William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

The transvestites skull-grinning with black cobwebs made up over their sparkling eyes didn't tempt him, not even the ones with black bridles and nostril-slits and double eyebrow-slits cut into their sweating glistening faces leering sheer and sweet out of darkness, but by now he'd begun to understand De Sade's prison scribblings when the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike De Sade he didn't want to hurt anyone, really didn't; didn't even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman among the pocked and speckled and gilded and lip-pinked grinning heads that floated in flashing darkness, cratered with deer-eyes, holding Japanese-style umbrellas like darkness-gilled mushrooms; he was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn't really loving them -

He was feeling sick again; his balls were aching again. He certainly didn't know what he'd done to deserve that. At the Pink Panther, lights reflected through his mixed drink; high heels clickclacked on the bar-enclosed platform; black bathing-suited ladies danced slow and sure while overhead the balloons aped red traffic lights. The first one that came to him was very fat and desperate. She kept sticking her tongue in his mouth. - I'm sick, he said, but she started jouncing on his lap. -Pussy accident, he said, and she laughed. - I have VD, he said, and she laughed. She kept asking him to buy her out tonight, tonight, and he said maybe tomorrow and she started screaming no no no and cramming her tongue into him, becoming more horrible every second until he almost wanted her to catch the white fungus on his tongue.

Finally she gave up. - You sick OK no problem you come bar tomorrow darling buy me out tomorrow?

OK, he said.

Promise? You promise? I say you promise me now?

Sure, he lied. I promise.

On a cocktail napkin she wrote NAME and then her name, first and last; she wrote NO. and then her bar number; then she wrote:

forget me not

and seeing that, how much she needed him, how deeply she longed for even one night's worth of his money, how much she was counting on him to come tomorrow when if he could help it he'd never come to this bar again, he was so sorry for her that he looked down at the floor; she; misinterpreting this or perhaps understanding all too well but still hoping to make something of it, spread her legs and jiggled her crotch into his line of sight; when he gazed into her sweaty face she hissed: You sick OK! You go other Thai lady I see you I. . - and she leaned forward, panting her desperate wet breath into his nostrils, and slid her hand's knife-edge across his throat -

I can't take you anywhere! the photographer cried in anguish. Whenever a girl asks you to buy her a drink, you buy her a goddamned drink! I can stay in a bar for hours and tell 'em all to go screw, but you're such a pushover it just blows my mind. You'd better never leave your wife. You need someone to take care of you, man!

I agree a hundred percent, said the journalist, who like the photographer agreed with everyone on everything; it was so much easier.

Then he felt contrite and said: In the next bar I'll do better. I'll watch my money better.

So in the next bar, just barely out of sight of the Pink Panther, a woman said to him: You buy me drink? and he said no and she said: You buy me drink? and he said: Sure, honey. If it'll make you happy I'll buy you two drinks.

In that bar, which he was to think of as Noi's bar, Noi being the name of the woman he was buying all those drinks for, he kept handing out Cambodian money like party favors and they swarmed around him; Noi on his lap pleaded with him to give her another even though he kept telling everyone that the money was worthless in Thailand; the boy-girl on his left kept wriggling a nightmarishly long tongue at him like some corkscrew parasite that penetrated into his all too fresh memories of the Pink Panther whore's tongue whose sour-sweet uncleanness he could still taste, and suddenly he wondered how often these girls thought of penises as he was now thinking of tongues, these slimy snaky things that were determined to enter him whether he wanted them to or not; glumly and with aching balls he sat at that bar (a weird open-air place in the middle of the alley, hot crowds passing on either side) while the boy-girl bartender wiped the journalist's nose for him and cleaned his glasses: — you buy me drink? prayed Noi, already sloshed (such a tiny girl! such big drinks! it seemed so cruel that the girls couldn't drink colored water; that would be the journalist's first reform if they ever made him King of Thailand); the boy-girl on his left held his hand captive on a squishy bazoomba; Noi (45 kilos) now more firmly in his lap had his other arm cuddled around her most tenaciously; with that hand he sluggishly unzipped her fly and stuck a finger in to see if she were hairy or shaved — so many things to learn about Thailand! — and she was hairy. After that she had him buy her another drink, and since in his situation he couldn't clink glasses with her she clinked hers against his and even raised his to his mouth for him while the moon-faced bartender rubbed his nose once more; he felt like a king surrounded by ass-wipers… — Buy me drink? said the boy-girl on his left. - One more, he said. But just one. - Why not me? wept the bartender.

When at last he took all the slips from the wide teak cup and added them up, he saw that he was short by almost 500 bhat. He had to call to the photographer for money.

I don't fucking believe it, said the photographer in the most genuine amazement that the journalist had seen in a long time.

The two of them went back to Joy and Pukki's to sleep. They couldn't afford the Hotel 38 anymore except on special occasions; it was 300 bhat. (They'd given Joy twenty dollars apiece, each without knowing what the other had done; but all the same, Joy told them that they owed the landlord 200 bhat per night. .) Her room was an oven at night, bright and bleak and reeking of insecticide. Splashing sounds came from the hall where ladies took turns doing the laundry. In the corner crack, a foot or two below the ceiling, a hairy curled wire protruded. The wire began to vibrate. After awhile the photographer got up and pulled it; something squeaked; it was a rat's tail. .

While we are waiting for Joy and possibly Pukki to come back from work, while the two sexist exploiters sleep (at rest, the photographer's face still looked almost sweet sometimes the way his eyelashes curved and his lower lip swelled; his cheek rested against his bent-back fingers), I may as well describe Joy's place, which one gained by going down a dark corridor deep in toilet-smelling water; then, just at the foot of the stairs where another girl stood scratching her shoulder-bites, one turned right down a hall whose left wall was a barred partition behind which a family lived with big slow rats (one as big as a piglet); on the right were tiny padlocked doors like entrances to storage lockers. Joy unlocked one of these. The room, whose walls were part concrete and part wooden slats, was maybe ten by twelve feet. The floor's grey cement was partly covered by a sheet of green plastic patterned like bathroom tiles. On the wall hung a broom; Joy and Pukki kept their room very clean. In the corner was a one-piece unit of open wire shelving, then a beaten-up card table on which the two women kept their purses, some lotions, a photo of Pukki with her English boyfriend; then there was a wastebasket where they kept their dirty laundry, and a narrow vinyl "wardrobe" for all the clothes. These items were all ranged along one wall, on the bare concrete. On the green plastic, which covered most of the cell, there was nothing but a fan, an ashtray, a box of matches, and in the corner a folded length of ticking too skinny to be called a futon. Joy kept her stuffed animals there. - This baby for me, she said, squeaking her soft pink teddy bear. I love. - That was everything. There were no pictures on the walls. (On the ceiling was a mobile of shells, it's true, hung from the same beam the bare incandescent bulb was mounted on. I'd forgotten that.) The rent was 900 bhat per month.