Incensed (23 page)

During a break in
the action at work, I used my phone to log in as Mei-ling at the lesbian board. I felt like a creep pretending to be a teenage lesbian online until I saw that Mei-ling had a direct message. I tingled as I clicked on it. This could be a major clue.

“Nice try, Jing-nan,” it read. “I've fallen from my perch and I'm in a place you can't go.” The user name was “fuckoffjingnan,” and I breathed a sigh of relief after reading it. She was all right, at least to the degree that she could still abuse me.

“Perch” was a curious word to use. Was she a bird now? Did “perch” have a special meaning to lesbians or teenage girls?

I did a search for “perch” and “lesbians.”

The Perch was a bar—for lesbians! Was Mei-ling purposely trying to tell me where she was? A criminal on the run who wanted to be caught?

Dwayne reached over and closed my mouth.

“What are you reading that is so shocking?” he asked. I told him about Mei-ling's online accounts and what I'd found. He rubbed his mouth.

“You'd better tell Big Eye,” he said. “You should have told him earlier about these chat boards, man.”

“I want to find Mei-ling but I'm not so sure I want to help him find her,” I said. “My main mission is to make sure she's all right and to help her any way I can going forward.”

Dwayne shook his head and tried to strangle a laugh. “She don't need help from you. Shit, you can barely help yourself. Big Eye has the connections to spot her on nearly any street corner.”

I found myself sticking up for her abilities. “Mei-ling isn't dumb. She knows exactly the extent of Big Eye's reach.”

Dwayne jabbed an index finger into the back of my left hand. “Well, what can you do at this point by yourself?”

I shrugged with my right shoulder. “I was thinking of heading to that lesbian bar to look for her.”

“Yeah, great idea. You'll get real far. The Perch probably doesn't even allow men on the main floors.” He rubbed the glistening short hairs on his head with his right hand. “I know what you
could
do,” he said, dangling his words like necklace beads.

“I am not getting Nancy involved,” I said. “Not after last time.
Gan!
”

Dwayne crossed his arms. “Seriously, Jing-nan, get a woman to help you. If you show up, you're gonna get your ass kicked.”

I fixed my feet and pointed an accusing finger at his nose. “Listen, Dwayne. Straight people shouldn't have pre-conceived notions about lesbians and gays. We are all the same. If I show up at a lesbian bar and ask people for help, of course they'll help!”

Chapter Fifteen

The bars around The
Red House in Ximending are primarily geared to gay men. Lesbian hot spots are more spread out in the city, primarily in the Shida neighborhood in the southern part of the Da'an District, according to my online research.

Shida gets its name from an abbreviation of Shifan Daxue, itself an abbreviation of the formal name of the local college, National Taiwan Normal University.

People around Shida are generally well-educated and tolerant. It's a college neighborhood, after all, and it welcomes people of different sexual orientations, alternative lifestyles and even foreigners.

The president of Clean Taipei, a powerful neighborhood association, was married with kids but felt the need to declare at a gay-pride event that she loved women more than men. If same-sex marriage were legal, she would have married for love.

I am well-acquainted with the neighborhood because of what the Shida Night Market has been through. It was once a bustling affair, not as big as the Shilin Night Market, but certainly a major competitor. A few years ago, developers began to buy up land around the night market and lobbied to rezone blocks to residential from commercial. The Taipei government removed Shida Night Market from city-produced tourist maps, a move that both hurt business and fulfilled the developers' allegations that the market was on its last legs. Inspectors from the Taipei Department of Health descended and shut down businesses, citing the flimsiest of excuses, including decades-old signage that was now deemed “inappropriate” because they were too big or too small or too colorful.

The writing was on the wall when the government shut down Phoenix Noodles, an eighty-year-old stew stall. The guy who operated it was known to all as “Old Uncle” and he was a complete asshole. He was grumpy as hell and apparently ancient enough to have been the original proprietor. When I think of him, all I can see is a shock of white hair and furrowed white eyebrows.

Phoenix Noodles was nearly a block long and featured a giant horizontal honeycomb of ingredients on display in wooden and metal canisters—some on ice, others over a fire. Fish-meal balls in liquid. Curls of dried fungus ready to unfurl. Chopped-up meats. His broths, varying from spicy to mild to sour, were hidden in vats under the counter.

Old Uncle stood behind the honeycomb, gathering up ingredients with extra-long chopsticks he wielded in his oddly youthful hand. He openly judged customers by what they chose. Ingredients he considered incompatible would earn his sighs and headshakes as he threw your stew together. It might still taste incredible to you, but to him it represented a missed opportunity to unblock
qi
and improve blood flow in your system.

Nobody could put a stew together like him. If you told Old Uncle that you were sick and what your symptoms were, he would look you in the eye and then grunt when he had you all figured out. His delight showed only in the flourish with which he threw together your meal.

A few years ago I had a stubborn wheeze that wouldn't leave my lungs. Nothing worked. I told Old Uncle about it. As he whipped up a stew for me, he frowned when I tried to peer through the honeycomb to get a look at his broth baths.

“Even if you saw them, you wouldn't understand!” he snapped.

He placed a steaming black stew with an iridescent surface in my hands. It threatened to overflow from the flimsy plastic bowl.

“You have to drink that in two minutes!” he ordered. I slurped it down, my throat alternately feeling burning and cooling sensations. I put the empty bowl on his shelf and felt a balloon swell up in my chest. I staggered to a drain at the side of the road and coughed out lumps of green phlegm. After two days I felt fully cured.

No one knows for sure why Old Uncle's stand was named Phoenix Noodles. The phoenix is a female element, the yin to the yang of the dragon, a male element. One rumor held that Old Uncle named his business after a sorceress from whom he had gleaned his recipes. Another story held that Old Uncle was a hermaphrodite.

One thing was certain. The space where Phoenix Noodles had stood was cursed. After the health inspectors shut down Old Uncle for “false claims,” even though he never promised anyone anything, he packed up his most crucial ingredients and drove away on a cart led by a water buffalo. Old Uncle muttered the whole time, occasionally gesturing back at the market.

When an excavator came in to dig a foundation for a condominium, the operator lost control and the boom spun in a circle. The claw bucket at the end killed five people, including the developer who had been on hand for the groundbreaking ceremony. The following week, a potential bidder dropped dead of a heart attack while on a preliminary tour of the ground.

That spot still sat empty behind a wall of wooden boards painted with happy children who were “Ready to Build the New Shida.”

Across the street from this forsaken ground was Shida's upscale lesbian bar, The Perch.

If a young, attractive
woman were on the prowl for the same, she would definitely go drinking at The Perch. It was exclusive but also rated tops for hookups by the users of lipstulips.com.

The stairs up to The Perch from the street were carpeted. I arrived there around nine at night and it was already buzzing. The first-floor bar was dramatically lit with spotlights. Slowly rotating prisms broke the light into rainbow shards that slid across the floor and up the walls. On first glance it was a paradise for straight guys because there were five men among thirty-odd women. But this was all I would get to see of The Perch. The second floor was for lesbians only. The rumored third floor was a big orgy with rubber-band masks.

The bartender poured six shots and drank three rounds with a customer. They were mirror images of each other, apart from their dress: Taipei thin and Taipei pale. That is, bone thin and bone pale. Short spiky black hair. The customer was wearing a black vest over a white blouse. The bartender's designer tank top was strategically torn and repaired with safety pins, too symmetrically to be punk.

When I thought their interaction was winding down, I made my way to the counter.

“Hi there!” I called out. Both women turned to me and frowned. I fumbled with my phone until I came up with Mei-ling's picture. “I'm looking for my cousin and I think she might have been here this past weekend. Have you seen her? Either of you?”

Both women glanced at my phone and then stared at me. The bartender said, “Are you a cop?”

Again? “Does asking questions make me a cop?”

“He didn't say no,” said the customer.

“No,” I said. “I am absolutely not a cop. Never have been. Never will be.”

“Why are you so defensive?” asked the customer.

“I'm not being defensive! She's only sixteen and I'm freaking out because I don't know where she is, all right?”

“Maybe you're her ex-boyfriend,” said the bartender.

“I am not!” I said.

“He's definitely straight,” the bartender said out of the side of her mouth.

“I can tell,” said the customer.

“This is my cousin,” I said in exasperation. “She could be in a lot of trouble.”

The bartender turned her back on me and became a busy octopus.

“I'm not lying,” I said to the customer.

“Do you know how many creeps come in looking to catch some girl-on-girl action? Or the homophobic cops who snoop around for parents trying to ‘rescue' their adult daughters?”

“I have no idea.”

“I'm sure you don't.” The bartender came back to me with a pint glass filled with some potion. “So you're not a cop, huh?” she said. “Then drink this.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Maybe I have and maybe I haven't. We'll talk after you drink.”

“I'm not drinking that!”

“Don't drink on duty, do you?” said the customer. I grunted and reached for the glass. The bartender held up a hand.

“That's three hundred NT,” she said.

“What!” I said. This drink of unknown contents was ten bucks American.

“Tip is included.”

I counted out three Sun Yat-sen bills and flattened them on the bar like a losing hand.

“Thank you.”

I picked up the glass and contemplated the reflection of my swollen head against the swirling dark brown contents.

Well, she couldn't poison me, could she?

“Drink up,” said the customer.

“Jia you,”
said the bartender.

I tipped back the glass for a mouthful. It started sour and ended salty. A liquefied preserved plum would probably taste like this. I felt the roof of my mouth tingling slightly.

“There's blood in this, right?” I asked. The bartender laughed and tapped her fingers on the counter.

“I'll tell you when you're done,” she said. “I'll tell you anything after.”

Mei-ling, if you're not in serious trouble when I find you, I'm going to kill you.

I worked the drink down. When I was finished I snorted involuntarily twice before I could speak. I looked the bartender in the eyes and said, “Tell me.”

“It was mostly plum wine with a big shot of this.” She brandished a fat glass bottle that held what looked like a thick coil of rope in ghoulishly yellow liquid. I blinked and the rope's braids become small scales. She had spiked the drink with snake wine.

“Ma de!”
I gasped. Both the bartender and customer laughed hard and rubbed my arm.

“You'll be all right,” said the bartender. “I actually gave you a discount. This stuff's expensive!”

“You're the first man I've seen drink it,” the customer added.

Snake wine includes the entire animal. As the body slowly decomposes, rotting fragments of the meat, organs, blood, and even poison add “essence” into the wine.

There is the stupid Chinese idea that imbibing the snake cells increases sexual performance. More than two thousand years ago, some idiot folded his hands into his sleeves, hunkered down and examined a snake in his path. Hey, he thought. This thing sort of looks like my penis, but it's longer and more dynamic. If I eat it, then surely my cock will inherit such attributes! Of course, nobody nowadays believes in such things, certainly nobody in this bar. That wine sits on the shelf as a dare.

“God,” I said to the bartender. “Can I get a Coke? I have to get this taste out of my mouth.”

Now that she had had her little laugh, the woman served me with newly sympathetic eyes. “Sure,” she said. “It's on the house.”

I gulped down hard and the soda pricked the roof of my mouth. I glanced at the two of them and saw that apart from winning their sympathy, they finally believed that my cousin was really missing.

“I did see that girl,” said the bartender.

“When?” I asked.

“Saturday night,” she said. “She asked me who handled the booking at the club and I told her we didn't do events. People come here to hook up, not watch a show.”

I noticed the customer tilting her head and frowning like she had lost her keys.

“Was she with anybody?” I asked the bartender.

“I'm not sure,” said the bartender. “I saw someone follow her out, though.”

“A man?”

“A woman.”

“What did she look like?”

“Femme. Longish hair. Maybe thirty.”

“Thirty!” I said. “That's twice as old as my cousin!”

The bartender shrugged. “I'm not sure they were together, but anyway, what's the big deal?” She turned to the customer. “Right, Pei Pei?”

Pei Pei was still frowning. She opened her mouth and clenched her bottom lip in her teeth.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I saw your cousin and that woman on Saturday night,” she said. “Not in here, but down the block. They were arguing about something.”

“How are you sure it was Saturday night?”

“I was coming to The Perch from . . . a different way.” Pei Pei cleared her throat. “Anyway, the three of us had to clear off the sidewalk at the same time because a car was coming out of the elevator of a below-ground garage. I saw her face clearly in the signal light.”

“What did the older woman look like?”

Pei Pei shrugged. “Femme in her thirties, like Daphne said. Honestly, I found your cousin more interesting.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“I think your cousin wanted to go back into The Perch, but the other woman was saying they had to do something else.”

“What do you think that was?”

Pei Pei shrugged. “I have no idea.”

I sat up high in my chair and crossed my arms. “Pei Pei and Daphne, I want to ask you both something. My cousin definitely is a lesbian, right?”

They both burst out laughing.

•••

I walked to where
Pei Pei said she'd seen Mei-ling. A now-dim bulb on the side of the building indicated the location of the underground garage. There was nothing else to see. I stood there watching people walk by, narrating their lives to each other.

So Mei-ling was a lesbian for certain. Or maybe just half. She had had a boyfriend, one she was having sex with, after all. At my orientation program at UCLA an upperclassman informed us that all people were part-straight and part-gay. Nobody was one hundred percent of either.

I had never been attracted to another man. Or was I lying to myself? A bus passed by with an advertisement that featured Jay Chou, the actor/singer guy who was known everywhere. He was such a famous Taiwanese he even did American movies. I could recognize his face as physically attractive, even if it held a vacant expression. I watched him zoom off and pursed my lips.

I felt something in the pit of my stomach. It wasn't lust, though. As my bloodstream slowly absorbed the snake wine, hunger raked its fangs across the inside of my rib cage.

Back at home, I had chopped garlic, some long-grain rice, ham, and eggs in the fridge and at least two cans of pineapple chunks in the cupboard. That was enough to whip up a batch of fried rice. But I wouldn't be able to make it home without keeling over. In fact, thinking about cooking was making me even hungrier.