By the time Johnny had chased him off, the conversation had shifted to a monologue from me on the value of pornography in a technological society, the need for less morality, and the ultimate good that came from a sexually open worldview.
The waitress brought a second pot of tea and sighed as she heard Johnny begin a long winded appraisal of the need for the Chinese people to be led and how the return of a monarchy or emperorship was the proper method of curing the countries humanitarian record, she moved away quickly.
I agreed and used my agreement to launch a completely new topic on the legalization of narcotic substances and several programs I had heard of which seemed to offer a more enlightened view of addiction….and so it went for two and a half hours. The Chinese people around us were thankful that they didn’t understand English if only to avoid the American discussing the need for more privacy and less morality and the Englishman lecturing on the superiority of the parliamentary system.
Dogma chased catma and even though language was the fundamental barrier, the Chinese looked on the two of us with distaste easily picturing a British officer in India and an American aristocrat in Africa despite our casual dress and unshaven faces.
Our assumed Lordly manner was offensive to the Chinese who preferred modesty, decorum, cunning, and ritual to puffed up airs. Finally, much to the relief of the ear picker, who was becoming frantic over our constant refusals to have him vibrate the wax from our ears, we got up and strolled through the park with our hands put behind our backs and our noses high in the air, satisfied that the world would laud us for the great solutions we had worked out for solving its problems.
We continued to talk as we passed the old men playing mah jong in their blue Chairman Mao suits. We paused for a moment as the middle aged women practiced their middle-aged dance moves in the public square. We laughed lightly as we saw Chinese teenagers riding in rusty Ferris wheel cars and having a great time doing it. We felt nervous and edgy when those same teens came down and began to practice their karate moves. But still the discussion carried the same weighty language and high-minded priggishness.
It carried us through the bonsai garden where neither Johnny nor I felt superior enough to take an educational tone and so we admired the ancient tiny trees in silence missing out on what information we might have shared. The light began to fade as we came to a fork in the path. One fork led upward and along a ridge-top while the other skirted the bottom edge, rimming the small lake shore. We chose the bottom path and had only walked a few meters when we heard a noise that made us stop.
“Oh, arrha, ohhh…” the moans sounded as if they were close by… I looked up and recognized the sound as coming form the top of the ridge, the bright sky behind obscuring the figure on the bench in shadow while my eyes readjusted to pick out the details. My mind conjured up images of saving a woman who had been stabbed, helping a sick child, or discouraging a crime. High-minded stuff indeed.
Instead, what I saw when my eyes adjusted was a 15 or 16-year-old Chinese boy lying on the bench doing something…what was he doing? It took a few moments more before I combined the hand motion with the moans and recognized the teenager for the masturbator he was.
“Oh my God….” I turned away but not before I had a moment of sympathy for the Chinese lad’s tiny cock….
Johnny’s eyes were slower to adjust…”What is he doing? Hey..mate…,” he called up to the boy and apparently at that moment saw the masturbation…the boy’s head turned and his eyes met Johnny’s for a moment, but he was too close to orgasm to see the big pale Englishman. He was locked inside the fantasy that had brought him this far. “Good God man! He’s wanking!” The moment of eye contact took away every bit of dignity from Johnny and I couldn’t help feeling low-minded at the filthy image that was imprinted on my brain. Never mind what I’d been saying before.
“Let’s go….,” I said and began walking away.
“Right….” Johnny looked back at the boy who was now sitting up from the bench, “Oh my God, Chris, he’s following us…he’s coming from the bench, “Oh my God, Chris, he’s following us… he’s coming after us!"
A teenage masturbator was coming after us. Neither of us took the time to consider that teenagers in China have nowhere to go to relieve the new sexual urges that grip them. Privacy to masturbate was a thing we overlooked in cultural blindness. With all our high minded ideals and talk, neither the American nor the Englishman considered that the youth was embarrassed at being caught and making a hasty exit which happened to lie in our general direction but further to the right.
No instead both of us were gripped by a terrible fear and we ran from the park certain that the terrible 15-year-old wanker was after us and by the time we reached the guesthouse we’d already forgotten all the solutions to the worlds problems. Instead we told everyone about what we’d seen in the park.
The Tiger Hunters
I looked through the candlelight and saw the hand reaching out from under mosquito netting. The half bottle of Jack Daniels it held was causing strange amber shadows to flicker in the room. Lightly, I lifted my own netting, captured the proffered bottle, and lifted it to my lips.
“Thanks Mate.” The whiskey was better than good. It was magnificent. The first decent drink we’d had in more than a month. It’s hard to find good whiskey in China and when we saw the dusty bottle in the duty free shop as we crossed into Laos, $12 American didn’t seem too much to pay for a fifth.
Lao whiskey was about a tenth of the cost, but it tasted like rubbing alcohol with a couple of cigarette butts.
“Chris, do you think there are tigers in Laos?” Johnny asked me in a low whisper.
The room was stiflingly hot. We hid under our mosquito netting, passing the bottle back and forth as the single candle lit the tiny room. The village of Maung Singh was deep in slumber five hours after the mandatory blackout that occurred each evening at 6 PM. The swampy rice paddies surrounding the guesthouse were alive with splashings and croakings however, and sometimes the startlingly loud voice of a gecko lizard would come from within the room itself in a sort of birdsong “gehhhhh-kooooo”.
“Tigers? Sure, I bet there are some tigers here still. They probably come out at night and eat anything foolish enough to go outside the city limits. They probably are out there waiting right now.” I couldn’t tell whether the Englishman across the room was making a joke or whether he were actually as concerned about tigers as he sounded. I really had no idea if there were tigers in Laos, but I doubted it.
“Yeah, seems like I read about some villager getting eaten around here not too long ago… maybe we should shut the window.”
“Can tigers climb to the second floor?” It sounded like a joke, but English blokes are so damn weird to Americans with their high sounding accents and strange cultural traditions, it wouldn’t surprise me if Johnny were actually concerned about a tiger coming through the window.
“Shhhh, mate did you hear that? I think I heard a tiger outside?”
“Here,” I handed the bottle under the netting, ”You better drink this… it’ll help keep em away.”
“Right! Good Show!” Johnny gulped from the bottle “Hey…did you hear it that time?”
I actually had heard the noise that time…it sounded near and it sounded like…a bullfrog. Maybe it was a tiger though…
“Come on. Let’s go see if we can spot the tiger.” I stepped out of the netting in my boxer shorts and slipped my feet into my boots.” If there’s no tiger we can always catch us a frog.” Funny how a bit of the Southern accent came out when I was pretending to be doing something stupid. Or when I was doing something stupid.