by Justin Chin
Stay awake, by sheer will. Stay awake.
I am awake. Sleep creeps on me like some snaking demon vine. I go out walking way past midnight. What I like about the city is that it is grid out, main drag crisscrossing main drag. But between these there are smaller, narrow side streets that break away from the rush of the drag, capillaries that break away from the main choke and rush, forging a different life at its own speed, but still remembering to keep pace with its source. Walking in the early hours of morning is a sleepless pleasure. The streets are quiet, there are few vehicles. The street people and the homeless have bedded down for the night. Neighborhoods in the day and the rambling night pegged as dangerous and grimy are now deserted and as safe as your grandmother’s driveway. This world is quiet, but people are always there. Midnight tweakers and bar dregs, people who have normal middle-class and working-class lives are folks crawling in the gutters of need. Kids, teenage fixers. The working classes who need to open shop, to start machines, to prepare for the day, the ones who work in time zones hours ahead, the shift-changers, the over-timers.
The things you see, the music you hear. The sensation of the material world as it grazes against your skin. Everything is intensified, as if you were jellyfishing through a dream-like ocean world, a psychedelic sea ruddered by nothing but your spiny body. Everything is haloed, every color saturated, every dimension and ratio intensified. The sounds, so white noise, are retuned on an expanding 32-note scale. Voices Stradavarius on angelic overtones as if you were walking through a version of heaven of your own and best creation and orchestration.
Stay awake. I want to stay awake.
My early dawn strolls down side streets became my grammar, my secret blood. And I know what I was seeing, what I had seen, all that I knew. In my mind, I saw myself become a pulsating figure, glowing like the day of rapture. The street was where I was found, was my love, was a corridor of endless doors, and the surface of the tarmac gleamed as if paved with Parisian cobblestones, and I was my own angel, my swan, as beautiful as any dark sweetness.
Stay awake. The flicker in any given ordinary life lures. No matter what or where the flickering points to, where it emanates from, it’s all triggered against such the beautiful naptime. Stay awake. My thoughts were never clearer, I never knew as many things as I did in those days of nights. I knew blood.
I am awake, the last day of my future, the first day of my past. I am awake and I’ve been awake. I am wide open and I don’t believe I shall ever close or fold ever again.
* * *
THINGS I KNOW I APPRECIATE
Two-ply toilet paper; Stoicism; The nature of cats; Good food in good company; Good books; Common sense; The subtleties and contradictions, the ridiculousness and ironies, the surprises and perfections that lay like bear traps in any life; Time of my own; A finely aged and hard-earned cynicism, one that hasn’t yet turned bitter or festered into meanness; Kindness (of strangers and not strangers).
* * *
SIDE EFFECTS
Headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, muscle pain, fatigue, insomnia, blood in urine, dark urine, pale stools, chest pains, dizziness, fever, chills, sore throat, increased urination or thirst, irregular heartbeat, numbness, tingling, trouble breathing, unusual bruising or bleeding, swelling of the mouth and lips, hives or rashes, skin blisters, weight loss, kidney problems, seizures, depression, suicidal ideation, fainting, excessive hunger, pancreatitis, jaundice, extreme anemia, hepatitis, male infertility, drug-induced Lupus, severe anorexia, renal papillary necrosis, vertigo, tinnitus, psychosis, phototoxicity, vaginal discharge or irritation, hallucinations, death.
* * *
He said:
Can you imagine if they found a cure? Can you imagine that? What would happen? For one, this whole freaking city would fall apart. Do you know how many people would be out of a job? How many non-profits and their directors and staffs would be dumpster-diving for their dinners? With medical practice insurance the way it is, and with lawsuits the way they are, would your physician ever admit to having made a mistake, even one that was unintended?
If they need your diseased body to maintain their livelihood, to justify their salaries, to fuel their grant applications, can you trust that they’ll tell you the truth?
* * *
He said:
I think this is a matter of moral statement than a public health one. Or even a rational one. (picks up the pamphlet and reads) The risk for STDs is directly related to the number of sex partners you have: The more sex partners, the greater the risk of contracting it. Having more sex with fewer partners reduces your risk of getting STDs. Let’s look at it this way: If I have sex with 200 men, absolutely dirty sex with 200 men, each of whom do not have syphilis, would the risk still be greater than if I had sex with just one guy who has syphilis?
She said:
Sir, you’re being difficult. Now tell me the names of those 200 men.
* * *
I’m a great believer of lying in one’s journal. It’s the one place where you can lie with impunity. If you suspect anyone is going to read your journals, you should lie even more spectacularly. Just make sure it’s plausible. I’m not a journal type of guy. I have notebooks, I take notes, even though the half-life of my handwriting is about 14 hours. But as far as a journal diary where daily or every few days I’d record what happened to me, and my feelings and thoughts about it, that’s not for me. Don’t have the discipline, don’t have the bother, don’t got the don’t got. Reading someone else’s journal is an odd enterprise. Even if you have the person’s permission or, say, the person is dead and his journals are in a box somewhere and you are given access to it.
The immediate sense right off the bat is that you shouldn’t, that you’re somehow betraying a trust, invading a private boundary. That sense is quickly and easily chucked to the side by your salacious curiosity. Oh, what morbid and titillating secrets will you find? What ghoulish confessions will be revealed? The answer to that, almost always, is none. Nada. Not a damn thing.
It’s go to work, come home, what I had for lunch, for dinner, what I need to do for work, for home, for self-improvement. Maybe Mom and Dad are visiting, I go on vacation and this is what I saw and Wow! Look at what I saw. I spy cute guy who doesn’t know I’m alive. Someone asks me out on date, I go. Didn’t work out. I ask someone out on date, Yay! He says yes! All atwitter date night. Didn’t work out. I love my pets. I like my friends. This is my reaction to what is happening politically in my time, it’s middle of the road, bootstraps and acculturation. If partnered, this is what my husband did, this is what pissed me off, this is what I did, this is our argument, these are our apologies and making up, and then the motherfucker did this again, argue argue, make up make up, I love him so much, go on vacation together, come home and break up. I miss him, I hate him, I love him but not in love with him, and these are the lessons I have learned.
And then there’ll be all the entries where therapy sessions are recounted. Holy fuck, how much therapy can one person go through? My therapist said this. I am trying my therapist’s suggestions. Putting into practice what I learned in therapy. I have therapy tomorrow, in two days, in two hours. My therapist said this. My therapist said that.
If, after the 8th journal, you’re still whining about the same crap, you’re either doing it wrong or you’re a hopeless little turd. Or your therapist is.
The one who is having sexual relations with his therapist is unlikely to journal about it, because his therapist has likely convinced him not to, hence disposing of evidence, and also because he’s too fucked up and too busy fucking up his life to take time out to journal. The slut’s not journaling either. He’s busy slutting. He is collecting pubes from each of his tricks which he obsessively and lovingly places in old apothecary bottles and labels. It’s a different kind of journaling.
I once knew someone who took snapshots of each of his tricks’ assholes. He compiled these photos in dozens of photo albums, the kinds with the puf
fy, hard cardboard, fake leather covers. This was before digital cameras, and he shot these with a regular 35mm camera, which meant that these rolls of film had to go somewhere to be developed. In this digital age, anytime you go online, on any hookup site, sometimes not even, you’re simply confronted by greasy butthole shots, whether you want to look or not, even if you avert your eyes, they are there, waiting to slap you in the face like a clammy washcloth. So it’s no small wonder that this man possibly had the largest collection of pre-digital greasy butthole shots in the world. Flipping through those albums, and when the pages were opened out end to end I remember thinking first that it looked not unlike the bed of coral reefs. Some pages later, it began to look like some meaty new wave paint chip sample, a color wheel of browns, pale orange earthtones, and mauve that you wouldn’t want on any wall. This man that I knew also happened to die very suddenly of a heart attack. And it was left to his college-aged twin sons from an earlier, straighter life to come and clean out his downtown apartment. I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere, I just don’t want to look.
Of the personal diary, poet Adam Zagajewski writes that they are often “uncommonly irritating — as it should be” with its “extreme narcissism” and “ill humor,” adding that the diary that “doesn’t bother everyone is one that has clearly been falsified.” In thumbing through modern day journals, one thing in common reveals itself: the last entry is simply an abrupt drop, a page of a day hanging in mid-air, like in cartoons when the ground has vanished under the character’s feet. And the poor thing is standing there with a gorblock expression on his face before he plummets.
No one journals right up to the bitter end. I’m certain it’s because by then the shit has certainly hit the fan and is pinwheel splattering the room. The run up to that is likely spent dealing with a whole hog of issues, medical or otherwise, and taking care of business, loose ends, all ends to the end.
Reading that last page, you sense that the person is still unaware of what’s coming up ahead around the bend. And even if they know they’re chronic, that last page still is unaware of the time line. The stopwatches ticking, the alarm clock with the snooze button pried off.
* * *
The new meds gave a new lease on life to many who had decidedly checked out or were prepared to. Going into overtime, the next round, the sequel. Would we be so gauche as to call it ‘sudden death’?
* * *
This one was about to sit for his real estate license. This one would do something at Franklin Templeton. This one and this one only wanted nothing more than academia, to be absorbed into the postgraduate miasma. This one returned to the Midwest never to be heard from again. This one got married and had four kids and a life down low. These ones moved to the suburbs for their techie jobs and turned to fungus. This one turned to fungus right where he was. This one moved to New York and made it big. This one moved to Los Angeles and gave up. This one got all corporate. This one jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. This one hung himself. This one got sober, then not, then again. This one moved back home to take care of his mom. This one became a born-again Mormon. This one became a porn star, which is to say he acted in some porn movies. This one got 10 to 15 years in San Quentin. This one always had his eye on higher political office and his plan was right on track. This one sought a higher spiritual existence. This one drank the Kool-Aid, and this one sold the farm twice over. This one everyone wished well, said with an eye-roll or two.
And then there was the one who told everyone that he was the Crown Prince of the Sultanate of Johore in Malaysia. The one who said he was the grandson of Akio Morita. The one who said his family owned Catalina Island. The one who said he was head of security detail for George Michael. The one who sold his story to the National Enquirer. The one who waited for his lawsuit to pay off, and waited. The one who married up and across and diagonally. The one who achieved some measure of fame from starring third fiddle in a successful network TV series, though few believed him even as the series ran for twelve seasons. The one who was a cop, a paramedic, a surgeon, an oncologist, a pediatrician, a pharmacist, a guru, a lobbyist, a firefighter, an award-winning chef, a professional lesbian. The one whose family connections were a source of great bragging and embarrassment. The one who lied so beautifully you would watch in awe with the fire extinguisher in hand ready to douse his flaming pants.
* * *
DISTURBING & UNSETTLING SNATCHES OF CONVERSATION OVERHEARD AT A SEX PARTY
“I don’t want to go home to your toys…”; “…mostly single…”; “… fuck my angry he-cunt…”; “…what should we do with the body?…”; “…start wiping off fingerprints…”; “…accidentally shit myself behind the…”; “…my therapist says it’s okay…”; “…stop touching me…”; “…oh, I’m still in high school…”.
* * *
To exist in a time that is not the tragic heroic AIDS ’80s, where the density of your grief and sorrow can wipe your slate clean, that what you experienced, what you saw, lived through — no matter how many degrees separated, no one will ever question you now — was enough to give you a free pass, a laminated card marked Redemption.
This was not the future yet fully emerging either, the new golden rainbow era of rights, relationships, optional closets, of acceptance, apathy, and a six-lane mainstream highway, all built on a history and struggle fast receding in the back distance. The rallying howls, the rebel yells, the wailing keen of the fallen all caught is a decrescendo. Don’t look back or you’ll turn salty.
This was neither nor the distance between them, but an exhausted netherland where no one quite knew whether to go forward or backward or to stay put, to lay down and die or to lay down a stake, to remember or forget, to recreate awash in nostalgia or to create anew, the past packaged in matching luggage sets and stashed in storage, to create anew without the annoying tentacles of the past, as if that were ever possible.
* * *
“First, no, I did not get laid. Yes, I got too high and no, I did not have a pleasant evening. I went to check out the guy I was telling you about. Well, Mr. Italy came to me in a cab and wanted to go to another guy’s home in the Outer Mission. We get there and that guy does not answer the door, so then Mr. Italy takes me back to the Westin Hotel where he decides that he does not want sex. So I traveled with this fool all over town and we get high and then he asks me to leave. I get home to find both Bobby and Ricky are gone and it makes me a nervous wreck because they have been up for days and Ricky already freaked out twice this morning about his illegal substance bag being hidden or taken by his other boyfriend, Lyle, or their roommate. I hate to say this, and I realize that it’s probably drug-induced paranoia but these people have been too good to me to not have an ulterior motive. Drug dealing whores do not just adopt a homeless person, feed him, and support his habit for no reason, do they? Well, I am kinda hot though, so maybe… But really, this all is now a life I want no part of. I really can’t understand how I became a puppet in this amateur drama production.
I am back in the big city. If you receive this on Friday morning before you leave for work, would you please text or call me as I would like to stop by for just a few seconds and drop off that one little package that I was short last time, and an extra one as well to say Thank You. I sincerely appreciate your coming to my assistance when I was so desperate. I am considerably better in my budget management skills and have a new job working for a private political consultant in Oakland. I started working today and am really enjoying it, although it was stressful and I did not exactly stay on top of things. I am just very grateful for having the opportunity to re-enter the workplace. Once again, thank you for assisting me and for being my friend at all times. I think you might be the longest lasting yet. Let me know when I might stop by.
I am doing very well. Thank you for your kind inquiry. I sincerely hope to be moving back to the South but the question is when. You see, over the past year I have lost my life savings, retirement, job, house, two pieces of rental
property, and most importantly my family due to my many addictions. Now that I have a grip and have successfully completed eight months of harm management treatment, I feel certain it is only a mere matter of time before I get saturated with this chemical and give it up completely.
At seeing this consistency of improvement, I had a lengthy conversation with my best friend’s partner. He has been dealing drugs in this city for 19 years but he is now too ill and is having to give up his business. And in 19 years, not one arrest! He has suggested that I take over his clients for as many months as necessary to recover my losses. (He projects 18 months.) By my calculations, he is clearing around $10,000 a week, tax-free, in cash and only has 10 to 15 major clients. It was amazing helping him count out $10,000 in $20 bills! Anyway, I would love to do this and in order to do so I am going to need a silent partner who backs 50 percent of the investment. Now, look, don’t run off saying No right away! Here is the deal: I am going to sign a legal binding agreement between myself and this individual that reads as a signature loan guaranteeing the return of the investment in full as a minimum, and if the investment has not been repaid in three months’ time, I am to begin paying back monthly installments of $300 until the loan is repaid in full. Furthermore, the investor will receive $3000 (retail) in product to hold as collateral. After the initial investment is paid in full, the investor will receive 30 percent of gross profits each week, which should average $3,000 a week, tax-free cash, for as long as I maintain the operation. I then have the option to sell the business at the 18-month mark and again at the 24-month mark with the first option going to the investor. This is an established business and has a good name among this crowd. I can’t see anything going wrong and it is the only way to gain that kind of capital in that short a time. And to tell you the truth, I sort of like the risk!
