Roy
Gotham Mamik
“That boy is going to be the end of you,” Mrs. Rebello,
the curt and dowdy English teacher scolded me at letting Roy cheat off
my quiz paper in second grade. Both Roy and I sunk our heads in disguised
remorse, having mastered the telepathy of laughter, together secretly
haha-ing at the pathetic lonely old bat in the cherry hued kitchen dress.
The first time I visited Roy abroad was in Kuala Lumpur. It was during
spring break of freshman year and the longest time that we had been
apart since chickenpox had kept me out of school for four weeks in sixth
grade. I had gone over to Roy’s house to play the previous day
but was the only one to contract the germ. How I still don’t know.
Now with both of us just over eighteen, Roy didn’t have a vacation
period at the time, but skipping classes was never a deterrent for him,
embalmed with a carefree paralysis that he graduated all the way up
to and through high school with. There were side effects of course:
low grades. While I accepted the offer of early admission decision at
a near Ivy level establishment on the West coast, Roy’s mailbox
accumulated rejection letters from all corners, even south of Texas.
Some universities didn’t even bother to correspond, perhaps contesting
a joke of their own in response to the one that was Roy’s application
– missing GPA and when received, it was understood why it was
not included; recommendation letters written by the assistant at the
tattoo parlor and another by Roy himself, impersonating a made up teacher
that went by the name of J.B Jovie. Even if some excruciatingly naive
applications counselor would have considered it genuine, the correspondence
address at the bottom of the letter was Roy’s own. Phone number
too. The personal essay was printed from the example ones on one of
those “getting into college” sites. Roy had been swift not
to waste time in removing the THIS IS AN EXAMPLE ESSAY watermark as
well as the URL before printing it. And so, shunned from a standardized
future in father’s homeland, Roy plunged into the uncertain one
afforded by his mother’s. He didn’t really have a choice.
Not to desecrate the academic institutions in Malaysia. I’m sure
they’re more than capable. In fact, Roy’s parents had to
cough up a sizable donation for a new wing in the college to influence
decision towards their son in the positive. And such unorthodox procurements
are probably apparent in America too, but the orient is relatively more
affordable. And relocating countries is sometimes easier than states,
and Roy’s mother welcomed the removal of homesickness, at least
temporarily.
Even if I felt partly responsible for my friend’s lack of ambition,
I was too drunk to act upon it. On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, we
lay coiled under a fan inside some shack in downtown Kuala Lumpur, unwittingly
lining up the dozen empty beer bottles on the table post consumption
owing to understaffing (hence service) of the establishment; the glass
vessels constant falling keeping from us doing the same.
“Can you believe it,” Roy belched. “Back home, we
would have to pay three times as much in any bar for this.”
“But we only drank in your basement,” I corrected.
‘”Fucking Phil. His fake IDs were a waste of money,”
Roy spoke in the negative of our classmate.
“I believe he got into Northwestern.”
I realized right then I shouldn’t have mentioned that, even though
Roy took no notice of it, his tongue struggling to funnel the last drop
from the golden colored bottle, which lent a natural gradation of tone
to the dust swamped dive. It was still two hours to happy hour and the
place was empty, thus affording the sole waitress disregard over two
loud Americans. Roy, in proportion to our weights, was doubly noisy.
“Hey, sweetheart!” he shouted, while snapping his thick
sweaty fingers that hardly clicked, “Two more La.”
“How about some sightseeing,” I suggested.
“Screw that,” Roy dismissed. “It’s hotter than
a goat’s testicles outside. We’re better off here till the
sun goes down. Then I’ll take you out for some real sightseeing.”
He said the last bit as the waitress plunked down two beers on our
table and Roy’s wanting mouth mimicked the froth on the rim while
his eyes undressed her.
“What’s your name sweetheart?” he asked with drunken
courage.
“Noname,” she blurted angrily in a high-pitched accent
that begged imitation.
“What do you mean you don’t got a name sweetheart?”
Roy insisted. “Everyone’s gotta have a name so people can
be loved and hated, although in your case, I don’t see how anyone
could do the second.”
Roy’s wantonness, though sincere, was dubious in either continent.
While American girls found the extra wordiness corny, non-native speakers
failed to comprehend. But mostly, it was his near obese proportions
that put off universally. Whoever said women weren’t shallow?
Regardless, miracles happen and Roy was one at birth – fully formed,
even pudgy at eight pounds and seven months premature. And he never
stopped growing, in size or determination.
“Give me your hand, darling.”
“I’d really like to see some of the town,” I interrupted
the tactic, sensing we might be thrown out anyway with Roy’s building
aggressiveness.
Roy obliged my embarrassment against his own wishes and we left, dropping
a sizable gratuity, paving a return to learn of Noname’s name.
His interest soon wavered courtesy twin sister strippers airing their
breasts inches from his face. The club was less than a five-minute walk
away from the bar and we stumbled upon it by chance, staying longer
than required, whereby Roy consumed ample amounts of the signature dish
at the buffet that was neglected by more discerning patrons: goats’
balls.
Four lap dances each cost us the price of a single admission alone
at a comparable Jersey City neon parlor. Not that we ever had the opportunity
to frequent one on homeland anyway. We tried, but Phil’s IDs had
let us down consistently. Roy did wind up paying more than me though;
he had skipped a mid term math’s quiz. And there was no exact
translation for ‘makeup test’ this side of the world. That
was the kick-start to his extra year at graduating.
The rest of the six days continued the streak of a typical freshman
spring break – excessive drinking, debauchery and public defecations;
anecdotes of backpackeresque memory formulation that would eventually
continue to amuse solely the participants years from then. I even met
his parents, who had shifted base for a while to help adjust their son
in new surroundings. But it was they who needed the most settling. They
continued as they had back in New Jersey to lecture me to lecture Roy.
Geography had barely scraped change beyond scenery in our lives. I flew
back to California, content with the maintenance of familiarity, naive
to the world of change that I would be landing back in. I superstitiously
estimated at the funeral later that my mother had died around the same
time my plane was being smothered by turbulent winds off the eastern
coast of Japan.
The second time I visited Roy was seven years later. In Brazil. For
his wedding. To Noname. Apparently, that was her name. We were just
too linguistically separated (and drunk) to tie it together at the time.
Convinced of the post good time fortune that the dive brought him, Roy
frequented that bar for the entire five years of his undergraduate life.
The dust on the tables remained steadfast, but the waitress eventually
was soaked under Roy’s perseverance. They dated for an additional
two years post Roy’s graduation, mostly to convince Roy’s
parents that she wasn’t just some gold digger. It was hard for
even them to digest why any sane woman would want to be with their son
other than a lucrative divorce settlement.
But true to first initials of her calling, the woman shunned thoughts
of practical advantage. She was truly in love with my friend as evidenced
by her sincere work on him. With nimble hands and overpowering spices,
she brought him down to acceptably large scale. Also, in private confidence
I learned through Roy that she was a steam engine in bed, but demanded
‘typical’ exercise on treadmill from him first and as reward,
he could board the train. Belo Horizonte: The nearly diagonally opposite
wedding venue from Malaysia (where Roy was settled now) was not a dream
of the bride but an eccentric demand of my friend, whose love for the
place was fueled by the fact that Phil was fired by the Brazilian Hedge
fund that had hired him.
“I even sent him an invitation,” Roy boasted. “He’s
living in Sao Paolo still and the fucker’s got a lot of free time
on his hands with no job now.”
Roy may have shed a few pounds, but vindictiveness never drained, like
his hard flesh. He was always good to me though, having his parents
put me up in the same fancy hotel marked for immediate family members,
while other guests were demoted to guest houses. Despite the changes
in our individual lives, our brotherly fondness remained intact. Stronger
even.
After my mother passed away suddenly because of a heart attack, I succumbed
to a streak of less than average semesters. And the lethargic sadness
elevated by three times daily intakes of pot smoking continued to keep
grief and performance at bay before time and harsh reminders from my
father set me straight.
“You’re not on drugs are you?” he said more than
asked over the phone.
“No! Of course not.”
“It would break your mother’s heart.”
And with that toothpaste of emotional blackmail, I brushed my conscience
and was well on my way again, having enough time to graduate with honors,
and land myself a job close to home. Three years later and a month and
move after promotion, I was handing my business card to Phil on Roy’s
insistence.
“Sub Senior Analyst already?’ the unemployed Phil gasped.
“In London!” Roy stabbed further with precision.
Despite his scornful attitude, Roy had amassed sizable numbers to be
present on his wedding day. Many, including Phil, were rightfully surprised
about being invited considering their not always rosy association with
Roy, and neither did my friend imbibe diplomacy among his limited qualities
to bandage such experiences. Yet, disdain could only be accompanied
by attendance. Roy had intended to invite alongside bodies, jealousy.
Two for the price of one. And no plate from the caterer was left unaccounted
for.
Regardless, the occasion called for merriment. Dance and alcohol swooped
down on egos and the celebrations rained over the humid summer night
in Belo Horizonte. The locals were well accustomed to loud euphoria,
and us, the Americans and what not, took upon the challenge to compete
in stride. No one would have noticed though, besides the caterer, staff
and wedding planner, everyone else in attendance was from north of the
equator. Even the belly dancer: a provocatively dressed specimen, whose
combination of trysting skill and show of skin raised blood pressures,
Roy’s included. But it was all in harmless fun. Even Noname indulged
the atmosphere in a scintillating dance between bride and hired performer,
dismissing any notion of envy stemming from the just over five foot
short limbed Malaysian against the richly mixed ascending limbs and
perfect gyrations that seduce only after years of practice.
Being the best man, I garnered attention from the exotic beauty with
half efforts. The next morning, too giddy with triumph of a beautiful
woman lying naked in my bed and rushed into catching my flight back
to London, I tripped across the room, confiscating my clothes that had
been liberated without aim: a trouser leg dangling atop the dresser,
socks – twin also in their evasiveness to grabbing from under
the bed and behind a curtain, briefs canopying an embroidered flower
motif lampshade (the flower print I would later recognize in life on
sofa cushions when my wife would be manically furnishing our new home
outside of London, her boomerang taste turning away furniture, regardless
of size, just after removal from delivery vans but before entering the
porch, the sight of something she had once wanted scurrying towards
something new or previously compromised. “Do you like them?”
she pointed my eyes with her anxious finger. “Yes,” I said,
seeing only abandoned youth in-between the silk and polyester threads
and affording sympathetic consideration for the warehouse catalogue
staff that were abused with receiving packages back from our home on
a weekly basis. “What good is a return policy if you’re
not going to use it?” she reassured in demanding an honest opinion.
Roy had introduced me to her at a pub in London when he came to visit
and I was too chicken to talk to her, reducing me to a tourist in my
own adopted city.
The second shirt button broke off when pulled from under the food cart
(the dancer had quite an appetite). I left the dancer in slumber, affording
her the courtesy of a late checkout by paying for it in advance along
with the room service bill, not wanting to take rash advantage of Roy’s
parents’ hospitality. With only over an hour before departure,
the loosely uniformed bellboy was thrust into ballooning, flapping his
arms in hailing me a cab. As I dived into the back seat, another poorly
tailored employee from reception dashed out of the lobby, mirroring
the actions of the bellboy from a minute ago in opposite intention.
Banging hands down on the hood of the taxi, he delivered a staying order,
“Sir! Urgent phone call for you.”
Despite my transient leisure status, I was faced with too many dams
of knowing in this city. Was it the dancer, unfulfilled and unimpressed
with efforts toward gentlemanly proper? Or Roy, fuming in defiance at
my leaving without the overly sentimental goodbye hug? Or Noname realizing
that there wasn’t much to her newly acquired husband other than
single syllable? His parents? Confound it. I have my own problems. My
own life.
A familiar voice on the receiver corrected my delusional narcissism.
No one from the wedding vicinity needed me at that moment. The call
was directed at my own life, or more precisely, that of the loss of
my sister. She had died in a car accident.
It wasn’t until three years later that my father’s increasing
visits had transformed into living with us, and his home in America
became the less visited. I was doing well at work and it allowed us
to maintain a comfortable distance of not having to wince grief behind
smiles at the premature deaths in our family. Still, I was more than
happy he was living with me, under the protective grasp of vicinity,
which was the most formidable, albeit illusionary foe to uncertainty.
In addition, my wife was grand (British slang overcame me) in filling
the void of female voices in his life, though he fatigued often at continually
surrendering unending verdicts on home furnishings. Dinner conversations
with three of us at the table were lively, with my wife speaking and
the old man and myself canceling out listening. And I was grateful to
Roy for having flirted her into my arms. I did continue an institution
that had been my late sister’s forte – purchasing the newspaper
and bringing it to him each morning from the newsstand. He always enjoyed
reading the paper, more knowing that someone had put more effort than
just printing it. In this sense, I too partially became a ghost of our
family. These unexpected conveniences of circumstances saw us through
in stale continuity for years: my wife and I couldn’t make a baby.
Dyeing my hair to disillusion my father that it was still too early
before adding to the mantle space of family pictures was juvenile. The
roadblock to procreation wasn’t because of his biological inheritance
or my average romantic stamina. “They just refuse to mingle,”
the gynecologist commented on my wife’s eggs. Giving up on looking
young and accepting the grey strands at least copulated respect at work,
which had been dismissed at home, even though, like compunctious colleagues,
my father and wife never said anything gratuitous to each other or myself.
I invited people from work to our house on the weekends. My wife was
a good host and my father entertained with an American perspective.
One of my subordinates, Luke, a likable Denzel Washington type with
a penchant for pink shirts and lewd jokes, managed to invoke laughter
both from my wife and father without having to switch conversation.
And so, while our queer family entertained and procrastinated change,
another grew: Phil had amassed three sets of twins in a decade; he had
moved to Southern Brazil, married and was employed by an Ethanol fuel
company whose main component was sugarcane. In a sense, this was a legitimate
extension of his ‘alternative ID’ endeavor from high school.
I visited his office as my firm was looking to invest in his.
“The future is sweet,” he said munching on a raw sugarcane
stick while touring me around the company’s vast plantation fields.
“You’ve done well for yourself,” I remarked.
“Yeah, but sending all six of them to College is going to be
a bitch,” he conceded that America was still the place to learn
even if the money lay outside. “What about you?”
He wanted to know about my family.
“Oh we just don’t have the time,” I lied poorly.
“Want to know how my girl kept popping them out?” he offered
with a knowing smile before I could even ask.
It was just before Christmas when I visited Brazil. In addition to
a tan and a ten-year funding agreement with Phil’s company, I
returned to London with an extra suitcase that was placed under the
Christmas tree.
When my wife unlocked the plastic casket on the festive morning, her
face was bewildered at discovering hordes of sugarcane.
“I’ll try some,” my father demanded.
And other families dwindled: Roy, too, had conceived, though unexpectedly
more conservative: a daughter. But he failed at the opportunities of
having her bounce on his amplifying stomach, buying dresses and excelling
at spoiling a toddler. Noname had left with one baby and outrageous
alimony in tow. Roy’s parents had been correct in their skepticism,
though it was their own son’s incessant cheating that pushed her
to the lawyer’s office.
“She used me like a filling station,” Rob sobbed over the
phone.
It had been years since I’d seen him and this was, technically,
the first crisis ever in his life that had affected him in the negative.
The phallic fruit had yet rendered no results in my wife conceiving
and had initiated diabetes in my father. Burdened with the new habit
of a tropical climate and drawn to nostalgia, I masqueraded the subsidiary
need to be there for my friend as pivotal and took off on a plane without
much domestic lament.
Roy had to give up the penthouse suite in the luxury high-rise adjacent
to the Petronas towers as part of the settlement and had moved into
his parents’ place in the suburbs.
“More like you had to leave for her to,” I joked soon after
Roy picked me up from the airport and I gauged his mood: more bored
than heartbroken. His body had matured back to impending proportions
now that he was free from the health reign of his ex-wife.
I stayed with him despite having a hotel reservation. And even though
the largest guest room in the mansion had been dressed for my arrival,
Roy and I returned to unkemptness in his room, aided by beer. I awoke
the next morning with a hangover and the sight of Roy complacently drooling
on the bathroom floor with his shorts halfway down, the line between
his buttocks superimposing on the tiled floor. It was just like old
times, except that we were older. And this deplorable behavior seemed
from so long ago, except it took less time and bottles now to return
to it.
At the breakfast table, his parents, now permanently settled in Malaysia,
buttered their toasts with resiliency, having defied the frailty of
old age knowing too well that their only son still needed them. And
I too recalled the fulfillment of helping my friend cheat in school.
It was as if Roy was the elixir of youth, affecting everyone close to
him, spurning them from moving on gracefully. It was his greatest gift
wrapped in selfishness.
The following afternoon, we toured the city on foot, revisiting the
trails of freshman year, and under the mirror of an unjust sun, realities
of time did peek through: my temple housed more lines and my toes, clamped
in new rusty oxfords and misshapen between cracks on the dilapidated
alleyways, spurted bunions. Just before my inability to weather the
surroundings voiced itself in complaint, “Here we are,”
Roy declared with corpulent arm pointing to a sign. It was the same
bar where he had met Noname.
We got a corner table; the seating had been reorganized, but apart
from that, familiarity settled alongside dust under a broken fan. We
advocated to be customers of belonging, but were drowned under the carefree
laughs of younger patrons. When we finally did manage to get a waitress’s
attention, Roy was still able to order conversation along with drink.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?’ he replayed old lines
through a double chin.
“Janice,” replied the young girl in perfect English.
Education had made it harder to flirt, but Roy persisted and eventually
wound up with Janice in the hotel room where I had yet to check in.
While Roy made epitomous use of the reservation, I squandered thought
and time in the mall, trading guilt with gifts for my wife and father.
I had planned on staying for just the weekend before returning home,
and now seeing that Roy was in better spirits than the entire human
race, I decided to leave the same night, breaking a smile in the anticipation
of surprising my family and earning their gratitude for having missed
them so soon.
Instead, I stayed for another ten days. That was what Roy did. He made
you feel wanted. Even when it was Janice and him clawing through each
other in a restaurant, leaving other tables staring and covering their
children's eyes to the sight while you sat beside them, forced to look
at the lobster on your plate that exhibited no interest in you whatsoever
while you massaged your injured toes under the table. I would have hired
him in our company’s PR department if I hadn’t known how
disengaged he was toward conventional accomplishment. One could partly
blame his inheritance, which my salary couldn’t mimic even with
an additional zero. The dinner make-outs and awkward pauses with seafood
sessions in pretentiously expensive basement restaurants with poor antenna
reception could possibly have lasted longer, had I not been buzzed out
of my trance with the cellphone in my pocket dispensing a speech-length
email that rendered me partially blind with shock to read through fully
after the first sentence: I’m sorry. Your father just passed.
With me being away, my father was cajoled for reasons of health and
compromised into exercise by walking to the small newsstand a few hundred
meters from the house for the daily paper. On my tenth humid evening
in Kuala Lumpur, it was my father’s last freezing morning in London.
While hurriedly crossing a signal-less street to evade the chilling
wind on the way back to the house, an ice cream truck hit him and he
died on the spot. It wasn’t the diabetes, though sugar was involved.
I conjured futile excuses, even blaming the weather (during the summer
the truck would have been parked for business) to distance reason from
myself.
After the funeral, there was little time for remorse or statistical
research into households with more than one road kill incident. Distraction
came as good news: my wife was finally pregnant. Spring rays broke tragedy
and grief and sweat were wiped away during exercises in Hyde Park over
a record high summer. The baby, a girl, was born at the twilight of
seasons. The soft breeze whistling the dawn of autumn outside the window
numbed me from instant reaction as I studied the child in my arms, its
fine skin walling a permanent tan many shades darker than my now lost
Brazilian one, its gorgeous black eyes pulling out the tears from my
oceanographic ones, its head exhibiting a healthy lush of expansive
ravenous curls choking my brittle brown locks, its mother, still lying
in the hospital bed, with features that were always paler than mine,
now snowed over with fear as she refused to look at me, and the answer
to the irrelevant nag-like inquiry in my head as I rushed over to the
hospital from the office when I heard my wife had delivered was answered:
Everyone in the firm had congratulated me except for Luke, the handsome
colleague with the permanently blushing shirts.
Still, I can’t rest the blame just on him. Quirks say a lot about
us. And I learnt very late that it wasn’t just cushions that my
wife enjoyed swapping. The gynecologist was only partially correct:
the eggs refused to mingle with me. I called Luke a wanker
under my breath and left England.
I sit here now thinking about how different life could have been if
I had heeded Mrs. Rebello’s prophecy from grade school and just
stuck it out with Phil, or James, or even Dwight or that kid in the
front seat, the teacher’s pet who no one liked. If only I had
paid attention to the premonition exhibited in the color of her dress,
the dark pink before the slaughter. Would I have a child that was mine,
passing the baby around to my mother, my sister, my father, each of
them clamoring for time before depositing the young urchin back upon
my partner’s feeding breast, a wife whose name I would not wipe
from memory and confine to title. Would I have evaded clinical and emotional
scars and not have to leave my father’s empty house now once a
day just to remind myself that I wasn’t alone in the world, by
passing strangers in marketplaces, if I had just heeded warning when
I was in second grade from an old body speaking eloquently even after
the last paragraph recital of Kipling’s ‘If’? Was
I delusional, or worse, pathetic in my attempts at inculpating woeful
destiny to my relationship with Roy? Had pilgrims to this supposedly
earnest of heart and unknowing friend bathed me in the wrath of an opposing
god, punishing every gall with sacrifice? Or was it Roy’s own
masked vendetta, shooting bullets of karma at each visit upon sensing
my partial jealousy and undoing me as its prized prey? Perhaps that
old cliché of not being able to pick family but friends holds
true. In that case, no one should have that kind of responsibility at
such an ignorant age. Roy’s been calling to check up on me. He’s
worried and furious that I haven’t bothered to get in touch with
him. Maybe I will someday. What have I got to lose?