Lost Time

*

He didn't know where he was. He certainly didn't know who he was. There were whole periods of lost time. He didn't care if he died tomorrow; finally all obsessions realised, all those sad days and wasted lust, it was something to be free, it was something to be different. The island was meant to be a honeymoon and turned into a debauched escapade of major preportions. At least he knew it now. At least he knew what was happening. Easy to understand how so many hearts were broken; here in the infinite, with the warm sea splashing against the white sand and the bars lined from one end to the other; the tropical green cliffs behind reaching up into what used to be a sky, before we disowned it, before everything was destroyed. He went for a walk because he did not want to be alone; not for some paid for boy who kept spending his money on girls and bottles of Jack Daniels. You don't mind? Tammy asked; and he shook his head. Boys will be boys.

He was papa now. They saw him as a money tree, but also as a subject of great curiosity and often affection. It was a long time now since he had spent much time with Westerners and only now, although he had thought he knew everything, was it all beginning to make sense. The easy gains; easy losses; the money that went like water and the boys who would do anything for you; well just about anything. It wasn't easy to be fair. Perhaps the west, used to notions of obsessional, life redeeming love and lifetime commitment, found it most difficult to comprehend, this entirely different attitude, where they rolled in the hay and did this and that; and if everything was lost then he had done it all on his own. This was a time for pleasure and a time for him; but also a time of immense discovery; if only he could save it; if only there was an answer to these many things. He couldn't be less sure. He was leaving now.

Nothing worked out as it was meant to work oujt; but those dreams, those pathetic little fantasies, were born from a great loneliness which had settled over him in his 50s. Unlike in Thailand, where in recent times there was usually at least one person in his bed, those years had been a trial of such infinite longing. No one wanted him; not physically, not mentally. It wasn't his time. And those sad little squirmy thoughts just kept going around and around; as if it meant something; as if there was a solution; as if chaos wasn't the only outcome. He could go and do it now; the final suicide trip; but he couldn't stand the despair at the end of the long tunnel. Nothing like that happened here. Even his man boobs, a subject of such personal embarrassment, were nothing but a joke here. Like me, the girls would say, poking him; or like a girl, the boys would say, suggesting that only added to his chance of success with them. What you do; whatever you do. This was not a subject of great surprise. He had finally conquered all doubt.

It wasn't as if the futu8re held anything but an increasingly difficult old age. It wasn't as if he could make anything out of what had happened; except for revelation about a culture that defied everything he had known; and which he might have thought he understood but understood not at all, not until he started sleeping with them anyway. It was crucifixion. It was time to die on a cross. But this was not going to be the moment, tortured or otherwise. Oh you are so handsome, he thought; and always they kept saying, I come to your room, no problem. He hadn't had so much sex since time began; it was just simply impossible to come so often. And yet the offers were easy and amazingly good willed; if of course commercial at their base. But they didn't do anything they did not want to do. They were crippled and alone, that had been his state of mind; so sad, so unbelievably sad, with the world and the beauty of the city nothing but a dissonant background for ever greater mentalo dislocation. And then he came here.

So they took him by surprise and kept him in surprise; and his furtiveness in seeking handsome boys was entirely misplaced. There were Go Go Girls and Go Go Boys. There was the boy on the corner who looked at you with dark appealing eyes which translated to: you can have me for 1,000 baht. There were the butch little moto drivers who he was initially suprised to see with men later in the evening. There were straight discoteques with bathrooms full of swishy boys who made it clear they would take care of you in whatever way you wanted. And so it was dark. So his fragile body kept walking through a deranged landscape. So he was loved, or serviced, in exact measure; like something that could only be resolved when he walked free of all the past; all the mistakes; all the things that had gone wrong in such a troubled; despairing life. All for what? For nothing. For brief flashes of comfort, for the ready availability of anything you wanted; for a serious case of the shakes and whole days of lost time. Oh save me, he thought: but didn't know how to save himself. Except to take time. To take care. To be taken care of. To love and lust and party in equal measure. Pity he was old. Pity he was "papa". Pity he hadn't done it before; instead of always surrendering to the first cry: Hey Johnny, you want something?