At one festival on stage during Dylan’s set, a nubile young woman in booty shorts and heels was lost sexily inside the music and gyrating on the speakers just left of Dylan’s head. My girlfriend poked at her brusquely, made a tilting definitive gesture in my direction and said, “Dj’s wife. Leave.”
The booty-shorted interrupted female blinked. Her gaze was vague and vacant. Then, in a muted sort of delayed reaction huff, she left. “Gotta protect what’s yours,” my girlfriend said in a rigid voice strict with instruction. I grinned. I didn’t need to arch my eyebrows because I draw them in like that every day, arched and at the ready.
My girlfriends seem to think that since Dylan is a dj, I should with hectic jealousness guard him 24-7, armed at all times with weapons like a taser, tear gas and a battering ram. They seem to think a legion of starstruck dj groupies all hopped up on booze and hormones will with throbbing suddenness at any time appear and sexually offer themselves to Dylan wholesale. Even if that were to happen, I’d hardly have married someone who’d take up such offers without any kind of pause or hesitation. Some might find the mere prospect of such things to be irresistible and exciting, but I think Dylan has a little more self-discipline, focus, and control, than all that. Also, if I didn’t trust and love Dylan at this most basic level, I’d be hard-pressed to define what the success of our relationship is based upon, or what our union means. I also like to think I’m worth all possible cases and causes that require denial, resistance, thoughtfulness and effort. After all, who are we if we don’t have trust and confidence in ourselves and in each other; what is love without confidence and trust that is both sustained and sustaining. In all happy lasting relationships, trust and confidence are keys.
Dylan was playing another show and that time I brought out some of my ladies. During Dylan’s set, Leslie jumped on stage and began to dance provocatively. I squinted at her up there, smiled, kept dancing and let the mammoth bouncers know they needn’t remove Leslie immediately. Leslie meanwhile danced with increasing seduction and sensuality. I took note of her provocative progress only peripherally and rather blindly. Leslie is a great and beautiful friend so I had no issue with her titillating show. As she became increasingly steamier and more suggestive grinding nearer to Dylan though, I privately marveled and took confused note. I had no idea Leslie was so turned on by Dylan’s music. After a time, I turned to Sarah to make an amused remark. But it wasn’t Sarah standing next to me, it was Leslie! Meaning the strumpet on stage wasn’t Leslie but just some girl! Dylan flashed me his “dude what the fuck” face. I made a subtle gesture toward the bouncers that conveyed the message, “Remove the floozy.” As the dubious damsel was hauled away, she looked at Dylan and squalled, “But your music! It makes me feel… so sexy!”
I know right. Shit is endearing. I really shouldn’t forget to wear my contacts out to shows.
Another time during another one of Dylan’s sets, a profoundly inebriated girl was dancing with a kind of lilting lurid lewdness up on the stage. Her extreme drunkenness greatly eclipsed her sense of basic balance and noticeably affected as well her skills in areas like elegance of public display and clarity in thinking. With wonderful woozy wobbliness, she swayed closer and closer to Dylan till his flitting eyes communicated to me that I should intercept and prevent this girl from proceeding past her state of being incoherently entertaining to becoming an actual liability. I moved casually nearer to her as she leaned into Dylan in an apparent attempt to whisper in his ear. Murmuring and slurred, she said, “I wanna be your Pretty Lady.” Then she fell over.
I know right. Shit is endearing.
“You’re like an alien goddess,” the girl divulged as I helped her up. Her limbs were a loose and jumbled mess. She scrutinized me with eyes as dim and lusterless as they were impenetrable. “An alien goddess,” she repeated.
“Thanks,” I said. “I try.”
“Don’t try,” drunken hippie girl breathed. “Be.” I bowed my head slightly to convey a holy receiver’s attitude of gratitude, with hopes to cut the conversation short.
“Do you know him?” asked the girl, gripping my hand and bringing things back to Dylan.
Recently I attended my very first baby shower if you can believe it and it was a pretty nice experience. Warmhearted, instructional and illuminating. It’s astonishing I’ve managed never to have been to any of these previously since it seems like everyone on my friends list recently had a baby or is having a baby, my Facebook news feed is almost exclusively an ongoing stream of intelligence and reports about all these mothers and their babies, the trials and joys, the suffering and the ecstasy, I think I’m the last female standing not to have kids and husbands and cars, paying mortgages on houses, being a wife and mother, worker and lover, aside from maybe four others, it’s down literally to me.
At the shower, there were all these wonderful women, most of them business professionals, married with one or two kids. The house was full of women, there were only two men there, I marveled at all the women and remarked to one of them about the head count.
“I don’t think I even know this many women,” she said. Her name was Jennifer. “Even if I did, I don’t think they’d all come to my baby shower.” I felt the same. The turnout was impressive. I was enraptured and entranced as I hovered abashedly around the finger foods and kept myself close to the bolstering bottles of champagne and wine. I was worried I’d be very much the obvious left field freak of nature Strange Woman Present but thankfully I wasn’t. The experience like I said was enjoyable and got my brain (and heart and womb) to ruminating.
On entering and before meeting Jennifer, a basket brimming with diapers was pointed out to me. I was instructed to write something waggish and whimsical on one of the diapers so that the diaper changes of the future for the new parents would be vivacious and engaging and not merely just gross and disturbing. This liveliness seemed lifted out of a list of possible activities from a page one might come across if you googled the key phrases “Baby shower” and “Cheerful doings.”
The two beautiful hosts of the night each don’t themselves have children, which added irony and humour and some nice subtle touches of free-spirited nihilism and anarchy to the evening. During a quiet stolen moment after Danielle, the resplendent mother-to-be, made her way through her incredible hull of cards and gifts with spirited efficiency, I confided with one of the few other childless women present, her name is Alison, she’s one of Danielle’s best friends and was one of the hosts of the evening.
“So!” I said, “Motherhood.”
“Right,” said Alison.
“Pregnancy. Oof,” I said, “Wow. Children. You?”
I offered wide unblinking eyes as I said these words, brought an intensity to my stare and made that strange blowing air through loosely pressed lips sound, an audible action that somehow always does with a certain unmatched accuracy sufficiently convey the “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” rock and a hard place viewpoint, position, manner of thinking and philosophy.
“I don’t know,” Alison said, “I don’t know.”
Her eyes glassed over as she deliberated.
“Me neither,” I said, “I mean. How does one decide such a thing. How do you ‘know.’ When is the best time to even consider having a kid, is your man the right man, does he want kids, do you want kids, will he make a good father, will you make a good mother, what about careers and costs and all the things that are expensive and hard and draining and time-consuming and depressing, the very opposite of adorable moments and endless fun. Right? Shit.” I said.
“Right,” said Alison, “Shit.”
“Also, it’s so easy to romanticize such things. Like your own kid’s gonna be so gorgeous and smart and cute and fun when maybe it won’t be, maybe the kid will be ugly or stupid or shitty in all kinds of very miserable, irreparable, super wretched ways. It could get into dealing drugs or be a liar or make bad friends, get into gangs and violence, drop out of school, be a horror and a nightmare, all kinds of things. Plus the tantrums and the shouting, and kids fucking touch everything too, break things, they can be holy shit so cute but also oh my God wow annoying and exhausting, asking ‘why’ all the time, constantly needing and wanting things, screaming or crying and maybe never stopping with that shit, driving you actually insane while you’re trying to remember the last time you slept or had some time to yourself or how to maintain your relationship with your partner, you could spend years not remembering the last time you had any kind of freedom or fun, or who you even are or what your goddamned name is. All kinds of difficulty in the coordination of it, the timing of things, fielding all the problems as they come in, trying to make it work when maybe actually it’s just too much or it’s not what you thought it would be or it sucks much more than it doesn’t. And the womb too. The womb’s like a goddamned ticking clock time bomb, you only have ‘so long’ to bandy about and fuck around.”
“Right,” said Alison.
“Decisions, decisions,” I said, and we both fell to another silent moment’s shared solemnity. It was like we were expressing a hushed and honouring respect for fallen comrades, the fallen comrades were our friends with kids or were ourselves for not having any.
“So,” I continued, “On one hand right, ‘it’s not for everyone.’ It’s a lot harder and more work and not always this relentless bed of adorableness and joy. Like I said, what if the kid just the pits. Also all those other things. Fucking the kid up bad by not always being the best parent, fucking shit up for yourself or for them, feelings of resentment, second guessing everything, especially if the kid sucks, or if your life does once the kid is there, other shit too, like postpartum depression and gaining weight, ruining your body from the pregnancy, not sleeping and feeling ugly and tired, no more romance with the husband, fighting with the kid or yourself or the husband, or maybe the husband feels like shit because you feel like shit, or you lavish all your love and thought and attention and time on the kid and the dad is clueless or doesn’t help or just gets in the way. Or the husband runs off with a twenty year old because you’re no longer so great to hang out with, or you aren’t meeting his needs anymore, or you just seem to now prefer the kid to him, or whatever goddamned else. Also some women are just sad and tired and miserable, they no longer prefer anything, not the husband or the kid or themselves even, they resent the whole thing, they’re sad, they feel like they missed something, they lost out, they might’ve replaced good career possibilities with motherhood and the motherhood thing isn’t always all sunshine and diamonds so like. Yeah. Christ. How to decide. How does one ‘know’. Because on the other hand… we’re kind of here because we’re alive. We live and we can create more life. We come outfitted ‘for the job.’ We’re born to love and nurture and take care of things, we’re maybe here most of all to make life and to give love. It might be the great regret of any woman’s life not to do that one Great Miracle Thing we are all so incredibly very specially designed to very beautifully do…”
Alison listened to my words with a Zen Queen’s patient calm.
“This is it,” she said finally, “This is what you do.”
I gave Alison my full attention. She produced a quarter from somewhere. The quarter was total in its look of innocence.
“Okay,” she said, “So. Heads is ‘Baby,’ Tails is ‘No Baby’ or you can decide what is what. You call it as the coin is flipping and you do the flipping. Then the moment the result is in, you see how the result makes you feel. You see how you feel inside, regardless of what the result happens to be.”
“Oh,” I said pointlessly and resisted the urge to glare at the quarter. Its former innocence had disappeared. I took a deep breath and focused for a moment, like I was about to attempt a gold medal vault at the Olympics or some totally different but equally life or death comparable in importance seeming thing.
“Okay,” I said, “Tails Baby. Heads No baby.”
“Alright,” said Alison.
We flipped the coin.
It was Heads.
No baby.
I felt annoyed. I also felt I should hide that annoyance by a mask of good sportsmanship and neutrality. I wasn’t immediately ready to express how I felt in words. We moved onto Alison. She said Heads Baby, Tails No baby.
It was Tails.
No baby.
We both gazed at the quarter. It offered no comment. There was another shared silence uniting us. A pregnant pause if you will. Then we looked fiendishly at each other, our eyes mutinous and flashing.
“Twins! Twins! Twins!” we shouted, clasping each other’s hands in compressed excitement as we jumped up and down like a couple of meth-addicted school kids. We grinned and laughed and huddlingly shared a delirium of defiance and delight, like we were already triumphantly popping out perfect, gorgeous, flawless, incredible, brilliant sets of twins unstoppably, all over the place, with no figures misshapened and no beats missed.
Alison and I had simultaneously given the finger to Providence and coins and fate. What did that fucking quarter think it was that it could with such implacable presumptuous inanimate importance decide the combined fates of both our marvelous wombs “just like that.” Fuck that quarter. Fuck fate. We both responded to the situation in this same exact immediate fired up way. We had agreed to leave the decision of our lives and wombs up to the coin of fate and then immediately rejected what fate had to say. And not only did we spurn fate’s decision, we both sailed right past “No baby” straight ecstatically through to “Twins! Twins! Twins!”
“Ladies, ladies,” said a nearby woman. She frowned at us. This had an instantly admonishing effect. We quieted down in a laudable attempt to veer nicely toward better public behaviour defined by elegance of sound and action and a poetry of restraint. None of this jumping up and down and shouting “Twins! Twins! Twins!” thing. There came an eventual “That’s better” expression onto the intervening schoolmasterish woman’s face. “Besides,” said this woman, “You don’t want twins.”
“Yeah we do,” Alison and I said together, trying our best to not sound like reprimanded schoolgirls.
“No you don’t,” said the immovable woman. “Just think about the logistics of twins. Imagine a kid crying all through the night and needing all kinds of things, needing to be watched 24-7 and being totally dependent on you at every moment, at all hours, for days, months, years. Now multiply that by two.” The woman paused to let the somberness of the cold hard truth of her knowledge and words sink deep, fast in, and through. “Also, breastfeeding. What are you going to do? Breastfeed both kids? Two crying babies at the same time.” The woman didn’t even wait to see whether we agreed with her reasoning, or if we had any worthwhile comebacks that could in any way legitimately argue some opposing side to the basically irrefutable points she made. There was no challenging the cold austerity of all her inarguable truths.
“Hm,” said Alison and I in diminished tones, “Guess not.” The lady gave us her “That’s right, girls” face.
The know-it-all lady gazed abstractedly. She’d said all that was necessary and then some. Alison and I were chastened and deflated, but the rebelliousness in our hearts remained. I think we both just come a certain way, fate and Providence and logistics and practicality and quarters be damned, what really matters is how cute and wonderful and adorable and fun and perfect and awesome our motherfucking twins will be, no matter what, despite whatever the goddamned “odds” were, fuck the odds, fuck everything that might dampen or damage the romanticization and the dream.
“Twins,” I stage whispered to Alison, the moment the voice of reason woman moved off. I gave Alison a nimble conspiratorial jab with one of my elbows.
“Twins,” she agreed in a medium volume stage whisper back. She smirked. I grinned. Our eyes contained evil sparks and luscious gleams. Life is all about these evil sparks and luscious gleams.
“Twins! Twins! Twins!” we chanted again later in a delayed reaction extension of our stage whispering. We were like two braindead teenaged cheerleaders in church who can’t stop cheering even during the endless sermon and all the praying.
Afterward on exiting I saw the diaper basket and remembered I hadn’t yet written something funny and fun for the parents-to-be to enjoy while changing the baby. I grabbed a couple of the tiny diaper things.
On one diaper I wrote:
What time does Sean Connery arrive at Wimbledon?
Tennish
It’s our last night of the two days we’ve been in Bangkok and Dylan and I decide it’s time to leave the disturbing and depressing example of “White People in Thailand” that is Khao San Road behind. We want to see other parts and areas of this incredible city and beautiful country and so hop a cab and clumsily attempt to explain in our nonexistent Thai to the disconcerted driver that we want to get to the Gay District and chill there among people who we might find more relevantly interesting, entertaining and fun. The driver is perplexed by the address scrawled in my Moleskin, he’s embarrassed and bewildered too by our gauche attempts to define the words “homosexual” and “gay” by an awkwardness of miming. We simply finally pile into the taxi, lapse into a trusting silence and feeling hopeful are on our way.
A forty-five minute quietly compelling and careening commute later, we find ourselves in another impressively urban area, distinctly less touristic and contoured by high buildings, several restaurants and wide busy lanes. It’s a much more business-type area of Bangkok and interesting enough but it doesn’t overly smack of “gay.” We pause after walking a while to take stock but we remain still unsure. We continue to wander around enveloped by the thick humid burgeoning Bangkok night, we’re weighed unpleasantly down by our huge traveler’s pack and shoulder bags, we grow tired and get basically nowhere. Gradually we accept that we definitely aren’t in an intelligibly homosexual neighbourhood at all.
After accosting a handful of mostly unhelpful strangers, we light upon an elegant older strolling man who seems most likely to be capable of giving us the succinct explanations and straightforward answers to the questions we have and the directions we seek. We are correct. He does and capably. This man is graceful and gracious in an offhand way, he’s not surprised to see or be accosted by us, he’s just strolling along and appears before us like he’s been “put” there exactly for us to ask him definite questions so that he can give us distinct replies.
This graceful and gracious man is accommodating and charming, he’s lived in Bangkok for twenty years and has a rigorous love for Thailand. He confidentially shares with us his various opinions and some personal details and accompanies us all the way to a sufficiently attractive modestly priced hotel that he himself recommends. He gives us clues too as to where to go for “good gay fun” and at the hotel we bid him grateful adieu. His farewell is warm and kind and refined.
We check in and once we are comfortably in our air-conditioned room at last, Dylan casts his towering and titanic travelers’ backpack energetically aside. I’m delirious with fatigue and prostrate, wearing as I almost always do the least appropriate footwear for a great deal of walking or for any manner of basic movement at all, let alone for what would be most suitable to something like world traveling and being a pavement pounding tourist. My feet as a result are almost always sore and destroyed. I collapse therefore with a plunge luxuriously face-down upon the big beautiful bountiful bed. I pass nearly completely out, I am exhausted to my core from the extended taxi ride and from all the walking and carrying. The Bangkok heat too, the heaviness of the bags, wearing those wrong shoes, none of these details help to maintain my energy or uplift my mood. Dylan by contrast is all shot up with excitement, his energy levels are luridly high. My exhaustion plummets me comfortably straight into sleep’s death embrace, it’s by this point almost midnight anyway…
I attempt to convince Dylan that a nap is the best idea ever and would be for the both of us “just the thing.” Dylan seems to sense some kind of trap. He defensively denies me and almost angrily replies, “NO. Cause then. You’ll just lie there. You’ll go to sleep. For good.”
I’m taken slightly aback by his vehemence and coo out a reassuring, “No I won’t” but Dylan refuses to be either tricked or convinced. Tensing his whole body, he flops upon the bed with an unrelenting bounce, he is stiff and unyielding, a nap is the furthest thing from all of his desire and interest or need. “Just twenty minutes,” I in my sumptuous sleepiness attempt to reassure and beseech. Turbulent and dubious, Dylan concedes.
Suddenly Dylan is “up and at ’em” once more, he’s firing ferociously to go. Dylan bustles about busily, stands straightly tall and disruptively commands, “Okay get up.” It’s immediately imperative apparently that we hit up the homosexual bars at once in Friendly Town.
“Just twenty more minutes,” I murmur into the pillows.
Dylan shouts something about us having actually napped already for nearly an hour. I’m too overrun with an all-consuming exhaustion to even attempt any version of opposing argument or any convincing defensive line. The thought of getting vertical and outside of the covers seems not just unattractive but vicious and impossible, I feel leaden and broken by the concept, to a point that is total in its oppression and lethargy.
“We have to go out!” Dylan shouts. “We spent all this time and energy trying to find the Gays and now we’ve done it! You’ll regret forever that we never went out and had the time of our lives in the gayest city in the world! We have to get out there and party with the ladyboys! You’ll never forgive me or yourself if I let you let me not make us go! Trust me, you’ll thank me later, we have to go out! We have to!” I’m so exhausted I manage to remain unmoved by this impassioned tirade, for all its impressiveness and extremity.
“What time is it,” I ask meaninglessly.
“Who cares what fucking time it is!” Dylan shouts.
“Go ask at the front desk,” I suggest, trying really just to get him out of the room and leave me to wallow beautifully in my nice and napping peace.
“Ok,” Dylan says. “I’m going downstairs and I’ll find out the goddamned time. But if when I get back and you are still just ‘lying there,’ I am going to fuck you in the ass. I am not joking, I will fuck you in the ass. A punitive assfucking, that’s what you will get so get up. I do not joke!”
That got me up faster than sheet lightning.
Dylan is startled and pleased. Imbued by ease of success and suddenness of accomplishment, he beams and smiles enormously. “We’ll have so much fun. Watch, I promise, you’re gonna thank me, it’s gonna be so awesome!” I ignore him and with sleepy sluggish sadness start pulling on some clothes. I’m peeved and defiant about the whole fucking in the ass threat thing.
“It’ll be so fun,” Dylan says again. His face is all radiant eagerness, his voice both soothing and conciliatory. I’m too drooping and drained to drum up any of my signature comebacks. I’m even too tired to roll my motherfucking eyes.
As a kind of revenge, I decide to go out basically “as is,” that is not get anywhere close to getting all dolled up at all and to just wear actual gray sweatpants, a grubby pale pink t-shirt, some nearby pair of forgettable shoes, a cheap straw hat even. Instead of contacts I wear huge heavy black-framed prescription glasses upon my deadbeat face. The glasses look like they belong to my dad, if I had a dad and if this dad was some kind of news anchorman from 1950. I look passably “cute” but excessively very casual too and not at all done up or eye-catching or anywhere close to my usual levels of Diva fierceness and fancy.
“So fun,” Dylan repeats. “Whatever,” I grumblingly mumble as I lurch with graceless grouchiness about. I gather my necessaries and glumly get ready to do some more of that thick humid Bangkok trudging. Dylan is all bright eyes and tail bushes, I am all “Fuck you” but drowsily, ineffectual as I am in my fatigue and defeat.
Finally we get out there and do the humid aftermidnight Bangkok trudge. The getting there takes a thousand forevers until we at last somewhere arrive. It’s a kind of open air partially covered alleyway and square, a “club cluster” sort of space and place. Seems this is where we go to enter what turns out to be a kind of Bangkok gay clubs hub and meeting place. The whole set up is a bit strange.
As we maneuver forward, we come across our elegant guide from earlier in the evening, we are just about to enter, he is just leaving. He is languorously delighted to witness our success in the finding and the coming, we in turn are pleased to be in passing strangely reunited with him so seamlessly. We the three of us smile, exchange greetings, he handsomely exits, we stride forwardly in.
The square space within is literally teeming with gay men of every imaginable stripe and kind. I’m beginning to perk up but continue to pointedly disregard the “See?” that radiates from Dylan’s bright shining eyes and face-splitting grin.
The first club we elect to enter is a karaoke bar and there’s a young handsome Thai man entertaining a calm cluster of homosexuals with basic karaoke renditions of those deathless Diva ballads which are so popular among the Gays. I have a couple drinks and smile pleasantly at the pleasant homosexuals seated all around in this complaisant karaoke setting. After one or two deathless Diva ballads more, we decide to check out the next club space place and enjoy immediately the charismatic hosting of some intimate stage show by two exquisitely captivating Thai homosexual Drag Queens. We enjoy the show for no more than a few minutes, we smile at and adore the hostesses and afterward we thank them warmly before leaving.
Wishing then to partake more totally of this homosexual club buffet, we take leave of this establishment also and push our way further and deepest in. We arrive at some enormous final club that is as huge as it is loud, it’s packed and very crowded, it feels surreal and exciting and totally crazy.
Inside we are demolished at once by probably the best sound system in Thailand. We realize we’ve finally found the most homosexual place in the country, possibly even the world. The club is the biggest most crowded gayest place we’ve ever seen, known of or been to. We are overwhelmed, giddy and amazed. We are fascinated, alarmed and happy. The music is booming and Dylan is excited finally to find himself somewhere in Southeast Asia that actually has proper sound, even if the music being blasted is the gayest kind of Diva Circuit House imaginable.
“This might be the gayest place on earth,” Dylan declares.
“Totally,” I agree. Wide-eyed, we marvel and we grin.
For every one hundred dancing and writhing homosexual Thais, there’s about ten middle-aged white foreigners calmly looking on. There’s only a smattering of the usually much more present Fag Hag quotient here and representing. We gaze with satisfaction around us and then are swallowed and smothered into the swoosh and swirl of many gay bodies careening and carousing, dithering and dancing. I unleash myself into the homosexual happiness and acquire a sweet sexy string of new best gay friends all in succession across the evening. The club is endless and huge and pulsing with gay men, we are blown literally away by the strength and seethe and scale of it repeatedly. The music is inescapably terrible but we endure and love it all as shards of Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue, Christina Aguilera, Cher and Madonna stab our ears and bodies with their homosexually worshiped Diva strains and melodies. The DJ nonetheless is competent and capable throughout, he knows his club and audience, the whole place is in every sense going “off.” We marvel as we immerse ourselves, we dance and we love.
Later we find ourselves upstairs and pick up our final gayboy hanger-on for the evening. I never clearly heard his name so let’s call him Khohn. “Watch this,” Khohn says and vogues for me. I make a show of being both interested and impressed before I dance in my own space and place again.
“You with him?” Khohn asks me, all gay and smiling. I smile back for reply and just keep dancing. “He with you?” Khohn asks Dylan. “Yeah. He with me,” Dylan says.
Khohn leans closely in exclaiming, “Yeah? He with you! He ladyboy?” and Khohn smiles proudly, happily, pointlessly. “You! Ladyboy.” Khohn announces again. I only smile a little bit back and give a partial shrug of one of my shoulders. Khohn grins in general commendation and some uncertainty. Then again he vogues for me. I offer once more that look of interest and of being impressed. Gay boys as a rule love to show off their signature moves and these moves are never by any sober person’s standards anything very remarkable or memorable but as a rule, the gay boy will want to repeatedly show you his moves and as a rule, you must offer that immediate face of the seriously intrigued.
“You! Ladyboy.” Khohn exclaimingly asks or announces to the world at intervals. Dylan and I smile and dance and grin. Later, another gay man joins our jaunty group. Khohn dances and makes a marked and meaningful movement with his head in my direction. In a clipped and confident voice Khohn to the newcomer says familiarly, “Ladyboy. Ladyboy.” The new gay man to our group dancingly pauses for a moment and muses politely, “Who. You?” to Khohn. Khohn makes the same adept head jerking gesture in my direction. He even goes so far as to jab me once or twice. “No. Him. Him.” he says. His expression reveals as though by right of his having “discovered” me a knowing and authoritative confidentiality. I gaze into the surrounding club’s dark pulse and steamed up details and continue to dance, my own expression a mask of warmly neutral inscrutability. Dylan continues too to dance and carouse and grin.
After lots more of this dancing, Khohn’s voguing and my feigning of being impressed, Dylan subtly gestures toward me and confides to Khohn, “Me love him. So much. He very special. He casual ladyboy.” Khohn stops dancing to consider the solemnity of these words. Dylan continues, “You know. Usually ladyboy so very nice? So much very fancy? Not him. He casual ladyboy.” Khohn blinks. Dylan then adds momentously, “New style.”
He pauses to let this clarification sink fully in.
Khohn dances and vogues and then says. “Oh.” He follows this brief and brusque consideration with an, “Oh!” as though suddenly everything makes real and genuine sense again. Reinvigorated and renewed, Khohn dances and vogues with heightened roguishness and greater oomph.
“I know Josh! From Hawaii!” Khohn suddenly says. I look at him blankly. Dylan gives me a “just go with it look” and so I say, “That’s wonderful.” Khohn smiles hugely, his happiness level is at a peak, he can’t stop himself from vogueing again just for me.
After we gamely endure more endless gay club Circuit House anthems, I finally begin at last to lose my fire and flare and am pretty much very ready to leave. Khohn looks about fit to vogue and show me off as his “ladyboy discovery” until sunrise and so I stealthily move to make my escape. I sit zen-like and statuesque for about a thousand years somewhere downstairs while I wait for Dylan to shake Khohn off and finally catch up with me.
Dylan and I are at long last reunited and he regales me with some lengthy explanation and overly detailed apology. I in my weariness can only think of the million years trudge home back to the hotel, I can’t imagine where I’ll find the strength to make it.
On exit, we’re suddenly presented with about ten bundles of giantly oversized stocks of green onions as thick and as tall as Dylan himself is. We cannot believe that these green onion bundles are “for real” or how or why they should exist in anyone’s reality. We’re so taken with these questions and the wonder of life that we pause to take some pictures to immortalize the surreality of things and I momentarily forget the intensity of my fatigue.
On the thick hot humid Bangkok night trudge home, we take still several more very drunken snaps of each other doing very drunken things. At last I run far ahead of Dylan, find the hotel by mere magical instinct and collapse instantly into the deepest stretched out stillness and public couches sleeping. When Dylan at last himself returns, he takes pictures of me serenely passed out calmly unconscious in the lobby. Moments later we are at last back in our great gay hotel room, safe, secure and happy.
“There. Wasn’t that great!” Dylan still drunk beams. I’m already half-naked and mostly unconscious still from my lobby sleep. “Who’s my casual ladyboy,” croons Dylan in a voice of subterranean satisfaction and the drunkest affection. He gets then also messily ready for bed and plops himself horizontally heaving and down. Fortunately the all-consuming urge to sleep is a mutual thing. Any possible erections, no matter how hopeful or indefatigable, are nonissues and safely out of everyone’s way. I can at last without interruption or disruption sweetly sumptuously sleep.
In the pitch and pleasing darkness, I fling my arm with careless familiarity across Dylan’s contented chest. “For Science,” I say in a voice muffled and my face pressed into the side of his susceptible neck. Dylan puts a lank free arm around me and sleepingly smiles. He traces with light loving fingers the back of my own susceptible neck and it’s time at last for signing off. This casual ladyboy says thank you Thailand, goodnight Bangkok and goodbye.
