by Don Lee
Jessica had given me a new pivoting razor, and, staring at the three sharp blades, I hesitated, questioning the rationality of this entire project, especially my participation in it. I stood in the tub and began with the easiest area, above and around the shaft (“Pull the skin taut and go in the direction of growth! Keep rinsing the blades! You don’t want to clog them up”). The scariest part was my testicles (“Just go slowly! Use this!” she said, and slid a small hand mirror underneath the door, the lock on which I had thankfully fixed three weeks ago). I had never noticed how wrinkly and ugly the skin of my scrotum was. I had never, actually, really looked at my scrotum.
It took forever, but finally I finished, somehow managing not to nick or cut myself (“Now rinse and pat it dry and put that moisturizer on!”). I climbed onto the edge of the tub and examined my newly bared genitalia in the mirror above the sink. It was, I had to say, a very clean look, even a good look—everything pristine, and seemingly larger.
I came out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist. Jessica stood waiting for me in her ratty white silk robe. “Why are you in that?” I asked.
“You might need some inspiration,” she said.
“This is getting too kinky for me,” I told her. “You said it’d be almost clinical. Can’t I just do it myself?”
“It’s very complicated stuff.”
“You could shout instructions to me like just now.”
“Just come in my room. It’ll be over in ten minutes.”
There was plastic sheeting spread over the floor. Jessica had fashioned a work table with a piece of plywood and two sawhorses, and on it was a small combo TV/VCR, a bunch of disposable containers and stirrers, scissors, a kitchen timer, duct tape, measuring cups, and a glass bowl with water in it. On her bed were some porn magazines (Barely Legal, Stuffed, Asian Climax) and porn videos (Doin’ the Ritz, New Wave Hookers 5, Fresh Meat 4). Scattered underneath the table were various boxes that were labeled Casting Willy, Create-a-Mate, Clone-a-Willy, Clone-a-Pussy.
“You’re going to use one of those kits?” I asked.
“No, I experimented with them, but I figured out a better way to do it,” Jessica said. “Okay, let me see.”
Reluctantly, I undid my towel, and she cranked a gooseneck lamp into position for an up-close-and-personal appraisal, getting on her knees to stare at my genitals. “Not bad, not bad,” she said. She lifted my cock to look at the underside, and I became half aroused. “But you missed a few spots.” She grabbed a razor and pulled on the stray pubes for a dry shave—no oil or cream.
“Hey, careful!” I said.
“Don’t worry,” she said, shifting and twisting my penis and testes this way and that for a thorough inspection. “You know, you have a very nice penis.”
“Thanks,” I said. What else could I say?
She plugged in an immersion coil—one of those cheap contraptions to heat up a cup of coffee—and stuck it into the water in the glass bowl. She held up the magazines and videos. “Any preference?”
“No.”
She popped New Wave Hookers 5 into the VCR. “You want a magazine, too? This is a two-part operation. I have to do a fitting first, so I need you to get fully erect for just a minute, then you can relax for a while. Feel free to beat off. Don’t mind me.”
“This is impossible,” I said. “I can’t get a hard-on at will.”
“No? You had no problem the night you walked in on me in the bathroom.” She sighed and took off her robe, under which she was nude, and waited for further developments. “Okay, that seemed to do the trick.”
In spite of her recent weight loss, her body verging on gaunt, no longer hard-yogaed, Jessica remained incontrovertibly attractive to me.
She shot close-ups of my penis with a macro lens and a flash from every angle.
“You’re going to give me all the prints and negatives when you’re done, right?” I asked.
“I’m not shooting your face. Who’s going to be able to tell it’s your penis? I hate to disillusion you, but all penises look pretty much alike.”
“Is that a yes or a no on the prints and negs?”
“Yes.”
“No one will ever know?” I asked. “You’ll never tell anyone?”
“I already promised.” She took what appeared to be a clear plastic report cover and rolled it into a tube. “Is this fully erect for you, or do you still have a ways more to go?”
“This is essentially it,” I said, betraying some deflation of ego.
“That wasn’t a value judgment. I was just asking. You’re pretty big.”
She manipulated the tube, enfolding my erection and balls. “How big?” I asked.
“Oh, come on.”
“Bigger than Joshua?”
“I’m not falling for this.”
“Bigger than Loki?”
“This is exactly what my installation’s going to be about, these kinds of insecurities.” She cinched the width of the cylinder with duct tape, marked it up with a Sharpie, and removed the tube.
Over the table, she cut the tube with scissors, snipping curves on the bottom end and a triangle on the top end. She then capped the upper opening with a section of rubber and tape and checked the fit on me. The tube slotted over the shaft of my penis and had a flap that went under my scrotum and between my legs. She made a couple of more cuts on the tube, measured the temperature of the water in the bowl with an oven thermometer, unplugged the immersion coil, and turned around.
“We’re flagging a little,” she said, looking at my wilting erection. “Once I mix this stuff, we have to go really quickly, and I’m going to need you to be absolutely still and maintain a full erection for at least four minutes.” She inserted another video, Fresh Meat 4, into the VCR and laid the Asian Climax magazine open on the table. “Do you think you can do that?”
“I’m not sure.”
She walked over and began fondling me.
I put my hands on the small of Jessica’s back and drew her to me and tried to kiss her.
“No,” she said. “This isn’t sexual.”
“How’s it not sexual? Everything about this is sexual.”
“I can’t have sex with you. I can’t go into those emotions.” She squatted down and took me in her mouth.
“Jesus,” I said. “Jessica.”
She worked her head back and forth, her tongue stud rubbing the underside of my penis.
“Maybe Bill Clinton wouldn’t define this as having sexual relations, but I do.” I should have been elated—fulfilling multiple fantasies I’d entertained for years—but it didn’t seem right, or really even erotic. It felt, as Jessica had posited, clinical.
She said nothing, concentrating on the task at hand.
“Did you do this with Joshua?”
“No,” she said, taking a breath.
Once I was rigid, she applied a rubber cock ring around the base of my penis, behind my testicles, cutting off the circulation and making me harder.
“Is that too tight?” she asked.
“Where’d you get this? How the hell do you know about these things?”
She snapped on a pair of vinyl gloves and mixed alginate powder with the water, which was precisely at ninety-eight degrees, in a disposable tub. The alginate, she told me, was usually used by dentists to make impressions of teeth.
“Did you give Joshua a hand job?”
“No,” she said, stirring robustly. “He didn’t need any encouragement.”
“Were you naked with him?”
“No,” she said.
“Have you ever fucked Joshua?”
“For God’s sake, no, all right? I’ve never jacked him off or kissed him or done anything with him,” she said. “What is this thing you have with Joshua?”
She had me hold the tube around my penis with both hands while she poured the pink alginate into the triangular hole she had clipped. The mixture was soft, wet, warm. It oozed down the tube, enveloping my cock, and pooled around my balls, then se
eped between my legs and down my thighs and dripped onto the plastic sheeting on the floor in clots.
“Can you move around a little?” Jessica asked. “Just a little. Like you’re doing a shimmy. But keep the tube in place. I want to get rid of any air pockets. Otherwise we’ll have to do this again.”
She pulled out a woman’s vibrator from a drawer and turned it on, and I felt a wave of momentary panic, thinking she had nefarious intentions for it, like lodging it into my anus to create an internal shimmy, or purely to attach an evil, twisted subtext to the whole endeavor in the name of art. But she simply held it against the tube in various spots, letting it clatter, plastic to plastic, to rid the alginate of microscopic bubbles. She set the kitchen timer for three minutes. “You’re not losing your erection, are you?” she asked. “Is there something you want me to do?”
I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to make love to her. “I’m okay,” I said.
When the timer dinged, there was an unexpected problem. I couldn’t get out of the tube. Jessica snipped off the rubber cock ring, put her robe back on, turned off the TV, and tucked the magazines away, yet I stayed priapic. “Can’t you get it to go down? Just shrink out of it.”
“It’s not a voluntary thing,” I said. “I can’t mentally switch it on and off.”
“Such a mysterious organ.”
The alginate had gotten cold and firm, and I stood there, holding the tube, my legs cramping, Jessica waiting for me anxiously. At last, after a few minutes, I was limp enough to extricate myself.
“Gently, gently,” Jessica said. She tipped the tube up and looked inside at the mold of my penis and balls.
“I’m not doing this again,” I told her, wiping myself with the towel and the bucket of water she had set aside for me.
“I don’t think you’ll have to. It looks pretty good,” she said. “Here. Rub this on if you start getting itchy the next few days.”
I covered my groin with the towel with my left hand, and with my right I accepted the small tube of cortisone cream.
“You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said.
Her name was Noklek Praphasirirat. Once she had moved from the couch in the living room to the master bedroom, which had its own bathroom, she was hardly visible. Sometimes I would forget she was staying in the house. She didn’t interact with us at all, never talked to us or ate with us. I never saw her in the kitchen. I didn’t know what she did for meals. She didn’t keep food in the refrigerator. It didn’t seem she used the washing machine or the dryer in the basement, either. She never made a sound. Perhaps she did everything in the dead of night, when we were all asleep.
The only conversation of substance I had with her was in mid-April, when I came home from work just before twilight and, through the sliding glass door, saw her on the back deck. She had gotten her hair chopped off. It was now spiky and streaked, just like Jessica’s. She was also, it appeared, wearing a pair of Jessica’s cargo pants.
She had assembled a shrine on the deck—three small Buddhas, one brass, one stone, one faux-marble, surrounded by candles, incense, two vases of flowers, and framed photos of a Buddha and of a man, woman, and girl. She was kneeling in front of the shrine in a posture of prayer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“You sit?” she said. “You pray with me?”
I knelt down beside her. It seemed disrespectful not to.
“This my father, mother, sister,” she said. “This Gautama.”
Noklek lit the candle on the right side of the Buddhas, then the candle on the left, followed by three incense sticks. She sat stiffly upright, her palms pressed together, then bowed down, forehead on the redwood boards, and I followed suit. She chanted, “Annicaˉ vata sankhaˉraˉ, uppaˉda vaya dhammino. Uuppajjitvaˉ nirujjhanti tesam vuˉpasamo sukho,” and bowed three more times.
She pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket. “Your mother, father alive?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You have brother, sister?”
“One older sister.”
“You love sister?”
“I suppose so,” I said, “even though she represents every bourgeois SoCal value that I despise. Southern California—that’s where I’m from originally.”
“My home, very far. Chiang Mai. You know Chiang Mai?”
“In Thailand, right?”
“Yes. Thailand.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Miss, no miss, no different. I no go home. This my home now. My sister dead. My father, mother dead. Everybody dead. This paper, my sister, father, mother name, my family name, ancestor name.”
I wondered how and when everyone had died. In her photograph, her sister was in a school uniform and looked no more than ten years old. The photographs of her parents seemed to have been taken a long time ago, when they were still in their late twenties. No one was smiling. They were rather grim black-and-white portraits, formal head shots, as if for passports. Yet I didn’t ask about the particulars, for without warning Noklek flicked a lighter and lit the corner of the paper with the names of her family and ancestors, holding it over a plate until it was completely enflamed. I was unsettled, assuming there was bitterness in her memories of them, not understanding until later, after I had researched Theravada Buddhist rituals, that this was a tribute to the dead, a passing of merit to their spirits.
She chanted some more, then lifted a bowl of water with flower petals floating on it. Jasmine. I breathed in the sweet scent. Where she had gotten the jasmine, I did not know. I gazed around the backyard. None of the perennials or bulbs that Jessica and I had planted late last summer had bloomed just yet.
Noklek gently sprinkled a bit of the water over the Buddhas and the photo frames, catching the runoff in another glass bowl—the same one, I recognized, in which Jessica had stuck the immersion coil for the alginate mixture. With the collected water, she doused the ashes of the paper. Then she startled me by tipping some water onto my shoulder, down my back.
“Hey!” I said. I was wearing a new button-down, and the water was cold. It was barely fifty degrees outside.
“Luck!” she said. “Songkran! New year!”
This was, I remembered then, a rite of the Songkran festival in Thailand, a three-day new year’s celebration in April. The tradition of pouring cleansing water had degenerated into a national water fight, caravans of celebrants driving down streets with water guns and cannons, drenching bystanders, who would retaliate with buckets and hoses. I had seen videos on the news.
“You water me?” Noklek asked.
I dribbled water onto her shoulder, and she momentarily shuddered from the chill.
She mixed a white powder, maybe chalk, in a small bowl with some water, then dipped her fingers in the white paste and daubed her face—a consecration, vertical lines on her forehead, swirls on her cheeks. She handed me the bowl. “You paint?”
I rubbed the chalk onto my face, mimicking her design pattern.
“Sawatdee pee mai,” she said, pressing her palms together and bowing to me. “Happy New Year.”
“Sawatdee pee mai,” I said, bowing.
“Suk-san wan songkran,” she said.
“Suk-san wan songkran,” I said, bowing again.
When I rose, she squirted my face with a tiny water pistol. “Hee hee hee hee,” she hiccupped in childlike squeaks. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh.
“Now you’re going to get it,” I said, and I jumped up and grabbed the larger of the bowls and whirled around and threw the water at the same time she tossed the contents of a bucket into my face. I had been errant in my aim and missed Noklek completely. I, on the other hand, was soaked. We ran on and off the deck, into the backyard, fighting over the garden hose, filling bowls and buckets and trash cans from the utility shed, screaming and laughing, the chalk smearing and streaking down our faces, until dusk fell and we were exhausted and deluged and shivering, yet blithe
.
We never really spoke again. I think of that evening, of Noklek, our abbreviated conversation and gestures of communion, every now and then. I think of the jasmine petals she had spread in the bowls of water. I think of her youth, how alive and joyful she was in those few minutes we had shared—for once, carefree. I think of the Thai Buddhist beliefs of renewal and rebirth, of the Songkran custom of washing away misfortune and receiving the blessing of protection, the making and passing on of merit. I think of the practice of commemorating the dead by writing down their names, and then incinerating them. I think of devoting myself to more acts of kindness and goodness, as you are supposed to do during Songkran, and of dedicating those acts, in part, to Noklek Praphasirirat, wherever she may be now.
15
On Sunday, May 2, five days before her exhibition would be open to the public, Jessica gave the remaining members of the 3AC a preview of Dis/Orienting Proportions. We walked up the stairs to the second-floor foyer of the City Hall Annex on Inman Street, and there, in the exhibition space known as Gallery 57, past a knot of freestanding partitions that had been temporarily assembled to conceal the installation until its unveiling, stood three life-sized mannequins. They were of Bruce Lee, Charlie Chan, and Suzie Wong.
Bruce Lee was dressed in the yellow tracksuit with black stripes that he had sported in The Game of Death. He was positioned in a three-quarters fighting stance, one arm up, ready to parry, the other forward and down to block. Jessica had silkscreened a black-and-white photograph of Lee’s face onto a sheet of rubber and stretched it over the mannequin’s head, which was crowned by a high-end wig. All the mannequins had very realistic wigs, styled by Jimmy Fung. The clothes had been just as skillfully sewn by Trudy Lun, the theater costume designer/seamstress.
