by Paul Theroux
“Now that’s a well-named place!” I said and grinned. I can’t remember whether it got a rise out of him. I asked if he had a meal on the plane.
“Yes,” he said, “perfectly hideous.”
“Well, that food is always so damned hideous,” I said, trying to sound more disgusted than him. The word stuck to my tongue. I wasn’t telling the truth. I thought airplane food was very good, always the correct color and each course in its own little covered trough on the tray, the knives and forks wrapped up and all the rest of the utensils in clean envelopes and in fitted slots and compartments. I had to agree the food was hideous. He was a guest, and I had plans for him.
The next thing I said to him was what I said to everyone who came through. I said it slowly, with suggestive emphasis on the right syllables: “If there’s anything you want in Singapore, anything at all”—I smiled here—“just let me know and I’ll see what I can fix up.”
He replied, as most strangers did—but he was not smiling—“I’m sure you don’t mean anything.”
“Anything.” I took a drink of my beer to show I wasn’t going to qualify the promise.
He mopped his face. “I was wondering—”
And I knew what he was wondering. The choice wasn’t large, but people didn’t realize that. A tout could follow a tourist on the sidewalk and in the space of a minute offer everything that tourist could conceivably want. The touts who didn’t know English handed over a crudely printed three-by-five card to the man with a curious idle face. The card had half a dozen choices on it: blue movies, girls, boys, exhibition, massage, ganja—a menu which covered the whole appetite of longing. No new longings were likely, and the tout who breathed, “You want something special?” had in mind a combination based on the six choices.
Leigh was perspiring heavily. Vice, I was thinking: it sounded like what it was, it squeezed, expressing the grape of fantasy. Gladys was free. It was possible to stop off at her place on the way back from the airport—Leigh would appreciate the convenience—and I was going to say so. But it is a mistake to make explicit suggestions: I discovered that very early. If I suggested a girl and the feller wanted a boy he would be ashamed to admit it and the deal would be off. It was always wrong to offer an exhibition—like saying, “You can’t cut the mustard but how about watching?”—and if a person was thinking of having a go he would refuse if I suggested it. Most people thought their longings were original, but they weren’t: they could only be one of six, or else a combination. Various as fantasy, but fantasy didn’t allow for the irregular performance of man’s engine. I knew the folly of expectation, and how to caution a feller against despairing of his poor engine and perhaps hitting his pecker with a hammer.
I sized up Leigh as he was blotting his cheeks and pulling at his collar, counting the whirring fans in the lounge. I took him to be an exhibition man, with a massage to follow—not an ordinary massage, something special, Lillian jumping naked on his spine. Intimacy, as the girls called it, or boochakong, to use the common Chinese term I preferred to the English verb, would still be a strong possibility, I was thinking. There was no such thing as impotence: it was successful as soon as money changed hands. It wasn’t the money, but the ritual.
“What do you say?” I asked, as brightly as I could. Usually it wasn’t so hard; when it was, it meant the feller was worried about asking for something I couldn’t provide.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and drew a deep breath. So I was wrong about the exhibition, and just as well, I thought; I hated those monkeyshines. I guessed Leigh was slightly bent; his particular crimp was a weakness for transvestites, of which, as is well known, there is a whole sorority in Singapore. Very few fellers admitted to this yen; they were the hardest ones to handle, but over the years I had seen how they reacted to the Chinese boys who in skirts were more winsome than girls. Middle age may be an emergence of this comfort, too, a fling at play-acting with a pretty boy, a reasonable occasion for gaiety, the surprise of costuming and merry vestments. If I detected the wish I took the fellers down to Bugis Street and steeered them over to the reliable ones, Tiny or Gina. Lucy had the operation which sometimes disappointed the fellers. Your bashful fruit pretended he was talking to a girl, but just so we knew where we stood I said, “Take Gina—he’s a very nice feller.” The client looked surprised and said, “You mean—?” And then: “I might as well take him home—I’m too drunk to notice the difference,” and going out would slip me ten dollars.
“What did you have in mind?” asked Leigh.
A very uncommon question. I was going to say nothing, just keep smiling in a willing fashion. But he looked as though he meant it and wouldn’t tumble to my willingness.
I said, “I thought . . . if you were interested in anything illegal, hyah-yah, I might be able to—”
“Illegal?” said Leigh and put his hanky down. He leaned over and, puzzled and interested, asked, “You mean a prostitute?”
I tried to laugh again, but the expression on his face turning from puzzlement to disgust rattled me. It had been a mistake to say anything.
“No,” I said, “of course not.” But it came too late, my tardy denial only confirmed the truth, and Leigh was so indignant—he had straightened up and stopped drinking—that shame, unfamiliar as regret, tugged at my neck hairs. Through the glass-topped table in front of me I could see I was curling my toes and clawing at my sandals.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll call a taxi.” I started to get up. I was hot; I wanted to roll up my sleeves, now damply stuck to my tattoos, revealing them.
“Flowers,” he said, and narrowed his eyes at me, “are you a ponce?”
“Me? Hyah-mn! What a thing to say!” It was a loud hollow protest with a false echo. Prostitute, he had said, pimp, whore, queer, ponce—words people use to name the things they hate (liking them they leave them nameless, the human voice duplicating the suspicion that passion is unspeakable). “I’m a sort of pornocrat,” I was going to say, to mock him. I decided not to. His incredulity was a prompting for me to lie.
The waitress passed by.
Leigh said, “Wan arn!” greeting her in vilely accented Mandarin.
“Scuse me?” she said. She took a pad from the pocket of her dress, a pencil from her hair. “Anudda Anchor?”
“Nee hao ma,” said Leigh. He had turned away from me and was looking at the girl. But the girl was looking at me “Nee hway bu hway—”
“Mister,” said the girl to me, “what ship your flend flom?”
Leigh cleared his throat and said we’d better be going. In the taxi he said hopelessly, “I was wondering if I might get a chance to play a little squash.”
“Sure thing,” I said, pouncing. “I can fix that up for you in a jiffy.” Squash? He was wheezing still, and red as a beet. Carrying his suitcase to the taxi rank he kept changing hands and groaning, and then he put his face out the taxi window and let the breeze blow into his mouth, taking gulps of it the way dogs do in a car. He had swallowed two little white pills with his beer. He looked closely at his palms from time to time. And he wanted to play squash!
“What’s your club, Flowers?”
We had agreed that I was to call him William if he called me Jack. I liked my nursery-rhyme name. Now I felt he was cheating.
“Name it,” I said, and to remind him of our agreement I added, “William.”
I had an application pending at the Cricket Club once, or at least the “Eggs,” two elderly bald clients of mine, who were members, said I did. I had been trying to join a club in Singapore for a long time. Then it was too late. I couldn’t apply for membership without giving myself away, for I often drank in the clubs and most of the members—they knew me well—thought I had joined years before. There wasn’t a club on the island I couldn’t visit one way or another. I had clients at all of them.
“Cricket Club’s got some squash courts, but the Tanglin’s just put up new ones—you may want to have a look at those. There’s none at the Swimmin
g Club so far, though we’ve got a marvelous sauna room.” I thumped his knee. “We’ll find something, William.”
“Sounds very agreeable,” he said, pulling his head back into the taxi. He was calm now. “How do you manage three clubs? I’m told the entrance fees are killing.”
“They are pretty killing,” I said, using his dialect again, “but I reckon it’s worth it.”
“You’re not a squash player yourself?”
“No,” I said, “I’m just an old beachcomber—drinking’s my sport, nyah!”
That made him chuckle; I was laughing too, and as I shifted on the seat I felt a lump in my back pocket press into my butt: two thick envelopes of pornographic pictures I had brought along just in case he asked. Their reminding pressure stopped my laughing.
The taxi driver tilted his head back and said, “Bloomies? Eshbishin wid two gull? You want boy? Mushudge? What you want I get. What you like?”
“Just a game of squash, driver, thank you very much,” I said in a pompous fruity voice to this poor feller for the benefit of the horse’s ass next to me. Then I smiled at William and tried to tip him a wink, but his head was out the window and he was blinking and gulping at the breeze and probably wondering what he was doing on that tedious little island.
3
I WALKED into a bar where they did not know me well and I could hear the Chinese whispers: “Who does that jackass think he is?” And then it ceased; my face made silence. It was not the face you expected in Ho’s or Toby’s or the Honey Bar, in the Golden Treasure or Loon’s Tip-Top. Years ago I had not minded, but later my heart sank on the evenings all my regulars were tied up and I had to go into these joints recruiting. I got stares from round-shouldered youths sitting with plump hostesses; and the secret society members watched me—in Ho’s the Three Dots, in the Honey Bar the Flying Dragons. There was no goblin as frightening as a member of a secret society staring me down. He first appeared to have no eyes, then the slits became apparent and I guessed he was peering at me from somewhere behind the slits. I never saw the eyes. The slits didn’t speak; and it was impossible to read the face, too smooth for a message. I turned away and slipped the manager a few dollars to release the girl, and when I was hurrying out I heard growls and grunts I didn’t understand, then titters. On the sidewalk I heard the whole bar crackle and explode into yelling laughter. Now they had eyes; but I was outside.
One night a thug spoke to me. He was sitting up front at the bar eating a cold pork pie with his fingers. He was wearing the secret society uniform, a short-sleeved shirt with the top four buttons undone, sunglasses—though it was dark—and his hair rather long, with wispy wing-tufts hanging past his ears. I didn’t think he saw me talking to the manager, and after I passed the money over and turned to go the thug put his hand on my shoulder, and rubbing pork flakes into it, said gruffly, “Where you does wuck?”
I didn’t answer. I hurried down the gloomy single aisle of the bar, past eerily lit Chinese faces. The thug called out, “Where you wucking!” That was in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, and I never went near it again.
Who is he? they murmured in the Belvedere, the Hilton, the Goodwood when I was in the lobby flicking through a magazine, waiting for one of my girls to finish upstairs. I could have passed for a golf pro when I was wearing my monogrammed red knit jersey—the one with long sleeves—and my mustard-colored slacks and white ventilated shoes. No one knew I had a good tan because I worked for Hing, who refused to pay for taxis in town and who sent me everywhere, but always to redheads, with parcels. In my short-sleeved flowered batik shirt, with my tattoos displayed, they took me for a beachcomber with a private income or a profitable sideline, perhaps “an interesting character.” Once, in the Pebble Bar of the Hotel Singapura, an American lady who was three sheets to the wind said I looked like a movie actor she knew, but she couldn’t think of his name.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
I smiled, to give her the impression that I might be that actor, said, “Take a guess, sweetheart,” and then I left; leaving, I heard some hoots, from the gang of oil riggers who always drank there, and I knew who they were hooting at.
My appearance, this look of a millionaire down on his luck, which is also the look of a bum attempting to be princely, was never quite right for most of the places I had to go. I was the wrong color in the Tai-Hwa and all the other Chinese joints—that was clear; at the Starlight, strictly Cantonese, they seated me with elderly hostesses and overcharged me. I was too dressy for the settler hangouts and never had enough money for more than one drink at the Hilton or Raffles, though I looked as if I might have belonged in those hotels. I certainly looked like a member of the Tanglin Club, the Swiss Club, the Cricket Club, and all the others where my chits were signed for me by fellers who liked my discretion. I was always welcome in the clubs, but that was a business matter. And they did not laugh at the Bandung: they knew me there.
In the taxi I mentioned the Bandung to Leigh; he didn’t say no, but he thought we should stop at Hing’s first—“Let’s have a look at the towkay” was what he said. We got stuck in rush-hour traffic, a solid unmoving line of cars. There was an accident up front, and the cars were passing the wrecked sedan at a crawl to note down the license number so they could play it on the lottery. There was a bus in front of us displaying the bewildering sign I Don’t Know Why, But I Prefer Sanyo. The local phrase for beeping was “horning,” and they were horning to beat the band. We sat and sweated, gagging on the exhaust fumes; it was after five by the time we got to Hing’s.
Little Hing was sitting in the shop entrance reading the racing form. He sat like a roosting fowl, his feet on the seat, his knees drawn up under his chin. Seeing us, he turned his bony face and bawled upstairs, then he locked his teeth and snuffled and paddled the air with his free hand, which meant we were to wait.
“Your Oriental politeness,” I said. “He’ll spit in a minute, probably hock a louie on your shoes, so watch out.”
We had made Big Hing wait; now, to save face, he was making us wait. Hing spent the best part of a day saving face, and Yardley said, “When you see his face you wonder why he bothers.”
Gopi, the peon, brought a wooden stool for Leigh, but Leigh just winced at it and studied Hing’s sign: Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioners, and below that in smaller assured script, Catering & Victualling, Marine Hardware, Importers, Wholesale Drygoods & Foodstuffs, Licensed Agents, Frozen Meat, and the motto, “All Kinds of Deck & Engine Stores & Bonded Stores & Sundries.” “Sundries” was my department. The signs on the shops to the left and right of Hing, and all the other shops—biscuit-colored, peeling, cracked and trying to collapse, a dusty terrace of shophouses sinking shoulder to shoulder on Beach Road—were identical but for the owner’s name; even the stains and cracks were reduplicated down the road as far as you could see. But there was something final in the decline, an air of ramshackle permanency common in Eastern ports, as if having fallen so far they would fall no further.
“What’s your club in Hong Kong?” I asked.
“Just one, I’m afraid,” he said. He paused and smiled. “The Royal Hong Kong.”
“Jockey or Yacht?”
“Yacht,” he said quickly, losing his smile.
Little Hing spat and went back to his racing form without bothering to see where the clam landed.
“Missed again,” I said, winking at Leigh. “I’ve heard the Yacht Club’s a smashing place,” I said, and he looked at me the way he had when I said “Honkers.” “You’re in luck, actually. You have a reciprocal membership with the Tanglin here and probably a couple of others as well.”
“No,” he said, “I inquired about that before I came down. Bit of a nuisance, really. But there it is.”
He was lying. I knew the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club and the Tanglin Club had reciprocal memberships and privileges; a member of one could sign bar chits at the other and use all the club’s facilities. So he was not a member, and there we were stan
ding on the Beach Road sidewalk, on the lip of its smelly monsoon drain, at the beck and call of a surly little towkay who had chosen to sulk upstairs, lying about clubs we didn’t belong to. It made me sad, like the pictures hidden in my back pocket I would never admit to having: two grown men practicing lies, and why?
Big Hing came out in his pajamas and gave Leigh that secret society stare. Hing was not a member; he was a paid-up victim of the Red Eleven, who controlled Beach Road and collected “coffee money” for protection. The payment gave Hing a certain standing, for having victimized him the Red Eleven would stick by him and fight anyone who tried to squeeze him. Leigh handed over a letter, and we waited while Hing gnawed the sealing wax from the flap. He put on his old wire glasses and read the column of characters, then he smiled his angry eyeless smile and nodded at Leigh.
“I trust everything is in order,” said Leigh to Hing.
It was a wasted remark; Hing was muttering to Little Hing, and Little replied by muttering into the racing form he held against his face.
“Where’s our friend going to put up?” I asked.
“Booked at the Strand,” said Big Hing. “Can come tomorrow.” He picked up his grandson and bounced the trouserless little feller to show the interview was over.
The Strand Hotel was on Scotts Road, diagonally across the road from the Tanglin Club. As we were pulling into the Strand’s driveway, under the arch with the sign reading European Cuisine—Weddings—Parties—Reasonable Prices, Leigh saw the Tanglin signboard and said, “Why don’t we pop over for a drink?”
I let my watch horrify me. “God,” I said, “it’s nearly half past six. That place is a madhouse this time of day. Fellers having a drink after work. Look, William, I know a quiet little—”
“I’d love to have a look at those new squash courts of yours,” he said. He hit me hard on the arm and said heartily, “Come on, Flowers, I’ll buy you a drink.” He gave his suitcase to the room-boy at the Strand, signed the register, and then clapped his stomach with two hands. “Ready?”
