With art by Ramon Sierra (Cocor)
I never graduated from high school. I am twenty-three years old. I’m half Chinese. The other half is generic white. I cut meat for a living. These are some of the things I like to be up-front about or at least imply whenever I meet someone new, in order to gauge their opinion of me – basically, to see if they are worth hanging onto. By ‘meeting someone new’ I really mean talking to girls or ‘young ladies’. By ‘young ladies’ I really mean women who are legal. Some women are illegal. My name is Morris Lee. I have an anxiety disorder that I don’t usually tell people about.
I live on my own even though I live on the second floor of my mother’s house; you have to come up the back stairs in order to reach the front door. When you take off your shoes you’re taking them off in my kitchen, where the fridge is filled with bottled water and microwaveable meals. Despite relying on such a diet I manage to stay relatively healthy.
Possibly the greatest, the absolute greatest, part of the kitchen is the EGGS switch, which is the kitchen’s light switch, painted green with a small painting of a hen and her chicks and the word EGGS under it. However, even though I’m a fan of the EGGS switch, I rarely use it and generally live in darkness, as while I’m fine with living in darkness I’m not fine with paying high electricity bills. The kitchen is also the dining room, where I eat my microwaveable burritos in the dark.
The kitchen is probably the second-cleanest room in the house, the first being the washroom. I make sure the washroom is positively spotless in case anyone decides to come over; I’ve become very proud of this over the years. The only things that tarnish it are the outdated EGM magazines that find their way on top of the toilet tank every so often; whenever a friend of mine uses the washroom, I always hear the same tired joke shouted over the trickling of urine: ‘Did you know Metal Gear Solid 3 is coming out? I thought it had come out three years ago.’ I keep telling him that joke isn’t funny anymore, but I don’t think he can hear me over the sound of his own voice. It has become almost as old as the magazines I leave behind.
Down the hall from the washroom is the bedroom. My bedroom is the same room I’ve lived in since I was born. It’s mostly known for its two drug-inspired posters of a purple Jimi Hendrix and a tv that can’t decide whether it wants to be puke-yellow or vomit-green. My blanket is patterned with baseball equipment even though I don’t like baseball. I have no idea how old my blanket is and I have no intention of getting a new one. Under my bed is the Box of Regrets, where I keep all of the old letters and photos and gifts given to me by a short-lived girlfriend in high school. I should have been nicer to her.
Across from the bedroom is the entertainment room; I guess I should say ‘the Guitar Hero room’. I mostly use it for playing Guitar Hero after coming home from a party, which is nearly every single night. I also use it for playing Street Fighter with the boys, but we tend to bust out Guitar Hero near the end of our hangs anyway. I’m an expert at Guitar Hero – I know it’s true because the game tells me so. I’ve also become extremely good at Street Fighter thanks to all of the new challengers I’ve been facing at different parties in different houses.
I wish these skills could translate into something worthwhile. I want somebody to tell me that anything is worthwhile so long as I enjoy doing it, because until that happens I won’t know whether it’s true or not.
In the living room is a set of five-hundred-dollar lamps modeled in an Egyptian style, with ebony bases and blood-red shades. The couch and chairs are of a very fine white leather. On top of the glass coffee table are large coffee table books that I'll never actually read. It is probably the most expensive room in the house; I'll even be paying an artist friend of mine to paint two large canvases to put up on its walls. In the closet of the living room is the corpse of my ex-girlfriend, the P & A. We broke up when I broke it.
A dog is usually scratching at the door that separates the two floors of the house. I try to ignore it, even when its whining begins to sound like crying; I’m heartless that way. I once had a heart but kept giving out little pieces of it to different people and it just kept getting smaller and smaller until I had nothing left.
Now that you’re familiar with my apartment – I call my floor my apartment – I’m going to go ahead and put someone in it: a girl I met on a bus going down to the argyle mall on Dundas. Her name is splendid – her name is Chantal; it is a French name and, while I don’t like the French, I like her name.
She sits at the dining room table, or rather the kitchen room table with me and looks at an ashtray filled with the ends of cigarettes. She takes one up between her thumb and forefinger and squeezes it, rolls it between her fingers until the insides come crumbling out. Then she looks at her fingers to admire the remnants.
‘Cigarettes are death, didn’t you know?’ she asks me with striking sincerity, tilting her head; the way she tilts her head is cute and it kills me. I think she might be three years younger than me. ‘Do you smoke, Morris?’
‘No, this is for other people,’ I say. ‘My mother.’
‘Did your mother smoke when she had you?’
I don’t know. I take the ashtray and dump it into the trash. I set it back down on the table; the bottom of it is black.
‘I hate the smell of cigarettes,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’ I offer her a rice cake but she declines because they taste like cardboard.
‘How do you taste?’ I ask.
‘Suck on your finger,’ she says. ‘That’s what I taste like.’
I smile and look down and fidget with my hands. I met her on the bus but she seems pretty well put together, both physically and psychologically. Usually when I meet strange women it’s because of my Asian features: they come up to me and ask me if I’m Chinese. They’re Chinese. I invite them to my apartment because here I have power; I know where everything is and I know how everything works here. This is my kingdom and it is at war with everywhere else.
‘I’m going to kiss you,’ I tell her. I stand up, the chair skidding loudly behind me. ‘Here I come.’ I’m being goofy and awkward because I think women are attracted to me when I’m like that. She puts up a hand between my lips and her cheek. I kiss her hand; it tastes like my finger. Then I push her hand down and kiss her cheek.
‘So you don’t kiss on the first date,’ she says, laughing, ‘you kiss before it! Well, aren’t you something!’
‘I’m something.’
She’s still laughing, hiding her mouth with her knuckles. ‘I let you kiss me!’
No, she didn’t let me – she tried to stop me but I broke through her defences. I stole my kiss.
After she left I never heard from her again. She gave me her MSN address but I never bothered to add her; this way I can tell people I’m alone by choice. I could easily get a girlfriend but I’m afraid of being rejected. The girls I love the most are very far away.
The types of women I hate are the dirty ones. I once met a fairly dirty girl standing in front of my house; she was doing stretches and seemed to be lost. When I met her I was wearing my black leather jacket. My black leather jacket gives me confidence: confidence to go outside, confidence to talk to girls and confidence to drive my car. Before the black leather jacket I suffered from a lot more anxiety attacks. But I digress.
I went up to this girl in my confidence jacket and, with my black, black hair done up all right, feeling all right, I asked if she was waiting for someone. I almost felt like a sleaze-ball asking if she was waiting for someone since that’s how the rape scenes begin in movies; I know because I’ve seen many such movies. But I asked and she said no, and then she told me she was worried that she was covered in termites and wanted me to check to see if it was true. So I invited her up to my apartment and we went into my spotless washroom.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked this strange girl in my washroom. I say she was strange but I’m strange as well.
She shook her head. ‘Shan’t tell,’ she said and then giggled like a little girl, which was off-putting.
‘Chantal? You know, you’re actually the second person I’ve met named Chantal.’
She laughed and looked at me but her eyes seemed dull and tired. ‘People call me Termite,’ she said. I didn’t want to know why she was called Termite. ‘Do you want to inspect my body now?’
Without waiting for me to respond she turned around and lifted up her shirt so I could see her bare back: it was pale and lined with thin blue veins – the lines of a dead leaf – and there were slight traces of acne here and there. I looked it over for termites but I couldn’t find any; she asked me to look closer and began pushing down her jeans. The smell was overwhelming – my hands started shaking and I had to ask her to leave. After that I made a pact with my friends to never talk to a dirty girl again. I showered several times when she left.
What is it I like about the girls I like? I like girls who are sweet but have a dark side to them. Is it cute cynicism or, in an attempt to be poetic, the kindness of shadows? When they smile at me, their eyes lit up like beacons of life in darkened rooms, captured on webcams, typing in MSN about the time they got so drunk that, got so drunk that –
I used to drink alone but stopped when I realised that I had become an alcoholic. Now I only drink when there are lots of people around. When I’m drunk I’m better at being funny around girls than when I’m shy and sober, or maybe the girls find me funnier because they’re drunk themselves. Most of the girls I know like getting drunk or talking about getting drunk, oftentimes in combined form like: ‘oh god I’m so drunk right now.’
The point of getting drunk around other people is to tell them how drunk you are. Getting drunk alone means you wish you had other people to talk to. Sometimes I’ll black out and wake up on a toilet holding a book, fifty pages past the last time I had picked it up. The repercussions of drinking are frightening, but that’s why drinkers never think ahead.
When you drink you drink for the moment: my motto is that nothing matters except for the current moment, which is happening right now.
So let’s say I’m in my room right now, writing this while talking to a girl in Hong Kong over MSN. I like her so much that I don’t want to say her name. We talk about music: I mention how my favourite band is Slayer, but that I’m also a huge fan of Squarepusher. She doesn’t know who Squarepusher is so I send her Beep Street, a song I use to calm myself down whenever my anxiety problems start to kick in; I find it so relaxing that I listen to it at work while dealing with overweight, angry bikers and their piggish, pregnant girlfriends. I also listen to it when I’m out driving the boys around. I wait for this girl’s opinion, looking at the feed from her webcam to try to gauge her reaction in real time. The expression on her face doesn’t tell me much: she’s almost always smiling.
I see her typing and she says she prefers Slayer. I know she’s never heard Slayer before, but I appreciate her polite tactics – it’s better than being laughed at for listening to experimental electronic music from the nineties. So I shrug it off and ask what she listens to over in Hong Kong. She seems excited to tell me: it’s somebody with a Chinese name, but it doesn’t matter what their name is since I’ll never listen to them.
Out of nowhere I decide to tell her that I’m going to go out to see a movie with some friends, signing off with a parade of emoticons; I then proceed to lie down on my bed for about an hour, thinking about nothing in particular, just trying to clear my head. I put on Beep Street.
This document could be called ‘Misadventures in China Girls and Wikipedia’. Make of that what you will.
One time at a party I liked the look of this one girl so I asked my mates for pick-up lines; her hair and eyes were jet black, and in my drunken state I was jet set ready to go up to her and embarrass myself with just about anything that was handed to me. So after conferencing with my friends I went up to her and asked her how much a panda bear weighs.
She looked at me and tilted her head ever so slightly, her thin hair falling over the side of her face; I thought she looked sweet-sweet and wanted to hear the sound of her, what I imagined to be the pleasant sound of her voice. With a smile she lifted her arms as though she was giving up the biggest guess in the world and was glad to be rid of it. When she spoke I thought she spoke with a slight accent.
‘About three thousand pounds?’
I began to ponder if it was in fact an accent. ‘Enough to break the ice. Hi, my name is Morris.’
After talking with her for a while about absolutely nothing – we talked about the concept of nothing – I realised that she was having more trouble hearing me than loud music normally caused. I took a break from my courting to confer with my friends again, this time so as to gather more information about her and ways of using that information to my advantage.
They told me she was half deaf; that was why she had the ‘accent’. I asked them if she was mentally retarded, and they asked me if it really mattered. I stole a quick glance in her direction and she looked like she was happy; she was dancing and having fun. Instead of going back to her I stood alone in a corner and drank until I blacked out. This is what happens when I hit on girls at parties.
About once a week I like to hang out with a friend or two here at the apartment. Too many guys view girls as collectibles and disregard their male friends in order to maintain and polish their little collections, while I, on the other hand, value male friendship just as much, if not more so, than female.
Part Two