Endless Blind Passions

Who Am I – Part 2

2010-08-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 1

HIS CURIOSITY WHETTED, the next evening Monty walked a short distance from his hotel to the Babylon, a legendary bathhouse. Located in a quiet leafy neighborhood of large embassy mansions, the Babylon had been completely retrofitted inside with saunas, steam rooms, dark labyrinths and small rooms, plus a modern well-outfitted gym and a restaurant. The interior throughout was elegantly decorated in traditional Thai style, with beige and dark green walls and dimly lit alcoves holding stone Buddha heads. Altogether different from the grotty, unfriendly gay saunas of the West, the Babylon provided a handsome and serene environment, a civilized environment, where one could comfortably meet and chat with other men, with young men, and do more.

Monty checked in at the entry and in return for his wallet and passport received sandals, a towel and a smiling boy, smiling like the boy from the night before. The boy guided him up and down stairways and along dark passages to a locker room, where he waited while the older man disrobed and tied the customary towel around his waist. The boy then gestured to himself with both hands as if to offer himself – or, more likely, ask for a tip. When Monty didn’t respond, the smile turned into a frown and the boy turned and left.

Trying to retrace his steps and explore the facilities, Monty arrived at a partly covered outdoor bar that extended along the entire length of the top floor. A balmy breeze cooled off the otherwise hot and sultry night air. He ordered a tall iced tea from a waiter and sat down at the far end of the bar. Soon after the drink arrived, two young Thai men casually strolled his way and sat down, separated from each other but discretely opposite Monty. He’d heard that this signaled a willingness to meet. After building up his courage, he crossed to the one most directly in front of him, said hello and introduced himself.

“Hello,” replied the man who appeared to be in his late-twenties, well built and tall for a Thai, with a narrow angular face. “My name is Kasim.”

He nodded to the chair next to him when Monty asked if he could sit down. “Do you come here often?” he asked.

“No,” replied Kasim sharply. “I don’t like the environment. Thai people are rude. They’ve lost their traditions. No values. Thailand is totally corrupt.”

“Really?” said Monty. “But I find people here so polite and friendly.”

“They’re fakes. All they care about is your money.”

Not taking this as an insult, or a hint, Monty asked, “So what kind of work do you do?”

“I’m at university,” Kasim answered. “Business school. I plan to export fine Thai crafts, like handwoven fabrics and porcelain, much better than the junk you usually see. I have all kinds of connections. And I’ve been with many foreigners, Europeans, Americans, Japanese. I had a long relationship with a famous French designer. Now I have an English lover. He’s an aristocrat. He lives in Singapore and comes here a few times a year. He will help me set up the business. We share an apartment. He doesn’t mind if I meet other men when he’s away.”

Although from peasant stock – his father had a tiny farm up north, he said – Kasim seemed well educated and spoke English well. “Where are you staying?” he asked, looking directly into the older man’s eyes.

When Monty told him the name of his hotel, Kasim shook his head and said gravely, “Not good. You should move immediately to the Sukhothai. It’s the best. Very new and very handsome. I like it best.”

Could this suggest a willingness to spend time with Monty if he moved there? It was worth a try. “You could show me the hotel, if you like,” he said. “That is, unless you want to stay here.”

“No, let’s leave now,” said Kasim. “We can eat dinner there. They have the best Thai food in the city and a very good Italian restaurant. It’s up to you. But I suggest the Thai restaurant.”

Though the hotel was only ten minutes away by foot, the young man insisted they take a taxi. Waved in by a guard, the cab driver drove down a long driveway through an expansive walled compound. At the far end sat a series of handsome low-slung white pavilions. Named for the Sukhothai kingdom, a center of power in early Thailand until defeated in the 14th century by the more southern, Ayutthaya kingdom, the hotel was designed in classic Sukhothai style. Sensual thin-waisted Buddhas characteristic of the period gazed serenely from the corners of the large lobby. The walls were papered in a distinct shade of green silk, similar to the color in the Babylon, and were lit by long downward-pointing funnel-shaped brass sconces. On the outside grounds, long narrow pools reflected rows of similarly funnel-shaped (but upward-pointing) warmly illuminated Buddhist stupas.

As Kasim had suggested, they went to the Thai restaurant. When they were seated at a table by a window looking onto a small courtyard, with its own pool and stupa, Monty asked, “What shall we eat?”

“It’s up to you,” Kasim answered, pausing briefly before calling over a waiter and proceeding to order from the menu in a rather perfunctory manner, as if he knew the menu by heart. The meal included duck in a sharp curry sauce with a citrus undertone; a flat fish in a tangy tamarind sauce, deep-fried so crisp it could be eaten bones and all; and a sour shrimp and coconut milk soup, which at the bottom of the bowl was so spicy Monty nearly choked. Each course was served in simple elegant green celadon bowls that matched the dishes. “I’d love to have a set just like these,” Monty remarked. “I can get for you, easy,” said Kasim.

For dessert they had sticky rice with mango served in the bamboo in which it had been grilled. “There’s a touch of passion fruit,” the younger man said, extracting the sweet rice and fruit from inside the bamboo and spooning it onto Monty’s plate.

After dinner he asked a clerk at the front desk if they could see a standard room. Without showing any sign of surprise or dismay that a foreigner would want to look at a room in company with a young attractive Thai man, the clerk called over a porter. Leading them down a long hall, the porter opened the door into a large and luxurious suite. What must non-standard be like? wondered Monty. The main room was designed like the rest of the hotel, with dark green walls, long sconces and planks of aged teak carved with scenes of Hindu and Buddhist gods fighting and cavorting with one another. A sliding glass door led onto a private garden. The bathroom, covered with mirrors, seemed nearly as large as the living space. The suite even had a smaller guest bathroom, a feature Monty thought quaint, as if a guest, someone like Kasim, were an expected hotel amenity. Back at the front desk, Monty booked a room for three nights, beginning the next day. Kasim said he would meet him there in the afternoon.

Arriving as promised, the young man ended up staying with him there for a week and a half, Monty extending his stay in Bangkok to the entire twelve days of his planned time in Thailand. Although he’d expected to travel to various outlying destinations, he was entranced with the city, with its dark crowded pungent streets, jeweled temples, lively outdoor night markets, sensational food – and with Kasim.

Bangkok seemed just the place to find one’s self, every moment filled with unfamiliar experiences and sensations, visual, aural, tactile; with smells and tastes and sights that were all new to his eyes. Stripped of his customary environment, thrown into an intoxicating alien world, every sense was alertly focused on the here and now, a state of exhilaration and apparent grace achieved without intention or laborious effort. Filled with the now, he mused, he could discover a new self, a self free and unencumbered with the past, with the self he’d accustomed himself to and taken for granted.

Kasim proved to be an excellent guide, sophisticated, knowledgeable, opinionated about everything. One day, after having exhausted Bangkok’s major attractions, Monty suggested they go to the famous floating market. “A tourist trap,” the young man declared, proceeding to arrange for a taxi to drive them to a more authentic floating market 90 kilometers north of the city. When they arrived at the destination, a bend in a narrow river packed with small boats, Kasim negotiated with a thickset, tough looking lady in calf-length trousers, and the two men jumped into her small wooden skiff. After navigating through the crowded main channel, she steered the boat into and through a long side channel, on both sides of which sat shack-like houses that extended out over the water, supported by decaying posts. As if her arms knew on their own where to go, she busied herself by gossiping with other oarsman and occasionally barking out orders to passing boats carrying fruit, vegetables, school supplies, appliances and everything else needed by the riverside inhabitants. “Plop!” A large plastic package of fresh noodles suddenly landed on the boat’s deck, the lady evidently doing her own shopping for the day while giving the two visitors a tour. “Sanuk,” the young man cried out. Fun. Everything in Thailand was sanuk.

Everything except sex with Kasim. Although he had the prettiest cock Monty had ever seen – demanding attention, it would slide out from its foreskin, almost like a dog’s cock, bright and pink – each night, after quickly taking his own pleasure, without bothering to reciprocate, the young man would immediately fall fast asleep, like clockwork.

The day before Monty was to depart for Bali on the last leg of his Asian trip, Kasim suggested that, instead of flying home to Canada from Indonesia, he return to Thailand and meet him in the north, in Chiang Rai, the principal city of his home region. “My cousin has a car,” he said looking at the older man with a faint smile, the kind of smile that with a only slight curl at one side of the lips seems more like a smirk. “He’s a policeman there. He can drive us around the countryside. We can see ancient Sukhothai. We can go to Chiang Mai, and you can buy the celadon there. You can go for an elephant ride and visit the hill tribes. We’ll start at the Golden Triangle. It’s up to you.”

There it was again: “Up to you.” But it was never up to him; he went along with whatever the younger man suggested. An invitation to do what he wanted really meant this is what you should do, especially if you want my company. But the suggestion to return to Thailand was beguiling; a trip in the north, off the beaten track, traveling with local people, would be an adventure, a chance of a lifetime. Dutifully, Monty called his travel agency in Vancouver, changed his reservations and postponed his return. The next morning he flew to Denpasar, Bali’s capital.

Toward the end of his ten-day stay on Bali – which had its own charms, erotic as well as cultural and artistic – he began to have second thoughts about returning to Thailand to travel with Kasim in the far north. What, after all, did he really know about the guy? And why was he taking him to the Golden Triangle of all places, to that notorious hub of heroin production and trafficking? Maybe Kasim was a drug dealer himself, his supposed student status merely a front. And what about this cousin, the policeman with the car, who would drive them around? The police in Thailand were famously corrupt. And then there was that long scar on the back of Kasim’s neck. He’d claimed that someone from his hometown, a poor distant relative who was staying with him in Bangkok and whom he was helping get settled, had knifed him one night and run away with his money. How could Monty be sure of this or anything else Kasim had told him? Suddenly the upcoming adventure lost its allure.

KASIM, HIS COUSIN and her husband – it was he who was the policeman – stood at the exit gate at Chiang Rai’s airplane field, the young couple considerably shorter than Kasim. The three waved to Monty as he walked down the plane’s exit ramp. Kasim was dressed in his customary dark pants and white shirt, but the young couple, who’d never met let alone socialized with any foreigner, wore what we’d call their Sunday best, he in a rumpled tan suit, she in a pink pinafore. They looked like high school sweethearts from a small farming town in the late 1950s who’d accidentally found themselves on the stage of Dick Clark’s hit TV show American Bandstand: three innocent Thai youths smiling and waving to Monty. No drug dealers. No murderers.

After a spicy succulent lunch at a secluded riverside restaurant known only to locals, the group checked into a recently completed four-star French hotel. The young couple gawked at everything in sight, having never before stayed in any hotel. After a brief rest they drove a short distance to the promised Golden Triangle, the point where Thailand meets Laos and Myanmar at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers. Monty hired a speed boat to take them across the water for a peak at Myanmar, where landing was forbidden. Fishermen wading in the river ignored the foreigners. A water buffalo briefly raised its head above the water, looked around and then sunk down again. When the boat ride was over, the young couple beamed with pleasure. “Sanuk,” they declared, more at ease now in the foreigner’s presence.

In the following days they visited the site of ancient Sukhothai, the old capital, which now lay in total ruins; the town of Phrae, known for producing soft French-style blue denim; a national park with a complex of large caves; and virtually every temple they passed, Kasim insisting on stopping and praying at each one. Monty would join his friend, the two dropping to their hands and knees and bowing three times to the Buddha. At the last temple they visited, when they rose from their bows the two noticed that the offering box near the main sculpture of Buddha had the words, “Up to You” written on it, and both laughed.

Foregoing a visit to the mountain tribes or a ride on an elephant, neither of which interested the younger people, they spent extra time instead in Chiang Mai, the principal city in the north. One day, after Monty treated them all to massages, given by fat giggling women who gossiped with one another non-stop while administering the strenuous twists and turns of Thai massage, the group went in search of a perfect specimen of durian, as it would be Monty’s first taste of the infamously smelly fruit that Westerners supposedly can’t abide. Tapping, smelling and rejecting those on sale at several shops, Kasim and his cousin’s husband finally found an acceptable sample. Kasim cut it open and they and the girl watched nervously as the foreigner took his first bite. “Wow,” he proclaimed, thinking it tasted like a cross between papaya and a stringy version of Camembert cheese. The others laughed in relief and shared pleasure.

The next morning, they stopped at an outdoor village market to buy some food to take with them to Kasim’s father. But when they bought several boxes of vegetables and fruits and three cases of beer, Monty wondered what was up. Only then did his young friend explain to him that that night a special Buddhist rite would be held at his father’s farm to exorcise the bad spirits lingering from the incident in Bangkok when his distant relative had knifed him and run away with his money.

Kasim’s father’s house was a small traditional Thai hut on stilts, with chickens and a few piglets running loose underneath. Over the next couple of hours, the large extended family gradually converged on the property, upwards to fifteen adults and twenty or so children. A wiry, shorter version of Kasim, the father lived alone, his wife having died shortly after their son’s birth. While the women busied themselves elaborately decorating chickens which had been slaughtered and plucked moments before to serve as offerings for the rite, the men gossiped outside and played cards. One of Kasim’s uncles shimmied up a tree, cut off a coconut and, beaming with a mouth nearly devoid of teeth, offered it to the foreigner.

When all was ready, the whole family crowded into the tiny two-room house, and the local village priest, more of a shaman , began the ceremony by brushing Kasim’s hands with leaves dipped in water, symbolically cleansing away the bad spirits. This went on for nearly half an hour, after which each adult family member, in turn, wrapped a short length of white string around each of Kasim’s wrists. The young man explained to the foreigner that the strings constituted a blessing, and that they were not to be removed until they wore away and fell apart on their own. As a special guest, Monty also had string tied around his wrists, a touching gesture that left him teary-eyed.

After the rite was completed and the bad spirits presumably expunged, the chickens reappeared, now stripped of their ceremonial decoration and cut into rough chunks. Along with other foods, they were spread out in platters on a mat set in the center of the main room. Everyone gathered around, squatting together in a tight circle, eating with their hands, Monty joining in, putting aside worries over sanitary conditions and threats of exotic tropical disease. The men grew happily intoxicated on the beer, each contributing a lively drinking song. When Monty’s turn came, he belted out a song he’d learned as a child at summer camp: “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer. When one of those bottles should happen to fall, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall . . .” Though none of Kasim’s family understood the words, they all tried to join in, mimicking the lyrics as best they could.

Around nine o’clock, this being the countryside, the cousins and aunts and uncles and children all headed home, and shortly afterwards Kasim’s father retired to his small bedroom. Monty helped his friend pack the empty beer bottles into their cases and put away serving platters, knives and various utensils. Everything was securely locked in rustic glass-fronted cabinets, this being essential, Kasim explained, otherwise mice would crawl around all night long scrounging for anything and stealing everything, even crockery.

“Now we can go to sleep,” said the young man, leading Monty to a bed that occupied a small alcove on one side of the room. “But no playing around. My father might hear.”

Despite the admonition, Kasim immediately initiated sex, or at least his one-way version of sex, and when it was done, as always, fell immediately asleep. Monty meanwhile lay still on his back, sweating in the heavy sweltering night air, thinking about the day’s surprising events, and listening to the oxen shifting and grunting somewhere in a neighboring farm. The minutes seemed to stretch out. A half hour passed, an hour.

Suddenly, without warning, a huge and ominous round face with fierce eyes appeared directly in front of Monty’s own face. It nearly touched him, nose to nose. Whether through fear or actuality, it paralyzed him and he was unable to move or say a word.

“WHO ARE YOU?” the face bellowed out at Monty, punctuating each word. “WHO ARE YOU? BE CAREFUL.”

And then, as suddenly as it had materialized, it disappeared.

Monty lay there shaken, shaking, mouth agape, trying to grasp what had happened. He was certain it hadn’t been a dream; he wasn’t asleep, he was sure. Terrified still, he listened to the night sounds, the animals stirring nervously, a farmer calling out to them. He wondered if he should close the window above the bed. It was still muggy and hot. But what if someone else should sneak into the house? Eventually, after an hour or so, he dozed off into fits of uneasy sleep.

In the morning Kasim awoke energetic and self-assured as always. “How did you sleep?” he asked his guest.

When Monty told him what had happened during the night, Kasim slapped himself and apologized. “Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I forgot to tell my father to tell the house ghost that we had a visitor staying overnight. Every night, the ghost goes all around the house to make sure that only the people who are supposed to be here are here.”

The explanation made immediate sense. That’s exactly what had happened, thought Monty: he didn’t belong here, so the ghost questioned who he was and warned him. Of course, he didn’t believe in ghosts. Once, years before, he awoke in the middle of the night and saw a filmy apparition of a fellow tai chi student with whom he had often practiced, a girl about his age with red hair. “Goodbye,” she said to him, her hand raised in salutation. The next day he learned that the girl had died during the night after a protracted battle with melanoma. Had someone mentioned that she was gravely ill? He couldn’t remember. Was it a ghost or just a phantom of his imagination, arising from unease that he hadnt' called her, though she had been absent from class for several months?

But the ghost or whatever it was in Kasim’s father’s farmhouse was different. Monty had no reason to fabricate this particular appearance, no reference. Later, after his return to Canada, he read an article about the shamanistic beliefs still prevalent in Thailand and much of rural Asia, even in Communist China. People in the countryside customarily believed each house was guarded by an ancestor ghost who protected the family.

The skeptic will ask, “So how could this Thai ghost speak English?” But, of course, that’s only what Monty heard; what the ghost actually voiced was beyond voice – a spectral language that living beings would hear in their own inner ear and interrupt in their own language.

Nearly a year after his trip to Thailand, in the midst of a powerful all-night peyote ceremony held in a Native Indian pueblo in New Mexico on a snowy New Year’s Eve, Monty would realize that, whether or not he had actually seen a ghost in Kasim’s father’s farmhouse was inconsequential. The experience, real or imagined, had taken shape within himself, within his own being, his own mind, just as all experiences occur within ourselves, within our own perception, as if the whole world is contained within each of us.

If he had gone to Asia to “find himself” amidst the exotic surroundings and pliant young men, what he had found instead was not an answer but a more profound questioning. The ghost’s demanding Who Are You? was Monty, unsated, asking himself this very question.

© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.

Who Am I – Part 1

2010-08-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

“WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?” demanded the naked young Chinese hairdresser lying face down on the bed in the closet-size Kowloon-side hotel room, waiting for the older man to do something.

Through the large window over the bed, red-sailed junks could be seen alongside giant freighters of various flags, tugboats pulling heavily laden barges, and sundry smaller craft, all hustling here and there, crisscrossing the brightly lit harbor. Across the water, more lights blazed from a wall of high-rise towers spreading left and right and down to the edge of Hong Kong island. Bustling, free-spirited, the city had three years left as a British Crown colony before its handover to Communist China; and then what – boom, bust?

Looking down at the man on his bed, Monty was afraid. It was the tattoo. It had startled him when the sinewy young man, who’d picked him up at a gay bar barely half an hour earlier, pulled off his tight black T-shirt, revealing a vivid red and blue snake-like dragon covering his entire back. Looking at the tattoo now, Monty wondered what the hell he’d got himself into. Why had he brought the guy back to his hotel? He was pushy and gruff. His tone was nasty, threatening. He could be a gangster or a Triad member. Yes, Monty was afraid.

A year after he and Thomas split up (on the ides of March of all dates, it had been), he took his first big trip alone. Get away, friends kept telling him after the break-up. Go for a long vacation. Get back in touch with yourself – as if you have to get away from yourself to find yourself.

He’d chosen Asia: Hong Kong, Thailand and Bali in that order. He’d always wanted to go to Asia, to experience cultures totally different from his own, sample exotic foods, visit colorful temples – and, admittedly, to meet young men. Young guys in Asia, so he’d heard, were more open to older men.

The quarter-century with Thomas had vanished as if in a dream. He could hardly remember what their life together had been like, as if it had never happened – not in a tangible, whole sense. He could recall individual incidents: emigrating to Canada; watching Julia Child and Masterpiece Theatre; chatty dinner parties with a tight circle of cultured gay friends; building a successful career while Thomas pursued artistic projects at home; trips to Hawaii, New Mexico, down the West Coast; numerous little sexual escapades; growing dissatisfaction with the relationship. But it had left no overall impression, no leitmotif, as if a relationship should read like a novel. Twenty-five years seemed to have evaporated without a trace, without substance, meaning or memory.

And without the younger partner’s having matured. Now in his mid-40s, still lithe and youthful, and on his own for the first time – no family, no roommates, no partner – Monty felt as if he were finally becoming an adult. It hadn’t even occurred to him until now that he had needed to be on his own. It wasn’t just for Thomas’s sake that they had split up, which he had convinced himself was necessary so that his older partner could assert himself and get on with his own career. It was for himself, he now realized, that he had broken free: free so that he could grow up, live on his own unafraid and find himself.

But what to do about this naked sinister character lying on his bed? After quickly finishing up their awkward sex, the hairdresser fell asleep and Monty lay on his back, frozen in trepidation, waiting for morning to come. When at last it did, they dressed quickly and went to a nearby smoky cafe for congee and long crispy Chinese donuts. The food arrived fast and they ate fast.

“It’s really funny, I only went up to you at the bar on a dare,” the hairdresser announced, as he pushed forward his emptied bowl of rice gruel. “My buddies there had a bet with me. I bet them they could pick out any white guy there and I could pick him up. Anyone. Easy.”

Victorious, the hairdresser slapped down a twenty-dollar Hong Kong bill to pay for both of them and walked out without waiting for his change.

If sex had failed, at least in other respects Hong Kong satisfied Monty’s thirst for the exotic. The morning he arrived on an overnight flight from Vancouver, after checking in at his hotel he crossed the harbor to Central, on Hong Kong Island, on one of the creaky old green and white Star Ferries. The sky was clearer and bluer than it would be in later years, and the wind blew in his face as he stood looking at the crowded skyline on both sides of the hyperactive harbor.

From the terminal he walked through a hive of interlinking skywalks crowded with businessmen scurrying between gleaming office towers. Eventually he reached the twisted alleyway markets of old Sheung Wan. He breathed in the astringent sweet-and-sour smells, stopping to gaze at the side-by-side stalls selling odd kitchenwares and hardwares, live fish, peculiar vegetables and tropical fruits with strange names like mangosteen, rambutan, dragon fruit and soursop. In the afternoon he had high tea with cucumber sandwiches, biscuits and rose petal jelly at the palatial Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The following day he strolled through the city’s lush hillside parks and aviaries and rode the chain of covered escalators rising up the steep Mid-Levels hillside, where wealthy locals and highly paid expatriates lived in large apartments with views looking down through the city’s high-rise canyons across to the bay. The city buzzed with a vitality greater even than New York’s.

And it was totally foreign; it was China. At least that’s how Monty saw it back then. Fifteen years later, when he lived for a period in neighboring Guangdong Province, where humongous factories spewed pollution out over the entire Pearl River Delta region, he would cross the Mainland border as often as he could to visit friends in Hong Kong and escape from the too-exotic overdose of living in the real China.

AFTER A BUMPY THREE-HOUR evening flight from Hong Kong, Monty entered the frenzied arrivals hall at Bangkok’s old Don Mueang International Airport. Sweat poured down his face, as he pushed his way through the crowd. The air conditioning must have broken down, he figured. At the far end of the hall, he spotted a man from the upscale hotel he’d booked for three nights, holding a sign with his name written on it. When the man led him to a large open portal, he realized he hadn’t been outside at all nor had the air conditioning failed; the hall was open to the outdoors. He followed the man to a waiting, silver Mercedes, gladly accepting the cool damp face cloth offered to him as he stepped into the car through the back door.

Welcome to nighttime Bangkok: 90 degrees, 98 percent humidity, two-and-a-half hours to drive the 15 miles to the hotel, inching through smog-infested streets, surrounded by swarms of motorcycles dodging in and out through the snarled traffic, many carrying whole families of four or five adults and children clinging to one another, others heaped high with TVs, refrigerators, or crates of chickens. Scruffy beggars, oblivious to the traffic and the fumes, roamed through the streets, stopping to plead at every car window, while on the sides of the road lay disabled filthy children with twisted limbs and signs appealing for help.

At several points along the journey, compounds surrounded by high barbed-wire fences could be dimly made out through the dusky haze, their disheveled inhabitants wandering around in various states of undress; migrant workers, they looked more like inmates than paid laborers. Meanwhile sleek black limousines cruised alongside Monty’s car, carrying dark-suited Thai businessmen or politicians with well fed women, presumably wives or mistresses, dressed in colorful silks and clutching shiny red, silver and black bags marked Gucci, Vuitton, Valentino and the other names that denote separate and unequal.

If Hong Kong had felt exotic, Bangkok was like landing on another planet. Monty set out his first morning to explore the city by foot, risking heat stroke and ignoring the warning of friends who’d spent time in Thailand to stay no more than two or three days in the capital and get around by air-conditioned taxi. Walk no more than ten minutes, they’d cautioned, before stopping at a hotel or an air-conditioned shopping center (frigid in contrast to the street) or, in case of emergency, at any of the scores of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that dotted the city. (KFC seems to have perfected a particular concoction of flavors that captures the Asian palate.)

Grasping onto the map his hotel concierge had provided, he made his way through a maze of narrow streets down to the banks of the Chao Phraya. Accepting after twenty or so minutes that the advice he’d received was no idle threat, he paused and ordered the recommended glass of beer at the luxurious riverside Oriental Hotel, where fat Westerners lounged next to a large empty pool. From there he hopped aboard a longtail water taxi and got off at Wat Pho Temple and the Great Palace, saving his detailed tour of these sites for another day. From the palace grounds he ventured another long walk to the crowded serpentine alleys of the large Indian bazaar. Shops displaying mounds of multi-colored lentils and beans, bright yellow turmeric, black mustard seeds, cumin, cardamom and odiferous asafetida competed for attention with others packed to the ceiling with shimmering rolls of printed silk and cotton fabrics.

In the evening he was met by a friend from Canada who was living in Bangkok, teaching English. “I want to see Bangkok’s gay world,” Monty told him after they finished dinner at a restaurant curiously named Cabbages and Condoms. (Later he learned that its owner had named it in keeping with his advocacy of family planning and condom use.)

“Okay,” the Canadian friend answered. “But I warn you, watch out. The boys are really cute, and they’ll all flirt with you. But they’re all money boys.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not buying,” said Monty. “I just want to look.”

And why shouldn’t he look? He was, after all, traveling in Asia, taking his first trip alone, to “find himself,” as his friends back home had suggested. He should look everywhere and try everything. Or at least be tempted. There was so much of the world he didn’t know. Although he’d fooled around often enough during his long relationship with Thomas, he’d always felt uneasy about it, slightly inhibited, as if something were holding him back, some tie, some commitment, even though the two had an open relationship.

The famous open relationship – an excuse to screw around, or an acceptance of man’s natural instinct to be promiscuous? Men are like dogs, it’s said, inclined to smell every behind that passes by, wanting sex as often as possible and with as many mates as possible, even if the desire is repressed. Gay men are said to be especially promiscuous, open relationships being more the rule than the exception. Yet straight guys are always fucking around, as well. And not only with prostitutes or mistresses or their wife’s best friends: many of the men lurking in gay saunas and pawing younger guys, begging for sex, have wives waiting for them back home.

Now, Monty need no longer even bother about having an open relationship; he was having an open life, no strings attached, free to indulge in whatever he wanted, in whatever he could get. And how else could he find himself? He had to explore, and what better way to explore than sex? Sex with boys – boys over age, that is; preferably in their twenties or early thirties, still fresh, with dark open eyes and firm soft chests, smooth chests, not hairy like his. In other words, Asian boys.

Asia enticed him in its totality, the home of Buddhism. Ever since he’d met the Zen master back at college, when he was nineteen, he fancied himself a Buddhist at heart. The man had “blown him away,” had awaken something deep and unknown, something untouchable but powerful inside him: something spiritual, but not spiritual in the sense of other worldly. It was this world, the world of birth and death. Ever since he could remember, at least from the age of three when his mother and father grieved inconsolably over the loss each of a parent, he’d been terrified of death. What was life if there was death? If everything including all those one loved and above all one’s self was doomed to come to an end, what was the meaning of life? At moments throughout his life, often when awakening from a brief sleep, the reality of his inevitable impending end suddenly rose up and struck him with absolute terror. Perhaps sex, promiscuous sex, sex driven by a deep unfathomable, cellular instinct for reproduction, was a way of avoiding the ultimate reality that nagged at the pit of the stomach. Perhaps that’s why all men crave sex with doglike determination. No. No. No. Sex is natural, Monty would tell himself. Sex with men, with boys, is natural. Savor life now; deal with all that Buddhist shit later.

As he walked with his friend through the murky streets and lanes of Silom, the center of the city’s thriving sex trade, a Mecca not only for gay men, Monty found plenty to look at and much to be tempted by. Bright neon signs advertised establishments appealing to every taste – gay, straight, undecided. Touts practically dragged wide-eyed tourists off the street into strip clubs and bars. Young men and women, boys and girls really, and unbelievably beautiful transvestites openly offered themselves for sale, hovering around every foreigner, of whom there were many, and many ready to pay.

At one of the district’s more notorious gay bars, the two Canadians watched with amazement as a pair of young men moved from table to table, draping themselves over each in turn and fornicating inches away from the occupants’ gaping stares. When the pair reached his table, Monty at first pulled back but then looked down carefully, curious to see if the act was simulated. It wasn’t.

Next, a troop of slim bikini-clad boys paraded around a raised stage and coiled themselves seductively around floor-to-ceiling poles, each boy bearing a large tag with a number. White-suited “captains” skirted around the bar like sharks, ready to catch the eye of any customer and negotiate terms of sale. Mesmerized by the whole scene, as if in a spell, Monty did something he never would have imagined himself doing. He signaled one of the captains, who immediately sat down next to him, and purchased the favors of a particular boy who’d caught his attention, number five. At least he had the sense to inspect the boy’s ID and make certain he was of age.

Short, dark, with a beatific childlike smile and, oddly, wearing a small crucifix, number five quickly left the stage and returned moments later wearing jeans and a white shirt. He sat down next to Monty, nestled up close to him and gently took his hand. Continuing hand-in-hand, they left the bar and walked out into the crowded alleyways, the air smelling of exhaust fumes and grilled meats. A tall buxom girl in a tight red, fake leather mini-skirt walked in front of them. “You like girls?” asked the boy, who could speak only a few words of English. “No,” said Monty, shaking his head. “You?” The boy only smiled. Poor adorable boy, thought Monty, he must be from the countryside. Certainly poor. I hope he likes guys at least somewhat. Probably he’d like anything if the money were right. But he’s so sweet.

They stopped at an outdoor barbecue where he bought dinner for the boy. He ate quickly, as if he’d not eaten all day. When they reached Monty’s hotel, despite what he’d heard was customary practice at such establishments, the night manager refused entry to the boy, apologizing profusely and saying the hotel had had some trouble recently and had to be cautious. Frustrated, Monty and his new friend hopped on a three-wheel tuk-tuk, the driver of which knew, without being directed, which rent-by-the-hour hotel to take them to.

The tiny room they were assigned was outfitted with nothing more than a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling over a low bed covered with a yellowed sheet, probably not recently washed. Carefully crossing the partly flooded floor to an open bathroom, the two showered together, the boy gently scrubbing the man’s body. Returning to the bed, they began to cuddle and explore one another’s bodies. The boy was fascinated by Monty’s hairiness and told him the Thai word for each different type of body hair, softly touching each area in turn, except for the man’s head; Thai people have a taboo about having their heads touched.

In the end, Monty declined to go all the way, telling himself he still had some scruples. He gave the boy all the money he had in his wallet and put him on a taxi so he could go home safely. If Monty had been thinking clearly, he would have realized that the boy would probably ditch the taxi in order to save the money, and was now, in all likelihood, heading back to the bar, to another Monty, to another white man in search of himself.

GO TO PART 2

© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.

Feudal State of Affairs – Part 5

2010-07-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 PART 4

AFTER THREE WEEKS on Santorini, Monty and Thomas had had enough of the cold and booked passage on a ship going south to Aghios Nikolaos, a small port on the northeast coast of Crete. They hit a storm on the way, and the rickety ship shook and rattled as it was jostled up and down by large waves. “Ti nakaname,” a Greek crew member answered when Monty asked if the ship would make it. “What will be will be.”

When they disembarked they were met by an ebullient local tourist official, excited to greet the only visitors to arrive in recent weeks. He gave them a tour around the town center, hardly more than three or four streets in any direction, and suggested they stay in the main hotel, where one floor was kept open over the winter. “Is it heated?” asked Monty.

“Sure,” answered the official. “Everything is heated. Everything is perfect.”

Heated perhaps by drinking plenty of the local brandy he kept pouring for them later that evening when he accompanied them to a small restaurant and insisted on paying. Over dinner they discussed their plans with the man, saying they thought they’d wait for the weather to warm up before heading south through the countryside. The official spoke good English, presumably a language he felt comfortable with and knew the restaurant staff didn’t understand. Either that or his growing inebriation led him to start complaining openly about the government.

“These bastards,” he said. “They’re not real Greeks, you know. Not like us Cretans. We keep the real Greek spirit. We were the ones who led the resistance against the Nazis, you know. One day the people will rise again. You’ll see. They’ll rise up suddenly and take to the streets and throw out these idiot bastard colonels. You’ll see.”

Perhaps, but if the people felt so angry they seemed to keep it well hidden under a solemn veil of silence. The Americans found none of the high-spirited joy they had imagined witnessing in Greece. None of the dancing on broken plates or jumping up on tables. No Zorba, no Melina Mercouri, and definitely no open homosexuality.

That this was no longer Socrates’ Greece – where men would dine together, talk philosophy over wine, and flirt with one another – Thomas and Monty would learn firsthand the next evening, when they went for a drink at a basement bar. The patrons, all male, were dancing to lively Greek music, dipping to their knees, spinning their legs, holding hands in a line. When they saw the Americans enter the bar they selected a Western disco record on the jukebox. Figuring they had license to dance the same way, the two started jiving together on the dance floor, shaking their hips to the heavy beat, in time with each other. But evidently this kind of male bonding was unacceptable, even threatening, for the Greek men quickly turned off the music and scowled at the two foreigners.

The only uninhibited exuberance they encountered during their time in Greece happened later in the week, in a restaurant by the harbor, where they met a troupe of motorcyclists in town to perform daredevil acts riding around at high speed along the inside wall of an amphitheater that had been set up next to a small dingy merry-go-round on the grounds of a Lent-time fare. The cyclists had recently returned from touring Italy and seemed not to pay the slightest heed to the police or local custom, the young men and women dancing and flirting openly with the two Americans. And, at last, broken plates.

Although the police ignored the performers, they kept a strong presence in Aghios Nikolaos. The well known leftwing composer Mikis Theodorakis, an outspoken critic of the military regime, had been captured by government agents in the town. He’d been hiding out there. Foreigners were closely watched, according to a Welshman who was residing there, teaching English. He seemed to cope with the oppression by drinking lots of brandy, waist-high glass jugs of which he kept in his bungalow. One night Monty got so drunk at a party at the Welshman's apartment that he had to run out to the nearby edge of the harbor, sit down and vomit repeatedly over the side.

Near the end of their stay, he and Thomas decided to see the film The Sound of Music, which was playing at the local high school auditorium. On the way there Monty suddenly announced, “I’d rather eat something. Let’s go back to the restaurant where we met the motorcyclists. Maybe they’ll be there. I’ve seen the movie before.”

They abruptly turned around and headed in the opposite direction back to the restaurant, only to find it was closed for the day. They turned around again and walked back toward the school. After a few minutes Thomas whispered, “There’s someone following us.”

“What?” asked Monty loudly.

“Be quiet. Just pretend nothing’s unusual. You see that man on the other side of the street? Don’t stare at him.”

“The one with the messed-up white suit?”

“Yeah. He’s been following us. Let’s go back to the restaurant again and see if he still follows us.”

He did. Evidently foreigners staying longer than a few days, especially in winter, aroused suspicion. Although they snickered at these antics when they turned yet again and walked back toward the auditorium to be followed once more, it was with some unease. They knew they could be detained for questioning. Maybe the tourist official was right; maybe someday the Greeks – peasants, students, workers, even the lower ranks of the army – would rise up against the colonels. But not now. Now everyone was silent and glum.

When they bought their tickets for the film and walked into the spartan auditorium, it was already packed with local townsfolk and peasants, virtually all couples, all darkly clad. They’d come to see the famous musical that, in a much-warn grainy print, had finally reached their small town, five years after the film’s release. The movie had been dubbed into Greek, the voices hyperdramatic and slightly out of sink with the on-camera characters.

An unscripted twist in the story occurred in the scene where Christopher Plummer as the stern Baron von Trapp returns home to find his children singing and prancing around the house, his standard of discipline having been relaxed during his absence. When Julie Andrews, playing the governess, stands up to his protest and speaks her mind, an angry indignant growl spread throughout the audience. The film was suddenly stopped and the lights came full on, brightly lighting up the auditorium. Everywhere, men had jumped up from their seats and were shaking their fists toward the screen and gesturing down at their still-seated wives, presumably cursing Andrews and warning the women they were never to talk back to them like that.

Yes, maybe these were the same men who would someday rise up against the country’s fascist dictators. But in their own home, in their own domain, they played out their own little version of fascism: like people everywhere who protest for human rights but in private behave otherwise. There’s always someone below you or weaker than you you can lord over – your subordinates at work, your child, your partner.

“I’ve had enough of Greece,” said Thomas later that evening. The scene in the auditorium had shaken them. Years later they would laugh at its retelling, at the parochial innocence and small-mindedness of the town folk. But for now the experience left a dull, sullen aftertaste.

“Yeah, me too,” Monty agreed. “Greece isn’t what we expected. Let’s go somewhere sane and civilized.”

“How about London,” suggested Thomas.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

Yes, England, land of liberty, the Magna Carta and all that. A country where, so unlike America, a real socialist party, a party of intellectuals and the common man together, united, could get elected and introduce real reform. Back in high school Monty and his friends had celebrated the victory of Britain’s socialists; now he would spend time there and see firsthand the fruits of progress.

After a few days touring the requisite sites of Heraklion and Rethymnon, and a few more days spent in a small fishing village on the south coast of Crete that had gotten electricity for the first time only a week before, Monty and Thomas returned to the Greek mainland and booked passage to Italy. There they toured Rome and Florence and then boarded a train through Switzerland and France, and a ferry to England. They ended up in London, where they passed nearly a year, long enough to witness the overthrow of the socialist government by the Conservatives and hear about the tough new education minister. Ridiculed for instituting cutbacks that resulted in denying young children free milk at school, she would go on to defeat the leader of her party, become prime minister and restore order to society, stripping down the welfare state and bringing in a new brand of conservative ideology that would soon sweep America as well.

In London and the years following, Thomas and Monty’s relationship changed and became less romantic and more routine, a routine where Thomas would focus on his own personal artistic projects and Monty would work at a job. The older man grew more withdrawn into his pursuits and the younger, more engaged with the outside world. Where once Monty had seen his partner as his model, now, gradually, he grew more self-assured and self-absorbed. Once he would have followed his lover to the ends of the earth. Now, more often, he would make most of their decisions – where to live, what to buy, where to travel – an exercise of self-will and power that came naturally to the younger man. But it was an unconscious evolution. If he had thought about it, he would have thought himself the most liberal and accommodating person in the world.

Feudal State of Affairs – Part 4

2010-07-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 1 PART 2 PART 3

“PO PO PO PO,” said the elderly man dressed in an aged dark gray suit, standing stiffly at attention in front of Monty and Thomas, his “po pos” matching in volume and enthusiasm the increasing length of each passing missile and formation of marching soldiers. They had come across the parade by chance their first morning in Athens while returning from the American Express office near Syntagma Square, where they’d collected their mail. (Monty had a letter from his parents saying they would try to adjust to his new life.) They’d known, of course, that Greece was in the grips of a military dictatorship which had taken power in a coup two-and-a-half years earlier. They’d read about it in American magazines but hadn’t thought much about it. They were in Greece to enjoy the land and its history and people. They didn’t care about politics. They’d left politics behind, in America – America with its own war and its own nasty government. But seeing firsthand the evidence of Greece’s fascist regime shook their apathy; it made them feel uneasy, somehow complicit. Most of the crowd watched the parade in silence, voicing their opinions with a somber lack of expression, not resigned but impassive.

When the Americans arrived in Athens the night before, Monty contacted the family of a Greek student who had transferred to his college in his senior year. The boy’s father and a cousin met them at the train station and drove them to a new hotel near the Acropolis. The family knew the hotel’s owner and bargained for a rate of three dollars a night, inexpensive even for Greece in those days. The hotel sat directly across the street from the Thesion Temple, at the northwest corner of the ancient agora. From their balcony they could look directly up at the Acropolis, brightly lit after dark for the nightly Son et Lumière show. The view became routine as they settled into Athens and its pace of life, still easy-going and less polluted than it would be in later years. Every morning Monty would get up before his lover and stroll through the nearby market streets of the Placa, in the days when it was still frequented by locals, not tourists. There he would buy their daily supply of fresh bread, feta, kefalograviera, thick yogurt, Cretan oranges, honey smelling of thyme and olives of various colors, sizes and tastes.

They celebrated Christmas, not a major event in the Greek Orthodox calendar, with the family of the absent student. They were wealthy shipping magnates, though far below the level of Onassis and his ilk. Their handsome split-level house overlooked the city from Lykavittos Hill, the preserve of Athens’s privileged classes. A few days later Monty and Thomas drove with friends of the son to see the famous sunset at Sounion, at the tip of the Attic Peninsula, south of Athens. Polite explanation of the ancient historical sites they passed along the way eventually turned to politics.

“They’re quite comical, these colonels,” said one of the friends, speaking of the military junta’s rulers. A pudgy boy with thick black-framed glasses, his family owned a chain of drug stores. “The best thing is to ignore them and one day they’ll just disappear.”

“You’re so naive,” said another boy, who kept his hair long as a mark of protest. “We have to rise up and throw them out or they’ll get stronger every day. If only you and your family’s rich friends were braver, we’d be rid of them already. You think you can just bide your time. You’ll see.”

“You’re too hot-headed,” said the first. “You and your leftist friends will play right into their hands. You’ll prove their argument that if it weren’t for them the Communists would take over. What do you think, as foreigners?” he asked the Americans.

“Well,” said Monty, “I don’t think we should comment. We don’t really know that much about what’s going on.”

“You should,” the second boy shot back. “It’s your tourist dollars that are keeping the regime alive, you know.”

“Hey, take it easy,” said the curly-haired girlfriend of the boy attending Monty’s college. “Besides, who are we to speak; our families keep making lots of money and stay comfortable all this time just by shutting up.”

The second girl in the car, who had remained silent until then, began to cry. “Stop it,” she shouted, her voice cracking. “Stop talking about this. It scares me. No matter how rich our families are, the government can get us if they want. You know what they’ll do to us. Just shut up.”

The others immediately changed the subject, not so much out of fear, though there was plenty to fear, but because they knew the girl’s brother had been detained during a protest the year before and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

After New Years Monty and Thomas toured the Peloponnese, going as far south as the site of ancient Sparta. It had been another case of the younger man’s insisting they visit a piece of history. But there was nothing to be seen of the ancient city other than a few weedy, rectangular indentations where buildings had once sat. Nor were there any tourist accommodations. A police officer suggested they spend the night at the home of local peasants who took in guests.

The family received the visitors graciously. “Please, you stay bedroom,” the father insisted, by which he meant their bedroom, the only bedroom; he and his wife would sleep in the other room, the only other room, along with their three children and the man’s elderly mother. “Here, you have heater,” he added, lighting up the charcoal briquettes on a metal brazier supported by a tripod.

Sinking into the soft mattress of the four-poster bed, the two guests snuggled together between soft hand-woven cotton sheets. Despite feeling awkward at having taken the parent’s bedroom and wondering if they might be asphyxiated during the night by the richly scented olive-wood embers smoldering on the open brazier, they fell asleep quickly, sleeping better than they ever had in their modern Athens hotel room.

IN FEBRUARY MONTY AND THOMAS booked passage on a small passenger ship heading to Santorini, the southernmost of the Cyclades Islands, an island visited by other Greeks but not yet widely known to foreign tourists. Arriving just before midnight, the ship slowly puttered into the caldera-shaped bay that had formed when the center of the island, a giant volcanic cone, blew up in a cataclysmic eruption sometime in the 16th century BC. The largest in historical times, the eruption caused a massive tidal wave so catastrophic that it wiped out the Minoan cities and settlements on the unprotected north coast of Crete. The apparent destruction of that civilization along with the literal collapse of Santorini, known in ancient times as Thera is thought by some to be the origin of the Atlantis myth. The island today is made up of the crescent-shaped remnants of the original land.

The Americans climbed down a ladder on the side of the ship and jumped into a small rowboat which took them to the island’s tiny dock. Monty bargained unsuccessfully with one of the donkey-drivers who had congregated at the dock to offer transport up the steep cliff. Today there’s a funicular, but back then donkeys provided the only way up other than walking. Under a full moon, the black sky ablaze with thousands of shining stars, they looked upwards, up to the top of the cliff and to the sky, as their donkeys, complaining and occasionally kicking each other, nudged grudgingly backwards and forwards along the trail as they zigzagged up to the island’s main town. At the top they were met by several scruffy men, each offering to rent them a guest cottage. The island’s one hotel was closed for the winter.

The February nights on Santorini were frigid, the cold, damp Aegean wind howling through the houses and shops that clustered tightly together at the edge of the cliff like haphazard congregations of white birds. Nothing seemed to dry in the cabin, certainly not the hand-woven sheets of their bed, where Thomas and Monty huddled close together at night trying to keep warm, too cold and damp for it to be romantic. The cabin was very basic, with a small electric heater that barely functioned, an indoor well for water, and no stove. They had no need to cook, however, since the island’s tiny restaurants were cheap and the seafood and vegetables, fresh and delicious. In the evenings they would sit in a bar that occupied a small dark cave on the side of the cliff, where they drank copious amounts of local wines, ouzo and a tangy citrus liqueur called Kitron, a specialty from the nearby island of Naxos.

One day their landlord introduced them to another of his renters, an archaeologist from Athens who was spending the winter on the island. He was there to lead the excavations of what would turn out to be one of the major finds of the century, a complete Minoan town buried by pumice in the great Bronze-age volcanic explosion. He invited the Americans to tour the dig and drove them in a small jeep to an isolated site called Akrotiri, near the far end of the island’s outward-facing flat-sloping side. The site was marked by two aluminum sheds covering the excavation. Following closely behind the man, they crawled through the entry into a tunnel leading downwards to an open space, where they could see the dimly lit remains of the corner of a house, at the crossroads of what seemed to be streets or lanes.

“Do you see these channels?” the archaeologist asked, pointing to two narrow grooves running along the ground. “These supplied water to the buildings, even hot water, geothermal water. No water piping older than these has ever been found.

“And over there,” he said, pointing to a spot toward the bottom of a wall of dirt and pumice, “we think there’s a palace buried.” (A year later Time magazine featured the first photographs of spectacular frescoes uncovered at the remains, depicting blue monkeys and youths boxing.)

From the excavation site Thomas and Monty hiked up to the top of a steep hill to see the remains of a Hellenistic city, which turned out to be of little interest after the exhilarating experience of seeing a freshly revealed, far more ancient site. A heavily whiskered wiry man, communicating mostly through gestures, told them how to get directly to where they were staying by walking along the top of the hills. “Two, three cigarettes, maybe,” he ventured, when they asked him how long it would take.

More like ten or twenty, they figured as they slowly made their way over rocky bluffs, the sky darkening, the wind picking up. A heavy fog rapidly fingered over the hills, obscuring the landscape. Through the damp dark mist they could just make out a black horse wandering on its own, half wild, half mad. As they walked further, a sinister periodic beep, faint at first, grew louder and more menacing. By now they had lost confidence in the directions they’d been given and concluded they were utterly lost. Suddenly, out of the fog, they came face up to a high barbed-wire fence with sharp spikes running along the top. The fog cleared enough to reveal a radar station, evidently the source of the beeping. The station’s militaristic aura added to the chill of the darkening evening. Perhaps it was a NATO outpost, spying on Eastern Europe, symbolic of the West’s complicit support of the military junta.

“Why did we come this way?” moaned Monty.

“It was your idea,” Thomas reminded him. “I suggested we go back down the hill and call for a taxi.”

“I wanted to see more of the island.”

“Yeah, just like you wanted to see Sarajevo.”

But Thomas hadn’t pushed for the more reasonable alternative. He’d gotten used to giving in to the younger man’s whims. It was easier than bickering. Thomas hated bickering. The two rarely argued, though Monty would sometimes lose his patience and swear at his lover. “Shit,” he’d sometimes cry out when he felt frustrated, just as his father had when he was exasperated by a tool’s breaking or by the briquettes on the barbecue failing to light or by any of life’s many other little disappointments. “Fuck you,” Monty would occasionally burst out, and then apologize and back off, fearful his temper might alienate Thomas. Most of the time the younger partner got his way just by badgering. As a child he’d fine-honed the art of pestering, learning that he could get what he wanted – a toy, drama lessons, a new car – by playing one parent off against the other, working on his more pliant father first, getting him to go along, and then laying it out to his more frugal mother.

This required Monty to suppress his otherwise impulsive and impatient nature. He hated delays of any kind: waiting to leave the house to go somewhere or waiting for things to get done. And so what most irritated him about his lover was waiting for him. Thomas habitually took his time, whether meticulously shaving in the morning or carefully selecting postcards from a rack in a tourist shop. Monty would pace nervously back and forth, anxious to go. It was almost as if the older man knew how much it irritated the younger one, as if it was his only way to get back at Monty for being so domineering. Monty would brood over these irritations for hours, hearing endless circular dialogues in which he would deluge Thomas with the illogic of his ways.

GO TO PART 5

Feudal State of Affairs – Part 3

2010-07-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 1 PART 2

AT THE END of their visit to New York, Thomas and Monty boarded a Yugoslav freighter that would carry them across the Atlantic and make stops in North Africa and five European ports. In the days before giant container ships became the norm, freighters often carried passengers, many for a fraction of the cost of a standard ocean liner or going by air. Scandinavian freighters were the most luxurious and costly. The Yugoslav line was barebones, this particular ship carrying thirteen passengers. For every meal they would gather in the officers' dining room to be served a dull, repetitive fare of bland meat balls, boiled potatoes and over-cooked vegetables.

Their fellow passengers included three young Mormon children and their parents headed to a missionary assignment in West Africa, all seemingly cheerful and innocent, like characters out of the 1964 film Mary Poppins. Also going to Africa was a young black man from New York, with a marked resemblance to James Baldwin in voice and demeanor, his exact sexual orientation however remaining a mystery. "No mystery to me," Thomas said to his lover, twisting his smile knowingly.

Equally enigmatic was a retired teacher who had lived most of her life in the Virgin Islands, where she had acquired a hacking cigarette cough and a deep rum-imbued voice; no one, including her, seemed to have a clue where she was going. Each evening, like a scene in a Chekhov play, she strolled the deck arm-in-arm with a kindly Yugoslav man, a retired engineer who had long before emigrated to the United States. He was on his way to visit his brother in Sarajevo, who he said was a high-level judge.

A Chicago painter and his Hungarian wife, both in their fifties, completed the passenger list. They were going to Tuscany for a year of "art." They took great pleasure in displaying their ill-mannered pretty two-year-old "miracle child," as they referred to the girl with curly black hair who'd been so late born to them. When Monty said in jest near the end of the Atlantic crossing that he would like to marry the girl when she grew up, the wife pulled the infant away and hissed, "I wouldn't let my daughter marry a Jew witch." Stunned by her words, Monty later thought how ironic it was that only a day earlier she'd bitterly derided the Communist dictatorship she had fled from after the 1956 Hungarian uprising had been crushed by the Soviets. "A bunch of narrow-minded bigots," she'd called the regime.

Other than verbal encounters – inevitable when strangers find themselves confined for many days in a shared space – the Atlantic crossing itself went by smoothly. There were none of the awesome storms Monty had actually looked forward to. Within limits, like survival and no injury, he enjoyed experiencing nature's overwhelming power. As a child in LA he was thrilled by the city's propensity for natural disaster. Earthquakes could feel liberating, like floating on the rolling ocean. The night sky would turn beautiful when fires blazed atop the nearby Santa Monica Mountains, consuming the mansions of the otherwise untouchably rich and famous. And once when a dam broke, wiping out whole neighborhoods, it could be seen happening live on TV, shot only blocks from where he lived. Yes, disasters could be menacing and thrilling.

The voyage across the Atlantic was in its own way also menacing: not because of waves or weather, but for the tempestuous atmosphere that enveloped the ship’s crew. It was rumored that the previous captain, in trying to set a record crossing, had nearly sunk the ship after steering it through the center of a powerful storm. The stern new captain had evidently been ordered to run a taut operation and exercise strict discipline, which seemed to explain the hostile and gruff atmosphere aboard the ship. Decades later, after the outbreak of the civil war that tore Yugoslavia apart, literally Balkanizing it, Monty figured the crew probably had hated one another on purely ethnic and religious grounds. In running his ship so severely and suppressing internal strife, the captain was merely copying what Tito performed on a bigger stage, repressing ethnic differences so Yugoslavia would stay united. The captain was treating his lessers as he himself was no doubted treated, bullying those below him as he was bullied by his superiors. Much of European history – the feudal order, the rise and fall of nation states, the formation of competing empires and dynasties – can be understood by looking at the crime world, at how bullies and gangster kingpins emerge, behave and battle for supremacy. Or look closer to home, at school bullies or workplace relationships or the dynamics of couples and families.

As the ship approached Casablanca, its first port of call, the distinctly sweet, fragrant, moldering aroma of North Africa, a mix of camel dung and spice imagined Monty, wafted across the sea. He looked forward to seeing exotic sights and sampling strange foods. After the ship was nudged into its berth by tugboats from a bygone era, swarthy longshoremen, many turbaned, began the slow process of unloading the freighter’s upper load of cargo. This consisted primarily of giant crates of light bulbs and jumbo-sized bales of multi-colored tightly corded rags, the latter destined to be transformed from North American fashion rejects into all sorts of native dress. The Third World practiced recycling long before it became politically correct in the West.

Monty and Thomas set out to tour the city in company with the James Baldwin character and the Virgin Islands lady. Inadvertently they headed directly into the crowded serpentine alleys of the Arab souk, into a world totally alien from anything any of them had ever experienced. Mound after mound of spices, grains and beans – red, yellow, blue, black – spilled out onto the narrow roadway. Hunks of lamb, whole heads and joints, hung from hooks, freshly killed, dripping blood, flies buzzing around freely. A child poked a stick at a tethered baby goat likely destined for imminent slaughter. Arab women walked in pairs, their heads covered with long bright scarves, a few in full-body burkas, the narrow slits of their eyeholes turning to stare at the foreigners. Blond and taller than his compatriots, Monty felt himself scrutinized from all direction.

After two days in port the ship sailed to Valencia, where machine-gun-toting Guardia Civil stood stiffly at nearly every street corner, a sight as culturally shocking in its way as the Arab market had been. Next, in Genoa, a great mass of timber was unloaded from the freighter’s lower holds, so emptying the ship that on the next, relatively short leg of its voyage, south to Naples, it stood so high in the water it heaved violently up and down when it passed through a moderate storm. Climbing the ship’s narrow stairwells became a major challenge and using the squat toilets, even more intimidating than before. Having read the Odyssey’s vivid accounts of fierce Mediterranean storms from a strictly literary perspective, Monty could now identify palpably with the horrors faced by Homer’s heroes. He loved it.

From Naples the ship headed back across the Mediterranean to the port of Sousse, Tunisia, which they learned had been cut off from all land contact for nearly two months, following devastating floods. As the ship entered the large all-but-enclosed circular bay, the sweet musky smell of North Africa again came their way. All the passengers and nearly all the crew came on deck to watch in awe as a languid sunset encompassed the sky, mirroring itself in the still water. It was like gliding into a slowly metamorphosing pastel sphere. Even the stern captain came to watch, standing however at a discrete distance from his mistress, who’d quietly slipped aboard in Genoa.

THE TWO LOVERS left the ship at Trieste, weary of the increasingly stale food and excited to visit nearby Venice before heading down the Dalmatian coast to their ultimate destination, Greece. Venice was cold and wet but pleasantly devoid of tourist hordes. From there they traveled to a small shabby resort on Yugoslavia’s Istria peninsula, where they made contact with the assistant director of an American film in production there. They had met his girlfriend in New York – she also danced with Martha Graham’s company – and she’d given them the man’s name and number. Monty and Thomas arrived just in time to attend a giant wrap party held in the gaudy ballroom of the town’s only modern hotel, for which all the food – pineapples, hams, cheeses, turkeys, rich desserts – had been flown in directly from Hollywood, local provisions presumably being suspicious.

During dinner a famous American comedian made the rounds from table to table, gossiping and issuing forth non-stop dirty jokes. When he reached Monty and Thomas’s table he sat down to ogle as closely as he could the half-exposed breasts of their tablemate, an aspiring local actress whose blouse looked more like a scarf. Later they attended an after-hours strip show in the basement bar. Invited by a Canadian movie star, they watched a troop of women who’d been flown in specially from Budapest (had Yugoslavia no strippers of its own?) two-step their way across the stage, dressed in scarves even more scanty than that of the hopeful starlet. After they’d removed their upper scarves, they danced around a solitary man sitting in the center of the stage, wagging a six-foot-long white plastic dildo.

Monty and Thomas made their way next to Rijeka, a grotty port in the north of Yugoslav, where they would catch a bus traveling overnight down the Dalmatian Coast. Monty ate a bowl of tomato soup in the depot’s dirty cafeteria, a mistake he regretted throughout the night as he made a hurried stop at every filthy toilet along the way. “The bus is leaving!” Thomas shouted in front of the toilet stop in Split, where a bright moon illuminated the stunningly handsome bay and coastal islands. Still hitching up his pants, Monty rushed aboard the bus. Peasants crowding the other seats pointed at him and laughed so uproariously a few chickens fell off their laps onto the floor.

At the end of the bus trip they stopped for two days to rest in the sunny, relaxed Medieval walled city of Dubrovnik. Thomas wanted to take a ship from there directly to Greece, but Monty insisted they go inland instead, to Sarajevo. “It’s only a couple of hours by train from here,” he said. “World War One started there. It’s history. We’ve got to go.” Thomas agreed without expressing his own doubts.

Along the way, in the town of Mostar – whose historic bridge across the Neretva River would be destroyed during the civil war twenty-some years later – a derailment up ahead forced the train, already over an hour late, to stop for another two hours. By the time they arrived in Sarajevo it was past midnight, the air was frigid and snow was quickly piling up. A man who got off at the same time pointed out which way to head to find a hotel. Nearly an hour later, trudging through the snow along darkened streets, bearing the weight of their heavy backpacks, their hands freezing, they still hadn’t spotted a single hotel.

Eventually a cab driver took pity on them and drove them to his taxi company’s small office. There, in broken English, he explained that the next day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the republic; every hotel in the city was fully booked, he said. Tito and Yul Brynner were arriving on a special train the next morning to mark the occasion with the opening of a film, starring Brynner, portraying the historic struggle against the Nazi occupiers in the Battle of Neretva. The driver called a number of hotels and finally found a room in the Hotel Europa – every major European city seems to have a Hotel Europa – an ungainly once-elegant heap of a building in the city center.

When they finally got into their room it was nearly two in the morning. Anxious to defrost their hands, they turned on the hot water faucet in a sink placed oddly in the middle of the room, only to discover that the hot water was turned off. Giving up, the two went to bed and fell sound asleep. Three hours later the night manager and two assistants banged on the door and stormed into the room. The hot water had been turned back on and boiling cascades of it were pouring over the sink onto the parquet floor. (Who would have known that faucets in Yugoslavia operate in the opposite direction, or at least the ones in this hotel?)

“Turn them off,” barked the manager to his underlings.

“You’re in big trouble,” he warned the Americans. “The manager will see you in the morning.”

Promptly awakened at six-thirty, they were marched down to the lobby, where a red-faced sweaty man informed them crews were rushing to repair two rooms below theirs that had been badly damaged and had to be ready in time for arriving dignitaries. Could it be for Tito himself, Monty mused, at first laughing to himself and then, realizing the gravity of the situation, fearing that they could be jailed or have their passports and all their money confiscated. “You must pay twenty US dollars for each damaged room,” the manager solemnly declared, much to the Americans' relief.

A few hours later, having lost interest in visiting the site of the Austro-Hungarian archduke’s assassination or any other of Sarajevo’s “must-see” historical sites, they boarded the Athens Express to get to Greece as soon as possible. When the train stopped in Belgrade near midnight, they got off and walked briefly toward a large plaza in front of the station. Hordes of drunken men celebrating the republic’s anniversary danced wildly in large circles around huge crackling bonfires, flinging empty bottles of beer and liquor, seemingly directly at the Americans. The two quickly made their way back to their train compartment.

The next morning, when the train crossed the frontier into Greece, everything seemed to brighten: the landscape turned from dreary grey to sunny shades of sienna and olive; the new crew who’d come aboard overnight smiled rather than frowned; even the food tasted fresh, bright and cheerful. Relieved to be leaving behind the drab, dark Communist country, with its narrow-minded peasants and grossly inefficient services, Monty and Thomas looked forward to the sunny promise of spending the winter, spending their lives perhaps, in Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, freedom and democracy, where, like in the 1960 film Never on a Sunday, they would dance on top of broken dishes, dance with other men, free spirits all.

GO TO PART 4

Feudal State of Affairs – Part 2

2010-07-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 1

“SAM! SAM!” Monty’s mother cried out.

Sam! Sam! is what she always cried out whenever she was upset or frightened, which was often. Earthquakes: Sam! Sam! Monty’s brother away at camp during a polio outbreak in the Fifties: Sam! Sam! Their son has a boy girlfriend: Sam! Sam! A timid, anxious woman, Sarah looked to her stern and quick-tempered husband for her emotional center of gravity.

“How long have you been a homosexual?” Sam asked gravely after coming into the kitchen and hearing Sarah repeat what their son had just said to her. He was as tall as his son, the two of them towering over the woman.

“What do you mean how long have I been a homosexual?” Monty replied, his pulse quickening. “I told you all I was a homosexual when I came home at the end of my freshman year. We had a family meeting and I told you everything. I didn’t hide it from you.”

“We thought you were just acting,” his father said. “You’re always acting.”

“Yeah, and that’s what you always think.”

“And what about that psychologist you saw at UCLA? Did he know?” his father pressed.

In his last year of high school Monty had participated in a research program at the LA campus of the University of California about child-parent relationships. In return he received free counseling. The mother of his best high school friend, Gordon, knew the program’s director and had put Monty in touch with him. Years later he learned that all of the program’s test subjects were gay or thought they might be. Evidently his friend’s mother, a brilliant writer and literary critic, was savvy enough to realize what lay behind Monty’s anxieties.

“Yeah, he knew. He asked me right away the first time I saw him.”

“So why the hell didn’t the bastard tell us,” Sam said, pounding his fist on a flat wooden drawer that served as a cutting board, almost breaking it in half.

“A psychologist can’t reveal what his patients tell him; it’s confidential.”

“I don’t give a shit about confidential. You’re our son.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you don’t own me.”

In a way, of course, they did own Monty. They’d supported him all his life and all through university, a huge expense for them since his father received only a modest salary as a junior college teacher. The tuition at their son’s private college was way beyond what a local university like UCLA would have cost. They even bought a car for him in his senior year, a safe car, a new Saab, when he said he needed one to commute to school from downtown. He’d told them he was moving because he found an inexpensive but clean place to live there, that all the rental houses near his campus were dirty and run-down from years of student use. Safer and cleaner: that was sure to convince them. Of course he didn’t explain that the real reason he’d moved downtown was to live at his boyfriend’s home.

“Look,” Sam said, hunched over a bit like the wrestler he'd been back in his college days. “You always wanted counseling. So, good, we’ll put you in a hospital or something and you can get all the counseling you want and get this damn thing out of your system.”

“This thing? A hospital!” shouted Monty, throwing out his arms. He glared at his parents for several moments, stunned by his father’s threat, and then stormed out of the kitchen. He slammed shut the door to his room, the room he’d had as his own since he was five years old, and flopped down onto his bed, his head facing the faded blue wallpaper that had hung there for as long as he could remember, the one with white lilacs on it.

I’ve got to get out of here right now, he thought, his heart beating heavily. He got up, quickly packed his duffle bag, and went out the side door without telling his parents he was leaving. He drove to his friend Gordon’s house. (He’d been best man at Gordon’s wedding, two days earlier, which was why he was in LA.) Monty asked Gordon’s mother if he could go with them to their cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains. They were leaving the next day. He would stay only a couple of nights, he said, telling them nothing about the scene at home.

Thomas commiserated when Monty called later that evening and told him what had happened, but then quickly changed the subject. “I’ve decided to quit my job and go to Europe,” he announced. “Forever, as far as I’m concerned. I’m fed up with work and this overgrown lumber town.”

Thomas often complained to Monty about how small and parochial Portland was, that one could only have a real career in the theater or as an artist in New York or Europe. “I’m going to Greece,” he added. No suggestion of their going together.

“Wow, I’d love to go with you,” said Monty, not picking up on the possibility that Thomas might want to travel on his own. They were lovers; of course they would travel together. They would share everything in life, together.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I haven’t thought about it. I’ve saved up enough money and I’m going to sell my Volkswagen.”

“I could sell my car, too,” said Monty.

What would his parents think now, when they learned he'd sold his car, the car they’d given him only months before, so he could run away to Europe with Thomas? He didn’t care. It didn’t even occur to him. All he could think of was that he had to go with Thomas wherever he went, however it had to be arranged. He would do whatever Thomas wanted to do.

Soon after the two first met, Monty had joined Thomas’s theater company and hung around with him as much as he could. He almost took up smoking cigarettes, the same filterless brand as his lover smoked, but Thomas decided to quit himself. Good, they would live together in the same lifestyle, healthy, back to nature. Whatever.

Thomas was less certain about his new friend going with him to Europe. He liked Monty. He’d been attracted by the younger man’s intelligence, his freshness, his dramatic appearance. Monty was in his Russian phase when they met. He’d grown a long moustache, wore a Russian fur hat even on temperate days, and added back the Russian ending to his family name, which his grandfather had cut off decades before to shorten it enough so it could be set in tiles on the threshold to the shoe repair shop he opened after he’d been fired at an Ohio steel mill for trying to unionize the workers.

It wasn’t as if Thomas hadn’t thought about forming a relationship with Monty. He was bored with cruising the gay bars. The crowd was so predictable, tiresome, focused on sex and nothing else. He’d had numerous sexual encounters, but he’d lost excitement with the hunt, with sex itself. Maybe it was time to settle down with one guy, at least for awhile. The younger man wasn’t exactly his type; he liked more graceful men, like dancers, not hirsute and gangly like Monty. But he felt comfortable with him, at ease, not pressed to play out the image of the alluring vamp he’d gained a reputation for. Why not let Monty come along with him to Europe? Besides, it was nice to have a warm body in bed next to you every night.

When Monty returned to Portland after the scene with his parents, he spent the months before the departure sunbathing nude with his lover on the small secluded porch of Thomas’s house. It was the “Summer of Love” and the Woodstock Festival and man’s first landing on the moon, which they watched on a tiny TV in Thomas’s living room. They recited passages to each other from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, which they were reading to prime themselves for their approaching Mediterranean journey. And they played a record of the recent musical hit Hair over and over again: “Sodomy / fellatio / cunnilingus / pederasty / Father, why do these words sound so nasty?”

It was also the summer that, with Monty’s urging, Thomas began to go by his full name instead of the Tom his friends called him or the Tommie his family still used, as if he were still five years old. Monty also started using his full name, Montgomery, a name he’d dreaded being called by his elementary school teachers at the beginning of each semester before he could stop them and prevent his classmates from teasing him about it. If he were British, people would have respected it and assume he’d been named for the war hero. But it was the actor Montgomery Clift whom his mother had insisted on naming him after. She’d loved Clift, not knowing anything back then, of course, about the actor’s secret homosexuality. Monty doubted his parents would appreciate the irony now; he did.

IN EARLY OCTOBER Monty and Thomas were ready to leave for Europe. They’d sold their cars and stored or gotten rid of most of their other possessions. They’d ordered identical pairs of Wallabee walking shoes from the Whole Earth Catalog, which had started publication the year before. Each planned to carry his portable typewriter, weighing down further their backpacks, already heavy with books. After staying a few days in the spare bedroom at the home of Thomas’s parents – who seemed to accept their son’s sexual identity without ever mentioned a word about it – they boarded a bus to Vancouver, British Columbia, and from there a train across Canada. To save on costs, they shared a narrow roomette, sleeping in shifts. Along the way Monty wrote a bitter, rambling eight-page letter to his parents, revealing where he was going and threatening that if they didn’t accept his homosexuality and his relationship with Thomas they would never see him again. Would they think this theatrical as well? Would they be anxious about his running away? He didn’t care. He didn’t care that they were probably worried sick. He was free at last, gay at last.

When the train made a brief stop in Edmonton, they got off to stretch their legs. Strolling in the concourse, they noticed a group of flamboyantly dressed, athletic young men and women huddled together in a circle, evidently waiting to board the same train. “They look like actors,” suggested Monty. “No, they look a little too vapid,” Thomas said as they approached nearer. “They must be dancers.”

They turned out to be members of a major Canadian ballet company on tour across the country. Later that evening they invited the two Americans to play canasta with them. Less flamboyant in person, they seemed timid, almost homespun. Several of them, men as well as women, kept themselves busy knitting. They gossiped about people they knew in the dance world and kidded each other about rumored affairs. It was all so artistic, exciting, gay. The next morning the company’s longtime impresario, a notorious figure in Canadian dance, walked into Monty and Thomas's small cabin, sat between them, a hand on each of their knees, and asked, “What’s this I hear about two men sharing a single roomette?” They weren’t in small-town Portland anymore.

In Montreal they left the train and spent several days with Monty’s friend Gordon and his wife, who were living there for a year, attending graduate school. Its streets paved with granite and lined by weighty old brick and stone buildings, Montreal felt distinctly foreign, very unlike America, at least that part of America Monty knew – the West. Montreal seemed clean, polite and peaceful, with no obvious hint of the kidnapping, murder and martial law that would overtake Québec only twelve months later, during the ill-fated October crisis.

They spent the following week in New York, staying at the Brooklyn apartment of an old friend of Thomas’s from Portland who was in the chorus of Martha Graham’s dance company. A tall, high-spirited man with dark shaggy wild hair, he escorted Monty one night to a Puerto Rican gay bar in the East Village, while Thomas was visiting other friends in Brooklyn. In the days before its gentrification, the East Village was rough and run-down. To get to the bar they walked through dark menacing streets, skirting between derelict cars with smashed windows. At the bar the two danced together in a free-form jivey, white sort of way. Immediately after, several dark handsome young Puerto Rican boys with tight-fitting pants and colorful silky shirts came right up to their table and performed their own, more precise and practiced routines, as if offering the white boys a choice of which one to take home. Monty was thrilled with it all: with the blatant sensuality in the bar, with the East Village’s threat of danger, with his lover’s old friend.

That night he tried to get the three of them to have sex together. But Thomas was unresponsive. They’d agreed long before to have an open “modern” relationship. Why imitate an idealized straight marriage, they agreed. Since meeting the year before, each had already had sex outside the relationship, Monty more so. In fact he first had a fling with Thomas’s first lover, a methamphetamine addict the younger man fantasized looked like a crazed character out of a Dostoevsky novel. Thomas hadn’t seemed to mind; he didn’t say anything when Monty told him what had happened. But Monty quickly turned jealous if other men even flirted with Thomas. He knew that his lover was considered exceptionally attractive, a catch. Whereas he always underrated his own striking, more Eastern European look.

Now he felt a compelling urge to play around, to make conquests – as many as possible. But he also felt a twinge of ambivalence. It was as if, only half consciously, the more men he had sex with the more he could catch up to his far more experienced lover and gain power of his own. Power for what? Sex simply had power; the more sex the more powerful, like rams butting heads or chimpanzees biting at each other in the battle to establish position and get the choicest food, fuck the choicest mate. Thomas had had enough experiences that he was confident in his own sexuality and didn’t mind his younger boyfriend’s need for exploration. Or so he told himself as he grew less and less interested in their sex play as a couple.

The next day the two toured the Museum of Modern Art. Turning a corner in a hallway they came face-to-face with a giant Jackson Pollock painting. In that instant Monty’s entire conception of art changed. Before he’d always preferred Impressionist painters – Renoir, Monet, Degas – and thought Pollock’s paintings looked like heaps of colored spaghetti. Suddenly now he felt the dynamic vibrancy and flow of the work. It excited him, and from then on he would favor abstract art over Impressionist, realist or even the trendy conceptual art of later years. Monty’s aesthetic, his whole life, was transforming forever.

The experience at the museum added to the first-time thrill of visiting New York. He’d hated growing up in LA, finding the city too spread out, diffuse and suburban in character, at least in the years he grew up there. On the last night of their stay in the city, he gazed out at the view from the 102-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. In the distance he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then under construction and totally dark except for airplane warning lights at the top. The towers looked like two giant eerie ghosts in the night standing at the far end of a canyon of hundreds of skyscrapers blazing with thousands of lights. The city pulsated with energy and he pulsated with it. This was the world he’d longed for, and standing next to him was the man he wanted to share it with.

GO TO PART 3

Feudal State of Affairs – Part 1

2010-07-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

“IS THOMAS your . . . your . . . girlfriend?” Sarah asked, standing in front of the kitchen sink, hesitating before handing her son another plate to rinse.

Monty’s parents had met Thomas, the “older man,” six years older than he, a month before, when they were in Portland to attend their son’s college graduation. They had driven up from LA and stopped briefly at Thomas’s one-bedroom clapboard house, hidden behind a tangle of overgrown salal and blackberry bushes. Monty had laid out a sleeping bag in the tiny living room to suggest the two were only roommates. His parents looked around but, other than his father’s declaring the house a firetrap, didn’t voice any concerns.

That his mother now used the word girlfriend – not boyfriend, not lover, not even that ambiguous term partner – suggested a particular assumption. Of course, she’d never before considered what a gay relationship might actually be like. The word gay meaning queer wasn’t even in her vocabulary. Yes, the “gay revolution” would soon go public, unleashed, so it was claimed, by the New York Stonewall riots of June 1969, only a few weeks after their return from Portland. But this was her son, not some anonymous sexual deviant on a certain named side street of Hollywood where, according to a Life magazine article published the summer before Monty’s senior year at high school, homosexuals lurked in the dark, wearing tight jeans and white sneakers to signal their “disgusting” intent. (Monty had nervously driven up and down the street several times after he’d read the article.) Surely in a relationship, like any relationship, like hers, one person must play the dominant role, the male, and the other the subordinate, the female. Surely it couldn’t be her son who was the girlfriend half. Shorter than him by a foot, she looked up at him now, her face flushed, her hands shaking, afraid of his answer yet needing it.

“No, mother,” he barked back at her, his head held high. “I’m his.”

He could have laughed at her saying girlfriend, gently poking fun at its naiveté. But instead he threw the word back at her, almost violently, confronting her ignorance and fear by flaunting his newly liberated identity and suggesting, just to dig the knife in further, that it was he, her son, who was the passive, female half. He could have comforted her instead and told her he was okay, that homosexuality was a normal occurrence in the vast panoply of human behavior, that it wouldn’t ruin his life or health or career. He could have been sensitive to how she must have felt – confused, anxious, profoundly worried for his well-being. But it was a travesty, he thought, for her to suggest that one of them must be the man and the other the girl. He and Thomas loved each other equally, no one dominated the other, they were equal partners. Surely this would go on as long as they lived together – forever. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Love. Surely it would go on forever.

A YEAR-AND-A-HALF BEFORE they actually met, Monty had spotted Thomas in downtown Portland, in the basement of the art museum, where he’d gone to see a screening of Greed, Erich von Stroheim’s silent classic starring Zasu Pitts. Monty noticed him right away, standing in the foyer of the auditorium with another man about the same age. He gazed at the bulge in the crotch of Thomas’s tight-fitting blue jeans and at the auburn hair that hung in a long pageboy-cut over the back neckline of an off-white Irish knit sweater. He looks like the cartoon hero Prince Valiant, thought Monty. Staring at the two men, he felt a shiver rising from his groin to his breasts, knowing instinctively they were different. He longed to know them, to be with them, to touch them, especially the prince.

The following summer Monty attended an immersion program in Russian at a private college in Monterey, California, where he had an affair with a girl studying Spanish. She was as short as his mother but slim, with perky breasts and curly dark blond hair. He’d had sex with several girls at college. It was okay, but he hadn’t ever sought out the sex part; it was always the girl who initiated it. The relationships never lasted more than a few days or a week or two. But this girl was different. He was strongly attracted to her, but not just because he found her attractive, she was, but because he’d seen her walking in town with a strikingly handsome young man with long blond, leonine hair. As with Prince Valiant, the man he’d seen at the art museum, the sight of the boy had caused a shiver to rise from his loins. Maybe if he got to know the girl, he thought, he could get the boy.

When he hooked up with the Spanish student, it was she, like before with other girls, who coerced him into having sex. She listened patiently, without surprise, as he explained that he was attracted to her male friend. No matter, she said. It’s okay. You can meet him if you want. And then when they had sex it was exciting. She fellated him. No one had done that to him before, and he’d long wanted it, fantasized about it, ever since a junior high school classmate had brought a few friends over, including Monty, and played a porno movie he’d found in his parents’ bedroom when they were away on vacation. It was straight porno, of course, but it was the first time Monty had seen an image of fellatio. And now, finally, the girl was doing it to him. But he didn’t reciprocate the oral sex. And the next time they were together again, he resisted and she intimidated him, deriding his masculinity, laughing at him, until he cried and gave in to her fierce carnality, hating it but wanting it. It would be the same each time they were together.

Toward the end of the summer session Monty marked his twenty-first birthday downing shots of vodka with the other students, all male, who boarded together at the home of the head Russian professor. “To the bottom” they chanted again and again in Russian, until he fell down drunk, under the table, drunk as he’d never been before. He awoke in bed the next morning with a heavy radiating headache that went on for four days. Never again, he vowed to himself, would he drink like that, and never again would he have sex with a woman; next semester he would find a man no matter what.

Back in Portland, at the beginning of his senior year, one of his roommates, the son of a minor movie star and a wealthy banker, suggested they start up a poetry magazine. Determined to solicit work from writers outside their college’s narrow confines, they announced their plans for the magazine at a meeting of an arts organization held at an old movie theater in the north end of the city. Afterwards, someone presented a slide show about an art workshop for street kids. Monty was surprised to see that the guy running the projector was the one he’d seen the year before at the museum – Prince Valiant. If I could only meet him, he thought, things might happen. When the group broke for coffee, he walked directly up to the man, paused for an instant, and looking down at the floor mumbled “Hello” before quickly passing by.

A couple of months later, Monty and his roommate launched their new magazine with a public reading by a nationally prominent poet, a trim bearded man in his late fifties who taught at another college, across town. Before going to the reading Monty smoked a joint with a few of his friends, as he often did in the evenings. Later, after the reading, the poet came up to him and told him he always chose one person in the audience to read to, someone clearly attentive, and tonight it had been him. Monty didn’t tell the man he’d mistaken his being stoned for rapture, but instead asked if he could visit him and show him his own poetry.

Two days later Monty took a bus to the other college. He found the poet waiting in his office, read some of his work to him and then spoke of his confusion about what to do next in life. He didn’t want to go to graduate school, he explained, but to pursue the arts, theater preferably. He’d always loved theater, even as a little boy. He had pressed his parents into letting him take private acting classes. Later he took more classes at a Jewish community center and played minor roles in high school and college productions. The poet suggested he talk to a young man who worked at a café on the campus. He’s a pianist, the poet told him, and he’s connected to the theater community.

Monty went to the café and met the guy, a tall man in his late twenties with thinning blond hair and a developing paunch. The piano player stared intently over his glasses at the younger man while the two talked. “I know exactly who you should meet,” he said after Monty recounted the same story he’d told the poet. “He directs a small theater group. I’ll be right back. I’ll go give him a call. Maybe he can come over and you can talk to him.”

Monty looked out the café window at the damp grass and nearby grove of arbutus, Douglas fir and cedar. Fall had arrived late that year but a soft steady rain had settled in. He loved the rain; everything became quieter, still, somber, so unlike LA, his hometown, with its seemingly endless smoggy days and endless glaring sun-drenched streets. While musing over the changes that had overtaken his life since he’d left home, it crossed his mind that the pianist was the guy he’d seen the year before with the young man in the tight jeans at the city museum and again, two months ago, running the projector at the old cinema. Maybe the theater director is Prince Valiant, Monty thought, the familiar tingling rising from his groin. Maybe the pianist was calling him right now. If so, it would be a third coincidence, more than coincidence; it would be fate. Their meeting was destined. Monty wanted it to be. He willed it to be.

When the theater director arrived – it was him! – the pianist suggested they go for lunch to a diner at the crest of one of the hills overlooking Portland from the west. Prince Valiant, who now had a name, Thomas, drove there in his car, a Volkswagen station wagon; the pianist insisted on taking Monty in his own car.

During lunch they talked about the city’s theater and arts scene. Monty asked Thomas about the group he was directing. The older man was happy to elaborate on his theories and ambitions, and Monty tried to look rapturously attentive though all he could think about was how to get in bed with Thomas.

After lunch the pianist drove them to a nearby park and led them along a path to an isolated bluff. They stood there silently for some minutes, taking in the panoramic view of the city, until Monty suddenly stammered, “I’m really interested in you guys. Maybe more than I should be.” As if he’d been waiting for the cue, the piano player drew the three of them together in a tight circle and got them to wrap their arms around each other’s shoulders. They stood like this for several minutes, Monty’s heart beating fast, his cock erect, pressing hard against his jeans. He felt as if he were in a dream, one of those dreams we dream again and again until we can’t be sure when we’ve awoken whether the dream is a memory of something that actually occurred.

The three returned to the restaurant and drove in two cars as before to the pianist’s small house, more of a shack, not far from the college where he worked. As soon as they entered and took off their shoes and jackets, the pianist began to initiate three-way sex but soon focused all his attention on Thomas alone, sucking him vigorously, fervently, for a long time until Thomas finally came. Later Monty would learn that the musician had set him up, hoping to use him as bait to get involved himself with Thomas, whom he’d been obsessed with for years. Thomas had mentioned to him that he’d seen an attractive guy, Monty, at the theater and described him clearly enough that he recognized him at the café.

When the pianist stepped out of the room for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, Thomas invited Monty to go home with him and, shortly afterwards, they left and spent the night together. Monty was sure they’d spend their lives together.

GO TO PART 2

Uncle Sam Wants Me – 2010

2010-07-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

“NO FUCKING WAY!” Monty cried out when he read the letter. “I’ll do whatever it takes to fight it.”

The letter was a notice to attend a medical exam in two weeks’ time. If he passed he would join the two million other hapless young men conscripted to fight in Vietnam, to commit atrocities and get butchered while some old farts in Washington used assembly-line statistics to show the war could be won.

Monty had lost his student deferment when he partly dropped out of college in his junior year to work halftime in a War on Poverty program for under-achieving high-IQ ghetto teenagers. The draft notice arrived the week after Christmas break.

“You’re fucking crazy,” his friend Brian said when Monty explained how he planned to flunk the exam. He would go to the physical, rip open his subconscious, say and do whatever came to mind, and convince them he was crazy. If actors could employ “the method,” achieving truth in performance by “living the part,” why couldn’t he?

“We’re all psychotic when you strip away our veneer,” he said, sucking in deeply from the glowing end of a near-finished reefer held tightly between his thumb and forefinger.

“You’re dead meat,” his friend chuckled. “They’re onto jerks like you.”

The day before the exam, Monty had doubts himself. I can’t screw around, he thought, or I’m done for. Jesus I’m scared shitless. What in the hell am I going to do? I need some kind of crutch I can hold on to get me through this. Like a riff in a song I can keep repeating. I need a theme!

And that night the perfect theme came to him in a dream. He was sure it would work, if only he had the courage to grasp the theme and perform it a hundred percent from the moment he first arrived at the exam center until the end. No second chances, no encores. Becoming genuinely insane was his only option.

At the appointed hour, dressed in bright purple corduroy bell-bottoms, a pink and chartreuse paisley pirate shirt and a hip-length navy pea jacket, he strutted up to the guard at the entrance to the induction center. “What time is it?” he asked, suddenly losing his nerve, barely looking at the man. “Eight-twenty,” the guard barked, sneering at the teenager in his hippie getup. “You’ve got five minutes.”

Monty cowered away and leaned against the side of the brick building. God damn it! he said to himself, grinding his teeth. I’ve already fucked up. This is it, I’ve got to do this now. It’s life or death.

Shaking himself, he ran into the building, sprang up a flight of stairs, and sprinted toward a group of thirty or so other young men standing in the foyer, waiting for the exam to begin. Half a dozen military guards stood nearby at attention.

“HELLO,” he bellowed out to the crowd, a broad, wild grin on his face. “IS EVERYONE READY TO HAVE THEIR COCKS CUT OFF?”

At that instant the ice broke. Monty knew from then on he was no longer the victim being led to slaughter; he was now in charge. Thank you, Stanislavski, he thought. The whole group, guards included, looked at him in stunned silence, jaws agape.

Moments later, a guard opened the twin doors leading from the foyer into a lecture hall. Instead of taking a seat as directed, Monty headed to the front of the room, planning to explain to the assembled group exactly what would soon be done to them. But before he could utter a word, three guards escorted him out of the room. “They’re going to do it to me now,” he said, waving goodbye to his still dumbfounded audience. “Be careful: don’t let them cut your cocks off.”

The guards led him down a hall and into a large open office area outfitted with rows of gray metal desks, all empty save one, where he was told to sit down. “Is this where they’re going to do it?” he asked the officer seated in front of him.

“Not necessarily,” the man replied, looking coldly at the boy.

Captain Murray, his name tag read, was evidently the person designated to handle troublesome cases and put punks like Monty in their place. Coolly but forcefully, he began asking a series of routine questions – name, address, birthdate, mother’s maiden name and so on, with Monty answering each one in a dry monotone, aping the officer’s stoic demeanor.

While the captain wrote the answers in a file, Monty noticed an adjoining office separated by an opaque glass door with a sign saying Joint Director. “Is that where the officer in charge of marijuana is?” he asked, pointing to the office.

“Not necessarily,” the captain replied.

“Well, I hear there’s lots of dope in the army,” Monty continued.

“Not necessarily.”

“Do you get much of it?”

“What?”

“Dope.”

“Not necessarily.”

“So are they going to cut off my cock now?”

“Not necessarily.”

Having turned the interrogation back to his theme, Monty went on the offensive. “So how does it feel to be under constant surveillance, with the FBI and the CIA and the military intelligence all watching your every move?” he asked the officer. “They’re probably watching you right now, checking how well you’re handling me. Does that make you nervous?”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Murray snapped.

“Why, am I upsetting you?”

“Look,” the officer said, “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

“And I don’t have to answer yours.”

“Yes you do,” he growled. “Here, fill out this form.” It was a loyalty declaration.

Monty had heard that if you say you’ve been a member of the Communist Party or any other “subversive” group, it would only stretch out the conscription process until the FBI investigated you further. But he wanted out now, today, without delay. So he answered no to all the questions, until it came to one asking if he’d ever used a different name. This he checked yes and, filling in the required explanation, wrote, “I used to use the original Russian spelling of my family name to remind me of my identity and that the US Army hadn’t cut off my cock yet.”

The captain's face turned red when he read these words. “How can you write this?” he snarled. “Don’t you know that women secretaries read these forms?” The boy shrugged his shoulders.

Exasperated, the officer implored, “At least you could write the proper word.”

Monty took the form, crossed out cock and wrote in prick and handed it back. Seeing the officer go an even darker shade of red, he took the form back again and was about to write in “the proper word” but, just to prod the man a little bit more, asked, “Is that spelled with one n or two?”

After making the final correction, he leaned forward and looking at the officer straight in the eye said, “I want you to understand that if you take me into the army, I swear to God I will destroy it. Not just where I’m stationed, but the whole fucking United States military establishment. And if I fail, I’ll kill myself. But I won’t fail.”

Without looking away from the boy, the captain pushed a button under his desk and picked up his telephone receiver. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “We have one.”

After a few seconds a burly red-haired guard entered the room and marched up to the desk. “This is Sergeant Johnson,” the officer said. “Since you have threatened to destroy the army and since this is a military installation, you will have a guard for the remainder of your time here.”

After a few more minutes, a medic joined them. “Williams here will take you through the exam,” the officer added. “Now take him out of my sight.”

NORMALLY THE DRAFT PHYSICAL lasted half a day or more. Occasionally inductees were required to stay longer, even overnight, to confirm that a condition such as high blood pressure had not been faked. But Monty was led through the various exam stations in under two hours.

His private guard and medic took him first to a small room where he was instructed to strip down to his underpants and leave his clothes in a locker. “Oh, oh,” he said. “I can guess what’s coming next. Is this where they’re going to do it?” he asked when as they entered an adjoining room.

“Do what?” asked the guard in a heavy Southern accent.

“Cut my cock off, of course."

“Cut the bullshit,” said the medic, a lithe young man with dark hair and dark eyes. “Stand here so I can check your weight and height.”

“What, are you going to do, compare my weight before and after they cut it off?”

“Shut up,” the medic replied. “Now sit up here,” he said pointing to an exam bed. “I’m going to check your blood pressure.” Watching the man while he wrapped the cuff around his arm and pumped up the pressure, Monty thought this was the sort of guy he’d like to meet under other circumstances, a fantasy he was about to declare when the medic said, “Holy cow. Did you take something or what?”

“You mean it’s high?” asked Monty.

“High?” the medic answered. “I’m surprised you’re alive.”

“Of course it’s high: I’m scared as hell. I’ve never had my cock cut off before.”

“Good,” said the medic, beginning to play along with the theme. “But first sit here. I’ve got to take a blood sample in case we need to make a transfusion later. And don’t worry, we’ll be sure to use a nice rusty, dull blade.”

“Hey, be gentle,” said Monty, unsure whether the medic was joking still about castration or talking about taking a blood sample. To his relief, the medic used a needle to draw blood from his finger rather than the crook of the arm.

“Shit,” the man said, after failing to get even a drop of blood. “I forgot you can’t draw blood when someone’s bursting with so much adrenalin.” He started rubbing the younger man’s finger between his thumb and forefinger, attempting to get the blood to flow.

“That’s the best rub I’ve had in a long time,” said Monty when the medic finally succeeded.

“What a jerk,” the medic hissed nervously. The guard chuckled.

After a botched hearing test, the medic administered a color-blind test, instructing Monty to decipher the number in each of a series of cards filled with a maze of multi-colored bubbles. He identified several of the numbers correctly but refused to name the last.

“Why?” said the medic, fed up with the antics.

“Because it’s a poor example of this number,” Monty answered. “I studied calligraphy and I know how it should be written: it should be closed at the top, not open like this.”

“Just answer the damn question,” the medic said.

“Okay, four.”

Next he was told to answer yes or no to a long list of questions about various medical conditions. For each question, he asked for enough additional clarification so that he could answer yes, one of the tactics he’s planned to employ.

“Do you vomit?”

“Do you mean do I ever vomit?."

“Right.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any growths on your body?”

“What size?”

“Any damn size!”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever suffered uncontrolled bleeding?”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

“Like from my nose?”

“I don’t give a damn from where.”

“Yes.”

More questions followed. Finally the medic asked, “Do you have homosexual tendencies?”

“What do you mean tendencies? Like do you mean do I tend in that way, or have I actually done it, or what?”

“God damn it,” the medic shouted. “Are you or aren't you?”

“Yes.”

The physical exam complete, Monty was left in a waiting area. For the first time since he’d been escorted out of the auditorium he found himself with other inductees. They looked like sheep, he thought, wandering around and huddled together in groups, terrified but ignorant of their approaching slaughter. He walked up to one group and began as before to lecture them on castration and tell them not to cooperate. An officer heard him and shouted, “Come over here.” “No,” Monty replied. “I’m not in the army so don’t order me around.”

To prevent him from talking to the other inductees, a group of guards crowded around him and asked questions like, do you like football or baseball? Monty stuck to his theme. One of the men, an innocent looking fellow not more than a year or two older than Monty, came closer to him and, with imploring sincerity, said quietly, “Really, nobody here’d do that to you. You don’t need to worry.”

Soon his guard returned and Monty was escorted to an office where two doctors were seated, one at a desk reading from a file, evidently the boy's. The man’s face tightened as he started to recite the list of medical conditions.

“What do you mean you vomit? What kind of vomit?” he asked.

“Vomit vomit. You know, blekh,” Monty answered, feigning a gagging sound.

“What do you mean you have a growth? What kind of growth?”

“I have a small growth on my right shoulder that my mother’s always fondling and saying I should have cut off. Would you like to touch it?”

“Jerk,” scowled the doctor, looking at his associate, perhaps a psychiatrist.

After asking a few more questions, the doctor turned to the other man and, holding up the file, said “All this for a clod!”

Without hesitating, Monty smiled at the doctor and asked, “Have you ever read William Blake’s poem ‘The Clod and the Pebble’? It tells how a clod is every bit just as important as a pebble.”

While his interpretation of Blake’s words may have been somewhat skewed, the poem was for real. He was so hyped up by all that had passed, so full of himself, his mind running furiously, the doctor’s words had instantly brought the poem to mind.

Exasperated, the doctor threw the file at him and, making a final attempt to intimidate the teenager, growled, “I’m going to make it so that you can never get into the armed forces, and I bet that’s just what you want.”

“Of course that’s what I want,” Monty replied calmly, smiling at the doctor.

“Take this asshole for follow-up counseling,” the man said after calling in the guard. “Just get him out of here.”

The guard led him down another hallway to a reception area for a facility run by the county where counselors provided advice and follow-up references to inductees rejected for serious medical or psychiatric conditions. While Monty was waiting to see a counselor, the sergeant walked up to two secretaries and whispered behind his hand, in his thick Southern drawl, “Want to see a PC-3?”

Monty called him over and asked, “What’s a PC-3?” After pondering the question for a few moments, the guard replied, “Well, there are PC-4s.”

Later, after Monty assured the county counselor, who turned out to be a friend of the director of the poverty program he was working for, that he didn’t have a serious psychiatric problem, he agreed to follow up on his blood pressure. His guard then escorted him out of the building.

Monty went to a nearby phone booth and called his parents. Traveling in Europe when his fateful decision to study part time led to his being called up for the draft, they had been extremely upset, and were now greatly relieved by the news. Their son, however, fell into a bout of mild depression lasting several weeks, filled with remorse at having so aggressively, even brutally, manipulated so many people. Nevertheless, he was alive.

Patina of Decay

2010-06-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

Illustrations by Ben Ze Wang

“ITALIANS ALWAYS GET LOST looking for my B&B because they insist on using their GPS phones instead of following the directions on my website,” said Mattia, a short, attractive, knowledgeable (and strongly opinionated) man in his 30s. He and his family continue to live in the old city, along with a rapidly declining number of other natives, rather than moving to the far less expensive and far more convenient mainland. In Venice everything must be shipped in, hand carted and carried along narrow streets and over numerous bridges. That and the rot – no wonder it’s an expensive city.

I’d mentioned to Mattia that Google Maps shows the wrong location for his B&B, indeed for the prominent nearby vaporetto stop Ca d’Oro itself, where we’d arrived the day before (a day earlier than planned, having shifted one night from Florence to Venice, a good move). “Yes, I know,” said Mattia. “I’ve tried to get Google to correct it a number of times. Nothing’s changed.” I’d noticed that many European locations are misidentified in Google Maps, particularly in Italy. But Italy itself seems to specialize in confusing signs and directions. As Ben had said several times in Rome, they need to hire Hong Kong to redo the signage in their subway system. They could hire Hong Kong to redo and rationalize everything in the country, but then it wouldn’t be Italy anymore, where chaos is one of the charms.

Following Mattia’s directions carefully, we had no problem when we arrived in Venice finding the B&B from Ca d’Oro, the fourth vaporetto stop from the train station. We walked 15 meters or so from there to Strada Nuova, a busy street running through the Cannaregio district, and from there only another 75 or 100 meters to the gate of our residence, in a quiet area between two canals. Mattia had written an email saying he would be away when we arrived but gave us the code to the gate. It opened and we stepped into a handsome small garden filled with white climbing clematis and the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Mattia hadn’t left yet and was sitting at a desk in his small office, behind him a view of a bridge crossing a narrow canal. He apologized that our room had a view of the garden rather than the canal. We didn’t care; we were already totally enraptured with the B&B, the garden, Venice, Mattia.

As with Rome, my memories of last visiting Venice, over 40 years previously, were sketchy and misaligned with present experience. My longtime partner and I had arrived on a cold, late fall day in 1969. We were traveling very modestly in those days and had only gone to Venice on a whim, having had enough of the Yugoslav freighter we’d been on for nearly a month, from New York to ports in North Africa, Spain and Italy. Trieste was the last port of call before the ship completed its voyage in the northern Yugoslav port city of Rijeka. We got off in Trieste and took the train to Venice, without reservations or plans of any sort. I recall our staying only a few days, at a barebones damp pensione. Venice itself was damp, cold and nearly devoid of tourists.

This time, all these years later, the city was warm, sunny and teeming with tourists. But the crowds were no problem. Besides a little time devoted to the obligatory, mobbed but worthwhile sites of Piazza San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale and the Basilica of San Marco, the rest of the time is best spent getting delightfully lost, wandering in the back streets of the outer districts, far away from the crowds, sitting and sipping prosecco and eating stuzzichini (tapas) at outdoor cafés, chatting with one’s neighbors and watching the boats pass by.

The best travel experiences often arise out of serendipity, like who’s sitting next to you in a restaurant. Our first dinner in Venice our neighbors were a young Canadian couple visiting from Cambridge, England, where he was completing his law doctorate and she was teaching English as a second language. The four of us were very animated, sharing stories of our travels and the pleasures of the various foods we’d ordered, particularly the roasted artichokes and peppers, Ben’s superbly spicy bucatini Amatriciana (thick spaghetti-like noodles with a sauce made from onions, tomatoes and Italian bacon), and my spaghetti with squid ink. I was embarrassed when everyone kidded me that much of the area inside and around my mouth had turned black, but then on heading to the bathroom I saw several other, Italian diners with the same mark of distinction. Squid ink.

On the last day in Venice I visited the Peggy Guggenheim collection, displayed in her former mansion, an 18th century palazzo that had not been constructed beyond its first floor, its completion blocked perhaps by the powerful Carrèr family, whose view from their own palazzo across the canal would have been impeded. What a fortunate mishap – another of life’s endless serendipities – for the resulting low-slung Guggenheim looks almost contemporary, Art Deco-like, a fitting home for one of the world’s finest collections of 20th century art. The Carrèrs, by the way, also have a museum named after them, in Piazza San Marco: one well worth visiting for the rich assortment of maps, artifacts and paintings all depicting the history of glorious Venice.

Ben and I were particularly amused by one of many paintings showing a richly detailed map of Venice – Venetians seem obsessed with the unique layout of their archipelagic city-state. The painting also featured scores of the republic’s then leading citizens – bankers, merchants, politicians, soldiers – each individual numbered and identified in a catalogue that forms the bottom area of the painting. With meticulous care – obsession – Venice was elaborated and transformed into a power that long ruled the world’s pocketbook and still rules its heart.

Capping it Off in Lombardy

I’D INCLUDED MANTUA (Mantova) in our itinerary, thinking it would provide a respite from busy travel before we left Italy for Paris. Online I’d found what promised to be a handsome B&B with a private garden, a large room and, according to its website, a splendid breakfast. Instead we found a mosquito infested garden (not part of the B&B itself), a room without its own bathroom (despite my having specifically requested one), and a breakfast without any distinctive character.

The town was sleepy and restful, so much so that Ben didn’t fancy it from the moment we arrived, especially coming after the delights of Venice. Long ruled by the powerful Gonzaga family, Mantua juts out into a lake in a flat squarish bit of land surrounded by water on three sides, evidently easily defendable in the Middle Ages and now featuring extensive waterside walkways popular with bicyclists and joggers (and mosquitoes). The city’s two main attractions are the two palaces of the Gonzaga family, one medieval in the town center, and the other the Palazzo Te, a captivating 16th century idyll of the high Renaissance, with huge gardens and large halls featuring giant frescoes portraying mythic scenes as fanciful as anything seen these days in 3-D animation. On the way to visiting the palazzo, our camera got lost, adding to the mood of disappointment already felt with the B&B. So we cut short our stay to one night and left early the next morning for Milan.

I should add a note that Mantua seems to have exceptionally good food. We had a superb lunch our first day at a cozy place run by a father-and-daughter team, the former the cook and the latter the hostess. (I think they were father and daughter.) We ordered two local types of pasta, one with donkey meat and the other a somewhat sweet ravioli stuffed with squash – and took a generous portion from the antipasto buffet of artichokes, peppers, cheeses and meats. In addition, our hostess graciously offered us at no charge samples of a specialty sausage made with cheese and meat, and after dinner, a local type of crumbly pastry called sbrisolona, served with a strong bitter digestif called Amaro Lucano.

Not part of our original plans other than a quick transfer from the train station to the airport, the following one-night stay in Milan was an unexpected treat, albeit a rushed one. Our friend Albarosa, whose lengthy annual trip to Italy overlapped with our own, thought she would be too busy with a family celebration that weekend in Milan to see us. But she managed to meet us at the train station, happily waving to us from the far end. She led us to a nearby hotel where she’d secured a handsome room for a surprisingly low cost for this city. After checking in, we took the subway to see the Duomo, perhaps the most grand and imposing cathedral in Italy (other than the grotesquely ornate Vatican’s San Pietro, of course). Next we went to the huge often-pictured covered shopping arcade, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where in need of a rest I had a milkshake at McDonalds! Even McDonalds was required to feature the mall’s distinctive black and gold coloring. Wandering off on my own, I found a hat shop on a street near the square in front of the cathedral.

All through Italy I’d been seeking out hat shops in hopes of replacing the now well worn cap I’ve traveled with for many years and in all corners of the earth. From my pre-trip investigations I’d learned that the company identified in the tag had evidently made the cap’s fabric – a soft, unusually pliable blend of cotton, linen and silk – but not the cap itself. I’d bought it at Bernie Utz, a great hat shop in Seattle, but they could no longer locate its type, an unusual golf cap that folds conveniently in quarters and has an attractive, unusually narrow brim. Sadly, I’d failed to find anything remotely like it in Rome, Florence or Venice, though in the latter I did buy a colorful Italian cap made of cotton, but not as lightweight or malleable as my old favorite. Surely someplace in Italy must have similar caps; surely in Milan, the world fashion capital.

The hat shop I found was very traditional looking, with high, dark wooden shelving filled with hats of all sizes and types. The late-middle-aged salesmen had probably been there all their working lives. They looked over my cap approvingly, declaring they’d never seen one quite like it. They agreed with my conclusion that I should try to get it cleaned and repaired, its shape having collapsed after so much loving use. Other than the contemporary stylish side of Milan (which I’d like to explore), the cap is a little like Italy itself – endearing for the very patina of its decay.

Medieval Showers

2010-06-24T20:52:00.000-07:00

Photos and illustrations by Ben Ze Wang

THANK HEAVENS the heavens didn’t open up into a tremendous downpour until later in the afternoon, after we’d strolled through a ravine leading down gently from the historical center of Siena. The owner of our B&B had suggested we go to the ravine, giving us only the name of the road leading to it. So we were surprised to find there a model medieval farm, complete with a large herb garden and unusual looking chickens, turkeys and goats. Everything in the heart of Siena is medieval, more so I understand than any other remaining major Italian city. Thanks to the Black Plague (in retrospect only), Siena was so utterly devastated that its development halted, leaving Florence to predominate in Tuscany, and leaving Siena looking pretty much just as it had, in the 14th and 15th centuries.

We arrived the day before at the nondescript modern Siena train station two hours late, having missed by 30 seconds our train connection at a small town, once a major Etruscan center, mid-way from Rome; in exasperation we watched as the two-car train headed down the tracks. Though not comparable to the plague, this misfortune had its own silver lining: we had to take a bus the rest of the way, traveling through several ancient hilltop hamlets and towns and through Tuscany’s seemingly endless rolling hills covered with fields of wheat. Here, we realized, is the source of all that great pasta. And none of this would we have seen from the train.

We took a cab from the station to our small B&B, located up five flights of stairs (no elevator) in a building at the edge of Siena’s historic center. After checking in and washing up, we toured the town, including the famous Piazza del Campo, thought by some to be the most beautiful plaza in Italy, as if one needs to measure and compare. There we sat at a cafe, me drinking prosecco and Ben sketching the vista. Siena is so charming I won’t begin to describe it. Just go!

The gracious proprietor of our B&B takes pride in running a genuine inn, where we were treated to a breakfast thoughtfully consisting of local foods, including a piquant preserve made from tomatoes grown by her mother, a medieval-style onion preserve, pungent local cheeses, and a medieval-style bacon. As our innkeeper explained, Siena is having a “renaissance” of things medieval. Hence the onion preserve and bacon, and hence the model farm.

Walking further along the ravine past the farm, we found a bench and, sitting there, ate the picnic foods we’d bought an hour or so earlier at the old central market: fresh raw-milk pecorino, roasted pork with crispy skin and succulent flesh, sweet freshly picked strawberries, and two kinds of healthy bread made by a young woman who had set up a, yes, medieval style bakery in a small town some distance from Siena. Ben found the bread overly dry. But one goes to Italy for the pasta, not the bread.

We spent two nights in Siena and due to the rain never managed to go to any museums or up the famous tower in the Piazza del Campo (the highest secular tower in Italy), but that was just fine: exploring the town and enjoying its relative quiet and peacefulness were all we needed. (We did go into the duomo, the cathedral, which on the outside Ben thought overly ornate and complicated, with its strongly contrasting horizontal strips of green and white marble. But on the inside, aided perhaps by the relative darkness, these multiple colors and the multiple shapes take more singular form. It’s stunning.)

From the farm we found our way to another site our innkeeper had recommended, again not knowing quite what to expect. It turned out be an exceptionally narrow lane, narrower even than any I’d in the once-Moorish towns of Andalusia, with a cobblestone path and pretty red flowers hanging from baskets and set on window ledges. Our innkeeper later explained that this street, and one other, were the most originally medieval to be found in Siena. The lane was so narrow and shadowed by the buildings clutching it from either side that moss grew on the coblestones, becoming slippery and hazardous once it started to rain. Which it did.

At first it showered lightly and Ben found shelter in a tunnel, happily beginning to sketch the scene. I headed off for a coffee and pastry, but the rain began to fall so hard that I headed back instead, at full speed, to our B&B to retrieve our umbrellas. Of course I got very lost on the way, and very wet. Once there I changed to dry clothes and set off to rescue Ben. This time I studied our map carefully and found an embarrassingly direct route. Understanding the sun’s path, Ben has no problem finding his way hither and yonder. I am always yonder; it’s in my genes.

Light at the End of the Hallway

ALONG WITH OTHERS of our friends, we were not charmed by Florence as a city, especially after Siena and Rome. In Florence one cannot get away from the tourist crowds. Nevertheless, we were charmed by the art and, again, by the food.

Ben was particularly impressed with the Uffizi gallery, where he could spend time looking carefully at so many of the paintings and sculptures he had studied at university. We’d gotten separated and I went through the gallery faster, having seen all these works before and feeling overwhelmed by the crowd, though not as overwhelmed or rushed as in the Vatican. In the Uffizi, one at least can see the end of the hallways. Later in the day we toured the Accademia, Ben dismissing outright my suggestion that David’s hand was out of proportion with his body; no master would ever do that, Ben argued, explaining that an open hand is the same size as one’s face. I wonder if other anatomical features can be so formulaically calibrated.

We stayed in a handsomely attired B&B overlooking the old market square with the famous statue of the boar, its nose polished bright over the centuries by hundreds of thousands, millions, of admiring visitors. The square was extremely noisy at night, tavern and restaurant revelers howling until quite late. Always travel with earplugs.

We did eat well in Florence, however. The first night we tried to get into a restaurant called Quattro Leoni, recommended by our B&B, but it was fully reserved. So I made a reservation for the next night and chatted with the manager, asking her to recommend someplace else for us to go to. She gave us the address of a new place, along the Arno river, which she said was very popular with locals. She hadn’t mentioned, though, that the restaurant’s specialty is hamburgers, very expensive hamburgers and very popular with the chic clientele. It turns out that one of the three owners runs the city’s main slaughterhouse and supplies the restaurant with the best meat. Ben and I opted for salads and a bowl of large ravioli, but when I looked across at a neighboring table’s steak tartare, I gave in to the urge and ordered carpaccio, which was very good indeed. But not as memorable as the next night’s dinner at Quattro Leoni, where I had a large dishful of exceptionally fresh, gently sauteed fried octopus in some sort of pink sauce, pink perhaps from the octopus itself.

Later, after strolling for awhile, we stopped at a heralded gelateria and got two tiny cups filled with chocolate, berry, hazel nut ice creams and gelati and an unearthly blend of berries and citrus fruits, Florence evidently deserving its reputation for having the best gelati in Italy: it should have a room of its own in the Uffizi. And what should we see while walking back to our B&B, gelati in hand? A large chalk painting on the ground of the Madonna and Child with . . .

Roman Holiday – 2010

2010-06-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Photos and illustrations by Ben Ze Wang

ONLY SKETCHY IMAGES remained from my last visit to Rome, forty years previously nearly to the day: the Coliseum, Roman Forum, Villa Borghese park, and a restaurant in a basement near the Spanish Steps, where I ate my first pasta in Italy, spaghetti alla carbonara, the first bite of which led me to exclaim ecstatically that never before in my life had I eaten real pasta. But for whatever reason, Fellini films perhaps, I retained a memory of Rome as a grand, bustling, sophisticated metropolis, not unlike Paris. Not so: Rome is low-slung, warmly multicolored, pleasantly anarchic, and oddly (given its ancient history) not imperial – more like an overgrown town really. Even the long and celebrated shopping street via del Corso is very narrow, and there are no long vistas as in Paris, radiating from central axes, but instead many unevenly paved streets that seem to wander here and there, aimlessly.

Our first two days in Rome, excitement trumping jetlag, Ben and I took long walks around the city, resting in its many befountained squares, saving museums until the next two days when we would use our Rome Museum Pass. The pass includes the Coliseum and Roman Forum, and these we toured on our third day. At one point in the Forum, Ben began to cry, so deeply moved he was by the stark beauty of the monumental marble ruins in their now somewhat weedy, overgrown setting.

Of late Ben has been sketching a lot, honing up on his illustration skills; but unfortunately by the time we finished our tour and he’d selected a site to draw, the sun faced against us, we were famished, and feared restaurants would soon close. So at the city end of the Forum we climbed two staircases at the top of which, according to the ubiquitous Rick Steeves, there’s a shortcut leading to the upper terrace of the Vittorio Emmanuel Memorial, with a great view overlooking the city – and, more critically at that moment, in close proximity to two restaurants I’d noted earlier in Vancouver, when I compiled city-by-city to-do lists. Alas, the authorities had evidently been reading Rick, too (Ben calls him Rickie Steevie), or were concerned by shortcutters like us, and the secret passage was bolted shut. Luckily we found another route, desperate to get somewhere to eat as quickly as possible. But when we passed the Coliseum metro station, I suddenly said let’s take the subway and go instead to a place I’d also noted, two hungry metro stops away, in the city’s southern section, the Testaccio, a somewhat louche area long home to Rome’s many slaughterhouses. Ben was irked (it was actually the fourth time I’d changed “our” mind about where to eat lunch that day), but all moods turned to heaven once we got to the restaurant and bit into our first course.

Rickie Steevie and others lavish praise on a particular trattoria in Testaccio, but I’d noticed its low ratings in a listing of restaurants for that district – and from Romans, not Steeves or other tourii. So instead we headed to another place, Felice a Testaccio – felice a name meaning happy or pleased in Italian – which had very positive ratings. After seating us, our waiter said there was no menu: I am the menu, he announced, proceeding to tell us exactly what to order. Fortunately we obeyed. And Ben underwent his second cry of the day, this time not from viewing ancient marble but from taking his first bite of tonnarelli cacio e pepe, a deceptively simple Roman dish made from a long, squarish-sort of fresh egg pasta, lots of butter and Pecorino Romano, Parmesan, very finely ground pepper, and the secret ingredient – pasta cooking water. Ben’s taste buds reacted as mine had all those years ago when I first bit into the spaghetti carbonara.

Our other shared pasta, large ravioli alla Romana, was also exceptional, but the tonnarelli was the well deserved house special. When I asked if they used green peppercorns to make it, since I thought it had a slightly greenish cast, the waiter looked at me askance and walked away, returning seconds later with a sample of the ground pepper, which he placed into the palm of my hand. Made from black pepper alright, it smelled of the divine. (Note to self: find source in Vancouver!) Outside it’s black, our waiter explained, but inside it’s – grayish, greenish, or I don’t know: what is the color of manna?

Our second course consisted of grilled vegetables – fantastico! especially the peperonata, which was red and thick and juicy, like Sophia Loren's lips – and saltimbocca alla Romana with an ever so slightly lemony sauce, as seductive as tonnarelli or Sophia. Though supremely satisfied and stuffed, we forced ourselves to share a small glassful of deadly rich tiramisu and a tastier semi-frozen (demi-frizzante) parfait topped with candied bits of almond. Our waiter asked which we liked better and was pleased when we said the semifreddo, also a house specialty.

Felice incarnate, we staggered out of the restaurant and walked back toward the Centro Historico along the Tiber River embankment, eventually reaching a simple, handsome 8th century brick church, in front of which, under a portico, a long line of tourists and locals waited to stick their hands into that infamous carved disc, the Mouth of Truth. This we didn’t need, having just eaten ultimate truth. Instead we walked further, past the ancient synagogue in the old Jewish ghetto and across a little island to Trastevere, the neighborhood “across the Tiber” (trastevere), where we strolled along one of its many narrow, unevenly cobbled streets, watching as ominous black clouds quickly filled what had only moments before been a sunny blue sky. Nearly every afternoon of our five in Rome featured a thundershower.

We reached the sanctuary of Trastevere’s main church just as a tumultuous downpour let loose. Stuffed, overwhelmed by truth, we sat on a pew and both fell happily asleep . . . until a preacher started to preach and we were supposed to stand; so we left. The shower had lightened and we walked back to where we'd seen a tramway and hopped aboard the next car, which unfortunately reached the end of its line only a few stops later, just as the thundershower struck again, with even greater fury. We dashed across the street and took shelter in a recessed porch, along with 40 or so other people from all corners of the earth. Those nearest the exit onto the street were repeatedly approached by street vendors selling collapsible umbrellas. I am convinced that throughout Italy, Spain, France, the North Pole, everywhere, the moment rain begins to fall, tens of thousands of East Indians suddenly appear, selling umbrellas of similar plaid colors and similar dubious quality.

When the rain let up, we crossed the street and made our way to a bus stop, where using my by-now effective fake Italian I asked a middle-aged lady how to get to the railway terminus. She answered in Italian (which I understand even if I don't, thanks to my friend Albarosa’s dear late mother, who would unhesitatingly speak to me in Italian even though she knew I knew barely a word). After a jostling ride, we arrived at the terminal and walked the two blocks to our B&B.

THE NEXT DAY we used our passes to tour the Galleria Borghese, where we both enjoyed Bernini’s sensual sculptures, with their fleshy twists and turns. Next we visited two branches of Rome’s national museum, populated by countless Roman artifacts and Latin inscriptions. Sated by the archaic, we headed back to Testaccio, our hearts and stomachs set on revisiting Felice, hoping for a repeat of what, three weeks later, we agreed was the stellar meal of our trip, only to find that it was fully reserved. Indeed, the restaurant is so popular we’d only gotten in the day before because we’d arrived so late for lunch, even by Mediterranean standards. Disappointed, we walked the two blocks to the place Steeves and others recommend, which for legal reasons shall here remain nameless. And there, we had by far the single worst meal of our entire trip, heaven turning to hell. I should have clued into the empty tables and their red-and-white checked plastic tablecloths, certain signs of “stay away.” Ben ordered roast lamb, craving the dish he’d seen others eating at Felice. Here it turned out to be all fat and bone. When at last I complained to the owner, a thin, dour woman reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the West, she sneered at us and walked away to the kitchen, returning with a small plate of more roast lamb, which she flung onto the table, saying, “Okaaaay?” That night I wrote an indignant email to Rick Steeves’s website informing them of our misadventure. I heralded in contrast our meal at the nearby Felice, which later I regretted doing, fearing that popularity and fame inevitably lead to decline and fall – something Romans ought to know a thing or two about.

Our last day in the Eternal City, imagining Felice again not that other place, I convinced a doubting Ben that we go yet again to Testaccio, but this time to get panini at a deli we’d noticed on both prior adventures in that neighborhood. Following my usual pattern, I ordered too many ingredients and also inadvertently received too many slices of two types of flat, jelly filled pastry. We toted the heavy bag to two open-air street markets, one in Testaccio itself and the other the famous Campo dei Fiori market in the old Jewish ghetto, close to the Piazza Navona. The markets disappointed Ben, who’d imagined vast lively congregations of food and people. Although I would have stayed longer to investigate the varieties of zucchini flowers, honeys, herbs, and pastas, I was growing worried that Ben should have his passport in hand when we went to our reserved Vatican Museum tour that afternoon; the confirmation clearly stated that official ID was required. Tired, hungry, we returned to our hotel room and solemnly ate our overly-stuffed panini.

After a short nap, we took the subway to the stop nearest the Vatican, there joining the hordes of tourists crowding the main avenue leading to St. Peter’s Square, discovering on arrival that the security gates one must first pass through to enter the square had been closed. We turned around and went back along the Vatican walls to the museum entrance, arriving there half an hour before our reservation, only to learn our arrival time didn’t make any difference; nor were our IDs requested.

What can one say about the Vatican Museum. It’s big? I had a memory of it, too, from 40 years prior: long endless hallways filled with vast hordes of stuff that only a Vatican could afford over the centuries to horde – this, an accurate memory. As Ben noted (along with remarking which generals or senators he found more attractive), the countless Roman statutes, far more infinitely countless than those in the national museum and packed tightly together, stacked one atop the other, were also of higher quality. But as with the innumerable tapestries, endless frescoes, ceaseless ornate floors, infinite trompe l’oeil ceilings, and swarms of tourists in the Sistine Chapel ignoring the guards repeatedly shouting, “Silenzio!” “No Flash!” – and even as with Michaelangelo’s humongous ceiling itself – it’s all too God damned endless.

After surviving the museum, we walked across a bridge back into the city proper and headed to the Piazza Navona, which I also recalled from long ago, with much fondness. Ben sat down on a step and proceeded to draw. I proceeded to a cafe, where I ordered an overpriced bottle of sparkling water, an overpriced can of limonata, and an even more overpriced glass of prosecco, figuring them to be, as most seasoned travelers will appreciate, rent for the aspect and the comfort. There I lounged for nearly an hour, slowly sipping my overpriced beverages and gazing at Bernini’s fountain, just a few meters in front of my table, and at a busker, half his body painted in vine-like green and brown strips, the rest covered with an herbaceous costume and headdress, who repeated the same routine again and again, a crystal ball rolling down his arm and mysteriously reappearing in his uplifted palm. After the late afternoon light had dimmed, I rejoined Ben and commented favorably on his drawing, with which he of course was not satisfied. We walked a few blocks to Ristorante Pizzeria da Francesco, on the small Piazza del Fico, where on an earlier day we’d had a delicious lunch and noted that the place was favored by locals – a good sign. Here Ben finally had a satisfactory dish of roast lamb, and I had by now my third (also satisfactory if not as stellar as Felice’s) version of tonnarelli cacio e pepe. After a leisurely repast, we returned to the Piazza Navona and from there leisurely strolled through Rome’s colorful narrow streets, warmly lit as if by candlelight, crowded in the late evening with animated diners, locals and foreigners alike, like us all delighting in la dolce vita.

Overkill

2009-08-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

May 1968. France paralyzed by largest general strike to hit a modern European nation. Soviet army rapidly approaching Czechoslovakia to crush Prague Spring and restore oppressive regime. U.S. riots following Martin Luther King assassination subside; unrest against war in Vietnam heats up.

On a warm sunny day in late spring, Monty stood with his friends Gordon and Sue at a street corner in San Francisco. A large crowd had gathered, waiting for Robert F. Kennedy to arrive any moment for one of the many whistle-stop appearances he would make in his final hectic swing through California before its historic June 4 primary, the winner poised to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Monty had flown to San Francisco from Oregon to visit his friends before heading down to Monterey to attend a summer immersion program in Russian. The three had arrived at the corner by chance after coming back from picnicking in Golden Gate Park, still stoned from the hashish brownies they’d eaten.

Gordon and Monty had been best friends in high school. Both were leaders in the Young Democrats, a powerful volunteer organization. When Gordon was running to succeed Monty as president of their local club, his opponent spread a rumor that the two were homosexual lovers. As a spoof, Monty’s girlfriend at the time, a well-endowed girl with a “reputation,” accompanied him to a party the club had organized dressed in a tight T-shirt silk-screened to look like a man’s tuxedo. Gordon, who wasn’t remotely gay, was visibly embarrassed. Monty thought it rather droll – and secretly he was gay, though he’d never had a crush on Gordon. Despite the rumor, Gordon won the election. And later, Monty dropped out of politics.

Sue, the other friend at the street corner, attended the same private college in Portland as Monty. Short and stocky, she grew up in Taiwan and moved to the Bay Area during her last year of junior high school. She was brilliant, tough, and destined to become a highly paid corporate lawyer. She was attracted to her friend but suspected he was queer. They went to rock concerts and occasionally danced together, but nothing more.

Monty was dressed in his customary “look at me” style – a chartreuse and purple gypsy-like puffy-sleeved paisley shirt a friend had made for him, orange bull-bottom trousers tight at the hips, and ankle-high boots with heels that added two extra inches to his already tall height. The outfit plus his shaggy hair and droopy mustache made him look every bit the hippie he wasn’t. Real hippies didn’t travel by airplane or go to private colleges that cost thousands of dollars a year.

The candidate was running two hours late. The crowd, many sporting Kennedy buttons and holding up placards, grew restless. Monty didn’t like Kennedy. Yes, he’d finally come out against the war in Vietnam, but he supported his brother when the president first sent troops there. He also played a central role in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. And earlier in his career, albeit briefly, he worked with the odious Roy Cohn as an assistant counsel in Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt, an unforgivable sin in Monty’s eyes.

But when he suddenly shouted at the top of his opera-trained lungs, “WHERE IS THE FASCIST PIG?” he wasn’t thinking politics. He was just stoned.

Stoned or not, when the middle-aged woman next to him dressed in a canary yellow pants suit opened her mouth so wide in shock at his words her jaw seemed to reach the bottom of her heavy turquoise necklace, he began to feel a little sheepish. And when the crowd opened a circle around him and a man in a tight three-piece white suit, his face flushed as much from drinking at a nearby pub as by his anger at the garishly dressed youth’s curse, growled, “God damn hippie punk,” Monty lost his nerve. “Let’s get out of her,” he said. His marijuana haze rapidly evaporating, he quickly disappeared with his friends into the crowd.

From the sidelines they watched as Kennedy finally arrived. His handlers helped him up onto an open flatbed truck, where he gave his standard stump speech about restoring morality and purpose to America. Monty stared at Kennedy’s campaign-exhausted face, feeling sorry for the man, thinking he looked waxen, almost as if dead. And five days later, shot by an assassin, he was.

A couple of weeks into his Russian program, Monty sat drinking tea at a café in Monterey. Someone had left a copy of Time lying on the seat next to him. Leafing through the pages he came across the magazine’s lead essay, condemning the nation’s hostile environment. “Verbal overkill,” it went on, had in effect led to Kennedy’s assassination. Reading it quickly, Monty was shaken to find that the editorial identified him in all but name.

Inflammatory to unstable minds is the rising hyperbole of U.S. political debate. Race, Viet Nam, crime – all lend themselves to verbal overkill, not so much by candidates as by extremists: the John Birchers, the Rap Browns, the most ardent war critics, the Ku Kluxers. The evidence is everywhere. In Dallas, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander snarls on a TV show: “Earl Warren shouldn’t be impeached – he should be hanged.” Cries Rap brown: “How many whites did you kill today?” Lyndon Johnson is routinely excoriated as a mass murderer. Robert Kennedy was branded by San Francisco hippies as a “fascist pig.” Eventually verbal assassination becomes physical assassination. – TIME, Essay, June 14, 1968 [Italics added]

Monty hadn’t meant any harm by his words. He was just stoned – stoned and full of himself. Full of himself! The very same “I am” the Zen master had told him the year before was the cause of war. How could he so hate the war, so hate violence, but be its creator as well? Too full of himself to even begin to penetrate this painful question, he would blithely continue on to his next joint, his next fantasy, his next episode.

© G S Sirotnik 2009. All rights reserved.

Love Changes Face – 5

2009-07-30T17:31:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 4

“I wonder WHERE Chen and Song Wei are,” says Wu Ming, referring to the overdue couple.

“You know what they’re like. After seven years together they still can’t stop fucking long enough to get out of the house,” says the TV producer.

“You ought to know, auntie,” says Wu Ming, flicking more ashes from his cigarette. “I hear you phone Song Wei every night and talk to him for hours.”

While the bantering continues, Shan tells Monty that Song Wei is a successful corporate executive, tall, masculine, and strikingly handsome. He shared a pied-à-terre with his gay stepfather before meeting Chen. He also used to own a bar where Wu Ming briefly worked. And it was there one night that they both first met Chen, the owner of an import-export company.

When their waiter delivers a large plate of frogs roasted with onions, garlic and heaps of Sichuan pepper seeds, Hai immediately picks up one of them with his chopsticks, dangling it in the air. “Look at how long these legs are,” he says, jamming the frog into his mouth.

“Speaking of long, take a look at Hai’s fingers,” says Wu Ming. “For such a short chubby guy you sure have long fingers. Is anything else of yours so unusually long?”

“You should ask,” Hai snaps back.

“What do you do with such long fingers, anyway?” asks Wu Ming.

“Mo pai!” answers Hai. “You’re an expert at mo pai, aren’t you, Wu Ming?”

Again, Shan has to explain to Monty why everyone suddenly laughs. Mo pai is a term used in mahjong when a player nimbly lifts a tile off the table and pulls it toward himself. In gay slang it means groping someone’s cock.

“I don’t know anything about mo pai,” Wu Ming says, sneering at his would-be (but actual) competitor. “I leave all the games to you.”

Other customers are now looking over at the table, grown noticeably louder and with Wu Ming and Jian blatantly caressing each other. They and their friends have been banned from several restaurants already, and the headwaiters watch the party nervously, making sure the remaining dishes arrive quickly. These include a dried smoked duck, chicken with garlic and green peppers, cold sliced beef boiled with a peppery oil and topped with ground sesame seeds, and a large, succulent stewed fish resting on a bed of delicately steamed soybean sprouts.

Just as the last course is crammed onto the table, Chen finally shows up – not with his lover, Song Wei, however, but with a guy who looks no older than nineteen or twenty and turns out to be a college student. No one asks about the missing lover, though no doubt everyone’s curious. Have the two split up? Is Chen playing on the side?

The dinner continues with more drinking and bitchy jabs at one another, the restaurant staff growing ever more anxious to see the party leave. Shan tries to ignore the goings-on, barely concealing his unease. When everyone finishes eating, they talk about which bar they’ll go to and, choosing one not far away, press Shan and Monty into joining them.

Wu Ming calls for the bill, but when it arrives Shan fights with Chen in the customary tussle Chinese diners engage in over who will pay. Finally, Shan grabs the bill out of Chen’s hand and pays one of the headwaiters.

FOUR DAYS LATER, a day before the two visitors are scheduled to leave Chongqing and tour neighboring Sichuan, Wu Ming phones Shan on his cell phone and excitedly asks if he’s heard the news.

“No,” says Shan. “What news?”

“Song Wei,” says Wu Ming, out of breath. “It’s all over the newspapers and TV. He was arrested a week ago for murdering some guy . . . eighteen years ago! That’s why Song Wei wasn’t at dinner. Can you believe it? And all this time poor Chen knew nothing. Seven whole years together and he didn’t have a clue.”

“Good heavens,” says Shan. “Did Chen already know about it at dinner?”

“Yes, but he was too embarrassed to tell us. He’d only just found out the day before and was afraid the news would get out. It did. But the news hasn’t reported what really happened.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I can’t believe it. Apparently the guy was crazy about Song Wei and threatened to tell his employer he was gay if he didn’t take up with him. Desperate he’d be found out, I guess, and lose his job, Song Wei killed the guy with a knife, cut up the body and buried the pieces in different places.”

“How did the police find out?” asks Shan.

“Song Wei’s stepfather saw it all because he came into their apartment just after Song Wei finished cutting up the body. But the stepfather never told anyone. Then he got really drunk a couple of weeks ago, started crying and spilled out the story to a friend, who called the police. The police arrested Song Wei and forced him to show them where he’d buried the body parts. It’s incredible! I guess he’s going to jail for life.”

“Hmm,” Shan grunts. “Song Wei’s rich enough to get out of being shot. Still, it’s a shock.”

But why the great surprise that a secret is so long-held in a land where much of so many lives is concealed, and where the fear of exposure remains so compelling and face must be maintained at any cost? And is it really so different, after all, in the West? How many of us have been shocked to discover that someone very close to us, a partner even – like the wife in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier – has long concealed a dark secret? For that matter, what do we really know about ourselves? Have we, too, worn a mask for so long, hiding the truth even from ourselves, that we no longer know who we really are?

The rest of the day, cell phone calls bounce back and forth among Wu Ming’s tight-knit group of friends, each speculating about what happened and what will happen next. They’re worried about Chen, especially if his relationship with the murderer is revealed.

When Monty and Shan return to their hotel room in the evening, Wu Ming phones again to tell them that another dinner is planned for that night. “Chen will be there,” he says. “You must come. We’ve got to stand by him.”

“I don’t know if we can go,” Shan answers. “We’re leaving early in the morning.”

“But I need you there,” Wu Ming implores. “I miss you, you know.”

I don’t miss you, Shan thinks to himself.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll speak to Monty and get back to you.”

Looking across the room at Monty, Shan wonders how long the two of them will stay together. What secrets will they hide from one another? What lies will they tell? Shrugging off the thought, he tells himself, this time I won’t expect perfection.

Love Changes Face – 4

2009-07-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

GO TO PART 3

Wu Ming’s other ex-lover at the dinner party is a handsome placid-looking man in his mid-forties who works as a bus driver. When the two were together, some years previously, Wu Ming bought an apartment for them to share and also sold tickets on a mini-bus he helped his lover to buy. He was briefly flush with money he’d made from investing early in the stock market, when companies in China were first allowed to issue public shares and the market skyrocketed. He loved showering gifts on his boyfriends, real or wished-for.

But the bus business failed, along with the relationship. The two men often argued, and one night Wu Ming swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. The bus driver rushed him to the hospital and called Wu Ming’s brother, which led to his family discovering he was gay. After the two broke up, the bus driver gained some notoriety when a local newspaper published an article about his giving money to a passenger who told him a sad luck story about being broke and needing desperately to get back to his hometown. Amazingly, the guy’s story was for real, and when he got home he wrote a letter to the newspaper relating the bus driver’s benevolence.

The bus driver’s current boyfriend, who’s sitting next to Monty, is in his late twenties, fashionably dressed, short and self-consciously cute. He works as a TV producer, an opportunity his cousin, a prominent local actress, opened up for him. He also owns a lingerie boutique in a chic new shopping center.

“Why did you pick this restaurant?” the TV producer asks Wu Ming. “The waiters here are all so old and ugly.”

“I picked it specially for you, auntie,” says Wu Ming, flicking the ashes from his cigarette like some famous diva. “I thought maybe you’d pay attention to us for a change.”

“I’ve seen too much of you already,” says the producer.

“Everyone’s seen a lot of Wu Ming,” adds Jian’s fan, Hai, glancing toward Shan and Monty.

“Oh, I take it back,” says the producer, suddenly perking up. “There’s a cutie. Look at that package,” he adds, referring to a nearby waiter’s crotch. “Let’s get him to serve us.”

“Why? Aren’t you getting enough at home?” says Wu Ming, a pointedly bitchy remark since everyone knows the bus driver and his lover don’t actually live together in the same place. Fed up with the tone of conversation, Shan lowers his head.

Just then, a waiter arrives and places their first course, a platter of musky-smelling smoked bamboo, on a large lazy Susan in the center of the table. Everyone, except for Shan and Monty and a quiet, plain looking older man with sad eyes, has ordered multiple bottles of beer. Shan and Monty carefully drink only a small sip each time someone rises to make a toast, which is often. They also turn down the cigarettes that keep being offered them even though they’ve said they don’t smoke – which all the others do, incessantly, except again for the quiet older man.

Later Shan tells Monty the older guy is very kind and generous but bores everyone, talking endlessly about what a failure he is with men. Wu Ming first met him when both worked as real estate agents. Now, ironically, the non-smoking man runs a tiny cigarette shop and is barely able to support himself, let alone his sixteen-year-old daughter, who lives with his ex-wife. Both the ex-wife and the daughter know he’s gay and encourage him to find a boyfriend. When Shan first dated Wu Ming, the older man let the couple stay in the living room of a small apartment where he rented a room. The apartment’s owner would often appear in the middle of the night, traipsing through the living room with some young man he’d picked up.

Throughout the dinner, Wu Ming comments about people at nearby tables. “You see that guy sitting over there?” he says, gesturing toward a dark-complexioned well-dressed man seated two tables away with a group of similarly dressed men and women. The man is glancing their way but turns his head quickly when they all turn their heads toward him. “I’ve had him – a couple of times,” says Wu Ming, caressing Jian’s neck.

“Who haven’t you had?” asks Jian’s fan, Hai.

“Besides you, sister? Well, there’s him,” answers Wu Ming, pointing at Monty. “I’ve never had a foreigner – not yet anyway.”

“You haven’t had a pig or a dog yet, either,” says Shan, the others bursting out in laughter. “Why don’t you try one of those?”

“Good idea,” says Wu Ming, regaining his momentum. “After I try a foreigner.”

The waiter arrives with the next two dishes, a large plate of green and purple vegetables stir-fried with garlic, and a frizzy vegetable cooked with rice in a mellow chicken stock. “Hey,” says Hai, “I thought we were going to have fresh corn tonight,” a remark which, inexplicably to Monty, causes the others to snicker. “I hear there’s some delicious corn on the market.”

“Aren’t you a little too fat already to eat any more corn?” Wu Ming shoots back.

“Well,” says Hai, looking toward Monty, “I hear that creamed corned is quite popular in the West. Is that true?”

“I guess so, but I like corn any way it’s served,” Monty answers innocently, not fathoming why everyone breaks out laughing. Shan whispers to him in English that corn, as in corn on the cob, is the group’s codeword for Jian’s famously sizeable member. Like the ancient Chinese saying shí sè xìng yě, the appetite for both sex and food is only natural.

GO TO PART 5

Love Changes Face – 3

2009-07-30T17:02:00.001-07:00

GO TO PART 2

The dinner for Monty and Shan is held at a steamy, partly outdoor restaurant in a warehouse district at the bottom of the hillside below Wu Ming’s old neighborhood. Most of the party are already seated at a large round table several feet from a narrow road. Heavy trucks pass by every few minutes, belching out smoky diesel fumes, the drivers honking their horns to ward off oblivious jaywalkers. The trucks and a crowded nearby overpass add to the overall din of boisterous diners, squealing children and shouting restaurant staff. Chinese people, even when spending a leisurely Sunday in the park, prefer their environments renao – lively, buzzing with excitement.

The restaurant specializes in modern Chongqing cuisine – less oily and fiery hot than the regular fare, but still pungently laced with the ubiquitous and addictively numbing Sichuan “pepper corn” (which is not actually a pepper but the seed of the prickly ash tree).

“Here we are,” says Wu Ming to his friends, stretching out his left leg and opposite arm in an arabesque pose styled after Madame Mao’s Cultural Revolution era militaristic ballets. “This is Monty, Shan’s new boyfriend.” Most of them already know Shan.

Ostensibly held in honor of the two visitors’ arrival, the dinner party gravitates like everything around Wu Ming. Besides his current lover, Jian, who’s late, and a guy who openly yearns to be Jian’s next boyfriend – they all call him Jian’s fan – everyone here is either one of Wu Ming’s ex-lovers, an ex-lover’s current boyfriend, or an old friend of Wu Ming’s – plus one other couple, also longtime friends, who are expected later.

These incestuous ties have a practical application. Shan and Monty, for example, are getting a huge discount at a five-star hotel in the heart of downtown because Jian’s fan has a sister who’s in the hotel business, and a friend of hers is the hotel’s manager. A few days later the two visitors will rent a car – usually impossible if you’re not officially registered in a particular city – because Jian’s fan’s cousin runs a car rental business. Relationships (guanxi in Chinese) count for everything here, whether you’re straight or gay.

Jian arrives a half hour after Wu Ming, dressed in a basic dark blue suit and a white shirt with a violet tie. He’s just returned to the city after a three-hour train trip from Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, where he’d met with prospective customers. (Chongqing became a separate political entity when it was split off from Sichuan in 1997.)

“Sit here,” Wu Ming says, gesturing to the empty seat next to him.

Jian sits down, removes his jacket, loosens his tie, and says little during the entire dinner. He’s a masculine, attractive man in his mid-thirties, tall, thin, with a forced look of merriment masking a bitter life of disappointment. He got married at nineteen. On his wedding day he had sex with his new wife’s brother. Both men were drunk and never mentioned it, but his wife’s family suspected something had happened.

The next year, Jian’s wife gave birth to a baby boy. Later, his father sent him east to work in another province. There he had an affair with a senior army officer, who showed up one day in Chongqing after Jian moved back home. The officer confronted him in front of his wife and her parents. Enraged, the mother-in-law screamed at Jian, “So how do you two fuck?” “With my ass,” he snapped back.

Some years later, Jian and Wu Ming met at a dinner party hosted by a rich, older friend of Wu Ming’s. Wu Ming followed the younger man into the bathroom, and things took off from there. This was while Wu Ming and Shan were still in a relationship. Shan was already living in Guangzhou and they would meet every few months either there or in Chongqing. Wu Ming began to drink heavily when he lost his job as a real estate agent, plus all the money he’d put into dubious, speculative investments. The two fought frequently, sometimes punching each other. “I could kill you,” Shan often screamed at his lover.

Then he discovered that Wu Ming wasn’t just having sex with other men; he was involved in other relationships – several. Jian wasn’t his only affair. He was even seeing the older man at whose party he’d first met Jian. In fact, this very same older man is also here tonight, sitting across the table from Shan and Monty. Throughout the dinner, he stares at them through his thick black-framed glasses.

Although Shan knew about his lover’s affair with Jian, he tried to preserve the relationship. A couple of times the three of them even had sex together. When Shan finally went his own way, Wu Ming was already sharing his apartment with his new lover.

Jian in the meantime had divorced his wife. He continues to support their son, as well as his and Wu Ming’s expenses, from the modest earnings he makes selling a line of cheap furniture. Wu Ming contributes little other than providing the apartment. On the days he feels like it he operates a small stall in a shopping center, where he sells a beauty product supposedly made from ground-up pearls. The powder is meant to be mixed with honey and used as a facial cream or be eaten.

Jian used to phone Shan regularly, complaining of Wu Ming’s drunkenness and solo late-night visits to the bars. Shan told him that he would have to accept Wu Ming as he was if he wanted to keep the relationship. Jian followed the advice, joining his lover in his carousing instead of protesting it.

“You’re just in time,” Wu Ming says to Jian. (For Monty’s benefit, everyone at the table is speaking Mandarin, which he can muddle his way through.)

“That closet case over there will start bringing our food any moment,” adds Wu Ming, looking toward their waiter, a man with wavy, hennaed hair. “The one with the big tight ass. Hey!” The waiter turns his head toward the table, blushing.

“I bet he’d serve us anything we want,” quips the fan, the guy who wants to be Jian’s next lover. His name is Hai. A chunky man in his early thirties whose bulky red sweater makes him look even chunkier, he speaks Mandarin with a heavy rural accent.

“I bet you’d serve us anything we want,” replies Wu Ming, adding a third empty bottle of beer next to the two already lined up in front of him.

What he doesn’t know is that Hai is no longer merely Jian’s fan: the two are already having a heated affair. To cover up what’s going on, Hai pretends to be dating a rather effeminate guy who’s barely out of high school. But it turns out that the boy is actually Hai’s cousin, and though effeminate he’s totally straight. Nothing is as it seems.

GO TO PART 4

Love Changes Face – 2

2009-07-30T16:53:00.001-07:00

GO TO PART 1

“I hate it here,” Shan shouts in Monty’s ear, anxious to leave the bar and loathing every moment of Wu Ming’s performance.

Shan is Monty’s boyfriend. They met nine months earlier on an Internet chat line, shortly after Monty arrived in China. Exchanging messages, they discovered common interests – European films, ancient history, Nineteenth-Century English novels – and arranged to meet in person.

Thirty-three years old, Shan is short and cuddly, like the Panda bears that live in the forests near the small hillside town where he grew up. The only son of a large family, he vividly recalls the years his parents struggled to feed him and his siblings, and the sacrifices they all made to send him to university in Chongqing, the only one in his extended family to reach higher education.

He and Monty live in Guangzhou, the center of China’s massive manufacturing region on the south coast. Shan works there as a copywriter for the China office of a multinational advertising agency. Monty teaches English at a private language school. They’re visiting Chongqing to see Shan’s old friends and tour the surrounding countryside. It’s Monty’s first visit there and his first time meeting Wu Ming.

Wu Ming was Shan’s first lover. The two became involved during Shan’s senior year at university. They met in a park frequented at night by gays looking to get picked up. Walking together along a dark trail, Wu Ming put his arm around the younger man’s waist, sending a chill up his spine. Shan was thrilled to be with someone at last, someone older, more mature, more sure of himself.

They saw each other frequently in the following months. Later, they moved in together when Shan got his first job, writing marketing materials for a pharmaceutical company. In time, the relationship began to change. Wu Ming rarely worked, living instead off his boyfriend and the money left from his own dwindling savings. He began to go out to the bars by himself and come home late and drunk. He would complain about his life, and often sobbed until he fell asleep.

For several years Shan tried to hold onto what became an increasingly troubled, long-distance relationship after he moved to Guangzhou in search of a better job. Even before that, Wu Ming never hid the fact that he was having sex with other men. But Shan put up with his lover’s promiscuity and his swinging moods. He wanted desperately to hold onto his first gay relationship, not easy to secure in China.

Eventually Shan gave up and the relationship ended. At first he felt devastated. He fantasized jumping from the balcony of his twelfth-story apartment. Feeling pressured at work and by his family to get married, he gave in and got engaged to a girl his supervisor had introduced him to. He stuck it out for almost a year, but finally worked up the courage and broke up with the girl, just before they were to be married. A month later he met Monty.

Looking at Wu Ming now, performing wildly on stage, nearly naked, Shan wonders how he could ever have been so possessed by this man.

BEFORE THE SCENE at the bar, Monty and Shan are met by Wu Ming when they arrive at the Chongqing airport earlier that day. He’s dressed in a tight black rayon T-shirt and black pants narrow at the cuff. “I’ve organized dinner for tonight,” he tells them, coolly scanning Monty from the floor up.

“Okay,” says Shan. “But no bars afterward, and I don’t want a big crowd. Just you and Jian.” Jian is Wu Ming’s current lover.

“Sure,” Wu Ming agrees, having already organized dinner for twelve.

“And no drinking either,” Shan adds, knowing how his ex-lover’s dinner parties usually end up – loud, drunken and embarrassing.

As their taxi reaches downtown, signs of the approaching lunar New Year are brightly evident. Trees in the pedestrian malls are strung with vivid red, green, violet and yellow lights. Shops selling all-red merchandise – paper lanterns, large decorative knots of rope, garlands of fabric peppers – are teeming with excited customers.

After Monty and Shan check into their hotel, Wu Ming leads them on a walk up and down the nearby precipitous stone stairways and narrow twisted lanes of the old neighborhood where he grew up. It’s one of the few remaining, higgledy-piggledy warrens that descend off the two sides of the densely populated, hilly peninsula that forms central Chongqing, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The city’s hillsides are so steep and extensive, and labor so cheap, that most goods are hauled up on sturdy bamboo poles shouldered by droves of sweaty male porters, stripped to their waist.

Wu Ming points out one of the few remaining, traditional dark wooden Sichuan houses, built on stilts. “I used to live in that place when I was a kid,” he says, brushing the dust off his pants. “Imagine, seven of us lived in that shack.”

The three-story structure has stood there clinging to the hillside for well over a hundred years, though it looks as if it will fall down any moment and in fact soon will, but under a wrecker’s ball. In a few years nearly all of Chongqing’s old neighborhoods will look like the rest of the city, and every Chinese city, chockablock full of gleaming new, bizarrely designed office towers and multiple clusters of identical, heavily guarded high-rise apartment buildings.

On the narrow landing of a dilapidated stone stairway, a middle-aged woman casually smokes meat in a makeshift cooker. Wafts of smoldering bamboo leaves and cured pork fill the air, blending in with the thick fog and sooty pollution that embrace the city much of the year, like an overweight lover. The stairs – everything here, buildings, streets, even leaves – are coated with dust and mud kicked up by endless demolition and construction projects. Countless hot pot restaurants add a slick layer of grease to the mix, pumping out a steady supply of pungent fumes from the wok-like vessels that rest in a pit at the center of each table.

Monty is fascinated by Chongqing, especially its seediness. An ancient city, its people seem cosmopolitan and more lighthearted than elsewhere in China. Even their dialect is more bubbly and playful than Mandarin, China’s crisp, official national language. No one seems to work here, he thinks, seeing the crowds strolling at all hours through the city's large open, brightly decorated squares and pedestrian malls, or sipping tea and playing cards or mahjong at one of the innumerable teashops and tea gardens along the streets and lining the parks overlooking the two rivers.

Seeing Wu Ming’s old house, Shan thinks of his own simple beginnings, of how much his life has changed and how far he’s come, even dating a foreigner. Maybe soon, he imagines, he will travel outside China. His brief reverie is interrupted when Wu Ming says, “My new place is just over there,” pointing toward a high-rise near the top of the hillside. “I guess I’ve stayed close to home,” he adds, glancing at Shan.

GO TO PART 3

Love Changes Face – 1

2009-07-30T15:12:00.001-07:00

A PACK OF SMALL BOYS, sweating heavily in the humid heat, rub their noses up against the soiled windows, pushing and shoving their way to get a look inside. Jumping up and down and giggling, they point at their classmate being punished. Standing on his hands in a dusty corner of the classroom, naked except for his yellowed underpants, Wu Ming stares back at them, grinning.

The twelve-year-old is dark and sinewy. Though not yet muscular, his young breasts are firm, the nipples large and sharply pointed. Long dark lashes draw attention to his languid eyes. You may have encountered one or two pubescent boys like him who will try to seduce you, not with conscious intent so much as to gain an alluring power over an adult. Though dauntingly self-possessed, such children often harbor deep self-doubts.

Wu Ming’s father, the head teacher of the classical Sichuan opera school, caught his son in the shower room masturbating two boys at the same time. “You disgrace me,” he shouted, raising his hand to slap the boy, but pulling back.

Punishing the boy brings back painful memories of when, only a few years earlier in the thick of the Cultural Revolution, he had been pulled out of his office by his students and subordinates. Screaming insults, they repeatedly slapped him in the face and forced him to wear a sign around his neck condemning his rank. Allowed to return home after three years’ banishment working in the fields in the countryside, he turned to busking, performing lesser theatrical works in the streets, assisted by his three sons. Eventually, he was reinstated to his old position.

The man is livid not so much to have found Wu Ming fooling around with his classmates. It’s an open secret that sexual relations of one sort or another are common among the boys boarding together. What angers his father instead is his youngest son’s lack of dedication to the art their family has practiced for generations.

Even more galling is that the boy has so much promise. Without practicing rigorously, he performs the various roles with a marked elegance and allure, better than any other student, better than his older brothers. Wu Ming takes to the stage as effortlessly and skillfully as he takes to satisfying the nascent sexual desires of his classmates.

MONTY, a lanky balding Canadian in his mid-fifties, imagines all this from the bits of information he’s heard about Wu Ming’s early life. But he’s not imaging him here now, standing in front of him, gyrating on a raised platform.

A masculine man with a strong jaw, dark features and seductive eyes, Wu Ming has the trim build and looks of a movie star hovering around the age of forty-five. Stripped to his damp briefs, sweating and gleaming under the multicolored rotating lights above the small stage of Chongqing’s most popular gay bar, he thrusts his pelvis this way and that, oblivious to the music’s measured beat.

His face fiery red, his dark eyes grotesquely exaggerated by shadows, he glares voraciously at his audience. Mimicking the changing face player of Sichuan opera, whose mask magically transforms from one color and character to another, Wu Ming turns his head away and back again, reflecting the changing light, his face now green with lust and envy. He brushes a hand over his face and turns yellow, as if quivering with fear, and then bright blue, grinning like a frivolous buffoon.

Performing the role of voyeur he’s fallen into in China, Monty takes in the whole scene – himself, Wu Ming, the onlookers.

Wu Ming stars in one of a thousand, a hundred thousand, sideshows in a subterranean gay world populated by a sampling of the same people who crowd every city in this exploding country: legions of street vendors and shopkeepers; overnight millionaires; policemen on the take; college graduates slaving away in new high-tech companies; peasants, shabbily dressed, looking as if they’d landed on another planet; artists thrust into stardom; and Party officials, they too cashing in on the new, materialistic Great Leap Forward.

These and others can be found here tonight playing out their second lives. The place is packed, the music injuriously loud, the air heavy with smoke. Every young guy who walks in is eyed and judged like a fresh piece of meat, leaving older ones to be hustled by the throngs of money boys.

Nearly all gay men in China lead double lives and eventually get married, abandoning their wives and children at night to get drunk or quickly laid. Few remain single, and fewer still live with a lover, risking exposure to their family or employer. Finding the pressure unbearable, some wait years to emigrate to the West. Or they drink themselves silly night after night, like Wu Ming’s circle of friends. Or they kill themselves in despair of ever fulfilling their sexual identity or satisfying parents who hound them incessantly to get married and produce an heir, preferably male.

Leaving the bars and bathhouses, the secretive men stumble home in the early morning hours, some to heavily guarded fortress-like housing estates, others to filthy slums of hastily assembled tenements. Reeking of cigarette smoke and beer, pretending to be just drunk, they tiptoe past their parents’ room and crawl into bed with their half-sleeping wife. Everything returns to normal.

GO TO PART 2

Boys and Buddha

2009-07-20T14:39:00.001-07:00

“BUDDHA IS EVERYWHERE,” the Zen master said, raising his hand in a wide ark. “Where is Buddha?”

Monty sat facing the older man, mesmerized by his penetrating eyes. Searching for an answer, he mumbled, “I don’t know. I’m … I’m …”

“This I am is exactly what causes war,” the man shot back, shaking his head. The words hit Monty like a sharp jab to the stomach. I cause war, he thought in horror. The small room suddenly felt heavy as if closing in on him. Incense filled his nostrils.

He was meeting the Zen master for the first time – more or less by accident. He hadn’t been particularly drawn to Buddhism, nor had he thought of himself as having a strong spiritual longing. Religion in his family was taboo. His father’s only faith, though he’d never have put it that way, was Marxism.

But his sophomore-year roommate Evan was very interested in Zen. And when Evan told him he’d heard that a real Zen master from Japan, a roshi, had recently moved to Los Angeles, Monty's hometown, he invited Evan to visit there during spring break and they would try to find the roshi.

A Protestant from New England, Evan was short, cute and had neat, straight strawberry blond hair. Monty was tall, gangly, a second-generation Russian Jew, with long stringy, dirty blond hair. Evan was passionate about art; he’d carry a sketchbook with him everywhere. Monty used to watch him do drawings in their dorm room of what he thought were ordinary objects. Sometimes Evan would show him portraits he’d made surreptitiously of students and teachers. Monty didn’t have any particular hobbies, though he’d taken up singing lessons during his freshman year, until he developed a bad case of tonsillitis.

Evan arrived in LA by bus a few days after Monty arrived by plane, in mid-April. When Evan settled in at the modest, Spanish-style home, Monty’s mother served the boys lunch. She’d made two of her son’s favorite dishes: twice-cooked brisket and a savory lokshen kugel (a baked noodle pudding richly laced with eggs and chicken fat). From the bay window of the small breakfast room, Evan gazed at the violet glow of the spring blossoms hanging from the jacaranda trees lining the street. Growing up, Monty had never paid much attention to plants or flowers, other than to pop the purple buds that appeared in the pot of bougainvillea his mother had hung from the archway that shaded the front of their house.

“How are we going to find the Zen master?” Evan asked after lunch.

Zen wasn’t widely known yet in America, but Monty suggested they try the phone book, where to their surprise they found a listing for a Zen center. He called and a man with a thick Japanese accent suggested they come and visit that afternoon.

An hour-and-a-half later, after driving far south of downtown, they arrived at the address in the phone book – a small wood-frame house located in a plain, treeless neighborhood that Monty had always heard was full of impoverished “Okies” who’d settled there in the 1930s after abandoning their farms during the devastating Dust Bowl era.

Childhood impressions like that form a kind of mythology about the world around you. Growing up in LA in the Fifties, Monty also assumed that all gardeners were Japanese. And many were, having been displaced from their earlier careers or businesses when they were interned in concentration camps in the hinterland of California during the Second World War. So when the boys reached the Zen center, he took little notice of the Japanese gardener working alongside the house. But when no one answered their knocking at the door, the boys walked over to the gardener and asked him where the roshi was. “Go back front door,” the gardener said. “Roshi coming.”

A few minutes later they were astonished to see the gardener again, emerging from the door now dressed in a Zen master’s brown robes. He stood less than five feet tall, had a large round, unlined face, and looked younger than his 59 years. He invited them into a small front parlor and served them green tea and cookies. He asked a few questions about what they were studying in school and what they knew of Buddhism. The man appeared quite jovial and made the two laugh with his imitations of professors and other sorts of people.

After tea the roshi invited the boys to stay for the late afternoon zazen, the traditional form of Zen contemplation. One other person joined them, a large burly man with a black curly beard. Evidently an experienced Zen student, he instructed them how to sit on the cushions that covered raised platforms lining two facing sides of what had once been a living room. Sitting cross-legged was easy for Evan, but Monty found it difficult, and the guy made him feel uncomfortable, ridiculing him for having such stiff hips.

The three sitting periods lasted about thirty minutes each but seemed to go on forever. Monty’s mind was filled with endless scattered thoughts and worries. “What am I doing here? My legs and back are killing me. Do I look okay?”

After the second sit, they went in turn to meet privately with the roshi in a room at the end of a short hallway. As instructed, Monty closed the door behind him and, facing the roshi, fell to his hands and knees, lowered his forehead to the ground, stretched out his arms and raised his palms upward. He then approached and sat on his haunches on a cushion directly in front of the roshi.

The roshi seemed transformed, looming now in front of him like a large shining moon. He could barely understand the few words the man said, but they struck him like a blazing light. It was as if the roshi could see right through him, knowing his entire mind. He tried to maintain the front he usually did with people, appearing cool or smart or funny, but couldn’t. He just sat there transfixed.

Monty felt blown away by the experience, shaken particularly by what the roshi had said to him about war. Later, he found it impossible to describe clearly what it was like to meet with the man alone. But he'd realized that whatever power or presence of mind the roshi possessed, he wanted it too. Something in the core of his being knew instinctively that someday, if not then, he would throw himself into Zen.

The truth, though, is that he had invited Evan to visit him in LA not because he was interested in Zen, but because he was interested in Evan and hoped something would happen. Something did happen, but it was Buddha, so to speak, not the boy. Many years would pass, however, before Monty would practice Zen anywhere near as passionately as he pursued love – and more years yet before it would become as bittersweet.

© G S Sirotnik 2009. All rights reserved.