Tart of Darkness

In 1921 Somerset Maugham described Penang, Malaysia, as "A pleasant little town, but the stranger finds little to do there, and time hangs heavy on his hands." It's quite a contrast to Bangkok, which is as close to heaven as any man who worships pussy and beer is likely to get. Penang, on the other hand, is a city where the laws are Islamic, the food Indian, and the manners Chinese. They hang you there for winking at teenage girls in the mall. Time moves very slowly in Penang.

Unfortunately, the Thai government requires all foreigners to leave Paradise every three months and renew their visas. Penang happens to be the closest Purgatory that boasts a Thai consulate. So four times a year I fly down, check in at the New Cathay Hotel on Leith Street, and meet a stocky Tamil named Mr. Metha who takes my passport and a small gratuity to fight the bureaucracy at the Thai consulate on my behalf.

I spend the required three days locked in my barren cell on the third floor, smoking clove-scented Marlboros made in Sri Lanka and dreaming about the compact, nearly hairless and oh-so-accommodating snatches back in Bangkok. But on my last trip, made in the gloom and drizzle of the monsoon season, quite by chance I managed to break through the stupor of boredom.

The cab dropped me in front of the ornate double doors of the New Cathay Hotel, which are guarded by a couple of crumbling, hundred-year-old wooden dragons. I carried my own bags through the rain into the lobby, because at the New Cathay nobody on staff is any younger than those wooden dragons outside. As for the stark, airless little rooms, there's no mint on the pillow, no towels, toilet paper, soap or phone. There's a creaky ceiling fan, a bed with a mosquito net, and a broad population of insect life. There's a stained porcelain sink in one corner that smells like piss and a communal toilet at the end of each carpet-worn hall. There's a dim aura that a hundred people or more have killed themselves over the years in each paint-chipped room.

A young couple was checking in at the desk when I arrived. He was pure Eurotrash. A heavy, guttural accent made him sound like he was choking every time he spoke. He had the standard spiky hair, pegged, greasy black jeans and torn T-shirt, and the Nihilist Deutsch Rock blaring from his I-pod headphones. His lady companion was Thai, trim and neat with large tits and a big round butt peaking out from the frayed edges of her cut-off American jeans. She had long shiny black hair that fell past the word "Airborne" tattooed on her shoulder. Her attitude - as she leaned against the counter with one hip shot out examining her nails - was one of "I'm a prostitute of the lowest order, and I don't give a damn who knows it."

It is not uncommon for guys who can afford it to bring their "mia chao," or "rented wives," to Penang to make the time go faster. The punk's companion looked to be about twenty years old, way over the hill by the standards of her profession. By now she should have made enough money on her back and on her knees to buy a little shop somewhere, or a bar, or at least some land and a water buffalo. The fact that she was still working meant she liked her job.

The clerk slid the punk the key to room twenty-two. The punk led the way upstairs with his woman carrying both their bags. I got the key to room twenty-four, right next door.

By nine o'clock that evening the lobby looked like a casting call for "Casablanca." Chinese gangsters in Armani suits sat nervously next to bearded, round-the-world backpackers wearing Nepalese bloomers. Aging European pensioners with buttons missing on their shirts sat next to long-haired Americans with fake Irish passports who hadn't seen home since they went AWOL in Saigon in 1970.

My neighbors were at the end of a patched, green vinyl sofa under the shrine to the House Gods. The punk was sitting on the one available cushion next to an Israeli who had a Canadian passport and a briefcase full of brochures advertising light armored vehicles. The girl was squatting third world fashion at her boyfriend's feet. She looked sulky and he looked smug.

Metha came rolling in and began a complicated ritual of illegal and supposedly secret negotiations with each client. While we all waited our turn we pretended interest in newspapers in ten languages and as many days old, politely ignoring each other's dealings.

The Tamil came over and greeted me, but before we could do our business the punk got up and pulled Metha away. "I've been vaiting fifteen minutes, old mahn!" he growled at the saffron-scented broker. "You giff me serwiss or I go somebody else!" Metha gave me a look that asked, "Do you mind?"

Knowing that time in Penang is a valueless commodity, I returned his look with a shrug and went back to looking at the cartoons in the South China Morning Post. Metha took the punk's papers and photos and a bribe that was three times the going rate for a Thai visa, then came back to me and offered to buy me a beer since I was his last customer of the evening. As we walked back to the bar I saw the punk pull his moll up to her feet and drag her upstairs.

Metha and I spent an hour watching Mr. Ed reruns dubbed into Malay on the bar TV, then I excused myself and went upstairs. In my room I took a book and five milligrams of Ativan to bed and crawled under the mosquito net. In ten minutes I was asleep.

Some time after midnight I was awakened by a tremendous argument from the room next door. I couldn't understand what the deeper voice was saying, but the meaning of the higher-pitched voice came through the thin plaster wall clear as a bell. She was calling him a cheap, ignorant, dirty, giant lizard. His grasp of Thai must have been slight, because a giant lizard is the worst thing you can call anybody in that language. Of the seven pronouns which mean "you" in Thai, she was employing the one reserved for animals and the bastard offspring of slaves.

I looked at the ceiling fan and listened as the hostilities escalated, and finally their door slammed open and I heard the woman making her way off down the hall, muttering darkly in Lao-accented Thai and something that sounded vaguely Slavic. No response from the Storm Trooper, but the sweet aroma of Cannabis soon slipped under my baseboards. Finally, one word - bellowed out loud and clear - came from him. It was probably the Slobovian for "female giant lizard." After he shouted, all was silent.

A minute later I heard splashing from the end of the hall, and realized that she had gone to the communal toilet. I heard her come back and try the door to room twenty-two. It rattled as if locked. I heard her knock, then pound, then kick and shout, but Gretel got no response from Hansel. There was a moment of whimpering and cursing, then about thirty seconds of silent consideration before I heard her knock again. This time at my door.

I make it a rule not to open my door in crummy hotels in third world countries after midnight. But the knocking went on and on, soft and insistent. "Who is it?" I said through the cheap plywood. No response,. I tried Thai, "Khrai ma?" This time she answered, also in Thai.

"Please, Uncle, I am alone, and afraid. Please won't you help Little Sister?" She was using all high-class pronouns with me. "My man locked me out, Uncle, and I have no clothes, only my sarong for bathing. Soon the police will come and I know what will happen to me in jail here. Please help me, Uncle. I beg you."

The mention of the police scared the shit out of me, but I could imagine what would happen to a foreign prostitute found causing a disturbance in a Malaysian hallway wearing only a damp rectangle of upcountry cotton. "Diaw, Nong!" I said, telling her in two words to wait a moment, and that I had accepted her socially on the level of a little sister. I grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of shorts from my bag and opened the door to hand them to her.

But when the door swung open she pushed her way into the room so quickly I was left handing my clothes to an empty hallway. I turned, closing the door as I did, and watched her in the light from the street lamp outside the room's single narrow window. She was naked, except for the thin and faded sarong covering her from armpits to crotch, a pair of gold earrings and the tattoo.

Her breasts were large for an Asian's, indicating that her people came from the Laotian side of the parched drought lanes of Northern Thailand rather than from the Burmese side. She turned around until she faced the connecting wall, the one with the punk on the other side. She was in profile to me, lit from behind, casually holding one hand over her barely concealed breasts and the other over her pubes.

"Hia!" she spat at the wall, calling the punk a lizard again. Her face glistened with tears, and after hurling that one word at the wall she seemed to lose all strength. She tumbled forward onto my bed, dragging the mosquito net with her and landing in a heap of billowy sheets and twisted gauze.

It is a fall performed by all the most popular female ingenues on Thai television dramas, and bar girls practice it to perfection. Her arms wrapped around a pillow and her hair fanned over it to fall off the other side of the bed. The sarong had slipped its knot and was only loosely covering the small of her back. Her legs were opened slightly as she lay sobbing on her belly, and I could see her buttocks were rounded and full, and they shook and shivered with her weeping. Beneath them, peeping out at me, was the tiny split bun of her vulva, its bright pink lips merging into the dark crack of her ass.

Her skin was smooth and unblemished, except for the tattoo. I sat next to her, pulled the sarong off and threw it with a wet plop into the farthest corner of the room.

"Look at me, Little Sister," I said. She slowly rolled over, showing me her naked body. Asian modesty dictated that she must not show her emotions to a stranger, so she covered her face with her hands as she wept, and I gazed down at two perfect globes of warm flesh, each tipped by a nipple that looked like a raisin on a big scoop of coffee ice cream. Her pubic hair was a straight, thin line pointing the way to her cunt. I ran my hand lightly over her torso and asked her what she needed.

"Please let me stay, Uncle. He won't wake up until lunch time tomorrow. The door is locked and I have no clothes." Her eyes were half-shut but glowing, and I could smell alcohol on her breath. Her sprawled body had the languid floppiness of someone pleasantly drunk.

I've always had a soft spot for strays: kittens, puppies, chicks blown out of the nest. In this case, I was developing quite a hard spot. "Okay," I said. "Little Sister can stay until morning, but then you have to go." She dissolved into a fresh gale of weeping, putting her head in my lap as I caressed her neck and shoulders. She pulled open the fly on my boxers and swept out my organ with the skilled hand of a professional. I felt a few hot tears fall on my prick. Three quick slides of a velvet fist up and down its length and it popped right into her mouth.

As she slid her small palm down my shaft, her hair caressed my thighs. Little moans of satisfaction escaped us both, but the thought of Hagar the Horrible, maybe sleeping, maybe just sulking, on the other side of the wall kept me at a happy, floating buzz that produced no shouts or screaming.

She looked up at me with a big grin and said, "Malee thinks you're a very good man. Good for Malee. Malee will be good for you, too. Promise!" That's how I learned her name was Malee.

I lay down full length on the bed. Malee bent forward on her knees, her head between my legs, her ass hovering just in reach of my right hand. She saw me staring at it and said, "You like? All men like Malee's ass." In truth, she had a great ass. The only fault that can be found with Asian women is that, by and large, they're all built like Peter Pan. But Malee had a voluptuous figure that still held the daintiness of waist and limbs that makes oriental females so delectable. I could imagine that her ass had been stared at before; in fact, I could imagine all sorts of scenarios involving Malee's ass.

You could have flown a flag off my cock. She took it in her mouth again, running her tongue from hairy base to purple point with deep, expressive moans. I ran both hands over her ass cheeks and dipped a finger into her moist slit.

She took her mouth off me long enough to say, "Oooooh, that's good, very good, darling." She faltered her way through a few words in English, "You no hat. I like, more clean."

"No hat" is how bar girls refer to a circumcised penis. She popped the hatless tip of my prick into her hot, wet mouth one more time, revolving her head back and forth so that her slick lips circled the knob, just under the corona, round and round.

I had two fingers inside her pussy now, and it was like a live thing, gripping and releasing my digits, drawing them deeper with tiny muscle contractions. I reached up with the other hand, and wetting my index finger with saliva, slowly inserted it into the tiny, puckered brown asterix of her anus. Malee seemed to like it. "Ooooooooooh," she moaned around my cock, her hot breath stirring my pubic hair. "Malee likes you, Uncle. Malee likes you very much!"

She went back to caressing my tool with her small, warm, experienced hands. She gave the very tip, just at its eye, a quick lizard-lick. She looked like a little girl with an ice cream who means to eat slowly and savor. She was gazing at my prick as if it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. I took my hands away from the two holes in her bottom and sat up. She let go of my cock, but didn't change her position on her knees with her head down. I stood by the bed and looked down at her.

By the light of the street lamp coming in the window I could see her, slender and toffee brown. Her jugs were hanging down and swaying gently, the erect nipples brushing the rough grey mosquito net that was still spread on the bed, and her big round ass was pointing to the ceiling. I put a hand on her back to hold her that way, though I knew it wouldn't be necessary; I knew she'd stay that way until Kingdom Come unless I told her to do something else. She closed her eyes and bit the sheet. Her hands reached out in front of her and grasped the wicker foot board where uncounted hundreds of other pairs of slender, brown fists had grasped on thousands of other nights in that room.

I put one finger back into her slit to turn her for a better angle, and she leaned back against my hand driving the finger deep inside where it was tight and hot. My cock was swinging back and forth and I pulled out my finger and grabbed her hips. She spread her knees and arched her back to receive me. I was just about to drive it home with the blunt head of my shaft wedged against her dripping cooze when common sense took over.

The thought had never occurred to me to bring condoms to Malaysia. That would have been like taking shrimp forks into the Sahara. No way was fucking this girl without a bag a good idea. As I paused she moaned and looked back at me over her shoulder, strands of her long hair plastered across her face with sweat, and said in broken English learned from a thousand faceless foreigners, "Fuck me! Please, Darling, I want you fuck me now wi' you big cock!"

I was on the horns of a dilemma. It would be easy enough to examine her cunt for any simplexes or warts, but gonorrhea hurts like hell, syphilis makes you crazy before it kills you and AIDS takes its own sweet time, every moment of it painful. Nothing was worth risking all that, not even free pussy in Malaysia. I ad-libbed.

"Let me fuck those big, juicy titties, baby!" I said, as no doubt a good proportion of those thousand faceless foreigners had before me. I grabbed an ankle and gave her a flip onto her back. She stuck the landing like an Olympic gymnast, legs spread wide and clutching her knockers with both hands to form an extra deep cleavage for dick dipping. My balls were aching and I could feel things twitching inside me all the way back to my prostate. My own asshole was clenched and my butt bunched for the big thrust. I stood on my knees over her, rubbing my dick up and down her body from sternum to chin.

I climbed over her as the ancient bed creaked with the strain. Her eyes were half closed, but I could see the blades of the revolving ceiling fan in their dark irises as I poked my throbbing purple mushroom into her open and waiting mouth. This time she sucked it like a babe at the bottle, no teasing this time, and despite the awkward angle managed to take almost the whole length down her throat. I let her suck for a minute, her cheeks bulging and her nostrils flaring for air, before I pulled it out and backed up a bit to slide the spit-slickened length between her titties. She squeezed her boobs around me, a sensation at once soft and firm. "Darling, please, I want to play with my pussy." I grabbed her two nipples, pulling them together until they were stretched and undoubtedly stinging, and immediately both of her hands reached around my hips and dove for her own crotch.

Believe it or not, coming from a prostitute, this is a compliment to a man. Most of them don't normally experience orgasms with their customers: their own satisfaction waits until they're back in the dormitory-style apartments they share with their girlfriends. In their off-hours they spend the afternoons lazing around together in bed, licking and rubbing each others' cunts for hours on end to release the tensions built up by dancing naked in front of a room full of men, or being fucked by horny sailors on shore leave. When an Asian whore plays with herself during sex, it means that you turn her on like her girlfriend does.

I rocked up and down for several minutes, watching the bulb of my prick poke in and out of view between those fleshy tits, twisting and pulling her nipples because we both seemed to like that. I spit down on my dick a few times to keep it slick, and my saliva mixed with her sweat to make a soft, slippery envelope of flesh. Every now and then I would turn around to watch her pleasure herself. She had two fingers buried to the hilt in her slit, and the other hand was busy on her little clit. Her eyes had closed completely now; her mouth was open in a fixed and silent "Oh!" and her head thrashed back and forth on the bunched mosquito netting.

I held myself in check until I saw her arch her neck and grit her teeth with her own orgasm. Then I let go, bucking and shouting and lunging on top of her chest like a bare-back rider at the rodeo. It had been days since I came, and it felt like quarts of hot jizz came spurting out onto her face and hair. As she lay gasping under me I held my cock over her glistening face and squeezed the last few drops out to dribble onto her cheeks and closed eyelids. Then I pulled her slack jaw open and stuffed my cock inside.

She began to suck, reflexively, and I watched her face, relaxed and at peace now, cream smeared over the wide, flat cheekbones, the pug nose and the full lips. We stayed that way until my knees grew uncomfortable, then I pulled my dick out of her mouth and backed off the bed.

I went to the sink to wash my dick. She continued her reverie with one hand deep in her cunt, the other cupping a breast, slowly massaging the no-doubt bruised and tender nipple. I could see her slick and slimy face glistening in the feeble light. When I was clean I went back and sat beside her. I wiped the come from her eyelids and she opened them. She smiled up at me and strands of jizz stretched between her lips. I stuck the gooey finger that I'd cleaned her eyes with into that perfect mouth and she giggled as she sucked it clean.

When the stuff started to dry to stickiness, I took her to the bathroom to wash. I went with her because I like to watch. Even though we hadn't fucked, I made her douche thoroughly, enjoying her yelps and squeals when she tossed handfuls of the chilly water up her snatch.

We went back to my room, clutching each other and giggling as we tip-toed past room twenty-two, where I could hear Herr Oberlieutenant's congested snoring. While I smoked a cigarette she re-hung the mosquito net, working naked in the cool blue light, her tits swinging gently within reach of my hands.

Whenever I touched her she stopped what she was doing and stood still, letting me do anything I cared to do, and when I let go of a tit or pulled my finger out of an orifice, she would go back to making up the bed. Always smiling, always calm, gentle and soft. We fell asleep spoon fashion, under the slowly revolving ceiling fan, with my cock nestled within the crack of her ass like a hot dog in a bun. Outside the rain fell onto the tiled gables of the New Cathay Hotel. The downpour ran from its eaves and overflowed the garbage-filled gutters of Leith Street.

In the morning I went downstairs and cornered Mr. Metha before anybody else had a chance to occupy his attention. We had a quiet conversation over Chinese tea and then I gave him some money. It was quite a bit of money by Malaysian standards, but in New York it wouldn't buy you lunch at a good sushi restaurant.

Soon a boy came to pound on the door of room twenty-two, waking the punk and telling him that there was an urgent phone call for him downstairs. When he went to the lobby the boy opened the door again with his passkey and allowed Malee to remove her clothes, passport and return air ticket. Five minutes later the punk returned, and while he was ranting and raving about the desk waking guests for phone calls that don't exist, the police came and arrested him for possession of hashish, a crime that carries the penalty of death in Malaysia.

It caused a small international incident since he was the nephew of someone important back in Europe. Malee and I enjoyed reading about it in the local papers over the next few days while I waited for my visa and she worked off her debt. She felt that she owed me the amount of money I had paid Metha to remove the punk from her life, and since it was a rather substantial amount of money, she was forced to use all of her imagination, agility and stamina to work off the debt.

For the fist time in my experience, time in Penang seemed to fly by.

© Steve Singleman. All rights reserved by the author.