Summer Confession

If summers could talk, they would tell stories of horror. It is just the nature of things that people are more transparent and sharing in the summer. They are less mindful of their private space and more audacious in accommodating the closeness of others. It makes an economic sense, in the sizzling season, for people to press close together in the few places that are climate-controlled.

The malls, the grocery store, the cafes.

The Hotel rooms.

The massage parlors.

Summer is an affront to my hygiene. I saw a spit bobbing on the surface of the pool the other day. I had just finished a lap and was slightly out of breath, and as I came up for air, I saw the enormous stain floating like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. No amount of self-restraint and indifference would keep that image away. Even as I turned my head and looked straight ahead, at a point somewhere on the other bank of the pool, the archipelago of saliva kept dancing on the periphery of my vision. Any serious swimmer will tell you that a certain amount of pool water will make its way into your ears, nose and mouth. I couldn’t entertain the thought of diving back into the water without concluding the matter. This outrage needed a culprit. I yanked my eyes off the spot on the other side and looked at my companions in the pool. There was the usual assortment of multi-colored silly children splashing around and speaking to each other in a corny American accent. There was a German mother with freckled shoulders playing with her baby. There was a guy ogling at the mother with a rapist grin. I couldn’t know what was there to ogle at; even her lavish breasts were invisible under the water. But the balding, swarthy guy with flaps of fat and a potbelly didn’t seem to be doing anything at all but look at the woman. I could imagine the scene: the bald tourist from a neighboring country finishing off his heavy dinner of rice and lamb and ambling down to the pool to caress his penis below the water. At one point his throat- which no doubt played host to more left over food than the MOE food court trash bin – needed clearing. And off came the environmental disaster.

I take off my polyester shirt and walk the short passage to my favorite part of the ‘Health’ Club. Here at the steam room you can literally relax despite yourself. No amount of resistance will stand in the face of hot clouds billowing from the steam muzzles. The stone bench is narrower than what is comfortable for a person to lie down, and towels aren’t allowed inside. So I tuck my spongy rubberic flip-flop under my head and lay, supine, waiting for the crushing wave of nausea. It usually hits after a couple of minutes. My hearts starts beating audibly; my breath diminishes to the point of indistinctive heaving and receding of the ribcage. None of your senses is strong enough to harness the idle time and keep you distracted from this battle. Your eyes are focused on the ceiling of white acrylic sheets, dripping with condensed steam. Millions of particles of off-white vapor swarm in your vision. At first, you hear nothing but the squeal of gas as it emerges from the pressurized pipes unto the air, but after a while (how long you aren’t sure), you being to hear your heartbeat. It is distinctive and unique in rhythm. Not hurried, nor panicky. It is just loud. Your heart is hard at work, like the workman with the jackhammer, concentrating at the task at hand and oblivious to the inconveniences he’s wrecking all around him. Your heart needs to work overtime to deliver blood to the extremities that are expected to help you flee the scene. A dose of low-grade adrenalin, administered with care and steadiness. You hear your heartbeats, and it is like no other sound you had ever heard, it drowns out all other audio stimuli in the surroundings. The smell? Well, your sense of smelling is crushed with the first inhalation of steam. The first intake is the toughest one. It is a balancing act between the desire to fill your lungs with warmth and the urge to cough. There’s no greater inconvenience at the face of the earth than a trapped cough. And it’s all you get to have at first inhalation, a chough coiled at the center of your being, and you feel the urge to give it all you want, to hawk, to jump. And yet, you can’t. There is no enough dry friction inside to give it the necessary spark. You’re at the mercy of this heavy, fluid-clogged breathing. You want to reach out to the area in crisis and wipe it clean with a white cloth rag, watch the sooty dirt accumulate on it. For you know how it is for a smoker. It is a coal mine down there.

While you lie down on your back, with your palms turned up in resistance of imaginary pressure, exerted by the sweat and the dehydration, you’re on the verge of losing consciousness. You are borderline insane with heat. In your mind eye you see a tormentor with a smirk on his face, watching through a one way mirror, turning up the heat, shouting obscenities through loudspeakers, demanding answers to short-phrased questions: Who are you with? Where were you last Friday?… and in your mind eye, you’re searching for an alibi. You envisage various scenarios in which you fall asleep or lose consciousness and die of dehydration. But then you remember being told once that it is impossible for a human being to sleep in the supine position. You remember that this was the reason you had adopted this posture to begin with. Your tactile sense is obliterated; the tips of your fingers are blistered like boiled squids. You wipe the face of your wrest watch and check the time, you had only been here ten minutes, but you can’t take it anymore. You are not supposed to take it anymore. It is amazing how, at times of hard labor, the sense of self tend to morph into the third person. The struggle you are being subjected to isn’t yours, and the panting look of defeat, which greets you when you glance at the reflection in the glass door, isn’t yours. He, the person who took off my shirt fifteen minutes ago, lowers his feet to the floor and walks gingerly out of the steam room. He inhales frantically, pushes the door to the lavatory and looks at me in the mirror above the sink. What he sees is a study in paradox, a relaxed face with healthy-looking ruddy skin. Calm eyes. Frightened nose. And as the everyday perception of reality begin to circulate in my bloodstream, I feel the trapped cough once again. I could no longer take the clump of foreign substance in my steam-rolled windpipes. I bend over the sink and set off an artillery projectile that lands at the white porcelain with multiple smacks. I’ve collected all the health benefits I was promised from the chamber of torture: Relaxation, Healthy Skin, Rejuvenated Respiratory System.

And I managed to do it without spitting in the pool.

Summer Solstice

Dear long-forgotten lady,

There is an odd legend in my hometown that involves hot bath water and floor drains. It says that you should always recite a certain incantation to dispel the evil spirits that reside inside the drainpipes of a bathtub before you turn on the hot water tap. If you don’t, the legend dictates; the devils will get burns and eventually get even with you in ways you couldn’t predict or imagine.

Although not particularly superstitious, it used to frighten me that I hadn’t been observing this ritual when I was younger. And sometimes I’d wonder if semen could have acted as an extenuating agent when it got mixed up with hot water. I’d wonder if the devils hovering in the pipes would have felt less furious had the hot water surging at them been mixed with that viscous material. Maybe the female devil is used to giving the male devil a blowjob and so is accustomed to the taste and the thickness of the fluid. Maybe they are grateful after all.

I sincerely apologize for having started off on that disgusting note. If you are still reading, then you must be at a loss by now as to why I’d mention such a personal and vulgar thing to you in the first contact since we’ve last seen each other, years ago.

Think of your private secrets as a collection of expensive objects on display in in your own living room. Only a few select people are allowed to visit and examine them. With the passage of time and the accumulation of dust, however, these objects gradually turn into artifacts, and these artifacts are moved to public museums. That is when they become old and innocuous memories, ‘declassified’, and it is a source of no shame or embarrassment to have them seen by strangers.

So, allow me to show you something… This way please. There’s an interesting piece on showcase in that hall up ahead. Yes, here. Let me just open the door. Here you go.

Remember that hot day in May, the year before the year we were due to graduate? You probably don’t, but if you look closely here at the display, you will see it crisp and clear. I was leaning against the dwarf wall that stood at the end of the giant steps that lead to the main entrance of our college. There were probably a hundred people in the miniature paved plaza that stretched from the entrance to the outer fence. I was waiting for a friend to come out of the crowded copy center right next to the entrance. And although the huge concrete canopy provided a shade against the robust mid-day sun, the weather wasn’t what you would call pleasant. You know the period; between the middle of May and summer solstice, where the air is laden with heat and late pollen and faint sweat. It is a period when people are at the peak of their sexual tension and confusion. The shifting of seasons, scurrying of clouds, migratory birds and approaching exams; all these factors unite to bolster the need for extracurricular copulation.

As I stood there, slightly annoyed, waiting for the friend to finish his business, I did a casual scan of my surroundings. It didn’t take long before my annoyance dissipated. You were with the usual group of friends. Some of whom sat side by side on one of the giant steps. You and someone else I didn’t recognize stood with your backs to me, facing them. Wearing tight jeans and a low-cut blouse and a pair of flat shoes, you had your left foot on a higher step to support the bundle of books you were lugging on a knee, while your right leg stood a little erect with the tension of probing your lovely figure.

Given the stance, I could trace the outline of your body dipping in and out of clothes, all the way from the nape of your neck to your ankle. Despite the tentativeness of the situation and the crowd and the noise, I could do nothing but stare. At one point, you had to bend forward and spread a roll of tracing paper on the contiguous laps of your buddies, to show them a sketch or a detail or something…

At that moment, the sweatiness and jostling of the scene experienced an immediate physical shift, revealing a layer of calm. The slight inclination of the torso, albeit graceful and vaguely immature, caused a cut in the logical sequence of the day, shifting its course towards something more compelling than revising for exams or worrying about grades. As I stood there, I felt a tug at my temples, as if a magnetic field had just completed a three-dimensional inventory of the piece of art before me, and was now telepathically transmitting it to my mind. I was motionless. Frozen in place. No sensory stimulation of any kind could pry my attention from the image I was witnessing. Knowing it’s going to haunt me for a long time to come.

Ever since that day, despite the number of women I’ve been with and the depth and expansiveness of my porn viewing: I still think of the hologramic representation of your bottom as the ultimate sexual outrage. I’d carry that image around like a shield, a proof of how delicate yet powerful it all is. I’d slip it out of its holder when I needed it the most, primarily in the shower. At other times I’d just bask in the knowledge of knowing it’s there somewhere, waiting to be invoked at a moment notice.

Recently, that image has undergone an imperceptible transformation: a new glint, a revived vividness, has been added to its glossy lamination. No doubt caused by the diametrically opposed views you and I have on crucial ethical and political issues. Like the contrast modifier of a photo-editing program, the differing views provide depth and shadows and intensity and passion to that image…As if its mere existence proves one’s point of view completely right, and the other’s completely off the mark.

But please… don’t get me wrong: this is not a situation where an oriental guy is lacking in debate skills and instead relying on the misogynistic idea that all it takes for a man to be correct is having a penis. That all it takes for my opinion to trump yours is an erection. No, this is something completely different. If you could analyze that image in a lab, if you could explain it to an artist and tell him to dream up an interpretation, he would draw an apple and a mushroom; an apple because the poles are so attracted they bore in the skin and tissue to get closer to each other; and a mushroom because of its similarity to the shape of a penis helmet.

Do you know why a penis helmet has evolved into its current shape? Science has it that those with the most enlarged penis tips among our ancestors were able to procreate more successfully, because the helmet helped expunge semen (left over from competing males) off the cervixes of the intended females, and gave their own sperm the advantage. And so this helmet shape had evolved to perfection throughout the history of man. Did you ever notice that helmets worn by soldiers are different than those worn by construction professionals? The ones proudly donned by army men are more like the helmet of a penis than the regular semi-spherical fiberglass bowl worn by engineers. Next time you turn on the TV and watch soldiers in action, you are bound to see some helmets. I urge you to pay attention to the form and circularity of them. No doubt the military helmet had undergone an evolution of its own, to improve competitiveness, to increase their performance against foes and rivals.

What connects drainpipe devils to army helmets or college encounters to political crises? I have no idea. I sometimes feel overwhelmed with unsolicited thoughts. Science argues that the feeling of helplessness tend to make human beings more prone to dot-connection and pattern recognition. That could probably be it. But no man is an island; my confusions are but the residual failures of my society to reconcile its suppressed sexuality with its political ambitions. The grind of time is too impatient to give each one of us a time slot to explain his unabridged point of view. The image contrast gets sharper and sharper until it boils down to a uni-color portray. If you want to stay alive and relevant, you have to choose to be either the color of the background or the color of the drawing, nothing else. The pressure of needing a release doesn’t impart one with the luxury of masturbating at leisure; the jerks must be quick and furtive. The muzzle velocity of ejaculate is 45 KM per hour, can hardly compete with that of the gun wielded by a helmeted man. I can’t tell whether this is a degeneration of the world as we know it or just an inevitable phase of transition. I need more time to think about this, but unfortunately, summer is not the season for deep thinking.

I hope you enjoyed this quick visit to my museum. There will be more exhibits of intrigue if you decided to come again.

Sincerely yours,