Real Love and Doors

Real Love and Doors

Is this a confessional booth? Great. Very quaint.

This friend of mine - a Canadian cowboy- was staying with me for a while and had just got back from a holiday in Thailand. He was quite suddenly back, and stood in the doorway looking as if he'd returned from a manic fairground ride through outer space. 
Shooooweeeee!
How you doing Cowboy?
Yeah wow cool weirdtabeback wow youok? Anyoneelsehere? Hong Kong man¦crazy
And he is set to plode in some way, im- or ex-, gotta be one. I'm hoping for im 'cause I just cleaned up.
You want a beer, you need a spliff? Jesus, I'm thinking, will he blink ever?
Spliff beer yeah sure not hungry though no no thanks yeah but sure spliff yeah sure you got? You got valium?

Turns out on his return journey from Thailand he had forgotten to get a re-entry permit for Taiwan and they held him at the airport over night, where he was interrogated as to the comparative size of a white boys penis. You foreigners have luck, we Chinese just small, right? Right.
Next day he was sent to Hong Kong to apply for a visa. After a month in a hut on a beach in Thailand with only a gecko for company and opium for sustenance, Hong Kong was over-whelming to say the very least. 

********
I had just got back, two days before, from a solo expedition to Vietnam, where I had had a lovely fling with a Canadian who was not a cowboy. We had scored some opium in Saigon and he had showed me a method of smoking using a cooldrink can with a hole in the side.
The smoke danced in the lush night air in our room under the fan as we wrote songs on the wind.

********
A month later Cowboy and I set out for our visa run to Hong Kong - his second go, my first. I checked my post box in the foyer on the way out and fucked if there wasn't a letter from Vietnam Fling. It had my address and name on the front, and the innocent looking thing was full of opium. Ohhh Peeee Om.
Holy fuck! Is he crazy? He didn't even wrap it in plastic for fucks sake! Jesus, it's got my actual name on it!
Cowboy was on the perilous verge of dancing a jig: shall we go back upstairs?
In the envelope a little piece of paper said, "remember the pop can method.
What the fuck was he talking about? What's a pop can method? Is it musical? I was feeling nervous now, had I lost time?
Cooldrink, said Cowboy soothingly.
What?
Pop is cooldrink.
Ah, right. Who says pop for fucks sake!?
North Americans.
Ok.

Here, it works, you hold, I'll light....there ya go.

A beautiful afternoon it was. It had a soundtrack: Chinese bells and the sound eyes make. It had a smell too; burnt opium and pop. The formerly rancid post-apocalyptic mess of the city transformed magically, breezily, shamelessly, into sheer industrial splendour before our pancake eyes. We took photo's from the back of thetaxi all the way to the airport....but no film in the camera, so we'll never know.

* * * *
That trip to Hong Kong: mind goes in green, comes out red.

There's a room in a house on Hong Kong Island, it's lodged in my memory , wrapped in aluminium foil that smokes, white smoke, and the smoke sucked in, like a gasp, mind shards, then everything clear and it's good to be on the cusp of reason, on the reason fence, to balance there like an irreverant dark god.

* * * *
I thought a lot, that night, about my trip to Vietnam, you can think about things very clearly. I remembered my boat ride around Halong Bay. I had gone to Vietnam on my own, like i said, but I had wanted to arrive completely cold, to just arrive and not have any idea and to find my way. I think I wanted to fall off the edge of the world. So I didn't read up, I didn't take a travel guide or even a map. I didn't take any phone numbers. I am often lost - I thought it might be interesting to be well and truly lost in the world, how bad could it be? Not too bad, not so bad that it kills you.

You could only go on a boat trip with a group, so I became part of a group of Norwegian tourists. That boat trip was weirder than any chemical trip before or since. I couldn't have been dehydrated, didn't have food poisoning - but the clouds spoke to me, they did. I lay on my back and stared at the sky for all six hours. The clouds played me a pale movie of my life, of all life in general, they played memories I had never remembered and scenes that seemed to come out of the future or out of a million pasts - it started with me as a young boy in a loin cloth, scrabbling up a tree, and on the plain below me a stampede of buffalo, as far as the eye could see. That's where it started, way back, and it went forward from there. And all the while the boat circled the islands of rock, like frozen dragons in the water, wrapped in mist.
The Norwegians didn't seem to notice the crazy sky....but they sure as hell noticed me...I had one side of the boat all to myself.

* * * *
Cowboy and our English friends are talking furiously about life, they have unravelled it. That's what the stuff we're smoking will do to you. These guys are genius, they are. I am a genius, I hadn't seen it before. Everything I say is wickedly intelligent, the intelligent universe moves through me, I am an expression of God, I am his face, her face. Eternity writhes an impossible snake and I with it, knowing all.

And then, then the precision mind and the ideas begin. All of us have ideas. We have very, very good ideas. These ideas form in three-dimensional glory above our heads and we express them beautifully so that they strut around in the centre of the room appreciated and understood. We should write them down, we should record them. I stare down the barrell of an empty pen.

The South China Sea calls, full of dragons and mist. We take a walk, a herd of imbeseals moving toward salt water. But in the dark, along the path the trees reject us, the clouds ambush our confidence and I think I hear demon blackbirds laughing. Cowboy hangs back, then I with him and quietly we turn back - the call is not for us, it's for the pure of heart - the untainted. Somewhere in the night I see a line that I have crossed, fading.

* * * *
By the time I left Vietnam I didn't feel lost anymore, I felt superb. But lost and found are part of a cruel, infinite loop.

* * * *
You okay? says Cowboy from out of the mystic depths of his hammock. I try to engage vocal chords, but am unable, it's a long swim to sound. I stare at him instead, he is unfolding outwards into a vast landscape of cowboyness. Were his eyes always that blue? Behind those eyes is the hugest expanse of calm i have ever seen, he goes on and on and on full of desert and cactii and shutters hanging off windows, full of clear skies and tumbleweeds and lone guitar riffs, and here and there an oasis, here and there. I want to jump in. I want to jump in and never come out.

A series of stills. Sitting. Only the sun moves in. It also rises.

A thought reveals itself to my cowboy: We should go and sort out our visas.
Ok.
Here, one more hit for the road.
Deep breath. White smoke.
We'll stay in the city tonight.
Sure Cowboy, anything you say....
Outside it's chemically reacting like nobodies business. We should have wept. no. slept. We should have slept. But there is the sun like fury.
Speak.
You know what i think about relationships? (making conversation, see how I run¦)
Tell me
They're about power - it's like one person always has more power than the other and that power creates like a pressure system or a force field - where's the money, we gotta have money to be on this bus- and the one with less power is pulled in, gravitates toward, and that feeds the other persons power...
(About 50 locals are staring at us with those eyes, swaying in rhythm with the bus. It's possible we're talking too fast, too loud.)
Yeah right, I hear ya. But then something happens -here, here i got it, just need one more dollar - like say someone else shows an interest in that weaker energy person...
Yes, and then another force field is set up and the weaker person gets fed power..
Gets juiced up!
Right....!
And then the power guy gets all wobbly in his force field, he starts to lose power and the other feeds off it and bam - tables turned...
(Cowboy has sat down on an old ladies lap by mistake, she doesn't seem to mind.)
What a fuck up
Indeed
We will have none of that
Friends?
Friends.

Wait. Did Cowboy decide that? God, now Cowboy has all the power - he is feeding off me! Oh Christ, no wonder he is so huge! i need to start another force field, i need to alleviate this pressure fast before everything spins out of control - but we are alone - so alone, completely alone, where did the rest of the world go?

They are probably all in their rooms, their offices. They are probably all fucking, there are probably mass orgies going on behind closed doors everywhere. There is blood on the walls....we are all going to die, and nature is laughing at me. I am a weak cold-blooded thing, circling a cowboy moon - I feel my neurons reaching dead ends in underground tunnels near the earth's core. One must backtrack from here. It is impossible, it is anti-probable, that things will ever be clean again.

You ok?
Sure.
This is our stop.

The visa office is very high up, around the 40th floor and the marble foyer echoes with the sounds of sanity.

We stand out.

I sit down on a bench and stare at the elevators. I am preparing myself, wondering why there are so many of them. Do they go to different worlds and does our fate depend on it? I look around for Cowboy who has disappeared, perhaps an elevator got him. He is standing behind a pillar, biting his thumbnail, he looks like a bomb. I need to take control of this situation. The security guard is moving towards him - that may be a gun. He may just take Cowboy out, cull him. We must get into an elevator, it is our vital next step. I get up (altitude change) and move very casually toward him- I seem to be swimming, maybe breaststroke, nice and easy. Security man is gonna do us, he must, we can't blame him, it's his duty. I swoop in, take Cowboy's elbow and lead him to a door.

I whisper fiercely in his ear: It is vitally important that you make every possible attempt to disguise your Self.
Up.

The Taipei visa office, this is it this is it this is it.

* * * *
That last night in Vietnam was New Years Eve, chinese new year in Saigon, Ho Chi Min and somewhere in the dark the Mekong crawled. The family at my inn had surrounded their various gods with offerings; Macdonalds chips, coke , fruit, batteries, cigarettes. At some point in the night buddha got a cigarette between his smiling cast iron lips and later it was lit so that by the time little boys came to accept the gifts - in a line of legs and dusty feet, dressed as dragons- there was a pile of ash in his lap and smoke curled a thread of enlightenment above his head.

Outside a scooter passed through the crowd, a huge plant loaded at the drivers feet so that all you saw were tyres and green madly flying. The world seemed infinitely big. Finally the familys' carefully picked watermelon was taken out and the mother sliced it open with a huge knife. Breaths held. If the flesh is red and sweet, the coming year will be lucky, if pale and listless, unlucky. It was Pale. We drank more beer and shook it off.

That night I dreamt a warning, a man with no face in the eye of a storm urging me to come with him. We will follow the North star, he says, to its logical conclusion. He had spurs on his naked heels.

* * * *
The room we stayed in was a hole, a rotten hole in the wall of a 50-floor building. The black sheep of the visa office building family; the old, broken, destitute black sheep. Chungking Mansions; housing a colourful assortment of drug dealers, curio sellers, prostitutes, destitutes, english teachers and families of rats. Also the best place for cheap accomodation and exceptionally good Indian food. It was about time we ate.

A dangerous looking guy had rushed me earlier and shoved a pamphlet into my hand, for a moment I thought I'd been knifed, but I hadn't. Cowboy saw it coming and tried to protect me. It was a bit of a scene. The pamphlet was for the Royal Indian - "The best Indian restaurant in Hong Kong. We thought we'd better go there, or we might get knifed later.

* * * *

In the morning in Ho Chi Min I had my last alone breakfast at a cafe called Good Morning Vietnam, I had fruit salad and a smoothie, I had Vietnamese coffee and one of those freshly baked baguettes with butter and cheese, one of those baguettes you smell first thing in the morning when the women bring them out for sale in bundles and baskets. I had all that food, then I got to the airport and cried all the way home, to Taiwan. Don't ask me why. I knew the winter was coming. My own private little winter, frozen, barren- punctuated with huddles around fires and friends coming in out of the cold. I knew: out there's a cowboy with his lasso.