I.
The condo smells like nothing.
This is either a feature or a diagnosis, depending on which country I’m standing in. In Bangkok, the air is an autobiography: diesel, plumeria, charcoal, fish sauce, the sweet rot of overripe fruit composting in a gutter that has been at it since the Chakri dynasty. In California, the air is a redacted document. The condo’s HVAC system processes the outside world into a sterile uniformity, stripping it of temperature, moisture, and whatever else might remind you that a world exists beyond the double-pane windows and the security gate.
I am photographing silver.
The setup is always the same: a folding table, a white cloth, two fluorescent tube lights clamped to a shelf I built for this specific purpose. The lights are brutal. Every nick, every oxidation stain, every imperfection in the metalwork stands exposed, a defendant at arraignment. I photograph each piece from three angles, top and three-quarter and profile. Then I log the weight on the digital scale, enter the measurements, and draft the eBay listing in prose that would embarrass me if anyone I knew ever read it.
Exquisite Hill Tribe Silver Chain Necklace | Handcrafted in Northern Thailand | 52g .925 Sterling
Exquisite. I have used the word exquisite four hundred and eleven times in eBay listings. I have used it more often than I have used it in conversation, in correspondence, in thought. It is a word that belongs exclusively to the fluorescent-lit table, and it means: please buy this so I can afford to go back.
eBay has awarded me a badge. Top Rated Seller. It means my shipping is prompt, my descriptions are accurate, my customer satisfaction holds at 99.8 percent, and it is, I am not too proud to admit, the last performance review I still receive. Somewhere in this country, men my age are sitting in glass conference rooms being told they have exceeded expectations. I have a badge, a feedback score, and five stars from a collector in Scottsdale who found the bangle “even prettier in person.” This is what a career looks like when you subtract the witnesses. Gop has a stage, a mirror, and a row of customers holding drink menus. Between the two of us, I am no longer sure who gets the more honest review.
The exchange rate is 33.12, down from last quarter’s 34.8, and the vendors at Chatuchak will have adjusted their asking price before my plane is on the ground. That is the arithmetic that should worry a dealer. It worries the part of me that files the quarterly taxes.
The rest of me is doing a different sum. 33.12 makes the off fee at Hot Male eighteen dollars and the nightly tip sixty and the joiner fee twenty-one, the gym membership on top of it now, ten nights of it on a twelve-day trip, about eleven hundred dollars before the airfare, and the silver I actually buy at a margin so thin it functions less as profit than as moral cover.
I could do this sum in my sleep. I do it in my sleep. Or rather, in the hours between midnight and four, when the jet lag hasn’t quite worn off even though I’ve been home for two weeks and the condo’s air conditioning hums its tuneless half-tone and the gecko on the ceiling, the one I’ve started to imagine, isn’t there because there are no geckos in Culver City. There are no geckos and no diesel fumes and no plumeria and no monsoon heat pressing through the walls. There is only the condo, the table, the fluorescent tubes, the silver.
I pick up my phone. Open Skype. Gop’s icon: offline. He’s offline more than he’s on, because Gop understands technology’s utility and doesn’t share its values. He uses his phone for calls, texts, and occasionally for watching bodybuilding videos on YouTube. He does not Skype. He does not understand why I would want to see his face on a screen when I could see it in person in, I check the calendar, a hundred and six days.
I close Skype. I photograph the next piece: a hill-tribe bangle, heavy, a level of work that takes a silversmith three days and that I will sell for thirty-five dollars after eBay’s cut and PayPal’s fee and the shipping cost that the customer in Des Moines will complain about even though I’ve already absorbed half of it.
Exquisite.
The word sits in the listing field with the cursor blinking after it. Outside, the sun is setting over Culver City: a thin, polite sunset, the sort that apologizes for existing and excuses itself early. There is no one here to watch it with me. There is no hand on my thigh. There is no body temperature running a degree hotter than average. There is no laughter, no “I lie you,” no braying eruption of joy from a man wearing a ridiculous T-shirt in a city that smells like everything all at once.
It is still blinking there when the sunset finishes, and for a long time after that, which is a fact about me and not about the listing. I save the listing. I close the laptop. I check the exchange rate one more time. 33.12, unchanged, because exchange rates do not change at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night in Culver City. Then I go to bed in a room that smells like nothing.
The silver is real. The silver is always real.
II.
A hundred and six days is a lot of nights to fill. I fill them with this.
Phuket. The trip before this one, last December. The trip that was supposed to be easy.
We’d come down from Bangkok with a group: Marta and Lin, the dyke couple whose relationship had the structural integrity of a sandcastle at high tide. And Chris, the friend who existed primarily to be embarrassed and sunburned, both of which he accomplished with consistent excellence. Gop had joined us from Bangkok, treating the trip south as an extension of our time together, a bonus round, an opportunity to demonstrate that he was not merely a bar-boy-by-night but a companion, a travel partner, someone who could navigate airports and hotel lobbies and restaurant menus without a mamasan and an off fee in between.
Freed from the role, the number on the waistband, the stage, the rotating lights, he expanded. On our first night in Patong he chose the restaurant by walking past the hostess straight into the kitchen, and I stood in the doorway and watched him lift the lid off a pot and put his face into the steam, one hand held up at the cook, who had started forward and then stopped. He said something in Thai that I did not catch. The cook laughed. Two minutes later the cook was walking him down the line, opening coolers, holding a grouper up by the gills for his inspection, the two of them arguing happily about tamarind while the girls stood out on the pavement deciding whether to be horrified. We ate what the cook chose, and it was the best meal of the trip, and it was not close. He did the same thing to waiters, to taxi drivers, to shopkeepers and stray dogs: the same warm, unguarded openness he had extended to me that first night at Lucky Boys, the openness that said I am interested in you, specifically, right now, and my interest is not conditional on your wallet.
I have a framework for this, because I have a framework for everything. Gop is an Expressive: the peacock, fast and open, the room reorganizing around him, the tail spread not out of vanity but because folding it would be a violation of the bird. I am a Driver: fast and shut, the lion, precise even when precision is unnecessary and especially when it makes other people uncomfortable. Two fast styles at the same rpm, which reads as complement rather than opposition, which is why every relationship I have kept for longer than a season has been with an Expressive.
That is the part of the framework I like to recite.
The problem was not the openness. The problem was the spotlight, and in a group of five the spotlight can only illuminate one person at a time.
It was evening. We were walking through Patong, the tourist sprawl, streets thick with neon and exhaust and the particular desperation of a beach town in peak season trying to extract maximum revenue from maximum human density. I was walking with Lin. My arm around her shoulders, my ear tilted toward her mouth, listening to the latest installment of the Marta Saga: the fights, the silences, the reconciliations that lasted exactly long enough to provide ammunition for the next fight. Lin was pouring. I was catching. This is what Drivers do for the people they care about: they listen, they process, they resist the urge to solve the problem because the problem is not solvable and the listening is the point.
Marta was out front, with Chris, performing the role of Unbothered Partner with the same theatrical commitment she brought to everything else. Which left Gop.
Several paces behind.
Alone.
The dark side of the peacock is what the peacock does when nobody is looking at the tail.
I didn’t notice immediately. My attention was subdivided, half on Lin’s narrative, half on the obstacle course that passes for a Phuket sidewalk: missing grates, uneven concrete, piles of refuse whose provenance was best left uninvestigated. The radar I usually kept trained on Gop had been reassigned elsewhere, tracking his location unconsciously, continuously, a background process running beneath the main operation.
“Where do you wanna eat?” I asked Gop over my shoulder, trying to loop him back in. “I think tonight you pick.”
Not the comfortable silence of a man who hasn’t heard you. The loaded silence of a man who has heard you perfectly and has decided that silence is the appropriate response, because any verbal response would require acknowledging your existence, and acknowledging your existence would require forgiving the fact that you’ve spent the last twenty minutes acknowledging someone else’s.
“Um, how about fish?” I tried. “You want seafood for dinner tonight?”
I hate fish. Gop knows I hate fish. The offer was a white flag waved so vigorously it should have been visible from space. It was not visible to Gop, who stared at the ground with a focused intensity, searching for something he’d lost, though what he’d lost was not on the ground.
Lin read the temperature faster than I did. “Go,” she said, withdrawing her arm from mine. “Take care of your boy.”
III.
Gop was not merely sulking. Gop was constructing a monument to the sulk. He walked with his head down, his shoulders hunched, the body that was his pride, his livelihood, his daily masterwork, deliberately diminished, folded in on itself, a building in the middle of its own controlled demolition. He did not look at me. He did not respond to my presence at his side. He radiated hurt as effortlessly as his body normally radiated heat, efficiently, thoroughly, in all directions.
I dropped back to walk beside him.
“You okay?” I asked, which was not a question and both of us knew it.
Silence.
I want to be accurate about what that silence did, because it is not what a reader would guess. The passport was mine. The tickets were mine, the room was in my name, and he was down here on nights he was not standing on a stage at Hot Male, which is the only figure on the whole trip that cost him anything and the one he could total faster than I could. Against all of that he held exactly one instrument, which was the ability to withhold the thing I had flown eight thousand miles for. And walking behind a man who has been refusing to look at you for forty minutes, on a street where every second doorway is selling what he is refusing, I was more aware of him than I had been at any point since the airport.
“Gop.”
Dinner was an exercise in atmospheric pressure. We found a seafood restaurant, my sacrifice, his victory, except the victory was unreceived because receiving it would have required breaking the sulk, and the sulk had achieved escape velocity. They brought a whole snapper, steamed, the eye still in it and the eye still working. I have hated fish since I was nine years old. I ate it anyway, in a room that smelled of hot oil and fish sauce and the sea two streets over, slowly and visibly, chewing an apology neither of us was going to say out loud and washing the wet flakes down with Singha. Gop watched me do it. Then he ate with mechanical precision, refueling a body he was currently too angry to inhabit. Nothing came out of him, and nothing crossed his face. He was the center of gravity at the table, pulling everything toward his misery and letting nothing reach him.
Marta, who recognized a fellow Expressive with the immediate instinct of a wolf recognizing a pack member, leaned across the table. “What’s wrong with Gop?” she asked, not Gop but me, as though Gop were a malfunctioning appliance and I were the customer service line.
I ignored her. I had bigger problems.
IV.
The fix came on Patong Walking Street, a kilometer of tropical Bourbon Street where the debauchery of a dozen nationalities converges into one narrow corridor. Four sound systems audible at once and none of them agreeing. Grilled squid, two-stroke exhaust, spilled beer gone sweet on the concrete, and every forty feet a bar door swinging open and pushing a wall of refrigerated air and Europop out into the street at chest height. The heat comes back in behind it. Bodies everywhere, everyone’s arms wet, the whole street the temperature of a mouth.
Lin took Marta by the elbow and steered her off toward the beach end with Chris trailing them, which is the kind of thing Lin does without being asked and without ever being thanked for it either. So it was the two of us. We’d barely cleared the restaurant when I bumped into Gop.
Not hard. A shoulder-nudge, the kind of accidental-not-accidental contact that happens when two people are walking side by side and one of them decides to steer slightly to the left. I bumped him and said “Oops” with a sincerity so absent it constituted its own form of comedy.
Gop didn’t react. He kept walking, eyes down, shoulders in.
I waited thirty seconds. Bumped him again. “Sorry.” The word contained zero apology and maximum impudence.
A scowl. Not a real scowl. Gop cannot produce one. His face is structurally incapable of sustained hostility, the muscles around his mouth genetically predisposed toward the upward curve of amusement. When Gop scowls, he looks like a golden retriever attempting to convey disappointment: the intent is there, the equipment isn’t.
Another thirty seconds. Another bump. This one harder. “Wow, this sidewalk,” I said, gesturing at the perfectly flat, perfectly navigable Walking Street. “Crazy.”
The face cracked. Not fully. Just a hairline fracture, a twitching at the corner of his mouth that he suppressed, grimly determined to maintain his grievance for at least another course.
I bumped him again. And again. Each bump slightly more theatrical than the last, each accompanied by an increasingly absurd excuse: the crowd, the heat, a sudden gust of wind that did not exist, a phantom tuk-tuk that had veered onto the pedestrian walkway and forced me into his path. By the sixth bump I was practically performing a pratfall, and by the seventh the hairline fracture in his scowl had become a breach, and by the eighth he was giggling.
The giggle. God, the giggle. When Gop giggles he channels the three-year-old he must have been. Wide-eyed, helpless, his body shaking with the effort of maintaining even the pretense of dignity. The giggle broke the sulk like a hammer breaks glass, completely, irreversibly, in a shower of fragments that caught the Walking Street’s neon and scattered it into something that looked, from where I was standing, like joy.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me in against him, still going, the heat of him coming through both shirts, and I stood in the middle of a Walking Street full of drunk Germans with a man shaking against my chest and I laughed too because there is nothing else available to a person in that position.
Then he stopped, all at once, the way he does.
“You do on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Six time.”
“Eight.”
He thought about that. He looked at the ground and then back up, and for a second and a half he wore the face he makes when a vendor’s opening price is lower than what he was ready to pay: the mouth pressed flat, the chin coming up, a man protecting an advantage he has not decided how to spend.
“Okay,” he said, and took my hand, and we walked.
V.
Marta saw it first, which is the part I mind. Standing on the beach the next morning at nine, when the sand was already too hot to stand on barefoot and the sea was doing nothing at all, the bay flat and glaring, salt drying to a fine grit on everybody’s shoulders. Gop had his shirt off, which on that beach was a civic event. She watched him and me negotiate with a jet-ski vendor. Gop doing the charm, me doing the price, the two of us operating as a unit so seamlessly that the vendor didn’t realize he was being outmaneuvered until the deal was done. Marta watched the whole transaction with an expression I have known for fifteen years and had never once had aimed at me.
Seven hours later the curtains were pulled against the glare and the AC was roaring and Gop was face down across the bed with the salt drying on him in a white bloom over both shoulders. He had refused a hat for six hours on the grounds that hats are for old men. Now his back was giving off the heat of a west wall at the end of the day, and I was sitting on the edge of the mattress with a bottle of drugstore aloe, and he had his face turned away on his folded arms and his eyes shut.
He kept giving instructions, low, without lifting his face off his arms.
“Not there.”
I moved my hand.
“Up. More up.” And when I had it: “Okay. You go slow now.”
The jet-ski vest had left a pale band down one side of his ribs, a hard red line at the edge of it, and he wanted that done too, and said so twice before I worked out what he meant, the second time with the flat patience of a man explaining something to a foreigner. The skin was tight over him and hot enough to come through the aloe, and under the heat the muscle was where the muscle always is, and he went quiet somewhere around the second shoulder blade and his breathing lengthened out until it was the breathing of a sleeping man, except that every minute or so, without opening his eyes, he still said “There,” so he was not asleep.
I was hard about four minutes in. He had his face in his arms and could not see it, and would not have stopped if he could. I did nothing about it and neither of us was ever going to mention it. My hands kept to the same slow track down his spine, the aloe going warm under my palms as fast as I laid it on cool, and every pass took a little more of my attention with it. A man on the edge of a mattress with a bottle of drugstore aloe, working unpaid on a body he had paid for, hard, and unobserved.
The aloe took most of an hour. It is on the shortlist of the most sexual hours of my life and from the doorway it would have looked like first aid.
Walking back from dinner that night, Gop’s hand in mine. Publicly, in the street, because in Phuket as in Bangkok he claimed me the way he claimed everything, with the flat assurance of ownership that did not need permission. I said something I had been thinking for months.
“I’m still trying to figure out how a bar boy from Thailand manages to make me a better person.”
Gop looked at me. He was quiet for three or four steps.
“I not bar boy now,” he said.
And he kept walking. His hand kept hold of mine. The warm night closed around us, and neither of us said anything else all the way back to the hotel.
From the Blog, posted the January after Phuket
I Fell In Love With A Bar Boy: Dark Side of the Gop
In Which the Author Deploys a Corporate Psychometric Framework to Explain Why His Thai Bar Boy Boyfriend Makes Him Nuts (And Also Better)
Okay so somewhere in the mid-nineties a woman in a conference room in Scottsdale, Arizona stood in front of a flipchart and explained to a room of twelve people why I specifically was impossible to work with, and she used the word “Driver” like it was something she’d found on an X-ray, and I sat there feeling more understood than I had ever felt in my life and also like I’d been mugged, and when I said so she wrote something down, and later she told me that both of those reactions were the diagnosis. [flipchart still in a box in the garage. yes I kept it. shut up.]
Twenty years on and I’m still running her quadrant on everybody I meet, which tells you everything about me and none of it good. I’m a Driver. Double barrel, Driver slash Driver, which she said was rare and which I chose to hear as a compliment and it was not a compliment. Gop gets up on a stage in his underwear and demands to be looked at and it works, every night, on everybody, and I have watched a room of sixty men all decide at the same moment that they are not going to bother pretending otherwise.
Anyway the Expressive has a dark side, which nobody puts on the flipchart. Expressive gets a cold, we’re drafting the obituary. Expressive feels underappreciated at dinner, that’s a war crime. And when an Expressive gets actually angry, not the “I ang-gy!” thing he does with his whole face that I find so cute I’ve been known to cause it on purpose, but the real one, the flat-eyed one, you want to be in a different postal code, possibly a different country, ideally one with an extradition problem.
He can’t spell. He offs for a living. He calls it bidness. And somehow he keeps sanding smooth every sharp edge I spent fifty years putting an edge on, and I have a framework for everything and no framework for that.
What I got in Phuket was not the flat-eyed one, thank Christ. The domestic model, the museum-quality sulk, an entire evening of it, and the honest version of what I did to earn it has me in it and the flattering version has him in it and I’ve already published one of those this year, and I know which one you’d rather read, and that’s sort of the whole problem isn’t it.
