(wobble-walk)
Meanwhile, how else to sum it up, how better, but with the one caveat that if I had things my way, I'd as soon stay asleep? The original plan had been to cut all ties, to leave school for a reason. But here I'd been in Hong Kong for almost four months, and while I'd barely drawn a stitch, I felt I'd beat those streets to death, feet to pavement, for weeks, months at a time with Benoit, chewing scenery, back and forth, chasing leads, roaming through nights or blazing over town like whirling platelets in the back of the red Hong Kong cabs . . . The idea had been to drop everything. I'd come to Hong Kong and I wouldn't budge until I'd made myself draw comics about it. Instead it was as if I was always somehow still back-to-back with Benoit, and I had to remind myself that we were hardly friends. With Benoit, flustered as usual, supreme torment, then cop-show cool, belting down drinks, circling his coaster with a fingertip, while on the other hand I had my doubts . . . With Benoit, for whom this thing with whores had become a relentless obsession! Or standing back, that was me, and with some measure of reserve, leaning against balustrades as he galloped about, sometimes shouting, sometimes accosting Chinese passersby in the street. Sometimes whispering: Say buddy, yet lau, yet feng . . . Or as he was always urging me, just think about it! One room, one Phoenix . . . It was the very fact that gems like this never seemed to elicit a response, not from Noi, not from any Chinese, that supposedly told us what we needed to know, that it was all right beyond our reach, fingertips against the glass in other words, and guys like us were meant to bust right through . . .
The ongoing mythology was that we were both excited about it, that for a while now we'd been convinced Benoit's Thai girlfriend, Noi, was a prostitute . . . And did it matter that Noi wasn't even Chinese? I asked myself because unlike Benoit I felt conflicted. The one thing I could say for myself was that I was no kind of sinophile, that none of it occurred to me beforehand . . . But then there was Noi; easy, buttered thighs, no ass at all, but still with the tight shorts, and yeah, some kind of mystery . . . Wobble walk, too-high heels . . . The shine on her bare shoulders, leading me and Benoit down through night-lit doorways . . . Dancehalls and O-K karaoke rooms . . . And that mystery was miles-long, like the jet-black hair down her back. Like an undulating, billowing tide, sweeping us right through every myth or off-color joke we'd ever heard, every kung-fu comic, every bad movie, and all of that was still beneath the surface! I was often in the next room or right behind the wall with Benoit going full-tilt, whamming it into her like a hydraulic press. Or in the Kit-Kat lounge, trying not to seem like I was watching them maul all over each other . . . Meanwhile above ground, I was on the streets in an everyday deluge of people who seemed to look right through me. Benoit was rabid about it, but in my own way I was also head over heels, and of course I came to Hong Kong to fuck Chinese girls! I still thought a lot about drawing comics, but it was like one of those tiny islands, shrouded in haze, off the coast of Repulse bay. The nights were frantic, but they also seemed so much more alive, more real. I spent the bulk of my daylight hours exhausted, racked out on the dirty mattress in the room I'd rented in Changking. And even sound asleep, even in my dreams, there was the same debilitating lust like a sickness, a chronic fatigue, dampening everything, more and more, waking up, back to sleep, same cycle, and it was as if I could feel some vital part of myself draining away . . .
