chicken because it is chicken, and it is fried.

  Chapter 15, verse 34 of The Gospel According to St. Mark tells us that “at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi Eloi, lama sabachtani?’ which is interpreted, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’“

  Life is difficult, and I am a useless, useless person. Look to the language, I’ve been told. But we all have the same language, used in the same epoch; we all have the same raw ingredients. Except some folks will make a lovely marinated smoked herring, to be served with a marsala custard on homemade pancakes. Some will make a good, filling unpretentious ham and cheese sandwich. And there are those content with an oily but tasty take-away with dubious nutritional value. And then there’s McDonald’s. This is why I hate cooking shows on television and why I love movies where the Amish fall in love; which is all neither here nor there, but I already told you I was useless.

  I am checked into a room in the tower of Babel. It is a tall building with many rooms. I wander through hallways and corridors rushed with the colors and soundtrack to this life. Somewhere at this time, somewhere in the world, someone is falling in love to Sam Cooke crooning That’s Heaven To Me, and here, in this one room, I will find my love. Here in this room, there is nothing that cannot be named, and nothing that needs to be. He speaks to me in barbed wire and I reply in gasoline. He kisses me fire-ragged and I smooch back lava-perfect. We crucify, we resurrect, we beloved, we end, we begin. We know. We tender. We open wide enough for birds to fly through and nest wherever they should desire. And in this one room, I know what it is to be happy.

  I’ve been told that there is a Japanese word for something that is made more beautiful by its use. I know there is a French word for the trail a scent leaves in its wake. There is a Dayak word that could mean either nausea or affection, all depending on the context, tone, circumstance, and the relation between the speaker and the subject. That’s the sort of guy I want to be when I’m tormented by love and its bafflements. But I don’t even have the proper words to describe what I want to be, how pathetic is that? Love, that cocksucker. Oh, if only there was truth in naming.

  I used to want a daddy. Now, I want a daddy to mother me.

  I still sleep on one side of the bed. I still love the way guys smell. I still harbor in my heart something that resembles hope but is not it. And I still want to see the ending that has yet to been written.

  I still want to be king.

  And in spite of it all, I still do love my life in all its queer permutations. Even on the days when I so desperately want to be saved, even in the moments when I so direly need to be tamed, even at my lowest crush, I still do honestly love my life. And saying that I love my life is not the same as saying that I expect any happiness from it.

  Queen

  The Cock of Last Resort. I am in an alleyway, a basement let-in, the leather blindfold firmly in place, gripping my eyes until I can feel the moist condensation of sweat between the fragrant leather and my short-sighted eyes. The puffy eye pads press into my eyeballs so tightly that I see green and purple phosphenes as if I were on acid watching a Grateful Dead lightshow but there are no unwashed hippies here, no skanky flower-children that never grew up nor teenage converts to the nostalgia trip, just the sound of shoes and boots scuffling around me, flies unzipping, the smack of cocks in hand, the ale smell of crotches and unwashed pubes, the occasional grunt and cough, the sticky smack of semi-dried lubricated cocks against flesh. The Cock of No Contest. There are those who will grab your head and there are those who will grab your ears like a teapot short and stout. There are those who will hold your shoulders and those who will try to reach down and pinch your nipples. There are those who you will feel nothing but their cocks in you as they are busy pinching their own nipples as hard as they can. Then there are those who have absolutely no idea what to do with their hands. The Cock of Dreams. Cocks fill my mouth, caress my tongue, poke blindly at my lips, slap against my cheeks, one by one they drip their load into my face, in my hair, dribbling down my chin, down my throat, on my lips, on my tongue, and I take it in like so many deep breaths, the last gasp of a drowning dog. The very first time I had a cock in my mouth, I gagged so hard, I vomited so much I scared myself. The man fled the toilet stall. At that moment I decided that I will never gag again, no matter how large or mean or deep the next cock got. I practiced with fat marker-pens, broom handles, shampoo bottles, beer bottles, carrots, cucumbers. I practiced on the dog to make sure that I could tolerate even the most disgusting cock. I practiced hard and, like musicians training for t
he symphony, I got to Carnegie Hall. The Cock of Wine & Roses. Once I was falling so fast that I woke up in a pool of piss. Once I was falling and when I woke I was falling and when I got up, I was still falling. There is a guy that I meet with sometimes, our relationship is wholly undefined, he is not a hustler, at least not in my eyes, but someone I pay. Not necessarily with money. But that is a different story altogether. We agree on a number and it is his job to get me that number of loads. We use dice for this, sometimes one die, sometimes two. He blindfolds me and puts my wrists and ankles in shackles and ties me to the bed, he puts a gag in my mouth, he saves his load for the last one of the session. In the meantime, he gets on the phone and calls phone-sex lines and party-room conferences, he gets on the computer hook-up sites and invites anyone to come and feed me. He takes pictures of the men who come through to feed me. I know, I can hear the click and whirls of the Polaroid camera, I can see the flash through the edges of the blindfold. After the session, after he empties his cock into my mouth, he unshackles me and holds me while I cry like a whipped child. He whispers into my ear, describing the men who I have eaten from. He never shows me the pictures though, in my imagination, I like to think that he masturbates to them in private, maybe he sells them to other people, saying, “Look, here’s a picture of a pig, a real pig, (oink! oink!) do what you want to do to him, here’s his address.” The Cock of Understanding. When did you learn how to suck cock? The artist Louis Nevelson was once asked how she created her art, and she replied in her croaky Bette Davis voice, Honey, how do you eat a peach? Sucking cock is nothing like eating peaches. It is nothing like sucking even as the prominent verb/ continuous tense of its namesake suggest. Suck: To draw into the mouth by inhaling; to draw from in this manner; to draw in by or as if by suction; to suckle. In my youth, terrified by the crudeness and suggestiveness of language, we called it “eating ice cream.” But it is nothing like eating ice cream at all. It is nothing like breathing, it is nothing like art. It is its own act, its own tense, transitive verb, noun, dangling pronoun. Oh, how it dangles. It is its own universe, not made of atoms but of stories, so many stories you wish you were deaf. The Cock of Love. Once, I considered pulling all my teeth out. I had met a man who promised me nothing but load after load of jism from his beautiful cock and I had partaken of it enough to believe him, it was his suggestion. The gum job, the selling point men who have gotten so decrepit that that’s the best they can offer on phone-sex lines, sight unseen, all that’s known is a mouth, void of teeth, just a fleshy wet slobber to face-fuck. I chickened out at the last minute. Or maybe I was never going to do it anyway. More likely, I couldn’t make the sacrifice of having a wound in my face, unable to suck cock for weeks while it healed. “Sucking cock has nothing to do with monogamy,” I recall being told and I got on my knees in the backroom of another bar and I never ever saw that man again. It is no loss. Not yet. The Cock of First Offense. There are two kinds of hell. One is an icy world where sinners are lodged in a lake of ice, their heads two-thirds popped out of the glassy sheet, mouths trapped beneath the frozen solidity, the air dry as meat lockers. In the other, the more common version, hell is the fire and brimstone land that children are told they will be sent to if they misbehave, don’t obey, or tell family secrets. Here, demons rip out the glutton’s bowels and drape their intestines on pine trees that are on fire. Liars are fed hot coals. Idolaters have their eyes poked out with blunt pencils. Those who love gossip have their eardrums perforated with biting insects. We’re told it is the hottest place that anyone will ever experience. The hell you want to go to, though, is that place somewhere between the two hells. Here, there is no sand, as all the sand has melted into glass. But unlike the fiery hell where sand melted into glass remains in liquid puddles collected on the floor like clogged storm drains in the Mission, rank and foul-smelling, floating with the flotsam of discarded memories, the melted sand in this place turns into a sparkling expanse of glass that you may walk on. It is like walking on an eternal sheet of shattered windscreens, cracked, shattered as an exquisite spider web but still holding to each chip, smooth as the underbelly of lizards, the size of the desert. The fierce light from the Fiery Hell and the coldest intense light from the Ice Hell light this place and the waves of light sneak through the cracks in the glass and make it radiate into a quintillion spray of light. It is a hell worth going to. The Cock of Heaven & Earth. Someone’s beeper goes off, someone is chatting to another in the background, someone is preparing for another shot, someone pops open a canned drink, someone can’t get hard, someone has the cold flaccidity of a tweaker, someone I recognize, someone has brought a friend, someone is being reacquainted, someone has a new piercing, someone has a fever, someone has strange bumps on his cockhead, someone is severely deformed. This is democracy in action. I take it all. I accept it all. I accept them all. Like a mother of a nation, I hold them all dear to me. Here on my knees, in this alley, this basement let-in with this blindfold in place, here at the wee hours of a new dawn, week after week, month into years, I am queen, and I will rule here forever and ever. Watch my coronation, watch me ascend the throne.