Trishaws and Dirty Hands (2000)

Lived there for three years, of blurred edge days; those smoke filled days of huts and dirt roads, trishaws and dirty hands. It shouldn't have been special for me, not distinguishable I mean. I was always in such places, cities surrounded by shantytowns, with dust bunnies (not to mention dust mites) fighting for living space. This boy seems to have lived everywhere.

The list comes out; Thailand, Laos, Nicaragua, Mali... I can't help but pause. Then came Sri Lanka. I arrived at the airport late at night, long after the sun's heat had left the wet wind that swept through runwayside palm trees. My father hugged me and asked how the flight went. I said it was fine and we got in the car.

* * *

The kids would leave the international school after three, trailing out for hours as if they had nowhere of interest to go. Nothing to do but hack butts in the back room of Perrera's store, where I went between school and a chauffeured ride home.

Leaning back between a makeshift cable-spool table and a wall of rusty cardboard boxes, I can remember the sticky taste of the local Gold Leaf I smoked. Everyone smoked Gold Leaf or Marb lights, 'cause all the other cigarettes went stale before they got from the docks to the street. Even with my then bronze skin, smoking local butts, we couldn't do it like them. Like turned up ancient roots, blown inside from the caked alleys, the men would appear to buy a single wretched cigarette with coins that didn't clink. All of us, even the Koreans, the Indians, the boys from upper class Sri Lankan families, we had our own packs and we bought by the pack. Once you make that distinction, we might as well have been the royal fuckin' family hanging in seedy London pubs. Even clothed in smoky shrouds, we could not blend in. We were like tourists in Tiananmen, Barbie in Bosnia.

Of those hours, lived daily, this is all that remains. What we said, what looks were exchanged, notes of distinction, acts worth notation, if any there were, they are gone. They were painted over as a single, motionless scene, with actors and notable props. Carried away, downstream, all the while hoping for me to turn back to see them drifting, in time for me to rescue the days.

* * *

Nights, around ten, I remember taking a trishaw downtown, to the beer gardens, hotels and cheap casinos. A little three wheeled thing, hooked up with a moped motor and tasseled handlebars, I would get inside and break up my English so the driver might understand and answer back in Sing hala snippets and colonial phrases. I remember one model had a picture behind the driver seat of a baby squatting and some words on Jesus. God Bless the Child Christ. The thing was laminated so long ago the orange dirt floated like clouds captured in a transparent photograph. By the ass end of a cigarette we'd be there and I pay for the ride in the playful colors of rupees. Red for five hundred, orange for one, blue on a fifty, and a tiny green ten spot, it was play money for the kiddies.

Strolling in like high rollers in Vegas, we'd float over to our regular table at the Empire Club. After an early spliff, it was the bottle. They only had one drink. Arrack, palm moonshine, we always said was "like fucked up hard Malibu". Of course, everything drove pretty hard 'round there. Hard like the burn of booze that the sailors and soldiers couldn't feel, the heat in your cheeks when you want to cough and take a drag instead. At first you could hardly face their crusty red eyes following you, questioning. What do you want with us? A few shots later, the pressure was off and you were free to watch. A few hits later, you were lifted, freed from consequence.

Maybe it was the way exposed light bulbs swung on long wires from anorexic crossbars or the way oily footprints mixed with sprinkled sawdust, but I envisioned that place as one of the toughened, envisioned myself as bad to the bone. Something out of a Western set in southern Texas. Of these details, there is one that I remember, a single image which, now, has had its meaning revealed to me. It is the way that dark swollen eyes looked at me from beyond creased cheekbone hills. Eyes that once said to me, "Watch it kid. Don't mess with us." It was those eyes that sang deep rumbling sailor songs. Arm in arm, twenty strong, they sang their songs, which, only now, speak to me of the loss of the weary and the loss of the maimed. Contrary to what was thought then, those glazed eyes, as if brimming with tears, did not wish to be there. There was no desire to remain, only the momentum of the series of circumstance, having thrust these men to live in shantytowns, now chaining them to those lives, with its only gift, those eyes.

* * *

Hotels and clubs were the scene for class parties, gatherings, birthdays... red cent events. They were up classy, clean and catered, with marble floors and enough open space for trade winds and weather patterns. Sitting limply at a fat round dinner table, so sloshed each moment seemed blurred into the last was how I'd be. One party didn't start till late at the Hilton on the seaboard, so it was charmingly cool all night. A quick six-shooter session of drinks put me on the line between sleepily chill and violently ill. Did we even talk then? The booze and drugs put a wall around me, shrink wrapped my brain and left me to my thoughts. I think we talked. I have the vaguest sense that in that state, my inner voice would play tricks on me, repeating the same conversation inside my head to see if I would notice. Sabrina came to me then, took my hand and led me upstairs to a room.

Her Sri Lankan skin and Finnish features made me forget everything and fall into her bliss. Sabrina...Sabrina. Seems like those were the only words passing shivering lips. There is nothing more. The memory should be clear but it fades and tints, as if some long departed mountain monk had brushed the scene within my skull. Painted it with scenes from the life of Buddha and the Kama Sutra flanking, still wet. It'll last a while yet but not to its original glory. It was wondrous and unexpected but that is all I know. Did I leave right after? We smoked beedees together, before I left to drink more.

And why should I care now, not having cared too much then? Why should it matter that I left her? I left to continue my night, thinking, "Wow, that was cool. That was nice." As well, since I am sure that she did not care either, at least she did not admit that possibility to herself.

* * *

Outside the Sakura, on the lawn I lay staring into a starry scene bordered by high standing treetops. It was downtown, with lights all around, but lacking the voltage to shut out the stars. The people hanged onto the night like green leaves, moving as if guided by Brownian motion or the sea breeze. The oldest was Mohammed, an Islamic hood who graduated long ago. He preferred to sit at a dusty bar in the dark, that hadn't seen drinks served in years. An empty flask of something sunk into the grass next to me, of which I had downed more than my small body's share. I had bought it several blocks away and took swigs as I walked. By the time I had arrived, walking through the gate felt like being in the passenger seat during a police chase. All swerves and close calls. Lying down stopped the trees from spinning at least.

Comfortable as I was, surely some boundaries must have been overstepped. Spiny hands took me, almost bringing me to a stand. Oh boy, here we go. I heard some yelling, and the hands were gone. Mohammed from the boxing club stood bubbling and fists clenched. My assailant was out, hunched on his side. People came over but too stiffly to stop my savior from booting the unconscious boy's head. I remember being frightened, but nothing else. News had spread and the army was on the way from across the street. Someone rushed me home and we promised to keep the night on the down low. I never saw Mohammed again.

My assailant, Darshna was his name, did not live. I hold nothing against him, and certainly nothing against Mohammed. I can still relate to the motives behind that night, the higher cause of keeping the social status quo, of keeping the herd separated. Even after leaving Sri Lanka, the same hormonally driven thoughts led me into the role of the aggressor. What actions once made me feel in the right, as a holy crusader, now induce me to protest, almost disgust. A line from a film comes to me now, "Don't get off the fucking boat," don't let the animals take you. Stay on the boat, stay within your civilized boat. Nothing particular led me, or all children, to discover our primordial selves. We just didn't get on the boat, perhaps until it was too late.

* * *

I scraped myself pretty badly one night, crawling over angry bushes behind a friend's house. At first I thought I had come too late. Curtis and a younger boy were motionless in a flickering darkness. Through the sliding door they looked as wide-eyed children caught still at the moment before a young death. I can still see Curtis the first night I took him out with the girls. Bought him his first beer, Lion Lager. Lit his first cigarette. Eight months later, there I was sneaking into his house after a busted night. I don't remember being deeply touched by the drugs, but the night was the kind to take a hold of a person. I came in and a video was playing. Two friends I recognized in addition to the two before me. All mocked up in flashy rags while they droned on about some teenage manifesto, they shuffled close to a pound of marijuana on the table and showed off a jewelry box full of heroin. I knew her scent even then.

Curtis was a shy child. He was the oldest of three brothers, but the thinnest and the weakest. I used to play D&D with him on the weekends. His brothers preferred football.

I stepped back and bumped into a monster of a hookah. Inside the ashtray of a bowl, I could see a glimmer of reflected light. Opium probably, but it could have been anything. I would like to say that I cried that night for them. For those children, collapsed on couches, engaged in reverie that would replace their lives until, perhaps someday, it might leave them, empty like beer bottles washed upon brown banks. I did cry that night, but for what reasons, I know only that some conditioning had taught me to fear those harder drugs. They were my demons, my wicked spirits, and from fear, I cried. Four kids in my grade got exiled for drug trafficking. I hear Curtis tried to look me up once, after I returned stateside.

He had run away and had asked where I was. I didn't know if he was still on drugs, but I suspected. And I was glad that he had not found me, because no part of me wanted to revisit that old place. Call me crazy, but I'm still shocked when the dredges bring up something to show me, to tell me, "The dreams are real. They are real and you were there." I am shocked and try to avoid any further reminders. After all, these are all stranger's memories, as no person is wholly who they once were.

* * *

A year after leaving, I flew back to see the remains of my mates. Many were gone. Some moved, others missing, and a few simply unreachable but still present. We met and talked. Stories were told. Sabrina had sex with a twelve year old. Some guy at the airport café says she blew him in the restroom. There were others for sure, parts rumor and fact. The ones about Sabrina are the ones I remember.

She left us, alone in a hotel room, and I can't help but imagine her passing slowly in lazy ecstasy as trickling drops of acid junk spun her sweet head for one last ride.

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," Blake said. Who would have thought wisdom to leave one so weary? Where is that Tyger promised me? I'd like to find some awesome symmetry in all these stranger's memories, but all I can see is that what beauty I once had has left me now. That sweet face of memory is gone; faded over the horizon with each drunken stumble. Not all roads lead to the same place; the bumpy path of excess brought me farther and farther from the clear cut world of tigers and lambs.

We used to sit deep in the shadows of the storeroom at Perrera's staring restlessly at the old men buying single cigarettes. I could feel the longing in them and in us. We wanted to be seen as strongly as they, and by some faulty logic changed our own perceptions. It worked though. I know some of what those old men were. Even these years past, I can feel my nineteen-year-old bones creaking when I step into a gas station to buy a pack of smokes, and I sometimes think of those men. Sometimes, when I have the courage enough to face them. We all carry the mark of memory. I used to display mine as proud battle scars like so many thought to do some anniversary of St. Crispin's day. I must admit, I was too high to remember exactly how I got mine.