Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

I didn’t encourage them. If they wanted a girl I suggested a social escort who, after a tour of the city — harbor sights, Mount Faber, Tiger Balm Gardens, Chinese temples, War Memorial, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral — would amateurishly offer “intimacy,” as they called it. Politics hadn’t stopped prostitution; it had complicated it, taken the fun out of it, and made it assume disguises. The houses had moved to the suburbs — Mr. Sim operated on Tanjong Rhu, in an innocuous-looking bungalow near the Swimming Club. Many had gone to Johore Bahru, over the Causeway, and all paid heavily for secret-society protection. There were two brothels in town, Madam Lum’s, behind the supermarket, and Joe’s in Bristol Chambers, across from the Gurkha’s sentry box on Oxley Rise: they were characterless apartments, unpersuasively decorated, and they relied on taxi drivers to bring them fellers.

Oddly enough, the fellers who looked me up were seldom interested in girls. They were tourists who fancied themselves adventurers, bold explorers, and they had two opposing wishes: to be the very first persons to reach that faraway place, and to be seen arriving. They thought it was quite a feat to fly to Singapore, but they needed a reliable native witness to verify their arrival. I was that witness, and the routine was always the same — a drink, a stroll around the seedier parts of town; then a picture — posed with me and snapped by the Indian with the box camera on the Esplanade. All these fellers did in Singapore was talk, remarking on the discomfort of their hotels, the heat, the smells, their fear of contracting malaria. And when I told my heavily embroidered tales they said, “Flowers, you’re as bad as me!” Sometimes, with wealthy ones, I wanted to lean across the table and plead, “ Get me out of here! ” But that was the voice of idleness, the one that screamed prayers at the Turf Club and hectored the fruit machines for a jackpot. I did my best to suppress it and listened to the travelers chuntering on about their experiences. I wish I had a nickel for every feller who told me the story about how he had picked up a pretty girl and taken her back to his hotel, only to find (“I was flabbergasted”) that she was really a feller in a swishy dress; or the story, favorite of the fantasist, beginning, “I used to know this nympho—”

For me these were not productive years. The longer I stayed at Hing’s the more I participated in the fellers’ conversations at the Bandung: “My towkay says—” The Sunday curry was the only event in the week I viewed with any pleasure. Though Singapore was awash with tourists, and, for the first time, American soldiers on leave from Vietnam, I did very little hustling. The attitude toward sex was changing in the States and I found it hard in Singapore to keep pace with the changes; the new attitudes arrived with the tourists. Fellers were interested in exhibitions of one sort or another, Cantonese girls hanging in back rooms like fruit bats and squealing “Fucky, fucky” to each other, sullen displays of gray anatomy on trestle tables; off the Rochore Canal Road there were squalid rooms where a dozen tourists sat around a double bed, like interns in a clinic, and applauded cucumber buggeries. The feller who said “I do it with mirrors” or that he was in love with a slip of a girl meant just that; and one joker implored me to get a young Chinese boy to (I think I’ve got this right) stand over him and, as he put it, “do number two — oh lots of it — all over me.”

“Now, you’re going to think I’m old-fashioned,” I said to this dink. “And I know nobody’s perfect. But—”

I could see nothing voluptuous about being recumbent under a Chinese and shat upon, something I went through, in a sense, every day at Hing’s. I would fall into conversation with a tourist and hear myself saying, “That’s where I draw the line.” My notion of sex, call me old-fashioned, was a satisfying and slightly masked and moist surprise, unhurried, private, imaginative, and inexpensive, as close to passion as possible; neither businesslike nor over-coy, maintaining the illusion of desire with groans of proof, celebrating fantasy, a happy act the price kept in perspective: give and take, no lies about love.

The anonymous savagery of the new pornography might have had something to do with the change in the tourists’ attitude. I had always considered myself a reasonable judge of pornography, but I was out of my depth with the stuff that came in on the freighters and was good-naturedly handed over to me by the mates responsible for the provisioning. It was as unappealing as a pair of empty rubber gloves. I refused to sell it, though I still sold decks of photographic playing cards. I didn’t know what to do with the new cruel sort; I had too much of it to burn discreetly, and someone would have found it if I had thrown it in a trash barrel. I kept it at the Bandung, behind the bar. At the Bandung I was able to confirm that I was not alone in finding it grotesque.

“It’s useless,” said Yardley. “They don’t have expressions on their faces.”

“She got something on her face,” said Frogget. “Sickening, ain’t it?”

“That’s what I always look at first,” said Smale. “Their faces.”

“Do you suppose,” said Yates, selecting a picture, “that she expects that bulb to light up if she does that with it?”

“Maybe she blew a fuse,” said Frogget.

“Yeah,” said Smale, “here she is blowing a fuse.”

“’orrible,” said Coony. “A girl and a mule. Look at that.”

“Let’s see,” said Yates. “No, that’s no mule. It’s a donkey, what you call an ass.”

“Oh, that’s an ass,” I said. “Oh, yes. Broo-hoo-hoo!”

“Do herself a damage,” said Smale.

“’orrible,” said Coony.

“This one’s all blokes,” said Yardley. “All sort of connected up. I wonder why that one’s wearing red socks.”

“Are there names for this sort of thing?” asked Yates.

“I’d call that one ‘The Bowling-Hold,’” said Frogget.

“Hey, Wally, come here,” said Yardley.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

“See what he does,” said Yardley.

Wallace Thumboo came over, grinning; he glanced down at the pictures, then looked away, into space.

“What do you think of that, Wally old boy?”

“Nice,” said Wally. He looked at the ceiling.

“Cut it out,” I said. “He doesn’t like them. I don’t blame you, Wally. They’re awful, aren’t they?”

“Little bit,” he said, and screwed up his face, making it plead.

“You said they were nice , you lying sod!” Yardley shouted. Wally wrung his hands. Yardley turned to me. “You’re a bloody hypocrite, Jack.”

“These photographs are shocking,” said Yates. “What kind of people—”

“And he’s the one who sells this rubbish!” said Yardley.

“Not this stuff,” I said. “The other stuff, but only if they ask.”

Edwin Shuck asked. He phoned me one morning at Hing’s and said, “You don’t know me—”

“Yes, I do,” I said, snappishly. I had wanted for a long time to put one of these yo-yos in his place, and this was the day to do it: out in the van a consignment of frozen meat for the Strode was going soft in the sun. Little Hing was double-parked on Beach Road and beeping the horn. The Strode had a right to refuse the meat if it wasn’t frozen solid, which meant we would have to sell it cheap to a hotel kitchen. “You met a horny feller somewhere who said he was a pal of mine, right?” I accused. “And he told you to look me up, right? You don’t want to take too much of my time, just have a drink, right? And after that—”

“Not so fast,” he said.