The Spy in the Sandwich

Friday, March 06, 2009

12:34 PM | Archived Fiction: Cruising, Part 2

[read part 1 here]

You can take me in a nice car, one of those shiny new models that burn rubber. You can take me to a nice motel, maybe one outside town, like maybe that one near Cangmating Beach. The Honeybee Motel. Honeybee, Honeybee... The name sings like a jingle.

Or maybe you can take me down to a cheap pension house somewhere—they dot the town and stay open 24 hours a day—for P400 a night, where the clerk never asks questions, only perhaps to give an impersonal nod, to nonchalantly give you the key to a small white-wallpapered room with no carpet (but with TV and cable), where the bed is large enough and soft enough and muffled enough to cushion my creaks and your moans.

The clerk has seen so many of your kind in this place to mind the fact, really, that you’re an older man with a young boy like me in tow. At 19, I look 16—and perhaps that’s what makes you mad, lecherous, for me. I look familiar to the clerk, too—but I do not have enough of the telltale streetside swagger for him to better pigeonhole me. But he still nods at me, and I give him a blank look.

Such are the exchanges of the trade.

In your room, you ask me if you have seen me before. It is a nervous question—something most tricks like you ask, as if this face can also be traded for another. (That’s how we call you, “tricks.” Like in magic. Like in a disappearing act.) Perhaps you ask me if you have seen me before for just your need of reassurance, for familiarity in unlikely situations. Psychology 101 tells me that. So I just smile, and give you a half-shake, a half-nod: non-committal, like the exchange we are about to make: anonymous flesh for discreet solicitations. The whole world is a puta.

“Why don’t you lie back, sir, get naked—relaxed,” I tell you, softly, but commandingly.

You are not used to being told what to do—not from a pick-up you pay, noooo. But who says I am a regular pick-up? It was my peculiarity of station that struck you, if I have to remind you once again. A while ago, I was just on my side of road going to Bantayan, ostensibly to flag down a pedicab home before the late night became even later. I wore a dark-blue long-sleeved shirt over carefully pressed denims, punctuated by Adidas sneakers. I had glasses—fashionable enough not to seem nerdy. I had a backpack. I looked like your normal college boy. I am, in fact, a college boy. And your car was gray, and purred slowly towards me with such dark intentions, the headlights blinking. When you got to me, you rolled the windows down on the passenger’s side, and you asked me if I needed a ride home. I just told you, simply, that for such a ride, you had to have a thousand pesos, no more, no less—but perhaps, if you were satisfied… more?

I smiled.

You looked me down, and up—and something in my years and in my air satisfied you—the way those unfortunate parke boys in Quezon Park, dirty, uncouth, and shameless and obvious of their trade, might not have.

You smiled back at me and said to hop in.

“Do you do this often?” you asked the silliest questions—also tactless ones.

I smiled and smiled, and said, “No, sir.” And then I told you my regular line that all others before you had fallen for: “I’m in college, and I need the money for tuition.” Which is true.

“Oh,” and then you had that look of fascination I’d seen in others slowly descending on your smile. “Wow. What school are you from?”

I told you.

“Fascinating! I went to that university, too,” you said.

And you looked at me again, and grinned—finding me an aberration, perhaps, but oh how that made you hornier for me. In Japan, I read somewhere once, some high school girls “date” older men for a little more cash money, dressed in their trademark uniform of white blouse, very short plaid skirt, and thick, white, knee-length socks. The Japanese call them “enjo kasai”—translated, it means “someday mothers.” Some older women prostitutes make this a regular fetish performance for demanding clients—with uniforms, pigtails, and all. The whole world is a pedophile.

Now, in this motel bed, I am master for the money you pay me, and I say again, “Why don’t you lie back, sir, get naked—get relaxed.”

You nod.

I straddle you and then I lower my chest towards you, my right nipple just so near, your tongue aches to lick. “Tempting, isn’t it, sir?” I say.

You nod.

“Well, sir, Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,” I say, huskily—meaning it, and saying it as academically as I can.

Oscar Wilde finally does you in, and you go for me like the temptation that I am, and I yield—beyond Marx, beyond Althusser, beyond guilt. Sometimes when I do this and I catch a glimpse of myself with an anonymous man in some stray motel room mirror, I do not recognize the body that heaves and works for pleasure: a picture of detachment is all I see—not I—and knowing, somehow, that abstract ideas are only abstract ideas. We live out our compensations.

Always, in these stray mirrors, I mistake myself for a little boy, and you the specter of a loss. Mother calls you “Son of a bitch!”, a “monster,” and has hidden your pictures from my reach. I do not know or remember your face anymore, only your smell on my skin. I suspect mother has burned all those photos, all memories of you, the way she burns her face every day and every night into an earnest concentration on mahjong tiles, so as not to give her an excuse, perhaps, to see me and my face. Something in me triggers her crying, so I have learned to stay away.

Then you moan deeply as you come, each spasm digging deep into me, into a certain hollow I do not even recognize. I realize all too suddenly that this is now, and this is you, not some shadow I do not even try to remember.

[to be continued...]

Labels: fiction