I had this nightmare that a plague swept the clean streets of Hong Kong. All these people were dropping dead on the pavement, and when I woke up and told Jack about it he just grunted, "Look, it's probably just some post-SARS trauma." But the thing is that we weren't in Hong Kong yet back when SARS happened. Then Jack rolled over, and I rolled over, and I squeezed my eyes shut and saw flowers painted on the insides of my eyelids. Beside me in bed, Jack snored like the end of the world.
* * *
"Anymore, everyone is someone."
Jack slouched in his wooden chair across from me in this English ex-pat pub that reeked like blue cheese. He was under the impression that sweeping statements announced in a booming voice made him sound philosophical, as if he partook regularly in some form of self-reflection. As if. Jack's mental laziness was rivaled only by his physical laziness—beer gut, splotchy Rosacea to which he habitually forgot to apply ointment, etc. Truly revolting, but I didn't notice all that, or the cyst-like zits on his back, until it was too late.
"These mainlanders are coming in, spitting on the ground, spending their salaries on the stupidest tourist shit. Disneyland. Goddamn Disneyland."
Jack sat in an office all day and brought home big fat paychecks. I sat on my fat ass in the apartment and worked on my paintings, never finished my paintings, waited like Little Orphan Annie for my Daddy Warbucks to give me some goddamn money, longed for my manhood back, etc.
Jack wrapped his meaty digits around his pint glass, jerked it up to his face, took a dainty sip of beer. "These mainlanders are someone now, too. Everyone is someone. They can spit all they want, because now they have money and fast cars." Jack had already clobbered his food. He eyed mine. I nodded like I gave a shit about mainlanders. I did not. My hamburger settled in my stomach. I was hungry for a nap.
"Everyone's getting rich." Jack dug into my basket of fries, shoved a salty handful in his mouth.
* * *
There were two things that defined Jack in my mind. First, that he was my boyfriend and had always been, for two years, my boyfriend. Second, that I hated him. I was tired of waking up beside a man—furry back, fat rolls, etc. We'd go out and I'd find myself looking at the natives—Hong Kong women with long hair and stylish clothes—and I'd think, maybe I am not a gay man at all. Maybe I'm just a man, a stupid man who happened to once fall in, and out, of love with a very wealthy and powerful douche bag named Jack. A million very wealthy and very powerful douche bags named Insert-Names-Here.
* * *
My lungs rattled in my chest. My ass rested on a rickety cot. My hooker in this palace of pink lights, a Hong Kong girl named Jenny or Gigi or something—thick black hair permed wavy, creamy skin, thin but toned arms, superb style—sauntered toward me.
"Ready?" She spoke this English word with no trace of an accent and pointed down at my ill-fitting khaki pants. I'd lost fifteen pounds since moving to Asia—a result of all the English pub food, Jack's favorite. Jenny or Gigi undid my button, unzipped my fly. I studied her little face—deep-set eyes, flat nose, lips the color of browned hamburger meat—and I was finished. Finished. No motion in my ocean, done, over, etc. Jenny or Gigi was beautiful, and I wanted to paint tiny flowers on the outsides of her eyelids with acrylics, and I wanted to get the hell out of her whore house, and I wanted to get the hell out of Hong Kong—too many beautiful people tempting me to be myself. I wanted to fly back to Texas and sit in a coffee shop with a bunch of pretentious, pierced nobodies. I wanted to be stricken with a disease so horrible that they'd have to cremate my body for fear of contamination. I wanted everything, and I didn't know what I wanted at all. That was my problem.
The girl, Jenny-Gigi, gently traced my jaw with her pink-tipped fingers. But I couldn't do it. A minute later, she was calling me a faggot in guttural Cantonese.
I shoved my way out of the sticky room, paid her boss, left.
* * *
I strolled the toasty Hong Kong streets of late spring—neon and steel and concrete, clean, plagueless, dream-like. It was late and I couldn't wait to be asleep, to wear a surgical mask, to feel something other than numb, to get out of the city, to paint something worth looking at, to become aroused again, to find Jack dead, etc. Someday, maybe.
I rode the elevator up to our floor, wrapped myself in Egyptian cotton sheets, listened to the air conditioner's hum. Beside me in bed, Jack snored like the end of the world. But it wasn't. It was a beginning. The beginning. The beginning of...
* * *
My mother once said that I clung like a dryer sheet to men with money. My brother, who works in Dallas, has only called me once in two years because he's too goddamn busy with his wife and kids and too goddamn cheap to buy an international calling card. My father died at age fifty-seven; he died in bed, in his sleep, with one hand clasped firmly over his cock. Mom swore this wasn't true, but my brother and I both saw it—our dad in a restful, permanent state of sleep, the precise location of his palm. We watched on, helpless, as the paramedics lifted him out of bed. The autopsy results came back, our dad didn't.
Jack never knew my father, but joked once that Freud would have wanted to gay-marry him; at this, I laughed politely. I laughed because I had a choice. I laughed because I could laugh politely or I could be alone. Some choice.
* * *
I woke up. Jack had already left for work. On the insides of my eyelids, I began working on this painting of a Hong Kong hooker. I began working on a painting of a plague. I began painting pictures of my dead father, of Jack, of acne-pocked backs, of greasy French fries.
There's this blank canvas in my head, and there's so much beauty in this world, and there's so much ugly in this world, and there's so much world in this world that some days it's too much to bear. Some days, all I can do is cling. Some days, all I can do is miss people who were never there—myself included. Some days all I can do is sleep, laugh, nod, test my sexuality, remind Jack to apply his Rosacea cream. Some days, all I can do is all I can do. And, I mean, someday, I will live on my own and I will finish a painting and I will be successful and I won't have to rely on rich men or think about my father's ghost or care what my mother says about me. Someday, I will turn forty and I will look back at my late twenties and make the choice to laugh politely. Someday I will have that choice and I will make the right decision. Someday I will be alone and it will be okay. Someday.
322 Review publishes provocative emerging and established artists. Conceived and operated by former Rowan University graduate students of the Master of Arts in Writing Program, 322 Review is aggressively seeking the best fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and mixed media works of visual art.
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