"A Trip to Tibet"

 

Soon enough, we were lifting off, in another plane, this one to Lhasa. Flying into Tibet, soaring over the Himalayas, a shudder plaited down my spine as I peered down from the plane, gawking at those mountains. The Himalayas were mountains like I’d never seen before. They had this unique shape, twisting sharp tips and spooky gray, white and black colors. They looked more like a leviathan, a strange dark living organism, than a chain of mountains. Thinking how they’d risen, erupted from the Earth, they were, in a way, the Earth’s adult teeth, wisdom teeth, fangs from the ground.

Stepping off the plane, the air was sucked dry from my lungs, as if a vacuum tube had been shoved down my throat. Frigid winds whipped at my face, causing my eyes to wet up and my nose to coldly congeal and drip icy snot.

It was tough to adjust. I felt breathless and lead boned as we lurched through the airport, respirating in rapid, shallow sprints. All of us were feeling rough, light-headed, dizzy due to the sudden shock of the altitude sickness. And we all were slightly aphasiac at the magnificence of the place’s scenery, the ruggedly exotic, breathtaking landscape.

(I’d been to Denver, so I’d been “mile high,” but this place was something else. It was 14,370 feet in the air. It really was the “rooftop of the world,” like walking through the clouds. If you stepped too quickly, especially when ascending stairs, you’d be gasping, literally. We found out fast, that in Lhasa, slow movements were preferrable…) 

The vibe in the place was weird, man. I don’t think I could ever have adjusted to it. Tibet, Lhasa, was just heavy with tension, and the minute we met our tour guide, by the baggage carousel, I felt a cold-dripping premonition...

We piled into a minivan with our tour guide, who drove us from the airport to downtown Lhasa, and he started telling us about the city, its ancient history. His English was excellent, only slightly accented, which was certainly advantageous for us, since none of us spoke any Tibetan...

Peering out the van’s tinted windows, we saw red flags everywhere. And I mean real red flags, the Chinese national flag. Chinese flags plastered on billboards, Chinese flags hanging from lampposts, Chinese flags attached to traffic lights, Chinese flags hanging over seemingly every business or home.

There were gigantic billboards lining every road with what looked to be propaganda. It was hammer and sickle, commie stuff, Chinese characters with lots of exclamation points and brave, happy peasants working under or saluting the omnipresent red flag.

Looking at the Chinese flag, the Welshman whispered into my ear that the flag was Mao’s bedsheet dipped into a pool of blood, and that Mao had run, like a cricket bowler, and launched himself into the sky, snatched five evil dwarf stars from space and then crashed back to Earth, slapped the evil stars onto his blood-soaked flag. Welshman said he’d read something about that in a book by a Chinese dissident.

“Ma Jian is my favorite Chinese writer,” Welshman whispered, panning his snarling mug back toward the passing scenery of wintery plains and spiraling swaths of snow-capped mountains. 

The Welshman was a bit of a bookworm, read a lot, unlike me, who’d read some, but was more into nonfiction and thrillers, the page-turner, Tom Clancy stuff. The Welshman read fucking Russian, French, and Indian novels and shit… However, you probably wouldn’t pin him as a reader, if you saw him walking down the street. Given his perpetually scowling Sid Vicious face, you’d think of him, likely, as a ruffian. And you’d also be right. The Welshman was really a case study of interesting dichotomies... 

The Welshman pointed out that every street sign was tri-lingual, with the Chinese characters atop, in the largest type, then the Tibetan script underneath, roughly half its size, and English, smooshed to the bottom, even smaller. “The irony is didactic,” mumbled the Welshman, as he angled his handheld digital camera, pressed it to the van’s windows, snapping pics like a seasoned traveler.

Arriving in downtown Lhasa, I found the city itself to be a dichotomy, a curious amalgamation of modern and ancient. Modern, glassy boxes of buildings were situated next to slanted roof, chalk white structures; knots of Buddhist monks in saffron robes played on cell phones in front of golden, triangular temples, constructions that appeared over 1000 years old; elderly street hawkers, with faces worn as an old leather glove, wrapped almost like mummies in countless layers of clothes, the hawkers squatting on tiny plastic stools, curbside, the hawkers with colorful blankets unfurled and piled with vegetables or fruits or handicrafts to sell to passersby, the hawkers adroitly operating smartphones, accepting mobile phone, digital payments… It was quite a scene…

Driving by a temple, we passed a group of lumpy elderly women, their bodies wrapped in heavy orange shawls. They were facedown, prostrating on the street, outside the temple. I’d never seen anyone prostrate. One of the other Brits exploded in laughter, upon witnessing the women throwing themselves, crawling on their bellies through the icy muck of the street.

“What is that shite?” he asked himself, through gasps of cackling, high-pitched laughs... The Brit had a narrow, ruddy face and a frohawk style haircut that made him look sort of like a chicken…

“They’re prostrating,” spat back the Welshman, sounding annoyed.

“Prostrating? What’s that?” the laugher queried, speaking in one of those London accents that omitted every hard “T”. “Prostra..ing,” he chirped, but after realizing his ignorance, the Londoner’s laughter quieted and slowly died.  

“It’s a religious thing,” returned the Welshman, sneering and pointing his camera at the prostrating women.

I’d half-expected the Welshman to crack a dark joke about it. But he didn’t.

 

We then arrived at our hostel. The place was a total dump. It had graffiti written on the walls and stank like a pungent mixture of cigarettes and unwashed ass.

After we checked in, our tour guide, a local Tibetan, a chunky, 30ish, sad-faced man, pulled the Welshman aside and whispered something, the guide speaking with a somber expression.

The Welshman stepped back over to us, with a pained face. He said something about how we needed to keep quiet about political matters. That the tour guide had done 3 years in jail because he got ratted out for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, saying something he claims he never said, and it had taken 3 years in jail for it to be cleared up, so we needed to be careful how we spoke during our trip.

(Yeah, like, I’d noticed immediately something was off about the tour guide, man. He had the thousand-yard stare and spoke mechanically. He never smiled. His lips weirdly twitched. His dark brown face, especially his eyes, looked droopy, like an invisible weight were pulling them downward. He had unevenly buzzcut hair, color-clashing clothes, tattered sneakers, and his yellow jacket was zipped up to his chin. His head seemed to be bloated, like the size of a pumpkin, really unnaturally large, even for his heavy-set body... He just didn’t look right, not at all… Man, I bet the poor fuck was tortured like a bastard for years in that Chinese prison. We all really pitied him after learning his past, laying our eyes on him as if he’d been a holocaust survivor or some shit…)

“A fucking cultural genocide,” mumbled the Welshman, as we hauled our heavy backpacks, wheezing as we trudged up three flights of twisting, narrow stairs, to settle into our dingy rooms.

 

Shortly after getting situated in the hostel, our guide took us out on a short drive around downtown Lhasa.

Man, it was amazing. It was sort of like I’d have imagined India to be, except colder and less populated. It was more modern than I’d envisioned, too, full of shiny new cars, vans, buses, trucks, and motorbikes. And there were no animal-pulled carts or rickshaws, either, like I pictured. Except for the bicycle driven rickshaws, though, which, like, at that altitude, those dudes pushing and pedaling those bicycle rickshaws had to be stronger, more jacked than even the most roided-up Lance Armstrong…

The traditional Tibetan buildings around the city were similar to other Asian buildings I’d seen, with the triangular, sloping roofs. But they were slightly different, had a chalkier white exterior, smaller windows, and loads of bright orange prayer flags hanging from their upcurved eaves.

Lhasa was turning out to be a bustling, lively little place, with tons of restaurants, tiny shops, street vendors, people in brightly colored garb, puffy sheep fur jackets, turban type head wraps and various colorful ethnic clothes.

(With their explosions of radiant colors, the woven patterns on their loose, long-sleeved robes, their wide-brimmed hats, plaited hair, beads, precious stones, glimmering jewels and finery, the Tibetans, reminded me, in a way, of Native Americans… And I spotted one Tibetan woman, in a purplish red robe, who was wearing a headdress that was similar to a Jamaican beanie, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a fortuneteller of some sort, maybe the Tibetan reincarnation or sister spirit of Miss Cleo…)

All of Lhasa’s winding streets and curving alleys seemed to be leading to the Jokhang Temple, which was the heart of the city, both spiritually and economically.

The temple was where our short driving excursion ended. We parked across the street from it, got out, set out on foot and perused the rows and rows of stalls outside the temple’s gates. The stalls were selling items to the masses of tourists (who were mostly Tibetans), hawking stuff like Buddha-themed souvenirs, Tibetan knickknacks, prayer wheels, and local food, largely consisting of dumplings stuffed with yak meat.  

As we walked through the rows of souvenir stalls, toward the imposingly tall, golden temple gates, which were glowing effulgently in the cold sun, we encountered more folks out front, Tibetan pilgrims, predominantly elderly, in black robes, who were prostrating, chanting and crawling on their bellies, through the streets beside the temple entrance… None of us said a word as we walked by, shifting our paths to avoid them, their bodies undulating and sliding as if submerged in water…

Our guide then brought us inside, took us on a tour of the Jokhang Temple, shepherded us around. It was astounding. Beyond words, really. There were bald-headed monks in saffron robes chanting Buddhist mantras as we walked in. I got goosebumps, stepping in there, for real. It was like a scene from a movie, like Indiana Jones or something. To a man, in our group, we were all pretty speechless, in awe of it…

The Jokhang Temple has an impressively long history. Our guide said it has stood in various forms since 652, and the Welshman whispered something to me about how it was a miracle the place survived the Cultural Revolution, when mobs of angry young communists were running amok, all over China, smashing up every temple in sight…

The temple was jam-packed with people, largely Tibetan pilgrims, Buddhists, who were there to pray. Long lines of worshippers were streaming in and out of the temple gates, crowding and moving in masses through the halls, rooms, and spaces. Practically every inch of the place was peopled.  

We carried forward, amongst the knots, like passengers in a packed train station. The temple was like a maze. It was disorienting, overwhelming, and incredible, with twisting, turning halls and corridors that were brimming with statues, paintings, writings in Sanskrit. The halls and corridors were somehow narrow yet vast, infinite yet still somehow small...  

Throughout the temple, there were Tibetans on their knees, chanting, bowing to Buddha statues, bowing and praying to and with the monks. The Tibetans were really into their prayers too. Their bodies electrified as they knelt. The monks sitting there all cross-legged and Buddha-like, too, were the epitome of Zen. It was quite a sight. The monks’ and pilgrims’ chanting reminded me somewhat of preachers speaking in tongues. But, really, it was nothing like you’d ever see in America…

The temple was simply magnificent. Man, like, I’d seen gorgeous churches in Europe, but I’d never witnessed anything that could compare to this temple, certainly not in terms of exoticness. It had these intricate frescos of scenes from Buddhism, and immaculate, brightly painted red, gold and green wooden beams, and various Buddha sculptures sat everywhere.

We trudged up a steep stairway to a rooftop deck, took a look at the peaks of the Himalayas that ringed around the temple. I noticed that the temple’s roof was gilded, and part of it looked to be made from pure gold. I couldn’t imagine how they’d constructed it, with that much gold. It looked like more gold than I’d seen in every gangsta rap video ever made. I think Trinidad James would die from a euphoric heart attack if he ever saw it…  

I wanted to ask the guide more about the temple’s construction, but he’d stopped to pray with a monk. He was on his knees, his eyes shut, and was chanting, rocking back and forth, and so I didn’t think it was the ideal time to disturb him.

A feeling surfaced in me, like, how peaceful this was, the temple, how chill. Unlike Christian churches, with the bloody Jesuses hanging overhead, the Buddhist imagery seemed so… serene. It seemed to be about life rather than death and purgatory. That was the vibe I got from it, anyway, and I appreciated it…

Not only was visiting the temple incredible, but the smell inside, oh man, it was unforgettable. The monks were burning incense, “joss sticks,” everywhere, plus some other sort of stuff that I couldn’t identify. As we made our exit, clumped amongst another surging mass that pushed toward the gate, I asked the tour guide about the unique scent, and he said it was yak butter.

Like, wow, the stuff had the most pungent smell to it. The smell crawled and nestled itself in my nostrils, clung to my clothes. It was stronger than any cigarette smoke, as if the scent were a power of its own. Everywhere in Lhasa, I noticed it, that same smell, that cloying, heavy scent of yak butter. At first sniff, it repulsed me, but pretty soon I got used to it, and even started to like it...

Walking out of that temple, our group was dead quiet. I think we were all experiencing a touch of sensory overload. It blew me away, really, that something so beautiful, intricate, and incredible could actually exist.

 

"The Welshman"

 

So my mom’s been spazzing… Man, she’s petrified about moving into the new house. Claims it’s haunted. It’s certainly haunted by bad vibes. There’s no doubt about that.

Everyone heard of what happened there. That kid going nuts and blasting his family, then attacking his school. Oh, and his trial, what a spectacle. They’d actually tried “demonic possession” as a defense. His lawyers even hired some quack to testify on his behalf. This quack was a famous ghost hunter, and he testified about his “examination” of the house and played, in the courtroom, these hissing and popping noises he’d recorded, claiming they were “voices of the dead.” The whole fucking shitshow was on TLC.

If you ask me, the “ghost hunter,” the quack, was just a clout chaser. He was trying to cash in on the tragedy. Look, he sold a book about it, went on TV shows afterward. He was an asshole, as far as I’m concerned, a bullshit artist, same as those psychics and mediums, those parasites who exploit misfortune, target the naïve, rake in blood money… Fuck him and fuck every one of his ilk…

I’m not sure if I believe ghosts are sentient beings. I imagine them more as forces and energy, but indifferent, not malevolent or benevolent. They’re basically the same as a gust of wind or the pull of gravity. They’re a part of nature.  

Ghosts make for fun flicks, though. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies. When I was younger, I’d be scared by that stuff, too. Carrie freaked me out. The frothing, fucking demonic bitch. I could have seen some lame chick I pumped and dumped going batshit like that. I could see her covered, head to toe, in blood, chasing me down a school hallway, shooting fireballs from her ass…

Nowadays, there are tons of Carries, right? Aren’t a lot of these kids, shooting up schools, a Carrie? It’s the revenge of the nerds out there. Nerds going homicidal. You know, like the middle school kid with dental headgear who got his face splashed in the toilet a couple years ago and then opened fire in the school cafeteria. Or that kid at a high school a few towns over, who got a banana shoved up his ass, at a houseparty, by jocks, and later went out and shot up a football game.

Carries, nerds. Man, don’t fuck with the nerds anymore…

But people still do. I bet they always will. It’s human nature, to fuck with people. And like nowadays, with the cyberbullying, it’s even worse. Like, remember the retarded kid with a lightsaber? That video went viral. Millions of people saw that. Millions of people saw and laughed at an 11-year-old retarded kid’s worst moment. It’s terrible. Really, it is. That kid will grow up to be a mass shooter or a serial killer or some shit.

Not that I’m innocent. We pranked lots of kids. We gave kids atomic wedgies. We did that shit. And the older kids did it to us. It’s a cycle. An ecosystem of abuse. But I never thought of anyone shooting up my school. We were fortunate that no one in our class was the type. But shit, if I’d been living in Colby Oswald’s neighborhood, right?

Yeah, dude, I was scared more of ghosts, as a kid, than school shooters. I believed in ghost stories, I believed in Slenderman and urban legends. I believed, at one point, for real, that if I said “Candyman” three times, into a mirror, Candyman would show up and kill me. And while I don’t believe in Slenderman or Candyman, anymore, I still sort of do believe in ghosts. But in a different way.

Look… my views changed. My outlook changed. I changed after I traveled the world…

That’s one thing I’m most proud of doing. Traveling the world. It’s one thing no one can ever take from you, your travels.

I remember hearing an interview with the rapper Lloyd Banks. He was once famous, on top of the charts. These days, he’s not, and an interviewer asked him about it, asking him euphemistically how he felt now that his time in the spotlight was over.

Banks, being cool as fuck, like he is, replied by saying something about how the money, fame, that comes and goes, but the experiences he had, especially traveling the world, that’s something no one can ever take from him.

And I feel that, man. I feel the same way.

Lloyd Banks, in that interview, was reminiscing, talking about visiting beaches made of volcanic sands, these black sand beaches, in the Canary Islands. Yo, I saw that too. I went there too, man. I actually saw that. I walked, barefoot, on volcanic sands. It was absurd...

Man, I floated in the Dead Sea. I strolled through areas of the Middle East that have been inhabited for over 10,000 years. I trekked through Aztec, Incan, and Mayan ruins in Central and South America. I chased after an alpaca that ran up and stole my phone with its mouth. I rode a donkey in the Andes Mountains. I hiked in the Amazon, went scuba diving in the Philippines, spearfishing in Tahiti. I visited the Roman Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower.   

As cool as all that is, the most spectacular place I’ve ever visited, and the most unforgettable, most transformative experience I ever had, without a doubt, has to be… Tibet.  

 

My perception of the world, of life, of virtually everything, changed, drastically, after I visited Tibet.

I’m lucky to have ever gotten in. Mere entry is strictly controlled. If you want to enter the country, and you’re not a Chinese citizen, you have to be part of a Chinese government-approved tour group, be part of a Chinese government-approved tour.  

I was fortunate enough to have joined such a tour group, along with a handful of travel buddies I’d made while staying in a hostel in Hong Kong. The idea was instigated by my bunkmate at the hostel, an older British “bloke,” this former S.A.S., heavy-drinking Welshman. Dude was fucking nuts. And cool as shit.

I mean like here we were, in this pub in Kowloon, and out of nowhere, his eyes bulge and he blurts out, “I want to climb Mount Everest naked…”

I thought it was a joke, that it was the beers talking. We really were shooting the shit, slamming pint after pint in that pub...

That pub. It was an authentically British place. The Brits seem to have a system, a network of British pubs, in every city in the world. I’m sure you’ve seen one. A place with pictures of soccer players and cricketers on the walls and Union Jack flags hanging from the rafters. This was one of those places… A place that served bangers and mash and pork pies and eggs and baked beans and black pudding and haggis and all the other weird shit the Brits eat.

Yo, I tell you, man, like I’d always heard British food was disgusting, but when I tried it, it was delectable. Traditional British food is far better than advertised… Just don’t ask what haggis or black pudding is made with…

Anyway, this crazy Welsh motherfucker was slugging down pints of Guinness. Using the side of his forearm to wipe away the froth from his thin lips, he starts getting serious, his face tightening, and he’s going on, writing an itinerary, plotting a voyage to the Himalayas. He proclaimed to have been to 82 countries, but said he never saw the Himalayas, never went to Tibet.

He was 43, he said, but looked 35 or so, and had a head full of scraggly blond hair. As with most Brits, he was shockingly pale, looking like he’d taken a bath in bleach.

Although he didn’t have any scars or wrinkles, aside from a couple light forehead creases, he did appear as the sort who’d been in his share of fights, had his share of drama, but, given his disposition, it was easy to picture his opponents faring far worse than him in any dispute. Dude was pretty jacked, I gotta say, looked like he pumped iron or did hundreds of push-ups every day. He had that natural, tensile type, corded musculature…

Yo, for real, how is it that so many of these army dudes stay ripped, even after they’re discharged? My Grandpa was like that. There’s something about what being in the army does to those guys…

But yeah, dude was bemoaning his traveling days coming to an end, confessing that he missed Wales. During his lamentations, with his face crinkling, and the way the neon light trickling in from the pub’s front window flashed off his face, I remember starting to think that he looked older and that I could see him being in his 40s.

At least I was able to understand him. His accent was clean. Unlike some of the other Brits I’d met, most notably the Scots.

Some guys from Glasgow, I could barely understand. Coolest people, funnest people in the world, the Scots, but I couldn’t comprehend what they were saying, half the time. I’m not even convinced what those Scots were saying was even really English. Maybe it was a kilt and bagpipes, fucking Gaelic language or something. Part of it was English, I’m sure. It sounded like English, anyway. I’d seen the film Trainspotting, so that helped. Too bad the real live Scottish people didn’t come with subtitles, though…

Oh, and I remember asking a couple Scots if they’d seen the Loch Ness Monster, and most of them just looked at me funny, shook their heads, though one responded that “I don’t think anyone’s ever seen it...”

Oh, man, fucking British people, they’re great. They say funny shit! Like, even if they’re mad and yelling, it still sounds funny, just because of how they talk. I’d always thought of the Brits as only being these tea-drinking, “posh,” jolly fucking Prince Harry, Lady Diana Jane Austen type of assholes. But nah, they get rowdy!

Especially around soccer, which I can understand, since it’s so boring. Those soccer hooligans, they gotta beat the shit out of somebody to make a game that stupid and boring into something more exciting. I can understand it.

Part of that must be related to the drinking. Those Brits get wild when they drink. You feed the Brits a few pints and all that stiff upper lip shit vanishes. And man, seriously, they drink hard. Like, having been in a frat, I saw heavy drinking, but the Brits, they were fucking animals. They took it to another level.

Oh man, they’re great. I loved those British guys. They were the best…

Tough bastards too. Lotsa shaven heads. Missing teeth. Ready to brawl in a minute. A real warrior culture over there. Like, that island, how fucking cold and rainy it is, you gotta be tough to live there.

I visited Britain, too, and loved it. It was so green, like even greener than the Irish Spring commercials, all the rolling hills, fucking Leprechauns hiding out there with pots of gold and shit. Oh, man, it was bucolic, truly beautiful, but those people are wild. They’re fucking animals.

Why don’t we get those sorts, the wild Brits in America? The “yobs” as they call them there... We don’t get those in America. We only get the goofy fucking Monty Python, Benny Hill, and John Oliver types or the classy types, like the Royals, and rich businesspeople, the “Excuse me, sir, might you have some Grey Poopah” riding in a Jaguar Brits, or the rock stars, or the Harry Potter magic wand waving Brits, or handsome Harry Styles or David Beckham soccer ball kicking motherfucker Brit.

The rest, they don’t get passports, probably. They do a good job keeping their animals hidden, caged up in that cold crazy island.

The UK doesn’t let its maniacs out. But America does. Any American abroad is likely either in the army or a criminal or evil businessman or all three. Or an escaped child molester. Or worse- a missionary. If you ever see an American abroad, run away! Nah, I’m only kidding. Sort of.

Some of the maniacs do escape Britain, though. I met a few maniacs, like the Welshman, traveling in Asia. And I have to say, they were pretty fucking cool.

 

Back to the Welshman, first time I met him, in my hostel. He was lying on the bunk above me, reading a book about the Korean War, and was wearing a t-shirt, a fucking t-shirt, and blue jeans, in the middle of winter. Dude had some big biceps, too, a pair of guns on him…

It was so cold then, too, in Hong Kong. This shit cold. This thickly humid cold. This damp cold. The cold was almost like a living force, a sinister, malignant being. It was everywhere and touching everything. I never experienced such nasty cold. It was miserable. And it was made much worse with the rainy, misty weather.

And then here was this Welsh dude, with this tattoo of a green dragon on his muscular arm, and he invites me out for pints and starts talking jokingly, then seriously about hitting Tibet. His sweet beer breath fogging over us, he was getting hyped up, his blue eyes bulging as he started talking about really going there, not to hike Mount Everest naked, but going on a legit tour.

Damn skippy, I’m with it. Tibet? The rooftop of the world? To me, it was the most exotic place imaginable. It was the farthest end of the Earth. I’d come to Asia without much of a plan, was just gonna bum around, check out different countries, and I was stoked to check out the wildest one possible…

We booked the ticket, tour from a travel agent nearby our hostel in Kowloon and left a few days later. It wasn’t the most opportune time to go, being winter, and colder than a witch’s cunt, but Tibet was open and way cheaper, at that time of year, so we seized the chance.

(Welshman said China would frequently close Tibet off around “sensitive” times of the year, like an anniversary of an uprising or holiday…)

 

Man, just flying into the place was a thrill. We flew first from Hong Kong to Chongqing.

Chongqing, somewhere in southwest China, was so foggy that, as we descended and approached the city, I could barely see anything from our plane’s windows until the black tongue of the airport runway appeared, almost magically, and mere seconds later we touched down with a hard bump.  

At the airport in Chongqing, we had a short layover, part of which I spent hitting on a cute young Chinese chick working at a souvenir stand. She was petite, with sky high cheekbones, big brown eyes, and straight shiny black hair reaching to her flat belly. She was wearing a tight red sweater and hugging blue jeans that complimented the curves of her flawlessly trim figure, and looking her over, I was starting to grasp the concept of “yellow fever.”

She spoke about 20 words of English, and I couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, but anything I said was making her laugh like I was a standup comedian. I asked for her number too, but she just kept laughing and giggling. I did the phone hand signals and everything. I don’t know if she didn’t understand or just didn’t want me calling her. Eventually I gave up and rejoined my travel crew, sat by them on a metal bench facing the gate.  

The Welshman swung his gaze at me as I sat down, and he snarled. With his snarling, his thin upper lip curling, his face reminded me a little of Sid Vicious. But like a blonder, older Sid Vicious. A wiser Sid Vicious. An in an airport in China middle-aged Sid Vicious. A Sid Vicious who hadn’t murdered his girlfriend and overdosed on smack. A Sid Vicious if he’d joined the S.A.S. instead of the Sex Pistols.  

I couldn’t really imagine Welshman doing smack, but I could see him murdering people. I could see him murdering lots of people. Shit, he was in the army, the S.A.S., so who knows how many bodies he had… I could see him in gully suits, running loose in jungles, jumping down from trees, his face slathered in green camo paint, all that Rambo sorta shit. Yeah, man, I probably didn’t even want to know the crazy military shit he’d done… Accordingly, I made a mental note to stay on his good side…

Welshman was sipping on a can of Coke, and he declared that Chinese chicks were hot; “fit” was the term he used. (“Fit” means “sexy” in spoken British.)

Though he warned me about Tibetan girls, proclaiming that Tibetan girls have hairy armpits and bad teeth, stinky breath. He was one to talk, really, considering his teeth were a train wreck, but his breath never stank, except of alcohol. His generalizations would have triggered people on Twitter, I bet. I sure hope he never took to tweeting.

He was tendentious, a skosh borderline racist to everyone, though; an equal offender of sorts, so I didn’t care, and again, he did frighten me a bit, so I kept quiet about his occasional inflammatory remarks…

Going to Singapore

"Going to Singapore" by Newamba Flamingo

"Singapore... yeah... was there back in 06. Great nightlife."
"Really? Wouldn't have thought that. Says here on the embarkation card something about death for drug traffickers."
"But they don't kill you for drinking."
"I can't drink anymore for a while. I got oral lichen planus."
"Oral what?"
"Don't ask."
"If you can't drink, at least you can go banging hookers. Prostitution is legal there."
"Yeah?"
"Don't litter, or spit on the street, though. They'll cane you for that."
"Cane you?"
"Yeah, it's a common punishment there. They strip you naked, throw you into this thick body suit with a hole in it where your bare ass hangs out, and they string you up and whack your ass with a cane. Whack your ass tomato red, 'til it bleeds..."
"Damn."
"But they don't usually cane you if they sentence you to death."
"I guess that's compassionate."
"But they do do it for stuff like spitting on the street or littering."
"Streets there must be clean."
"Sure are."
"Think they cane you for spitting on a hooker?"
"I don't know."
"They cane you for all sorts of things, even for overstaying your visa..."
"Really?"
"Yup, but only if it's a couple months or more. I mean, if you miss your flight or something, they won't pull you into some room in the airport, and, you know..."
"Sure is an incentive to not miss your flight, however."
"..."
"You know a lot about Singapore."
"I go on Wikipedia sometimes."
"Think they'd cane Westerners? Like, Americans?"
"They would and do. You're probably too young to remember, but they did it to some American kid back in 94 or 95, for throwing eggs at cars, I think. Michael Fay, Ray or Day, the poor bastard's name was. Beat his ass pretty good."
"For real?"
"Sure did, a lot of people in America were up in arms about it too, on CNN and talk shows, crying about it, but I remember my old man was saying how they oughta do that here to these young punks..."
"Think that'd be a deterant? I could see idiots all bragging about it, like they do about going to prison. Like Lil Wayne taking out his naked ass in music videos, pointing at it, showing off his scars, like it's gangsta."
"Who's Little Wayne?"
"You don't know who that is?"
"Nah, I must be getting old. That's a sure sign you're getting old, when you don't know who Little Wayne is."
"Actually it's Lil Wayne."
"Lil?"
"Lil."
"Whatever."

"Just seems sorta demeaning to be known as 'little' something or another."
"Chris Rock calls him a retarded midget."
"I know Chris Rock. I like Chris Rock."
"Is he really retarded, this Little Wayne?"
"I'm not sure. He is quite short."
"Still, if you're a kid and they call you 'little' whatever, I guess it's alright, but if you're fifty, would you still want people calling you that?"
"I wonder that about 'Young Jeezy' too."
"'Young Jeezy?' For Christ's sake..."
"I don't know if Lil Wayne or Young Jeezy will make it to fifty. They'll probably get smoked by some hater. Rappers get shot all the time."
"Smoked by a hater?"
"Never mind."
"..."
"Hey, scope the tail on that flight attendant there, the tallish one, with all the makeup."
"That is a sweet yellow ass right there."
"Asian women are just beautiful."
"You catch that yellow fever if you're out here long enough."
"Oh, I already got it."
"And there's no going back from it either. I can't even get an erection for other ethnicities."
"Walking Viagra, these women."
"Never understood the yellow fever, until I came out here."
"It's something serious. They should pass out pamphlets about it when you apply for visas."
"What I wouldn't give to grab that ass..."
"I hear guys grab flight attendant ass a lot on flights out of Hong Kong."
"But we're in Singaporean airspace now, on a Singaporean airline, so you wouldn't get away with it... I bet they'd cane you."
"An ass like that might be worth it."
"Nah, in all seriousness, I'd never do that, molest a woman against her will. I only molest consensually."
"Can one molest consensually?"
"I can and do. Non-consensual molesters deserve to be caned."
"And getting caned on the ass, for grabbing an ass, talk about the irony."
"Look, that's what being a man is all about, being able to hide and suppress your perversions."
"I guess that's what separates us from the animals on all fours."
"That's right. Much more so than anything else."

RED SPLOOGE by Doc Sigerson (Part 3)

Part One

Part Two

He ventured next to a more upscale establishment, The Jasmine Touch.
Sippy was met upon entering by a fetching young Asian girl, her jet
black hair in a Louise Brooks cut, her slim figure sheathed in a red
cheongsam as warm with gold dragons stitched into the silk garment, its
thigh slit revealing a slender, yet shapely, leg. She gathered him by
the arm, led him down a hallway to a massage room where he undressed
and donned a white terry cloth bathrobe before heading to the steam
room. While taking the steam, Sippy enjoyed some hydration as the
girl brought him a pot of ginseng tea on a tray with a small bowl from
which to drink. He showered and dried. When he returned, the massage
room was filled with a subtle scent of lavender and the ambient
strains of Chinese music, more “new age” than authentic.

“You want banana or cherry?” asked the girl after the flipover.

“No understand,” said Sippy, hoping that she meant that Slurpees were
included in the amenities.

“Banana,” said the girl and she made a circle of her thumb and
forefinger, pumping them up and down in front of her mouth, a
pantomime of fellatio.

“Cherry,” said the girl and through the circle of her thumb and
forefinger she plunged in and out the forefinger of her other hand, a
pantomime of coitus.

“I would like both banana and cherry,” said Sippy. The girl smiled.
She slipped out of the dress. Sippy noted that she wore Hello Kitty
panties. There ought to be a joke somewhere in there, he thought.
Her dress and undies neatly stacked upon a chair in the corner, Lily
expertly wrangled his erection and lowering her face, placed her lips
ever so gingerly on the glans and then rolled down the condom that had
been hidden in her mouth so swiftly that his penis was enveloped
before he even realized what she had done. Then she set to work. She
moved up and down Sippy’s lower body, her breasts caressing his
thighs, as she tongued his shaft and finally began sucking him off
with real conviction.

“Ohhhhhhh, sweeeeeetheart,” moaned Sippy for the only thing he could
think of as the animal stormed and raged was the proverbial golf ball
through the garden hose. Crescendo. The condom shot forth like a
champagne cork.

“You asshole!” yelled the girl wiping the bright scarlet splooge from
her eyes, “[something in Mandarin]! Shit, shit shit! [something
derogatory in Mandarin]! You are disgusting! Oh, I must get this out
of my hair!
[something unspeakably vulgar in Mandarin]!”

Lily fled the room, sheathed in a very different red. On his way out,
Sippy snagged the abandoned Hello Kitty panties as a trophy.

* * *

Oh! He was crowing! Such victories he’d won which now he saw fit to disclose.

“Sippy,” I said. “You’ve really stepped over the line!”

“Doc, how can say that? Isn’t that what you do here all day long in
this dang card room? How many times have you boasted to me of all the
suckers you’d fleeced?”

“There’s a big difference,” I began, “between the sheep who come here
willingly, knowing in advance that there’s a damn good chance they’ll
lose their wad and those women who make their living providing a
service, doing honest work for an honest dollar. And I’ll tell you
something else, Sippy Cullen. These are women are mostly new to this
country and because they may not have sufficient English to call the
police, they are most vulnerable to predators. Predators like you,
Sip.”

“Oh, it’s not like that, Doc. I’m not doing any real harm.”

“You’re cheating them, Sip, pure and simple. And I’ll tell you
something else. Because they can’t rely on the police, they have
other ways of protecting themselves. Not always legal, not always
pretty. Get me?”

“Jiminy Christmas,” said Sippy, “You mean like ninjas or those Yakuza dudes?”

“Wrong culture but gangsters of some sort, usually dime-a-dozen
thick-necked goons with gaudy tattoos. Many of these places are
‘connected’ to shady organizations.”

“Really?” he said, quietly.

“Sippy, you have got to give up this game. It can only end badly for you.”

“Okay, Doc.” said Sippy, “I know you’re right.”

I had misgivings. Sippy Cullen had proven himself not always a
forthright fellow and there was something in his eyes that said that
the boy’s gotta have it.

* * *



Much like a gambler, Sippy knew his luck would have to run out sooner
or later and, as the animal seemed unsated, the urge to assail just
one more spa was so compelling that Sippy rationalized that another
outing would incur minimal risk, but no one could possibly have
foreseen the terrible exactions of his comeuppance. As it happened,
The Paradise Health Spa, nestled unassumingly between the Formosa Nail
salon and Poppa John’s Pizza would become his Waterloo. He was
greeted by a woman in a blue smock who introduced herself as Lily.

“Would you be interested in the four hand special?” she asked, “Most
beneficial for relaxing muscle and will promote healthful blood flow
through your body.”

“Four hands?” asked Sippy, “that mean two ladies?”

“Yes,” said Lily, “two therapists will perform deep tissue massage on
your body. This special would also include a table shower before the
massage”.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Sippy, “but I will give it a try.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeet! two-on-one and that’s a dream come through! he
thought, as, Cleo and a second woman in a pink smock, both protected
by clear plastic lab coats, lathered his body with rich suds and
rinsed using shower heads which extended from the wall just above his
body as he stretched out on a padded vinyl-covered table. They
scrubbed diligently every inch, literally, from head to sole, and if a
client entertained the notion that there were certain taboo locations
on the body which they would avoid, he would be mistaken. The two
attended the sensitive and secret places with unswerving zeal. Three
times they washed completely Ol’ Sippy who afterward felt exuberantly
tingly, freshly minted. Now the animal was revving up.

On the massage table the women plied with warmed lotion his back and
legs, their hands, petite yet applying steady pressure, crisscrossing
in a subtle choreography. He could not discern which hand belonged to
which woman and gradually he felt as though there must have been more
than two pairs of hands working him. This is really paradise, he
thought. Suddenly, he was flipped over and pinned to the massage
table, rendered immobile, before he even realized what they had done.
Just as swiftly, he was gagged with a small towel. He could count at
least six Chinese women holding him down, most in blue smocks and some
in pink, and there may have been more women beyond his limited field
of vision.

“Mei-Mei,” said a woman with long light brown hair as she reached
behind her and opened the door. An elderly Chinese woman entered,
padding softly in fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, a pink bathrobe wrapped
around her small gaunt form. Next came a young girl, not quite of
high school age, bearing a tray that held something which Sippy could
not make out.

“You have been a very bad man,” spoke the old woman into his ear. The
animal still purred, his cock remained hard and one of the women held
his erection at the base so it rose perpendicular from his supine
form. The old woman now began taking ultrathin acupuncture needles of
varying sizes from the tray and inserted them with great precision
into Sippy’s lower abdomen. Even though he could barely feel a
pinprick as each needle penetrated his skin, his anxiety level rose
and soared. Finally, from the tray she took a sounding probe about
twelve inches in length, which to Sippy looked like the largest needle
he’d ever seen, and she brandished it above the head of his penis so
that he could comprehend with ever increasing terror what she was
about to do. A few dabs of lubrication and she inserted, slowly,
slowly, the sounding probe into his urethra He started feeling woozy,
his mind slipping into absurdity. Jiminy Christmas, he thought, a
penis kebab. Halfway in, she removed several of the acupuncture
needles, then plunged the probe to its limit. A sudden scorching
white light leaped across his brain pan and his mind went black.

* * *

“Okay. Well,” I said. “In a way it makes sense. If acupuncture can
cure, then it can also harm ...”

“Dang you, Doc! You’re not listening!” shouted Sippy. He stood in
front of my booth where I worked at draining the ale from a semi-clean
glass. It’d been five days since his ordeal. Upon regaining
consciousness he’d found himself slumped in a heap in front of his
apartment door. Still naked, his clothes had been dumped next to him.
Only a few hours had elapsed and no neighbors had noticed the inert
Sippy Cullen displayed au naturel in their communal hallway.

“Sorry, Sip. I was ...” I began. I had been deflecting as now it
hit me that I’d been too sanguine, too lackadaisical, in dealing with
the man and failed to foresee these repercussions. I needed, somewhat,
to back up, regroup my thinking. “That was a message - they were
telling you they know where you live.”

“How ...?” he asked.

“Oh, I imagine it was a simple as looking in your wallet for your home
address.” I said, “You had it with you, right?”

“Yeah. I checked it and nothing was taken. Except ...”

“So take it to heart. They could have done much worse.”

“... and the woman, “ he said, “she called me a bad man ...”

“I won’t sugarcoat this, Sip,” I said. “You made some bad decisions,
some incredibly reckless decisions, without a shred of regard for some
of your fellow human beings. Surely even you knew that body fluids
are considered biohazard. You weren’t just unethical - you put them
at risk.”

“But dang it Doc,” he said, “sure, I skipped out on paying for
services but that blood could just be wiped off or cleaned up. I
don’t fucking deserve what they did to me. You say they could have
hurt me much worse but you don’t know. They took away my life as I
knew it.

“Sippy,” I said, “you’re alive and intact. Just make amends and get
on with your life.”

“That blood vessel blowout should have bummed me out.” Sippy said,
“but here I thought ‘Mr. Cullen you just take positive steps and get
your act together.’ Dang it, when life hands you lemonade then make
lemon cake! And that’s what I was doing - boosting myself with my
bootstraps and just for a few moments in my life I felt in the game,
riding the crest of the wave ... like I was someone ... like I was
really someone ... it was like I stepped out of that old life - the
life where I schlepped the equipment for the players ... those guys who
were actually in the game ...and where I was constantly bombarded
with the sex boasting and the jock jabber in the locker room ...
taunted by the sort of life I could never have ... and all of a sudden
I could be this new person ... a normal person with a normal life ...
or something more ... I wanted to attack life and chew it up in
man-size portions ... to drink up the whole dang world in big gulps
... to really leave a footprint ... my life should have been so much
more ... but it never was ...”

He swallowed, suppressing a sob.

“And in your eyes, Doc,” he continued, “ ... in your eyes I was always
that no-moxie munchkin ... the snuffler in the backroom ... the guy
what missed the gravy boat ... and now fuck it all! I may be
sidelined for the rest of my life. In the game for a few plays and
then sidelined, benched like a chump in a slump.”

He was trembling, noticeably.

“And you know what they took, Doc?” he continued, “they took away my
drive. They killed the animal. I can’t get it up anymore and I’ve
tried everything. Looking at any image no matter how extreme don’t
juice my fella. Talking to Barb at the 7-11 don’t give me any kind of
buzz no more. I tried little blue pills I borrowed from Old Man
Bigelow up the hall and nothing happened. I can’t even fantasize and
my dreams are dullsville. I never had much before, but I had porn and
now porn is a closed door. There’s a hella big sucky black hole
that’s was my life. Did I really deserve that from them women? I
just want what everyone seems to have. Doc, I ask you. Am I so much
less deserving than anyone else?”

Ah, Sippy, I thought, you wretched man, you were never the one and
never going to be the one to paint the town red. And maybe it’s just
your lot in life to be sidelined from the game which in the end is
just a trifling thing. But, you’ll learn that eventually. We’ve all
had setbacks, especially you, Sippy Cullen, but you always had porn to
fall back on. Now you don’t have the one thing that made tolerable
your sad sack existence.

All the things that I could possibly tell Sippy would be of no comfort
to him at this moment. He swayed, emotionally exhausted, unsteady on
his feet, his rant spent.

“Sippy, there are times I don’t know anything at all,” I said. “Sit
down and I’ll buy you a pint. A big pint.”

He tottered, collapsing into the seat like a dead weight.

* * *



Now you’ve heard the story of Sippy Cullen. I’ve told it straight, no
digressions, no trick endings, a direct and unvarying trajectory with
only one possible outcome. Several days afterward, I made my way to
the Hong Kong Palace restaurant. Inside I asked for May and was shown
the back office where sat an old Chinese woman wearing a black tunic
and slacks and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. Thank you, she said, for
helping us stop this problem. He has made a first payment of
compensation. I asked if he would recover. Possible, she said, but I
hope not. My girls were so shook up, they will not come back to work.
They must be tested. Tested again in six months. The rooms
rehabbed. I said he had become unhinged. All his life a harmless
midge and just the slightest injury derailed his sense of what is
right. She spat on the floor and gave me the cold eye. Do not tell
me your troubles, Doc Sigerson. I have my own.

RED SPLOOGE by Doc Sigerson (Part 2)

Part One

The last thing I should have done was proffer any notions that might
inspire a harebrained stunt, least of all to Mr. Keith “Sippy” Cullen,
that mook. At first it seemed out of character. The man practiced a
pathological frugality, pinched his pennies until they squealed like
pigs. His porn sessions were his version of a cheap date. Sure, he
was a natural introvert, but it was parsimony mostly that prevented
him from pairing up. Now, The Red Splooge Boogie had him
high-stepping to a different tune as he betook himself to The Joy Luck
Rub, a tidy emporium of tug jobs tucked into a strip mall not too far
from his favorite 7-11 store.

Middle-aged Chinese women, originally from Hong Kong, operated the
massage parlor. Though they possessed but a smattering of English,
they moved him from lobby to massage room in a manner businesslike and
brisk. The women wore plain blue hospital scrubs and though far from
matronly frumps, they were certainly not the China doll ingenues of
desire’s imagination.

Mother naked, he stretched out on the massage table, his arms dangling
rubbery and loose off the sides of the table, his face firmly in the
cradle allowing him but a hemmed view of the floor and sometimes a
glimpse of a sensible workshoe. The masseuse set to manhandling
whatever muscles he had achieved through a regimen of role player
video games and internet porn. She directed him to turn over onto his
back and as he turned, she placed deftly a small pillow beneath his
head before he even realized what she had done.

“Little Brother need massage?” she asked.

“What brother?” he started, “I don’t have a ...”

“Little Brother.” and she pointed.

“Oh ... oh, yes, please,” said Sippy. “Please, take good care of him.”

The woman stationed the bottle of lotion between Sippy’s knees,
applying liberal amounts to her hand and began slathering Sippy’s
loins. She proceeded in circular motions on his abdomen, sweeping
lower, lower, and then working the inside of his thighs. The circle
was closing in. Then running tentatively her fingers along his shaft,
with the other hand she kneaded the scrotum. Grasping his balls with
increasing pressure, she started stroking his penis. Sippy felt the
grumbling and flexing gland exert its power. A sudden inner
convulsing,and like a damburst, the woman was drenched. Sippy moaned
and the woman gasped.

“Aieeeeeeeeee!” she cried, “Ugh! Ugh! Oh, no! [something in Mandarin]!
You ugly defective white man! [something more in Mandarin]! I might
be contaminated and die of a horrible disease!
[something-something-something in Mandarin]!”

She wiped frantically the blood from her face and jetted from the
room, down the hall. Sippy heard doors slam and could discern several
excited voices but could not understand the words in Mandarin. Then
more slamming of doors. He toweled himself dry, then dressed and made
his way to the front desk. Seeing no one there, he slipped out the
door, hastening homeward with many a backward glance. The woman had
not collected money before the massage and Sippy had failed to leave
payment on the desk. When it became apparent no one pursued, he
slowed, breaking into a saunter and a shit-eating grin.

* * *

As if no one wanted to play cards with a man called Doc, pigeons were
scarce in the card room that next day when Sippy showed up, a spark in
his eye, a spring in his step. I motioned him over and asked how he
fared.

“I took your advice, Doc,” he said, “been trying things out, seeing
what’s exactly my new normal.”

“Your hemospermia condition - still erupting red?”

“Yeah, Doc. It’s a dang mess.”

“Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Sippy Cullen.”

“Doc, sometime I don’t get you at all,” he said. “So it’s funny. I
thought this brouhaha with the burst blood vessel would check my
action but just the opposite - it’s jumpstarted and turbo-charged my
whole sex drive. I’m in full-on horndog mode. All the time.”

“Well, that’s surprising,” I said. “I ‘d have guessed it would have
let the air out of your balloon.”

“It’s like I have an animal down there below my gut” Sippy said,
“purring away all the time, then when I get going, the animal is
roaring like that talking tiger on the cereal commercial. I’m about
to shoot my wad and the animal feels like it’s trying to explode out
of my body. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve felt before.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a good thing going there,” I said.

“It’s like when you absorb a power booster capsule, you up your energy
and your firepower increases tenfold.”

“Sippy, for the sake of my reputation, I’m going to pretend that I did
not understand what you just said.”

“Hardy-har-har,” he said, “You just like to pretend that you don’t
know as much as you really do. So let me ask you about something
that’s come up.”

“Tell me what’s itching your brain,” I said.

“I’m thinking of going to one of them massage places I see around
town. Seems to be new ones popping up every month and I don’t know
which one would be really right for me, if you get my drift.”

I gave him the eye and thought oh ho, once more he’s the man of gelded
dreams and stillborn schemes.

”Well, Sippy,” I said, “there’s legit ones and then there’s not so
legit ones where you can exercise your animal, if that’s what we’re
talking about. But seriously, you need to take care of your problem
first.”

“It’s getting better, actually,” he said, “should be cleared up in a few days.”

“Just like finding the right plumber or barber shop, it’s trial and
error, or you rely on word of mouth. You might try doing some
searches on the internet. I understand there’s chatrooms and websites
where the ‘patrons’ discuss and rate the different establishments.
I’ve heard that if you’re interested in a superb by-the-book working
over, then steer yourself to the Asian joints.”

“Really?” he asked. “Why’s that?”

“Regular massage has been a part of their culture for centuries and
unlike run-of-the-mill American-operated massage parlors, those run by
Asians make a practice of rendering service before receiving payment,
leaving the amount of the gratuity, if any, to the gentleman patron,
which is one their ways of sidestepping the snares of Uncle Leo.”

“You mean the crazy uncle from Seinfeld?”

“That character’s name has been hijacked by the criminal subculture so
that here LEO stands for Law Enforcement Officer.”

“Jiminy Christmas! No kidding!”

“And try to avoid anyplace that advertises ‘hot stones’ therapy,” I
said. “According to my sources, that’s the piss-poor substitute
provided by sleazy incompetent joints that don’t have trained massage
therapists and any extra services they might offer are usually
substandard, as well. So you think you want to sample the skills of
one of our local service providers?”

“Nah,” he said, “probably not.”

“I didn’t think so for a moment, Sip. We are who we are.”

“Guess so,” he said.

In hindsight, he’d laid enough cards on the table for me to suss out
the situation but, you see, I had never taken Ol’ Sippy seriously, not
even halfway, and so my mind skated over what otherwise would have
been evident.

* * *