Gaysia (5 page)

He turned his palm down then flicked his hand upwards, as if scalded.
Hot
. I laughed while still trying to worm my way out of his vice-like grip.

‘And what do you like about them?' I asked. ‘Their looks?'

‘I want to have
sex
with them!' Eelga said.

Eelga demanded I take photos with him on his smartphone, using our posing as an excuse to kiss me all over the face like a persistent and hyperactive dog.

‘EELGA,' I said.

‘You are
gorrrr
-geous!' he said.

‘You say that to everyone.'

Eelga pretended to look hurt.

Eelga could come out clubbing only once a week because he worked full-time as a waiter in Legian. He mainly chased after older European guys aged between thirty and forty (‘Because hot!' he helpfully explained), and unlike other Indonesian guys, he insisted the whole money thing didn't matter.

‘I don't expect the money or the rich man,' he said. ‘No, I don't expect about that. I just expect the HOT SEX. Of course I like old men, especially when he is
gorrrrrr-geous
. Especially
when I was with good-looking men' – he lowered his voice and touched my arm – ‘like you.'

I stared at him, baffled.

‘I'm not white,' I said. Remembering that he preferred older men, I had a horrible thought:
But am I old?

‘You
white
!' Eelga said, as if I was stupid.

‘Eelga, I'm not white!' I said, pointing to my face. ‘I'm Chinese?'

Eelga looked confused. ‘But you said you live in the Brisbane?'

Eelga was familiar with my Australian hometown because he had a boyfriend there right now. Actually, Eelga had a couple of boyfriends, neither of whom knew about the other's existence. He had one boyfriend in France and another in Australia, whose photo he showed me on his phone before saying, ‘He is not good-looking,' which I thought was sad. Eelga's Australian boyfriend sent him about 200 dollars every month and had invited him to Australia for Christmas. Eelga's French boyfriend was even more generous, sending him 300 euro every month, and was already proposing that they marry each other in Quebec. Eelga's boyfriends flew to Bali in successive months to visit him and he made sure their paths never crossed.

‘That's a nice system you have,' I said.

‘
Exactly
,' he said, snapping his fingers.

‘And are you looking for Boyfriend #3 tonight?'

Eelga giggled, scandalised. Then he got really close to my face and looked into my eyes. ‘Maybe,' he said.

I rocked my head back and swallowed.

Eelga, Leo and I headed to Mixwell's together. As I bought us all beers, two German men in their late fifties latched onto Eelga and asked, without any introduction, whether he would come home with them for sex right now. Eelga wasn't afraid to
be rude and bluntly told them both that they were too old for him. It didn't matter: within minutes, the German men were surrounded by swarms of other young Indonesian guys who had sniffed old blood and good money.

At Mixwell's, hard-bodied go-go dancers climbed on top of the bar wearing nothing but white briefs, the outlines of their crotches and butts not so much suggestive as anatomical. Middle-aged women from Australia and England on holidays stared at the men's bulges as they thrust to the club's beat. The women were hypnotised, almost dewy-eyed at the beauty of it all. Watching them was like seeing someone's sexual awakening occurring before my eyes. Middle-aged gay men stuffed money into the go-go dancers' briefs. Emboldened, the women followed suit, sliding in 20,000 and 50,000 rupiah notes, almost visibly shuddering as they made skin-to-skin contact. The go-go dancers winked at the women, making them blush.

Leo had lost his drink but was already, somehow, weirdly drunk. Or maybe he was on something. He was incomprehensibly slurring, but he had been sort of like that when we had met outside. Boisterously, he shoved his way past the crowd of dancers and drinkers, leaving angry looks in his wake, before storming up to me. With his mouth in a pout, he locked eyes with me, swiped my beer right out of my hand –

‘Leo!' I said.

– and sculled the drink without breaking eye contact. He handed the bottle back to me dramatically, nearly empty. When I rolled my eyes and reached out for it, Leo leaned in to kiss me like a giant, slobbering Saint Bernard. I turned quickly so all he got was my neck.

‘Leo, I have a boyfriend!' I said, pushing him off.

Leo made a face. ‘Your boyfriend is ugly!' he barked.

He rolled his eyes at me then sashayed back into the crowd, leaving me holding a beer bottle that was now nearly empty. With the back of my hand, I wiped Leo's spit off my neck.

‘I think he likes you,' Eelga said into my ear bitchily as we watched him walk away.

We kept drinking hard. The rest of the night was a blur of alcohol and go-go dancers and terrible drag queens dancing to Lady Gaga in wigs that looked inspired by both Elvira and Susan Sontag.

Outside on the road, an elderly, wrinkled
bulé
aggressively shoved his hand down the pants of a young Indonesian guy and pretended he was a puppetmaster. Another Indonesian guy, barely out of his teens, swung flirtatiously off the back of a wizened, goblin-like white man. Both of them looked thrilled with the other as they poured themselves into a cab. Judging by the older man's clothes, he was loaded. Both parties had clearly done well out of this transaction. All the
bulés
were well over fifty.

Seeing this, I was reminded of what an elderly Australian expatriate man had told me. He had lived in Bali for years and enjoyed the clubs and attention when he was younger. Nowadays, he avoided them. The older you were, he said, the more aggressive the attention from the young boys.

‘You see this?' he said to me, pointing to the deep lines in his forehead. ‘ATM,' he said, tapping out the wrinkles with his finger. ‘ATM.'

I woke up at Spartacvs feeling as though my vital organs had been rearranged. My mouth tasted as if it belonged to a dead
man. Morning sun crept through a tiny slit in the curtains, carving a blinding and exact path across my face, like a laser bisecting my skull. Groaning, I brushed my teeth, grabbed my towel and sluggishly hauled myself downstairs towards the pool, dipping my feet in. I looked around at the surrounding bungalows. No one else was awake. Everyone was sleeping in, recovering from the night before.
Fuck it
, I thought. I took off my clothes and dived in naked.

When I broke through the water, there was movement nearby. Panicked, I quickly swam to the side of the pool and watched as a sleepy-looking moneyboy crept out of a ground-floor room. Earlier, I had met the Belgian guy who was staying in that room, an affable man in his late fifties who seemed to have a different Indonesian guy on his arm every night. This moneyboy had bed hair and smiled at me as he put on his shoes. He couldn't have been much older than eighteen. He looked like a kid sneaking out of someone else's dorm at a school camp following a late-night junkfood binge, all guilt-ridden but helplessly pleased with himself. We waved to each other sheepishly.

I'd been told the best place in Bali for a gay visitor to nurse a hangover was Callego Beach, a twenty-minute walk from Spartacvs. Callego was a gay hotspot where you could get snacks and legitimate massages, or disappear into the bushes for blow jobs with local men who didn't ask for much money. If you were lucky – or unlucky, depending on your tastes – you might also encounter the Balinese guy who was said to actually
live
in these bushes, animal-like: a puckish man with long curls who made a living entirely out of selling hand jobs and blow jobs for 20,000 rupiah (two dollars) a pop. Someone told me he slept under Callego Café's ramshackle roof whenever it rained.

Only a year ago, Callego Beach was still beautiful. It'd had voluminous duvet-like lawns and carefully landscaped plants that grew in explosive floral clusters. Until recently, it had been public property and the locals had taken pride in maintaining the grounds. But a few months before I arrived, the site had been bought out by a new 300-room hotel development that was in the process of bulldozing the entire site. The master plan was to erect an enormous resort as direct competition to the brashly luxurious designer beachside hotels here that charged up to 1000 US dollars a night.

By the time I got there, Callego looked sad and derelict. Past the little archway entrance, the stone paths leading to the beach had become rubble, smashed by bulldozers to make way for the new hotel's foundations. The grass was brown and flammable-looking, crunching as I walked on it. Local boys had used to have regular volleyball competitions and visitors would gather here for sunrises and sunsets, or to celebrate birthdays. Now, as I set up a deckchair and sun umbrella, Indonesian and Chinese inspectors in business attire tiptoed between the sunbaking men, taking notes on clipboards and surveying the site for demolition. By the end of the year, this would all be torn down.

Around the site, there were some battered remains of small statues depicting Hindu gods, some embodying the concept of
trimurti
: the creator Brahma, the preserver Vishnu and the destroyer Shiva. In Hinduism, at all times, there was supposed to be a balance among the three, a cycle of creation, preservation and destruction in order for things to regenerate. Whatever: it wasn't long before the statues would be bulldozed too.

Next to the
bulés
sunning themselves at Callego, I was shamefully skinny and pale. One sixty-something Caucasian guy was so alarmingly tanned that he seemed to belong to a
new race entirely. He lay flat on his stomach wearing what was technically a G-string, although the way his giant butt consumed the fabric he may as well have been naked. Every so often, he blinked and looked around confusedly, before getting up and shuffling off, smacking his lips and gently flossing his anus as he walked to the bathroom.

At the nearby Callego Café, an old man sat by himself smoking cigarettes while wearing the tiniest white rugby shorts. He had an interesting face that changed depending on the angle. When he took a drag on his cigarette, he looked craggy and villainous – like someone being tried at a war crimes tribunal – but then he exhaled the smoke and looked utterly charming and dapper. The old man smoked languidly alongside a younger, compactly muscled Indonesian guy, and they both caught my eye. Their names were respectively – no joke – Steve and Irwin.

Steve and Irwin were just friends. Australian Steve had an Indonesian boyfriend, while Irwin's
bulé
boyfriend had recently passed away. As Steve smoked, he told me about the first time he came to Bali in 2000, having just broken up with his long-term Australian boyfriend back home.

‘You came here looking for a rebound?' I asked.

‘I wanted to come and fuck everybody I could, actually.'

‘Oh,' I said.

‘I'd never had sex with an Asian until then,' he said, ‘so I thought, I'll go and have a look. And since then, I've never been with another
bulé
.' Steve laughed to himself.

When he first arrived in Bali, Steve found himself at an Australian bar called Peanuts. It was a standard mixed club, because that's all he could find. Despite what he'd heard, there were no obvious gay bars and he hadn't seen any advertisements for them. Steve started talking to the Indonesian barman
and asked him if there were any close by.

‘Oh, there are no gays in Bali,' the barman had said. ‘No gay scene.'

The barman was friendly, but also looked nervous talking about this stuff. Steve was convinced he was covering up, so bought him a few drinks to loosen him up.

‘Okay,' the barman eventually said. ‘I'll call somebody. Just wait.'

Soon after, a guy on a motorcycle came to pick Steve up and usher him to the newly opened Hulu Café – the one that would eventually burn down – where a ladyboy greeted him at the bar.

‘No,' Steve said to the motorcyclist. ‘I want a man who looks like a man.'

Overhearing what Steve was saying, two young Indonesian men immediately approached him.

When I asked whether the men were good-looking, Steve shrugged.

‘Actually, looking back,' he said, ‘they weren't so handsome.' He laughed croakily at me. ‘I looked at some photos yesterday.'