Days Volume Two

* Now was a time to be free. Now was a time to find a home and stay there. Sweet Jesus, evoked all the grandiloquent lines. Nothing wrong with a bit of delinquent grandiosity he declared. Johnny Cash: "...playing Jesus to the lepers in my head". Bukowski: We were born to strew flowers down the avenues of the dead. Burroughs: Fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. The windy smell of rotting oranges. All these strange, well actually they didn't seem strange at all, thoughts came and went as he grizzled at idiots and worried about money and found odd tunes to play, here, there, everywhere he went, oscillating in darkness and in health, shorn, bereft, off stage, passing through the days and the eye of the needle, consequence in a land and a time without consequence, shorn of meaning and delivered anew. It made sense but no sense; so instead he felt sleepy and went to bed early. Chaos was at the door but not allowed in. They could almost have been happy. Well I received n...

* There were a thousand things right and a thousand things wrong; focus on the negative; I don't do happy, the dwarf said; and yet here they were, marooned in a happy place, where the world could get lost and they could feel ultimately safe. He was astonished by what had happened. Where was the misery? Where was that atrophied creature behind seven veils, seven walls; the creature shrieking at the very hint of light? Now the days passed in relative domestic bliss. Ian was coming to stay and he looked forward to his old friend's no doubt chaotic presence; beaming good cheer and healthy lust. If only he could share the same simple pleasures. We were moving deeply into the quagmire, fragile and forgotten. Atrophied not the word, but sheets of pain and ossifying flesh, calcified nails and stringy hair, a corpse walking, a mind deranged, love lost. They could smell the stranger from 20 feet behind; the stench of his urine soaked clothes. Drunk? Shawn asked. Mad, he responded. Mad...

* All trace of everything was being erased as it happened, a program destroying its own path, physical pain alternating with a blank head. He plunged off the air just as quickly as he regained competence; and everything was delightful. Nothing made sense and yet he should have known better. After the 100th partner, most people start to lose count, the worker at the STD clinic said; when he claimed ignorance to the ridiculous question of how many people he had been with. The mirrored walls. The lithe bodies. The charming smiles. The pain that cramped his shoulder. The winning smiles that drained him of every cent; just as he had done to another generation in another country. As if it was all the same. A continuum. A little gaggle of them went to visit Mark from Wales; another of the charming British. Wise boys and wise scenes. Sow! Forward with strength; Aek kept emphasising, noticing how rapidly he had plunged off the air, disturbed. One phone call and he felt like drinking, that...

* He didn't mean for any of it to happen, didn’t think the situation through for a second, it never occurred to him that a relationship sealed on the first morning with four shots of Vodka before breakfast might be fraught with alcoholic doom. Sober for weeks, he was starting to feel at least partially sane. He had no thought of becoming part of a tribe-let of marauding Thai boys, haunting karaoke bars – once classy brothels, now decaying dens packed with cheap girls and the smell of Thai men; on the hunt, always on the hunt. Oh they’re so naughty, the dry old queen – his alter ego – sighed. My money, their whiskey and girls. He would wake up sandwiched between sex workers of various genders, hands groping everywhere, the grunt of someone coming in the bathroom and think: nothing could be more beautiful. Swishy girls and high pitched boys; after cruel abstinence, time spent afresh and anew, woken, from a long sleep, if not at the end of his life then older, much older than ...

* I'm so hot I wish I could f... myself, Shawn declared enthusiastically on the phone, I keep catching sight of myself in the mirror and I'm transfixed, I can barely get out of the house. I wouldn't sleep with myself for a million bucks, he replied. Probably one reason I'm so generous to the Thai boys. All this banter while he tried to dispel the creeping sense of unease which had been invading his life for weeks. Where did the initial triumphs go? Why was he so worried? If all they did was pay for themselves, if the dancing boys beckoned from catwalks, dressed in their tight white underpants, what was the problem? Opportunities kept presenting themselves, but none of them were very ludicrous; none of them made ridiculous amounts of money. He was staunch and beknighted, glasped and clasped, groping and bewildered, craving affection and listening to the far off grunts, watching the lights come on and off in the building opposite as someone, he knew not who, moved from...

* The thoughts were all twisted around inside, hollow of substance, insubstantial of will, everything coalescing. He needed to be free again. He didn't know what was happening. All things colluded to make the biggest con trick of all. I love you, the young man said, and love in this world was a practical thing, haunted, especially, by images of former lives. They lay bathed in sweat and nothing was consequential. The f... show at Night Boys was particularly athletic. Everything was hollow. Not like him or me, they said of a friend, a singer, who made a legitimate income. Although all was seen as legitimate here. Everything came round and round. Haunted by the light, by the right, by the triumphalism of the left. They so believed they were in the right; and dismissed the normal populace, which they were supposed to represent, as having done nothing, of being blind and ignorant, fools long before they emerged from the bush, the scrub, the mud, before these neanderthals crawled ont...

* Strange how when he drifted off the air, so did his sleeping companions. All else was lost. He gathered himself up in the storm reaches, water swirling down a drain. He didn't know what situation he had got himself into. He didn't expect them to be anything other than devious. Consternation was at its height; but also a strange fog as he landed back where he had been only two months before; recycling hope, handsome boys, the gift of a smile. The flags still fluttered in the heat. The rickshaw drivers clustered outside the hotel. The begging families, a pregnant woman and her children camped on the pavement all day. The convergence of the Mekong and Tom Lesap Rivers. An ancient creek bed. A time far beyond anything he knew. Wasted moments and wasted days. Cruel discord. Laughter at its most manic. Head buried under the pillows. What have I done? Does love die as fast as it is born? Do moments of intimacy betray us at the heart? Did a lonely old man stumble into keeping a bo...