This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Story by CJ
This all started happening to me seems to me must have been a long time ago, my first job since I was retrenched as a software engineer in a local bank two years ago. There was still a silent war between foreigners and Singaporeans.
It was hot and humid. Filth everywhere. Just like now. I didn’t have any love in my life. To speak of. No love at all, and nobody to care for. Just very little self-respect.Whatsoever.
There are certain Singapore mornings when just about everybody wakes up crazy. Even the native Singaporeans. You can see it on their faces. Such misery and unhappiness. Well so this other person was hanging around too, on his lunch hour and he seemed very extremely unhappy. Said the security guard at Public Housing Authority knew him as a troublemaker. Said his name was Kian Heng. He’s a property agent who has to go back to work or he will be out on the streets for good. He’s plainly worried about himself a lot as he needs to hit his sales quota. Said he didn’t like being recognised and started at because this was his free lunch hour to do with as he damn well pleased.
Also I’d been thinking that spending all of my all-too-free time at the Public Housing Authority was basically a step in the wrong direction. For staying up all those nights with insomnia, I suspected I should be paid.
A few mornings later on this hot humid filthy mother of a day, I went up to Public Housing Authority security guard office, job hunting.
Unreal. Divorcees, foreigners, skunk, pussy everywhere just don’t go to make up a city in my book but there you are; that’s basically your Singapore early in the morning. Well thank God I’d seen worse.
In my head I was making all these notes: real cunt of a day,
Well that day, too, I began to keep this journal. As a keepsake. Something to keep me from going completely crazy. Keep me busy.
Public Housing Authority security guard room is a small faded blue office with a few closed circuit cameras nailed and screwed to one side of the wall.
Caution signs. Check-in logs tacked to the walls. Organisation chart hanging in another.
My dairy says I saw this person at the entrance next to the chart. That personnel office was also unreal. I took my chances on the man with a white spot in his right eye. He was sort of skinny at one end and sacklike on the bottom. Not very pretty to look at.
Once he sees my Singapore Computer Engineering Association patches, he wants to know if I was retrenched.
“May 2010….”
“What’s that?”
I say “That’s my approximate date of retrenchment. From Hewlett Packard Singapore. Jobless for 2 years doing temporary jobs but really want a job.”
Emphasizing a lot so he would see I had respect for him, meant no harm. Well I really wanted work but I also mean business.
He stopped me. “From the influx of computer engineers from India?”
He seems to have all sorts of different things on his own mind except my getting work. Probably scared he’ll lose his own job.
Well I don’t seem to seem rude. “I came here to see about getting a job as a security guard, I think.”
“Oh,” says the guy. “I bet you have seen our advertisements before. You think getting work here in Public Housing Authority is a great big cinch.”
“I’m willing to work… is all…”
“Any troubles with the law?”
“No sir.”
“Willing to work night shifts?”
“Yes.”
So just then there was a lot of commotion, couples screaming, car exhausts, Somebody has slammed some doors along the corridor.
The man squints at me hard and over all the noises I can hardly hear him when he asks, “So… why do you want to work as a security guard? You are overqualified, you have a degree to be accepted as a member of the computer engineering association….”
Well I don’t happen to think that’s any of his business anyhow. Though I am not ashamed.
I tell him very straight: I can’t seem to find a job at my age and with my qualifications.
Well he says the cab companies are always looking for drivers.
Me, disregarding his insult: “I know. I was not able to pass my driving license.”
He still won’t let me be, won’t let up. “So what do you do now?”
“I ride around nights mostly buses. Have been going for job interviews for the past 2 years. Figure I might as well get paid for it.”
“We don’t need any misfits around here, son.”
“Who else would want to work as a security guard in Public Housing Authority breaking up couples’ fights every day?”
I’ve been speaking to him like my mind don’t know what my mouth is saying and now I am getting angry. Riled.
“You got others to take the heat off you at the Human Relations people. It’s ok with me.”
The guy brightens. Says, brightening, “You are willing to work permanent night shifts?”
“Permanent night shifts, day shifts doesn’t make any difference. What have I got to lose? I’ll work anywhere anytime. I can’t be choosey.”
Then he wants to know if I have an arrest record and when I tell him I’m clean, real clean, “as clean as my conscious,” he says, “listen, if you are gonna get smart, you can leave right now.”
I apologise. I don’t mean to seem so smart. So the guy asks can I pass a physical, how old am I, if I am moonlightening. Stuff like that. Words to that effect. He seems to like it that I’ll work long shifts.
“Hell,” he says, finally, “we just ain’t fussy around here. There’s always openings on one position or another.”
He asks me to fill out a bunch of pink yellow white forms, leave them with the girl at the front desk behind the window. They would call.
Good to break the ice anyway. On the way out saw myself in plate glass again. This thin dark shadow. I read my Association patch backwards.
By March I was working and it had been raining days ever since I started, well, practically. Lousy wet syrupy weather. Like the beginnings of a miserable spring.
Well at least the divorcing couples and the crowds in Public Housing Authority bicker less in that weather.
“When couples fight, the boss of the PHA is the security guard,” all the guys in the control room say.
I started out working the day shift but that got to be too much for me. Too many higher-class people can be harder on your nerves than some divorcees. The higher-class people expected you to know all sorts of very strange things.
I am walking down the aisle with a half chewed burger in my pocket. I have no time for giving reports on lift breakdowns or lighting failures, just no inclinations.
“Listen,” says this guy in a business suit one day, “Is the lift working today? The repairman changed the motor parts?”
“I suppose so,” I tell him. “There is no big crowd at the lift lobby today.”
Man says, “You know that for a certainty?”
“There is a board meeting with visitors from China. It does mean something, don’t it?” he demands, moments later. “Do you know or don’t you?”
My hamburger tastes like solid brown fog in a bun. Through a mouthful I ask if he has tried telephoning the the company.
“In other words, you don’t know?” This guy is getting me crazy.
“Well,” he snarls, “You should. Should know, dammit or who would know?” Stuff of that sort. A lotta blah blah. Says, “Do you know who I am? I am the Deputy Director of Corporate Communications.”
He’s pointing out to the lift like a schoolteacher. Says, “Why don’t you stick your head into the control room and find out who I am!”
I had a laugh. He must have been angry to know a security guard didn’t know who he is.
Mostly, when I had my break, it’s at the McDonald’s three blocks from my work.
There was also a woman in full dress and she was selling tissue paper at a dollar to us. She asked if I knew her son Adrian Lu in Hewlett Packard after she spotted my old jacket with the Singapore Computer Engineering Association. She had gray hair. Doused herself a lot with lilly-of-the-valley water. She said Adrian Lu was her oldest, such a good boy but was retrenched last year, had I ever known him? She quipped, “Private companies are already infested with foreign talent and economic refugees.”
She says her name is Tara. That if she had a job, she’d be at that job, but instead she’s here talking to me. Asks if I’m up from Nanyang Technological University or wherever the hick I’m from, and if I aspired to downgrade myself to be a security guard and so again I tell her about Adrian Lu, and how we was ex-colleagues in different departments in Hewlett Packard and look at our lives divergent, and she shakes her head and says, “Fucker stole my future. And look how Tembusu Holdings and our politicians left you. Sure you don’t want some tissue?”
It’s true I have not slept in days due to my insomnia and maybe also the truth that I have not had the heart to tell her the truth about Adrian Lu, and it’s nice that this old lady cares because when no one cares, you think about dropping dead all the time.
It comes easy to chant her grief out loud.
“You have been fucked by the political system,” she told me.
I wasn't sure what I was going to say to her but then I saw her lips and brow twitching, I said, "Hey,. . what're you doing? Are you crying?"
She wept, “If he had graduated and stayed on to the basics of finding a job, this wouldn't have happened.” said, in between sobs.
"Well then, The politicians will be telling you — foreigners create jobs for Singaporeans, help to improve our salaries bottomlines. If slow down the mass import of foreigners, Singaporeans will all become jobless. Of course, the politicians won’t tell you that slowing down mass influx of foreigners will make their businessmen, Tembusu Holdings and CEOs friends very unhappy, and reduce the GDP which will then reduce their bonus & pay and good way of life."
She fought for control and at last the tears stopped and there was only an occasional sob. "Why didn’t you stand for the President’s election and fight for us then?"
One night, in the morning in the Public Housing Authority, there was a Pinoy in short mini skirt. She was going to a bar at a few blocks away as a masseuse. I get picked up by her and says she wants to give me a massage when I go off duty as a guard. Well I said no. And when she sat on a chair, she has her feet up inside the stirrups with her legs spread and she is sticking herself with this long glass tube in the hot spot. I asked what’s going on and she explains that she was extracting her blood. Seems she did this every month so she wouldn’t have to have her period. Her boyfriend liked her better that way and she said she had more control over her body.
Well she said she was going over to the bar to see her boyfriend tonight and was staying over and she would almost forgotten. She wanted to surprise him that way again. Well she liked me, said I could come home with her sometime if I wanted. She drank a lot I think. I don’t like that sort of forward woman. Afterwards I would still be lonely.
As usual. I look up into the notice board, I see her skirt hardly and barely enough to cover her hot spot.
So forward. Just like animals. All too many of them. I suppose if I said yes maybe so if not for that boyfriend.
Also I liked to think they would come to my place and my place was a mess. Really pretty awful.
Well I had this room and a half on Toa Payoh, a ratty old mattress on the floor, a chair and a table. I almost never got calls at my place so the phone was disconnected. There were also some porn photos, I’d collected too and a kitchen full of grease and roaches, a stopped sink.
Well that was no place much to hang out for long, and I didn’t. I just fell out there to sleep, if I could, after a day’s work.
I was working very hard, six to six, sometimes six to eight in the AM, a stretch shift, it was a hustle, kept me busy. I could take in extra shift allowance by working the nights.
People never seemed satisfied. That face in the aisle as they come into work in Public Housing Authority. The buzzer in my security room means that I have to vacate my post to come settle some dispute. A lotta distrust and disapproval makes my stomach queezy.
I was exhausted all the time now, back achey, too from my scars. I almost never got a chance to write in this book much in those days, didn’t even see a movie a week at a time.
By April 10, I was doing stretch shifts.
I knew I had to do something about my loneliness aside from talking to colleagues but I didn’t want that sort. That kind of colleagues can get really heavy, depressing. You find yourself twisted. This way and that.
I guess like most people I wanted to meet someone I liked have some fun. Eventually maybe make her a commitment. Just to be with another person. To have a friend.
I felt I was capable of giving and getting. Had been so ever since I came home. Well you know I really couldn’t prove it but I felt there were these things inside me that had to come out on another person. With another. Good things and bad. A man is not a fountain pen, you know> I wanted to care and be cared for. Well it was a heavy time. Bad days those. The people I saw. The things I did.
At least, I think she was a sort of a girlfriend. I guess she liked me a lot better than I ever liked her. She really wasn’t my type, I’m afraid. No class. She said she loved me but it felt like she was taking me over. She called me Juan like a rhyme. Her big dill Juan. Said she needed a bit of my dill morning, noon and night. Said, Sure I liked her but not that much. She wasn’t any dream to me, just another woman.
I guess I hurt her feelings. I imagined she thought with a face like hers she would have to get her hooks in somebody or else, pretty soon. I imagined I was too young for that. That sort of thing. When I left her she cried. More like a mother to me than a girlfriend really.
Well, as I say, working in the day shifts, I saw things happening me being unemployed a lot better in some respects. I saw people at their worst. Whatever that means. The PHA is hardly a fit place for making friends and influencing people.
I would go back to the back of the security guard room to clean stuff off people who left their belongings, mostly umbrellas, sometimes mobile phones they left behind when they sat down. The seats were bucket shaped, meaning their phones tend to drop out of their trouser pockets due to the inclination.
Those poor women in shawls eating out of garbage cans at 5:00 am, well, sometimes I’d think there’d never be anything but hard times like this. So many guys sleeping out in the street, at least I had this roof over my head. First thing I did when I came out of the unemployment days was to put that roof over my head.
Most of the time, I couldn’t straighten up after an evening and I would always be getting these terrible cricks in my back. I booked in sloppy sometimes. My head just fuzzed on me was all. My head fuzzed…..
One night, I dreamt I got back to my former workplace in Hewlett Packard after a typical day with over three hundred bucks in my pocket and all the food court seats were taken by Indian foreigners. The food court had been converted to sell Indian food to suit their tastebuds. I’d have to go back out again on another shift. All I could see were signs on the walls: BE ALERT! The computer programmer is always ready for the unexpected.
That girl in the massage parlor who spread her legs open as walking past the glass panels and I thought this was just like hell. Hell surely.
People are really weird. The woman who signs your time-sheets thinks she’s got something on you. So goddamm unfriendly.
I guess she thinks you stink on ice just for being a security guard.
One night I asked for her name. “Come on,” she said, “Just because I work in a joint like this doesn’t mean I am that kind of girl. I am too good for you.” And she wouldn’t give me her name. Even after I told her I was serious: “Really”.
Well, then she says, “Want me to call the boss? What you want?”
So cruel and cold.
I ordered a big coca-cola – without ice – and a large buttered popcorn, and …. Some of the chocolate covered malted milk balls. Kind that makes you cavities ache. It came to $1.47 and they didn’t have cokes so I took a Royal Crown…. That’s when this little sorta diddy started going around and around in my head: “Whatsa life without a wife a cunt without any kindness?”
Little bits and pieces to that effect. Over and over again: “What’s a cunt without a heart a heart without a cunt?”
I don’t say it’s topflight, topnotch, really great stuff. I was only trying to express myself. Honesty. Better that than go altogether weird like the others. Those other security guards.
Those other security guards I knew, all they ever did was hate Deputy Prime Minister Suman Shammugan and the dinge. Even the dinge. They hated him too and all they ever did was jabber. Everything’s a remark. Must be because they were so bored they just had to let off some steam heat.
There’s Rizal and they just call him Freak-me-Out some people because he liked to do crazy stupid things at night with the zipper on his trousers in the front seat.
Says a guy can get a lot that way too.
He used to say his wife had taken this lover and he would kill the son of a bitch if he weren’t so grateful.
Morny is in love with a lady property agent. Big bull dyke, she won’t give him the right time of day. He wants to soften her. She aims to be a top 20 in sales. He’s always keeping tabs on her when she is around PHA. He knows her customers, and where she eats and who she is seeing after work. Well she calls Morny a pig and he isn’t, he’s just extremely jealous and possessive of his right to know her. She calls all the security guards pigs. Liked to have slapped her one sometime only Morny would get pretty mad at me if I did. He’s a married man too and he needed all his friends he can get. Not to say she was much.
There was this one Chinese security guard Charley. I used to see a lot with Morny and everything he said was a big racist remark. It was never just a customer he was seeing but a Malay or an Indian or Eurasian, a colored customer. That’s why he called his own. Colored. We are all hanging out and he has remarks galore for everybody who passes by or is in the place. Like he tries to show he knows who you are by speaking your own language.
Despite all, I’d never known how to share my life with others. Shared only the worst of it. If at all. But human beings are not bullies. They enjoy experience.
All my life I’d known that, it seems to me and I still could not convince myself it was so. Seems like I was just living in this motel, couldn’t pay the rent, couldn’t leave. Waiting for that money from home.
All my life, I thought needed was a sense of direction, someplace to go.
Those near and dear to me.
Between shifts, I got to spending a lot of time on the corner of Toa Payoh. The Shanmuggan Campaign Headquarters. A store front: “Singaporeans for Suman Shanmuggan for President of Singapore.”
The primary was July 20. A long way off. People seemed pretty excited already.
Suman had something. He was no middle-class bullshit artist. He looked like he could be your friend for life or your friend’s friend. A happy man. Lotsa positive vibes. Had one of those nice clean honest faces. Middle-aged, smiling with thin lips, wiry gary hair. Used to wear seersucker suits and pink shirts. Nice ties. I thought I would vote for him though that was not why I was hanging out.
That day, I picked up an iPhone that was dropped along one of those bucket seats. When I picked up the phone, I saw 3 missed calls and one SMS message. I called the number and it was answered by a woman with a Pinoy accent. Initially, she berated me for holding up the queue in PHA and calling me a ‘useless hubby who will be forever unemployed’. Upon realising that I was not her husband, she froze and changed tune and apologised. She wanted me to return the iPhone to her husband who was working in XingPost Limited in Paya Laba as soon as possible.
Apparently, she was the wife and worked in the Suman’s campaign office. The SMS message read “meet me at Jo Chen’s office tomorrow to see my lawyer. Don’t you dare not turn up”.
Today was the day when I would return the iPhone back to her. Apparently, she is quite a beautiful lady as evidenced by the photos kept in the gallery of the iPhone. I didn’t even know her name but she was beautiful, tall and brunette and clean and cool. I liked keeping an eye on her, watching her with the other workers. There was a guy she talked to a lot. A chub, cute with a big shock of curly brown hair and glasses. Sort of a kid brother type. He reminded me of my second lieutenant. Well I don’t think she liked him that much but he liked her.
Me, I had eyes for her too, liked to watch her a lot, all the time. She was one of Singapore’s ‘chosen immigrants’ to prep up our falling birth rates. I sometimes think, so beautiful and fortunate. When she walked out on the street to get coffee, she always seemed to float above any of the others, suspended. She was certainly better than your run of the mill. I didn’t know what she did, we never spoke. Once in a while, our eyes touched through the glass and then she had to look away, or I would get a stare. I thought if it was ever going to happen this was it. I could only stand so much. Like being inside a tin can, holes for peering out. I had the cab fitted out with a rubber portable fan and a little transistor radio, but it was still not all the comforts of home: And I would always park across the street and stare at her typing or talking on the phone, such a beauty.
Well, one day, she pointed me out to her friend and she was coming at me through the door so I just put the cab in gear and drove away, fast. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get involved. What did I know about politics anyway? A lone wolf like me. The’re all no good, I thought but she was so very beautiful.
I thought she was my dream woman. She always wore this nice long yellow dress or a Suman T-shirt, jeans. Built nice. She spent so much time on the phone, too, talking and looking happy and she typed with only 2 fingers. So stylish, slender, a little pug nose,brown hair, a yellow dress that clung to her body, among the masses on the street, untouched by the crowd.
Well she was like an angel out of this open sewer, out of this filthy mass. Alone; they couldn’t touch her. I would call her – what’s wrong with just her? Names wouldn’t change a thing about the way I felt for her. I’d call her Her….
But that day when her male colleague started out the door, I got so very frightened and angry and started to drive away because I could see her pointing me out to him.
I don’t think he meant to chase me away. He was just being protective of her. That’s all…
By that day, I had given her a birthday. April 15, the anniversary of our eyes first meeting a week ago. I still didn’t know a thing about her except that I was madly in love with this person, if she was who I thought she was, my woman I could respond to.
I tried writing notes to leave for her: “I am a working person vitally concerned about the welfare of our country. I want to help Mr Suman and return your hubby’s iPhone to you. Can we talk? I want to meet.”
“I think you are a lovely clean young woman… Could we be friends?”
There was also a sort of poem I scribbled to myself, though I would never send her that: I bring you my lonely death with open arms to love you. Like a flower that smells sweetest whenever you are bending over it
Well, I never finished that one because it seemed she would not understand. All that week, my favourite song was, “Killing me Softly with his Song,”
I wondered what her favourite song was. Deep in my thoughts. A dreaming time. I’d have to buy her an album with my letter of introduction and poem when we got acquainted. One thing was certain, she was very well brought up. You could tell.
Well people do such things when they are about to have a relationship and I was talking to a lot of people about a lot of things lately. In my day shift, a property agent says to me, “Singapore is always cold when it’s hot and hot when it’s cold, ever wonder about that?”
At the PHA at 3:30 one morning, I’m with Morny and we are comparing our shift. The usual shit: How everybody tries to drag the security guard into their quarrels if they can. How they talk to you. How lonely it is in the night.
How they don’t even care sometimes if you are listening. And customers, they like to chisel you.
A fat guy with a sob story about his divorce. The guy was a bad drunk and he said he felt all mixed up, ethically and professionally. Words to that effect. When people tell you these things. They don’t really want you to hear really. In my journal, I write, Fat men carry their lives in a big bulge.
On April 14th, I wrote the following in my journal:
“Dear Diary – this really happened. I got up the nerve and went to Suman Shammugan’s headquarters today to see her and return to her and return her the phone.”
No kidding. I got all dressed up: Tie, pressed my jacket with the Singapore Computer Engineering Association and slacks, shined my shoes, shaved, walked right through that door on my own two feet.
Entered the place quickly, at a quick step march, headed right for her desk. That guy she sees with the curly hair trotted over, too, though I ignored him.
Me: “I want to volunteer.”
I was feeling a little panicky but OK, I guess, except for wear and tear from lack of sleep. So he comes over to her right then, too, and interrupts: “If you’ll come this way.” Didn’t even call me sir like they usually do.
Well, I give him the elbow. I’m not budging. I didn’t have enough time to notice what’s going on with her.
I just plant myself there and say, “No, I want to volunteer to you.” I took out the white bony iPhone to her and placed it on her table. “And at the same time, return this phone to you. It has 3 missed calls since you lost it yesterday.”
He sort of warns her, in an undertone, “Sienna.” Now I know for certain that’s her name. But she waves him away. Everything is going to be OK. She is looking at me real warmly, I think. Then he goes about his business and she says to me, “Why? Why is that?”
Me: “Because you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And here is your phone. With 3 missed calls from your husband.”
“Soon-to-be-ex husband.” She corrected me. She seems to like that, in a mild way. She knows I’m coming on, gets startled, though not angry. Those lovely greenish-blue eyes are watching me close.
She: Smiling all the while, “Is that so? But what do you think of Suman Shanmuggan?”
“Who, ma’am?”
“Suman Shamuggan. The man you want to volunteer to help elect President.”
“Oh, I think he’s wonderful, a wonderful man. Make a great, great President.”
“Do you want to canvass?”
I’m trembling. We are sort of playing around, I think.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She’s grinning a bit now.
“What do you think of Suman’s stand on minimum wage system?”
She’s a real teaser, no doubt about it.
Me: I’m feeling as though I can finally speak my mind to a friend.
That guy is shuffling his papers a few desks away.
“Minimum wage system,” I asked very respectful at first, and polite. Well, even though politics is not my bread and butter, I have my views. “Well, I’d say he wants to get all the lazy people off welfare, all them old coots. Make them work for a change.”
She gives me a funny look again and then another, unreal, a little more interested.
“Well, that’s not exactly what the incumbent President has proposed. You might not want to canvass but there is plenty of other work we need done: office work, hanging pictures.”
Me: “I’m a good worker, ma’am, a real good worker.”
She says, with her cool little smile, “Call me Sienna, that’s my name. If you talk to Tom over there, he’ll assign you to something.”
“If you don’t mind, Sienna, I’d rather work for you.”
“Well, we are all working tonight.”
When I tell her I drive a taxi at night, she lifts her eyebrows at this, asks, “Well, then what is it you exactly want to do?”
“If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’d be mighty pleased if you would go out and have some coffee with me.”
Well so did she. Seem pleased. Real pleased, even smiled, openly. “All right.” Then she seems to be thinking again. “All right. I see you are not just another pretty face. Well I am taking a break at four o’clock and if you are here we will go to the coffee shop at the corner and have some coffee.”
Tom over there didn’t seem too pleased but I was.
“Oh, I appreciate that, Sienna, ma’am. I’ll be here at four o’clock. Exactly.”
“Sienna,” I went on.
“Yes?” She was delighted with me.
“My name is Cheng Juan.”
“Well, thank you, Cheng Juan.”
And after 4pm, I added the following little note in the same book:
“Sienna even nicer than I thought and very well brought up, too. Lives a broad. Sienna wouldn’t tell me much. Said her parents had been cruel to her when she was little. Well, I don’t see how, the way she looks. They must have loved her a lot, though she wouldn’t tell me more. Said it was time she grew up.”
Which all goes to prove I took Sienna to the Mayfair Coffee Shop and had only just returned when I started writing in my book again.
Me: Black coffee and apple pie with melted yellow cheese. I think that was a good selection.
Sienna: Coffee and a fruit salad dish. She could have had anything she wanted.
She told me at first about her work with all the volunteers. Hundreds of them. Said, “The organisational problems are just staggering.”
Me: “I know what you mean. I got the same problem. I just can’t get things organised. Little things, I mean. Like my room, and possessions. I should get one of those signs that say, ‘One of these days I’m going to get organised.’”
Well I guess I ended up grinning at myself and her like that because she matched me with her own grin then and laughed, threw back her head with all that blond soft hair and said, again: “Cheng Juan, you really are not just another pretty face. I never met anybody like you before.”
“I can believe that.” Though I was blushing.
Sienna asked, “Where do you work?”
I pointed into the direction of PHA building and explained how I had this regular job for a while days doing this and that computer server maintenance stuff. Didn’t go into any of the details about the server room and stuff. Why should I?
Why should I reveal that I am just a security guard to ruin my chances with her. No Pinoy girl would fall in love with a Singaporean male who earns lower than her. But I did tell her I never had much to do nights. That I got kinda lonely and that’s when I decided to work nights coz at nights, we do server maintenance so that it doesn’t get disruptive to the other staff who work normal day shift working hours.
That was when I picked up her husband’s phone in one of the bucket seat when I went down to the customer service counter.
“It ain’t good to be lonely,” I told her, “you know”
Sienna says, “After this job, I’m looking forward to being alone for a while after my divorce. Things haven’t been working out well ever since he was demoted from being the post office worker to a financial consultant. That’s why I shouted at him over the phone when you picked it up yesterday.”
Me: “Yeah, well… the forces of globalisation and privatisation of state-owned enterprises have done wrongs to Singaporeans in general and with people like you……” Trailing off, as I might be referring to the influx of foreigners like Sienna.
Sienna asks, “What kind of people?”
“Just people, people, you know, just people.”
Well, you know, again, I didn’t want to go into any of the amazing unreal details. Just stuck with the obvious. Bullshit like that. Didn’t mention that sickening security guard job.
I felt she was pushing me a bit, so I said, “Oh, you see lots of freaky stuff when you work in PHA.”
I wasn’t exactly trying to impress her but it was getting me down being there like that with nothing more to say (a person would never understand, I thought, if I said what was really on my mind).
Sienna cut me short with another question, “What hours do you work?”
I explained how it all came to about seventy hours a week. Sienna (amazed): “You mean you work seventy hours a week as a computer engineer in PHA?”
Me: “Sometimes we work overtime but because we are white collar workers, there is no overtime pay. Sometimes, things can get unpredictable. For example, changing a new server may take 2 hours but the data transfer would take more than 6 hours which means my weekends are burnt. It keeps you busy.”
Sienna: “You know what you remind me of?”’
“What.”
Sienna smiling again. “That song by Springsteen, in 2009, he wrote his first song about a "guy that wears a tie in his album Wrecking Ball". The financial crisis reportedly convinced him it was time to write about the people and forces that brought America to a breaking point to Occupy Movement.”
Well you know, as soon as I heard the word, breaking point, I half shut off on her. Grew a little riled.
Said, “I’m no anti-foreigner or anti-globalisation……”
“Oh,” she said, all wide-eyed. “Well, I didn’t mean that, Cheng Juan, honest. Just the other part…. About the guy that wears a tie…”
Words to that effect. As I recall. Bullshit like that.
Well, so I said, “Who was that you said, again?”
“The singer?”
Told Sienna I didn’t follow music much.
“Bruce,” she said, slowly. “Springsteen.”
I confided to my journal why I went to HMW to buy her that Bruce Springsteen Wrecking Ball record:
“Now that I know her, Sienna,” I wrote, “I can give it to her if we ever go out. A good first meeting. Didn’t like being pushed so much about me. What do I know about her except she is lovely. Real pretty.”
“Such a beauty. Stuff like that. Guess she must just be stringing her husband along. Who am I to her? I always get uncomfortable around a woman after the first few minutes because I am living a lie.”
“I think I talked too much. She was real easy to talk to. In some ways. In others not. I had to lie a little. Anyway, she always got more out of me that I got from her. No fair. Don’t want her to betray me. Ever.
Decided finally I can’t walk around with a broken heart rest of my life over what’s not going to happen with me and some women so I brought her the album. Approx $10. Maybe I’ll take her to a movie. If only I could find out her last name. Must remember to ask her things like that and maybe racial and religious origins.”
In case you don’t know it I’m the sort of person there’s always a crisis moving up I’m not doing too well at. It’s always a case of overwhelming odds, I think, except maybe with Sienna. Lately things were always happening to me in PHA I didn’t know what to do about.
That very same afternoon, the gal who spread her legs open came by again and said, “Hellow Cheng Juan, how are you?”
“I’m fine…”
“Good,” she said. “My name is Myra. Can I suck your cock?”
“Well I don’t know about that.” I found myself asking him, “What did you say your name was?”
“Myra,” she said, “But you haven’t answered my question.”
“Sorry, I don’t think we ever met before.”
“Well, if we had,” she says, handing me a five dollar note, “even if we had, would that matter? I just want a Singapore husband to stay in Singapore a bit longer to prostitute myself.”
My journal reports that on April 27 I called her finally at the office, of course, and she said we could go to the movies together after she got out of work tomorrow, my day off.
Other things would happen too: Like with the tourists. A woman comes to PHA from China and asks me how to go to the PHA Auditorium. Well, I was so upset I didn’t even know where it was. I carried this little blue book but that doesn’t help.
In those days, I was living for nice smiles, but in between shifts, I somehow managed to walk past Suman headquarters for another look at Sienna.
My journal reports that on April 27 I called her finally at the office, of course and she said we could go to the movies together after she got out of work tomorrow, my day off.
On that very same day on the way uptown, a party of three very nice well-dressed men stopped me and one of them was, guess who… the man Sienna is working so hard for, Mr Suman Shammugam himself. Her boss. Her hero.
Well he looked so much more real in person. Sort of a nice-looking fellow. Like a TV commentator. Well, I just had to check the rear view mirror to know just who I was seeing. But my eyes certainly did not deceive me.
The candidate was talking about how to line up delegates from Singapore when I interrupted him.
Said, “Say, aren’t you the candidate, Mr Suman Shammugan?...”
Well, I guess that happens to him all the time with his face as big as life in color all over Singapore but he said, only mildly irritated, “Yes, I am.”
He cleared his throat. “Well,” says I, “I’m one of your biggest supporters. I tell you and everybody that comes into PHA, they should vote for you.”
I can feel his eyes moving from my shoulders to the Singapore Computer Engineering Association badge on my jacket. He’s smart.
Suman says, “This is going to be a crucial race here in Singapore. A tight race with many voters unhappy with globalisation and growing income disparity.”
Me: “I’m sure you will win. Sir. Everyone I know is going to vote for you.”
“In fact,” I tell him, “I was going to put one of your stickers on this jacket, but the company said it was against their policy.”
“Well,” Suman says, “I’ve always respected the opinions of computer engineers.”
So now he stopped relating to his other friends and seems interested in me. “Tell me, what single thing would you want the next President of the country to do most?”
I told him just like I told Sienna: “Reduce the widening income gap. Improve our unions. Robin Hood style – tax the rich and give to the poor.” Words to that effect.
“It’s filled with filthy greed,” I told him. Words to that effect. “Greed is like an open wound. It’s too open, it can get infected. We need a President that would clean up and flush out the greedy pigs in every organisation.”
I figured he was not some professional bullshitter but a real person, a real man, if Sienna liked him so much. And he looked OK to me, too, as I say, but I guess he couldn’t help but be a little vague. Said something like “I know just what you mean”
His friends were looking more upset than he.
Suman said, “It’s not going to be easy. Look at Sweden, their union is so strong that each employee is drawing too high a salary until the employers cannot fire them or reduce their income. In the end, this affected the fresh graduates from Sweden universities who can’t even find jobs after graduation. We are going to have radical changes but not so soon.”
Me: “Damned straight.”
Afterwards, I felt lonely again.
Felt a little let down.
Well I mean I had this Wrecking Ball Springsteen CD for Sienna and all gift wrapped by my side and I was going to be with her in just a while and I knew I couldn’t breathe a word about that to the Mr Suman and there he went all slim, neat, and trim from the shoulders down, up these steps, through the glittery entrance to the Plaza.
Well, I just had to go right home and clean up because I had to let Sienna see me as a computer engineer and not as a security guard.
The rest is history. My journal records: She was smartly dressed when I went to see her tonight all blue. I can’t describe the exact outfit but it was neat. For sure. Sienna seemed very glad to see me too. We are walking down.
The big moment: I give Sienna her CD and seems very very please. It was a limited edition Bruce Springsteen. It had one more extra bonus track titled “Calling You”.
Says, “Terrific. I told you you weren’t just another pretty……….”
“Face,” I interrupt as we walk.
“Really, you didn’t have to spend your money.”
Well, she saw the seal on the album hadn’t been broken and said, “CJ, you haven’t even played this.”
Well I lied to her, my player was broke but assured her the album was just fine.
Sienna was pointing to the CD. “So you haven’t even heard this song yet?”
“No.” I took a chance on Sienna then, said, “I thought maybe you could play it for me on your player later.”
Well it was the wrongest thing to say. I know that now. Her face just turned off on me. She looked really worried, bit her lower lip and made a little laugh.
Well I asked could I carry the CD for her and then I turned her on the corner from Toa Payoh to ERA Centre. Eng Wah Cinemas was showing Lost Weekend, a revival. We went next door where they advertised in big letters, “Swedish Marriage Manual,” because I wanted her to know that I was a serious person. Not just in this for kicks. I said, “You stay here and l’ll buy the tickets.”
She actually started pulling on my hand, then my elbow: “What are you doing?” Unreal again, the look on her face.
“Buying a couple of tickets.”
“But,” she sputtered, “these are movies that normal people go to.”
“No,” I tried to explain, “These are the kind that couples go to. They are not like some others. All kinds of couples go all the time.”
I wanted her to follow me. I wanted her inside that movie theatre with me. Wanted her to see with me.
Sienna wasn’t buying any of that. “CJ,” she said, “these aren’t the kind of movies normal people go to.”
“Well, mostly….”
Again, that look. She slapped her brow with one hand, weakly, “My God!”
Well it was very crowded there with the usual freaks and degnerates staring at us when she started walking away back toward the corner of the street and Sienna started pulling me by the elbow to another movie poster, “We can go to this movie if you’d like. I don’t care. There’s plenty of movies around here. I haven’t seen this yet.” She pointed to Fifty Shades of Grey. “I’m sure this one is all good.”
Sienna looked so filthy when she said that. She seemed determined to watch Fifty Shades of Grey, stamping her foot and looking at me very grimly, her lips tight: No, CJ, you are a sweet guy and all that but I need something dirty.’
“You mean,” I asked, feeling embarrassed in front of all those people, “You wanna watch something porno?”
Sienna seemed practically in tears, “Yes.”
We sat in the back row in the movie theatre. The whole stretch belonged to us as those were unpopular seats. They were in a corner and you can’t see the full screen without craning your neck out a bit.
Ten minutes after the start credits started rolling, she had put her hand on my crotch again but I battered it away, maybe harder than I should of because she took it up her mouth as if to suck on the fingers, and I got real distraught then, said, “Sienna, I don’t need this now.”
Sienna wouldn’t stop trying. Kept coming on. “You can’t make it can you? I can help you. Let me help you.”
Then she brought her head over me as if to go down on me and it was like this rag had fallen right across my lap. I jumped away from her. I swore the patrons in the row before us could hear our conversation.
My fly is still open. You can see the white of my underwear showing though, kind of dirty gray but I don’t let my tiny cock be exposed yet. Not yet. I don’t like certain people to get that close. Didn’t like her pulling all those tricks on me.
Said, “Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck you!”
Because you see, I was very angry at her for pulling those tricks on me when I was at the movie.
She surrendered and stopped groping me for a minute. A moment later, I flicked back to the other view to find Sienna's legs even further apart and stroking her inner thighs, teasing a finger along her labia about ten minutes into the movie.
The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it. It’s fun to challenge yourself to not make any noise while having sex.
There were two instances in which people walked by the aisles between which Sienna was rubbing me. It was like a game — having to frantically put our clothes back on and immediately pretending to be interested in the movie while panting and giggling hysterically.
"Please do," pleaded Sienna. "Jesus, I've never cummed so hard before." Every now and then as a spasm of pleasure passed through her, her grip would tighten and move up her legs again.
"Is it OK to play with your cock?" asked Sienna somewhat nervously.
Sienna gasped and flinched again, as obviously her cunt was again entered by some part of my hands. “This is how you should treat me in future when I am your wife. I want a Singapore citizenship soon.” She moaned.
It was clear now that Sienna was trying to let her legs part, desperate to increase the contact between genitals. She forced my hand onto her pussy and dragged it towards her wet vulva.
"Oh fuck, I shouldn't be doing this. Gees, fuck, …aaah." I continued to gently probe back and forth at the entrance to her vagina.
She began to give me a massage on my palm and fingers, which I enjoyed. Sienna started moving her hands down my body. I was kind of shock as I thought she was clean. But this time, I did not stop her.
My tiny cock bounced up against my abdomen with a little "thwack".
The music soundtrack had long since stopped, allowing me to hear not only Sienna's moans.
"Come on baby. That's it, let it go." I whispered. “Let go of your hands on me. I don’t wanna let you see my cock yet.”
“Why? Had enough massage for one day? Or yours too tiny" she cheekily enquired. For a second there, I thought she had already felt my micro penis through my underwear. “Let’s get married next week after I divorce my husband.”
The movie ended but I was in abysmal misery after that. Apparently, the storyline of Fifty Shades of Grey was about a sadistic relationship between a college graduate from America, Anastasia Yue, and a young business magnate, Christian Seubert. Anastasia would sleep with Christian to get that Swiss citizenship while Christian wants his shot to deflower a virgin like Anastasia.
As I stomped down the street in a fury, I obsessed about Sienna in voice-over, as if the voice had leaped ahead of the action, as if he were already writing in his diary. “I see now that she’s like the other Pinoys. Cold and distant. Many foreigners are like that, women for sure. They are like a union fighting against us.” That’s a bombshell in appraisal. I am angry not just at Sienna but at women in general. I will unconsciously sabotage his relationship with Sienna later on by giving her the cold shoulder so that she would reject him like all the rest.
After that I spent a lot more time at home writing. I was on a real slide down. I tried everything. Vitamins. Aspirings, Booze. I developed a special liking for apricot brandy because you couldn’t taste the bitterness so much. Well you know, I spent a lot of time just sitting about and then hanging out on Facebook and check out “Sienna Macapagal-Arroyo”.
Highlighted and selected some text on her comments on her Facebook wall. Went to Google Translate and pasted it in the box. A rough translation of her Pinoy blog post read: "It's so annoying to have gangster Singapore uncles stare at you when you bump into them. There are more dogs than humans here in Singapore including my no good ex Poh Quee."
One day was no different from the next. I watch Poh Quee’s facebook and the stuff that he put on her wall, sleep a little, scribble in the journal.
It’s a fact that our elite Ministers will never be able to understand the life of the peasants!
Singapore is increasingly populated by two groups of people: the Hawker and the Banker. I am the Hawker who has seen my salary stagnate and deteriorate and the Banker get fatter and fatter in bonuses.
From what I could tell on TV, Suman was doing well because he was being interviewed all the time and once or twice. I caught glimpse of Sienna too, at some rally, cheering up the crowds for him, just like a little girl beaming up at her father as he spoke on anti-foreigner sentiments.
He said most Singaporeans understand the need for immigration and are comfortable with diversity, but feel the competition on space, jobs, public housing, transport and opportunities.
He said that the government is already addressing these issues by increasing the supply of flats and enhancing the public transport infrastructure.
However, he pointed out that there is still a small group of Singaporeans taking a negative view on foreigners, and they are currently dominating public discourse. He said the majority of Singaporeans should speak out against such views when they do not agree with them.
He said, “Treat others like how we would like to be treated. Although we may not agree with the number of foreigners in Singapore, we should still treat another human being like a human being.” Well, that would get me so angry. I thought that I could had that admiration, all that love and all the attention.
She tried calling me. Pleading with me. I would no longer come to the phone. I knew it was my fault, knew I should have seen the true colors of Sienna and leading her on. But something stuck in me, a feeling that it all might have been different if she wasn’t a Pinoy or facing a threat that her dependant’s pass may be cancelled once Poh Quee divorced her.
I felt it was never too late to explain. That she saw me wrongly as just a convenient excuse to hook up to any Singaporean male. I really was misunderstood.
She made one last attempt to see me at PHA. I hadn’t slept in days when I walked in about noon time on a blinding hot day.
Sienna was standing near the rear of the office but when I saw her, I ducked from sight. Then Morny stepped in and asked her what department she was going to. She pointed to the organisation chart up there, presumably the 20th level which is the Information Security Department and after that Morny shook his index finger at her and telling her that the level was out of bounds to members of the public.
Well, I quieted down I guess. I realized then how much she was like the others, so cold and distant. How many people are just like that.
I looked into your Pinoy dreams one night and they were full of dollar signs. They were full of people getting by on their Mercedes, their two maids, their country club membership or Singapore citizenship. Getting by and not living. Getting but not achieving. Buying and selling but not giving.
You like to hold on to this idea of being this clean, perfect Pinoy when really it’s the dirt that makes you who you are.
I guess I gave up on myself then. Gave up even on my security guard rounds. I just wasn’t making it at all. The week of the rank-and-file picnic, I slept all day and worked only nights, got stopped by a foreign prostitute asking for directions. When I said I was off duty, she got mean with me. “You mean you don’t know?”
“No, I am off duty.”
“But how come you are wearing the uniform and the badge?”
I took off the badge pinned on my pocket. Pointed to the area. “See it was off… all the time…”
“Like hell it was.”
“Hell it wasn’t.” She cursed.
So disagreeable. The way it was I thought, seems like I don’t have a friend in the world. Everything stunk suddenly. The dinge they just seemed to know when I was down and out and the whoe black world started singing the blues at me.
Well I can also remember this young gal student or hooker from China and she says in her accent: “I bleed a lot from my cradle. Doctor said it was fireballs from my uterus.”
Shit, and I thought I had troubles.
The people you sometimes meet along. You feel so helpless to do anything for anybody and all those young couples coming out of the bars really just turn you off inside out.
Well I was still all alone again by myself, naturally. A loner. Words to that effect. Bored stupid most of the time. To say the least. One night late I went to Jurong Point Shoppin Centre to look up Poh Quee.
"Ya see that woman there?"
"Yeah."
The dude's really chattering like he's swallowing pills too big for his throat. "That's my wife, gulp, but it ain't my wife soon. She left me a month ago, gulp, it took me this long to find out about her"
I turned around to look at him. He was real sick-looking, white with big hollow eyes, crazy man.
By now, I'd saved a couple thousand dollars that I wore in a money belt about my waist. I felt heavy and sluggish a lot of time. Lowly fat. A real thug. Well nobody expects a security guard to be Tom Cruise.
I can remember the day that I had to go to Toa Payoh to meet this friend I found on Facebook. Andy. I was on aspirins that day out of the giant econo-size bottle three and four at a time plopped in my mouth and chewed like chicklets. My teeth.
They came riding over in an off duty taxi. Andy, a nice-looking guy about twenty-nine: a dark pin-striped suit, white shirt, floral tie, long modish hair.
We went into a cab to a kind of hotel, Hotel 81, a little run down but not, you know skid row and then followed Andy to his room. It was just then as we are going through all these corridors in the hotel and I am feeling pretty cranky from lack of sleep and maybe reds a little groggy, a speed hangover, you know, that I began to become aware again of this dream I was in. Call it the dream-of-almost-certain-death.
In Andy's hotel room, everything is barren, clean. A bed a bureau, little picture of the Blue Boy on the wall no signs anyone real lives here. No hot plates.
When Andy locked the front door behind him, he walked over and unlocked the one closet in the room, pulled out these two light blue Samsonite cases - the kind you can drive a truck over.
Said, "It's all out of Singapore stuff, clean, brand new and top quality."
He placed the cases on this freshly made white bed-spread and they looked heavy, many, bounced a little, made the springs sigh. They were equipped with special locks which he quickly flipped open and then he lifted the lids and all I saw stacked in gray packing foam were row on row of brand new hand guns.
Well, I knew what I wanted. A.44 Magnum but Andy said, "That's an expensive gun."
"I got money."
Andy looked me over and sort of nodded and he slid out this leather pouch all soft like something you put jewels inside and he zipped it open and there was this .44 Magnum. Holding it like some precious treasure. Just took the edge of his fingertips and ran them along all that heavy blue shiny metal. A small cannon. Unreal.
"The .44 Magnum." He whistled. "It's a monster. Could stop a car - pull a bullet right into the block. A premium, high resale gun. Three hundred seventy four bucks - that's only a hundred twenty-five over list. He was like some salesman showing off the fall line, fast talking, a hustler, the type who sold lottery tickets in a high schoool. He really seemed proud of his goods and I had to admit, that was a monster, a mother.
I reached out to hold the gun like out of my dreams but Andy drew back from me. Said, "I could sell this gun for five hundred today 0 but I just deal high quality goods to high quality people."
He was looking me over very carefully again. Said, "Now this may be a little big for practical use, in which case I would recommend the .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Fine solid gun. Snubbed nosed. Otherwise the same as the service revolver.
Now that will stop anything that moves and it's handy, flexible. The Magnum, you know, that's only if you want to splatter it against the wall. Worth every dime of it."
He hefted out of this shiny silvery pistol like in the detective stories. Said, "I'll throw in a holster for another thirty bucks."
Andy let me hold the gun and I hefted it this way and that, pointing it out the window toward the bank and then citing along the eyes of Blue Boy on the wall. Andy was smiling as he watched me. He said, "Some of these guns are like toys but with a Smith and Weston man you could hit somebody over the head with it and it will still come back dead on. Nothing beats quality."
I was clicking back the safety as I drew it from my belt and Andy watched me and then he said, "You interested in an automatic?"
I told him no. I would take just these, the Magnum and the .38.
Andy seemed very pleased with me now. Said, “You can’t carry it around even with a permit”
Well I knew what he meant but I wanted to go through that open door, wanted to touch the trigger. I asked if he knew of a good firing range in the neighbourhood.
“Oh sure, here, take this card,” Andy said, handing me a small embossed white business card. “You go to this place and give them the card. They will charge you but there won’t be a hassle.”
Well, so then I was pulling out my roll and counting off seven brand new hundred-dollar bills, just like that, seven of them, seven big ones and Andy watched me and seemed pleased with himself and with me and the light in the ceiling fixture flickered a little and turned waxy orange overhead and I heard him ask, “Say, you must have been a computer engineer before. Couldn’t help but notice your jacket.”
Well I was started, managed to say, “Huh”.
“HP Hewlett Packard.” Andy said. “I saw it on your jacket I was formerly a computer engineer too.”
I just handed Andy that stack of bills and he counted them and crinked them and then counted them again. And then looked at me waiting for me to say more.
“Yeah, I finally said, “One non renewal of contract and then out I went.”
Andy wet the top of his finger and counted again. As he counted, he let out a few lines as if he had rehearsed them all along.
“Computer engineering and software IT are a sunset industry in Singapore. If someone wants to stay in this industry, better work in public sector or they will end up like me as a criminal. If possible, those working in the IT field in private sector should make their exit before hitting 40 years of age and go into lecturing, on any executive jobs in public sector or even in the social services sector where there are more Singaporeans.”
Then he pocketed my money and for a second, I felt the loss, heard myself saying in a loud voice, “They would never get me to go back. Never. They have to shoot me first.”
Well then I realized I was just talking. Talking too much. I mean what was the point? I asked Andy if he had anything to carry the stuff in and he found me a little blue nylon gym bag from under the bed and dumped the stuff out and wrapped the guns into an old sheet and put them in a bag and zipped it oup and handed it to me. All the while he was doing this, he seemed a little scared f me, I thought, like I said a little too much for him just then. The light seemed very bright in my eyes and when I took the gun bag in my hand, there was a spark where my fingers touched the material. Andy looked away to close up his suitcases and look them again and stick them back in the closet. I started out the door. “Wait a second, CJ,” he said. “I will walk you out.”
From that day on, it was practically all dreams for me. Day after day of getting organised. Fixing up the apartment: charts, pictures, newspaper clippings and maps. There was this thing that I had to do and I had to do it right. It was my whole life, you might say. To compensate for my weakness from being wounded and the scars I did twenty, thirty, forty push-ups a day. Too much sitting around had ruined my body. I had to get in shape. I practiced Yoga too and resistance to pain and suffering. I would try to pass my arm through the flame of the gas burner without flinching a muscle, for instance, on the theory that total organisation was necessary and every muscle must be tight to be effective.
At that range, Andy told me about I always got down to business in a hurry, learned how to stand rock solid with that Magnum at an arm’s length. My body would shudder and shake, my arm rippling back and I’d be sprung bolt upright from the recoil but I held my position, firing as quickly as I could round after round on the big Magnum.
Well it seemed you know that there was this…. There was this thing that I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace, but my body fought me always. It just wouldn’t work hard enough. Wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t shit. Wouldn’t eat. I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill. Wrote all night long in this journal, making calculations, and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of the gun. Some nights I would just stay up watching TV with the Magnum resting on my lap. It was like the guns were new arms for me, they had to be that if it was going to work.
One show I watched a lot in those days was “Rock Time,” the late afternoon local teeny-bopper dance show. Those kids would be bopping and dance and the camera would zoom in on your firm young breasts.
Watching that show I couldn’t feel my face anymore. It had become granite. I was like stone. What was the world doing out there to me in here? Why did assholes like that get all the beautiful young chicks?
After the show, I went to a drink stall and was disappointed with how the stall assistant treated her customers, and that the stall used to provide good service.
I was at Rochor Original Beancurd. I bought some food and I requested to pay for the takeaway beancurds at the same time. Upon seeing the staff packing the beancurds I wanted to take away, I told her we will be collecting those later, and the rest was for eating here.
She got a bit unhappy, threw the packed soyabean drink into the basin on the floor and then raised her voice saying that she will leave the takeaway beancurds in the fridge.
Seeing her rolling her eyes and her unhappy tone, I was displeased and asked for her name. She rebutted, 'you have no right to know'.
Then out of curiosity (and since I’ve never seen her working here before and with such bad service), I asked how long had she been working there.
She rebutted, 'Two years! Who are you? What right do you have to ask? You Singaporeans think you are so great here and bullying us! I can work for one more year and buy one big house in China. You? You work for 30 years in Singapore and you still can only buy one fucking pigeonhole! Don’t think you are so high and mighty!”
Singapore has tried to attract foreign talent and foreigners while at the same time encourage native Singaporeans to reproduce. However, 2 polarising scenarios have occurred - foreigners bad-mouthing Singaporeans and Singaporeans bad-mouthing foreigners.
And yet, Singapore politicians keeps encouraging this to take place by bring these 2 groups who hate each other together.
If this is America's Funniest Home Video, this is a very funny joke. How sick is it?
Pretty soon, I started taking the pistol with me wherever I went. It was like having an insurance policy. I started parking near the XingPost HQ at night. I was looking for Poh Quee, I guess. Not to harm him but to show him I was still around. Still there. Even more so. There were always a few people working late at nights. He was probably out with someone else. That sign in the window read: “ezy Cash in 10 minutes” It comes to a man at such times when he is like that with such equipment on him that his real safety, if he wishes to preserve himself as he is, is in the dangerous places. That he must do what is he is afraid of doing sometimes.
I guess I really wanted to know what would happen if I ever had to use one of my pieces. To make that dream somehow visible for me.
You see I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys. I thought I couldn’t fail otherwise. I had just as good brains education-wise, had the guts, was getting to be a sharpshooter a very good shot. It was all a matter of how real I could stay for how long. I thought some guys let their problems get the better of them.
I thought a guy was better off keeping his problems to himself, under the circumstances, because everybody has problems, don’t they? No use projecting them onto the whole human race. You just do what you have to. Go bam.
What with me it was a little bit this unreality thing. The feeling of it I mean. To go down in history I needed to be real every minute of the day I could inside the dream of night. Well it was in driving, cruising like that, I guess, that I was able to keep in touch with myself that way.
Like I was there inside the control room while life went on and on outside. And I knew I had only to take that piece in my hand and punch a really big hole in the glass separating all of us. To be somebody in this world. Really go down into history.
On the streets people looked so out of it. Raw face like steamed pork. The whores, scam artists, foreigners. World without end amen.
All that night as I went back to the control room I thought to myself that man in his pathetic outfit and his pale face and that there was nothing any decent person could do about it. That was just part of the condition of life. I thought it was an outrage that he should be such a victim of foreigners like that and I let his namecard just lie there on the seat next to me until I clocked in for the midnight shift and then you know I took the namecard and stuffed it into my jacket pocket and signed in.
That night I just couldn’t sleep at all. I had so much work to do. The idea that had been growing in my brain for some time now took entire hold of me. I had collected all the material I could find on Suman’s itinerary from Airport to the Hotel and about the city. I knew the allocation of secret agents personnel from clippings in the papers and was compiling a kind of action or game plan. Words to that effect.
The only solution seemed to lie in true force. After I memorised Suman’s route, I strapped on the empty holster of the.44 and practiced late into the night at drawing and squeezing off imaginary rounds. I had devised this system of metal gliders along my inner forearm so that the .44 could rest hidden behind the upper forearm until a spring near the elbow was activated. I had also figured a way to strap a knife to my calf with a slit cut in my jeans so that the knife could be pulled out easily. The problem was concealment. The guns bulged on me everywhere. I looked bulky and armored. It was only by wearing two shirts, a sweater and a jacket that I was able to obscure the location of all my weapons but then I resembled some hunter bundled up against the arctic winter and the weather was getting very warm outside. The rest of that evening, I sat at the table dumb-dumbing forty-four bullets, scraping Xs across their heads. I had a big poster of Suman’s head in the room and I would sight at him through the scope of the .38. At last all bundled up in my shirts and sweater, my jacket and guns, I fell out on the mattress into my half-sleep, like a big furry animal drifting into his own world. Last thing I remember is writing in this diary: Listen you screwhead. There is a man who stood up against the cunts, the digs, filth, the greed and extreme capitalism
Capitalism and market competition, in extreme and especially as it is advocated in Singapore, means to each his own. You do well, you enjoy your good life (even to the extreme). If you don't do well, that's too bad. Its your own fate or fault.
Today we are so much richer - one of the richest country by per capita income. But I am not sure if the SENSE OF UNITY, SENSE OF PURPOSE & NATIONAL TEAM SPIRIT between the people and the Government have all become stronger. Not everyone is doing as well. Not everyone earns as much as the per capita income number. But property prices had skyrocketed.
Naturally with one of the highest income in the world, our cost of living here is also one of the highest. Everyone understand this.
About that time, sometimes late at night, I began to frequent this all-night deli in Novena for snacks when the streets were relatively deserted. Well this one particular night I had just gone over to the fridge to get a pint of fruity alchohol when I hear a very nasty low voice talking to the lady cashier and I turned around the counter and saw one Pinoy man at the automated teller machine. The dudes and the cashier hadn’t noticed me yet.
Cashier said, “Hey, dude! I was here first. Stop trying to cut the queue!”
Pinoy Said, “Dear…. You have been at the ATM for more than five minutes. Give it up will you! If you want do more transactions, go back to the end of the queue!”
Cashier said, “But who gives you the right to push me? Can’t you just ask nicely?”
Pinoy Said, “I don’t give a shit to a lady who can’t even remember her own password on her ATM card!” One of them used his forearm to block her access to the ATM.
With my pint of milk in hand, I stepped closer towards them. One of them stepped on my feet in the midst of melee.
“Watch it dude. I am holding a glass bottle. Don’t you have manners talking to a lady? A Singaporean?”
Surprised, he turned towards me and said, “Go back to home and fuck his own mother some more. Because that’s where you come from and you miss her cunt hole.”
But I refused to take no for an answer.
I confronted the Pinoy and berates him for ‘being like all the others – foreign fuckers’.
I socked him. Socked him hard on his cheekbone. He fell sideways and crashed into a can of coke. Knocked him out for a couple of seconds.
I instantly drop into a menancing karate crouch. The intensity of my rage raised. I am still trying to hold myself together. It’s like watching someone trying to cork an exploding bottle but I am unable to contain it myself.
Well, I couldn’t feel anything else except the trembling in my hand as the grits came tumbling down and then the lady cashier sort of came apart too and screamed. Sort of leaned or fell across the cashier counter as she scrambled for her own baseball bat in her hand.
When I turned to go, I saw her pick up the phone to dial the police. I waved a finger towards her and warned her not to dial, “The punch is for all Singapore citizens who stood up to the injustices”
He’s also smiling in a shit-eating grin mixed with just a hint of predatory bared teeth as he reaches for the exit door. Realising that I am seriously disturbed, the cashier tries to humour him and even offering him a drink for the ‘angry little Singapore man’.
I know I am being humoured and it pisses me off.
As the saying goes, when a man has taken blood, once a man has taken blood like that, there is a definite dent in his life and it isn’t anymore the same as it was. Time has a different feeling. And it just blends one minute into the next. The film over life seems to slide back and forth so that one minute you are inside this horny dream, all wild and hot with blood and the next it is like some sort of soap opera.
I told myself that one day, someone would clean up the city. “This is my home and I should have priority in the queue. This city is like an open sewer and someday, I will flush it down the fucking toilet.”
I stayed home more and more after the killing. My place became a cave to hide in. I cleaned and recleaned the Magnum. Watched TV. Ate out of jars. To be silent and careful and exact so that I might go down in history too. I don’t know it was like nothing mattered to me anymore except to do what I had to do and that would take time.
It was boring a lotta the time but it didn’t seem that way to me then. I didn’t know whether I knew what it was to be bored. There was this game I used to play when I watched TV. I would be wearing all my guns and I’d be watching the TV with my feet up on that crate.
And as the people in the little box hussled each other, I would sort of take the heel of my boots and sort of rock that crate slowly back and forth to see how far it would tip over before falling. It was all a question of balance, I guess, a teeter tottering kind of thing. This beautiful young man would be talking to the beautiful young woman earnestly about their relationship and how she had hurt him, maybe and my heels would be on the melon crate rocking it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, everytime just a little bit more, until one day, the inevitable happened and the crate tipped backward and that TV went crashing to the floor.
And there was a short smelly flash and everything turned white like a cloud and the box was all jagged and broken glass. Dead knobs That image had fled, “Damn,” I said to myself, “damn.” I said to myself “Damn, damn.”
That image had fled. There wasn’t even anything to watch on TV anymore.
Recently, I read some news online that a husband passed his wife HPV and had cervical cancer. It got me thinking about how it’s like to be be a HPV carrier and why, for some of us, it’s never easy and why some of us choose to ‘let it go’ and eventually put ourselves in a position where we have unprotected sex.
The cute thing was that the husband and me shared something in common. We both had micropenises or some say buried penises.
1 out of every 200 men is born with what’s medically known as ‘micro-penis’.
I was born with a condition called micropenis which means my dick is smaller than 0.5 inch erect - a very small size. I'm 37 years old now, so I can't expect my penis to grow for me even a few mm. My penis is also bent severely to the left when erect, which I understand to be the Pelagius disease.
I had always wondered why I never did fall in love or go into a relationship when I was in secondary school when I’ve heard of the stories of so many others meeting their first love when they were in school. What was I missing? Was I not good enough? For a long time after school, I kept on with the idea that I wasn’t good enough a person. Until recently when I reflected on my time in school did I realize I had many missed opportunities!
Desperately, I asked one of my closest friends for advice - they advised me to go to a penis building club, at least they said it was a penis building club - truly it was a swimming club, and I was forced to hit the showers, only to face ridicule and shame, due to my little man.
As a penultimate resort, I decided to try penis building pills, and go in for surgery that could straighten my embarrasingly bent penis, but, the pills made no difference, and I could not afford the surgery. I have also taken herbal teas and remedies known for increasing penis size, only to be let down again.
In my first year of school, a girl had made a hand sign – I love you – with his thumb, index and last fingers to form, “I”, “L” and “Y”. Then I didn’t realize what it meant. I kept doing the same hand sign back at her, oblivious to his hints.
In my second year, a gal would always come to me in the Student Councillor’s Room and sat on my laps. She had always said how he was curious as to how it felt to be sitting on someone else. We had a close relationship for a while but I didn’t think too much about it. I would stay back after school in my third year to wait for her (she was in his second year and in the afternoon class and I was in the morning class).
When the discipline mistress decided to take her off being a student councillor because her closeness with me became a point of discomfort for her and some of the teachers who were teachers assigned to manage the student councillors, I was there to comfort her. I knew then why they did it but didn’t quite understand why they needed to – I hadn’t realized that the closeness that two people have could become a point of contention for people.
There were one or two other missed opportunities but I never had the awareness to realize what they were! And I held on to the notion that sex with someone else I loved was all about kissing and hugging that person you love – the intimacy. That was until I was 15!
While on the way back home after an art class, at the back of the bus, a man who was possibly around 40 years or so came and sat next to me, at the back row of the bus. I was perplexed, as the rest of the bus was quite empty. After a short while, he started asking about how my parents were and reminded me that I should take care of them. This man was quite thoughtful, I thought to myself! Was he here by some association to teach me how to respect my parents? And then the conversation veered towards something a little more sinister.
“Do you play?” he asked.
“Well, I do, yes – games, right?”
“I mean, do you play with yourself?” he ventured further.
“Oh!... erm… well… yes…” I wasn’t quite sure where this was going.
“Do you want to play together?”
That got me a bit curious, and I agreed. When the bus stopped at the bus interchange, he took me to the toilet at the Ang Mo Kio Bus Interchange, where the toilet at the old interchange used to have stories of the sexual activities of other men at the toilet scribbled at the back of the door. I would sometimes go to the toilet to read the stories inside the largest cubicle at the back of the toilet.
That day, I was in that cubicle. Uncle-with-a-social-conscience-who-wanted-to-use-being-filial-to-my-parents-to-get-into-my-pants pulled my pants down and did what he wanted to do with his mouth. I showed him my 3 inches or smaller in erect size. Very puny and pathetic looking.
He laughed, Like a maniacal hyena! “Dude, do you need some help finding your micro penis in order to take a piss?” He then took his out and showed me his 12 inches.
Initially, he said he had loved me dearly, and, I can assure you are the best I will ever find, he was just scared of my penis and scared it may damage his reputation if anyone found out.
Once the deed was called off, I ran out of the toilet. I remembered thinking to myself, when he took his first dip – Woah, you mean mine is so short?!
So, there goes my romantic idealism of lovemaking and what the kissing and hugging it would entail.
Morny had asked me, “The thing is I am worried about, what if a woman meet a bad guy, and he decides to infect a wife with HPV?”
Morny at that time was pissing in the men’s urinal. I was washing my hands after a meal and rinsing my mouth when he broached the subject. Based on the reflection in the mirror, he had a very long foreskin and his piss parlayed into split directions due to the crumpled skin.
“I don’t know. Why you ask?” I told him while bending down in the basin trough to splash some cold water on my face.
“Coz that time, when I tried to fuck that prostitute, she told me to use a alcohol swop to clean the tip of my penis as she said that another hooker got cold sores on her mouth after blowing another customer.”
I said, “Well, it’s better that you realize early, rather than if you had found out later through her.”
“Perhaps that’s the way for you to find out – by dating more people and seeing if they get cold sores after that.”
That night, I clicked Human papillomavirus (HPV). It is a virus from the papillomavirus family that is capable of infecting humans. Cancers of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, oropharynx and anus. This process usually takes 5 years, providing many opportunities for detection and treatment of the pre-cancerous lesion. 37% of 582 Mexican army recruits positive for high risk HPV. They were told not to wash their genitals for 12 hours before sampling.
Uncut are left with all pitfalls of that tiny flap of skin.
All penises have a unique smell. And smegma (the white cheesy stuff that appears from nowhere under our foreskin) is meant to be there. But to get smelling cheesy, you do not wash under your foreskin every day, mix it with warm milk, a bit of cheap apricot brandy to marinate into that area and leave it unwashed to incubate for more than 2 days. The sugar and the proteins in the milk and brandy will be a great playground for HPV.
I have no clear recollection of the days that followed. I had gotten into the habit of tracking down every single Suman rally. Making an appearance there. It was just important to me to see the candidate in action. If I was to go down in history I had to make an appropriate plan.
Looking back I don’t know whether I got to certain places on my own or because I arranged to take a fare there. Can’t even recall any of the words Suman said those days. I can remember the city, though feeling very much like a cage. Doors everywhere. You squirm around to get what you needed. Needed to be on the scene with Suman.
I walked on, calmly watching him drop. There seemed no way of knowing the expression on the man’s face except to note those of the pedestrains on the busy street. The people in cars. The people sitting in the plazas near fountains or coming out of bars.
People seemed so hard and clear, as if they all had purposes to lose themselves in, all those determined city striders they seemed stamped against the building fronts like pressed tin.
The man high up momentarily waded in the air and moments later, I thought I heard his screams as conversations of shoppers drifted back at me to the din of traffic horns from the various arcades.
Well I was feeling pretty shakey, I guess, and that same afternoon in Queens there was this rally for Suman in the parking lot of a supermarket. Everything all dressed in red, white and blue bunting.
Maybe five hundred people milling about. Music on loudspeakers. I had gotten so I could recognise the secret service men from their metallic gray suits, their sunglasses and big linebacker physiques and I knew hot to position myself so as to stay always out of notice. Especially when I was carrying hardware.
I got there just as a whole bunch of local political types and some of the Suman workers were being seated on the platform and I saw Sienna and she was talking to another worker. Looked beautiful as ever. You better believe it. Well as I say, I was trying to be inconspicuous as hell but that Tom looked up for a moment to his left and then back down into his clipboard and then he seemed to look my way again. Watching me sort of very closely and I didn’t dare to hide. After a moment, I saw him go over to Sienna and point my way. They started whispering together, I could imagine what they were saying. I saw Sienna and she started salivating.
I was all in a sweat in this bulky, bulged out army jacket with my hardware. I almost bumped right into this secret service guy. Better I thought to brazen it out, if I could hardware and all.
“Oh say, pardon me,” very boyish, “are you a secret service man?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I have seen a lot of suspicious-looking people around here.”
The agent gave me this very chilly look for a moment and then he asks, “Who?”
“Oh, lots. I don’t know where they all are now, there used to be one standing over there.” And I pointed over to where I’d been.
He followed me with this look… actually followed the tip of my finger for a second and then he was staring at me hard and I just had to improvise fast. “Is it hard to get to be an agent?”
“Why?”
“Well I kind of thought I might make a good one,” I said, “Because I am observant.”
The agent was getting interested in me now in his sly way. “Oh?” He was looking at me hard and cold.
I used to be in army as a sniper.
Said, “Listen mister, if you just give me your name, I will send you the information on how to apply to the organisation.”
Thinking of what to do next. Said, “You would, uh?”
He took out his notebook and said, “Oh, sure.”
There would be eight more rallies next week. My time was coming. One way or the other.
“The name is Tan Cheng Juan. That’s with a K. I live in Blk 10, Lor 7 Toa Payoh Level 9 Unit 33.”
“Sure. We will send you all the stuff.”
Like I recalled how I used to say as a kid, someday I am going to do something and nobody is going to stop me. Ever. I felt that I could, if only I dared to, because there was nobody who dared to stop me not even the secret service agent.
Well, it was in the next couple of days that I started going to Xingpost again. I thought I might see that man again. Something about his look made me think he would help me if I could help him. Something about a friend in need. It didn’t take me too long to find him.
We had a typical date, dinner and a movie, but this time the sexual tension was thick enough to eat with a spoon.
We were at a local pizza parlor, and it was packed full of people! There was a huge lineup to order and the lady working at the cash register looked tired and unhappy with the current state of the restaurant. When we approached the cash register, I simply asked the lady how she was doing.
In a quiet, defeated voice, she said, ‘Okay’. At this point, I almost got ahead of myself, and forgot to take the time to listen carefully for her response, and interpret her energy level.
The laws of attraction would believe that you would attract to you those people that are similar to you in nature. Negative thinking would usually attract me to people like that defeated cashier counter lady.
In addition, you will be repelled away from those professionals that are fundamentally different from you. Just like Sienna and me.
After she responded with the answer of, ‘Okay’ to my question, I took a few seconds, looked at her and said, ‘That is good to hear.’ I didn’t just say this, but I meant it. She could tell that I meant it as well.
“A wastrel old man” that’s what Sienna calls Poh Quee during our conversation and dangles a $5000 cash cheque in front of me, asking me to consider her indecent proposal.
My eyes are stone cold and his body is so tight with anger that he looks like metal wind-up toy.
While the money is tempting, I am horrified at Sienna’s utter lack of humanity and full of shame but doesn’t back off from my rescue mission.
Sienna, for a moment, being impatient and all that gets annoyed. A manic smile contorting her face.
“Hey, mister, you are being insincere…… I took the initiative to ask me out for a movie date, touched my crotch, I even exposed my panties to you but still refuse to consider my marriage proposal.”
There is an immediate animosity between us. I think the people on another table would have heard our conversation.
Sienna is nervous energy – she never stops talking and moving – even if she is only shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
I can smell Sienna’s desperation. Sienna knows that something about me is not quite right but she can’t pin it down as she herself is desperate to get any Singapore guy to register for her scam marriage in order for her to extend stay in Singapore. Her dependent’s pass was expiring sson.
Sienna explicitly told me what the plan was. Once she got rid of Poh Quee, she would try to get the earliest date available to register a marriage with me. In return, she would pay me S$5000 upfront and then another $$5000 once the marriage is confirmed.
Said, “Where you get the cash?”
Sienna was confident, “From that old man. Women’s Charter Act. Once I get half the house’s sale proceeds, I can pay you the money.”
“You have the S$5000 now?” I asked, cautiously trying to cross the minefield.
She was so horny she didn't pay any attention to the movie and barely tasted our food.
Her eyes stayed on my crotch. She couldn't see anything but she thought it was because I kept turning my hips away from her so she couldn't see...teasing her.
“Sure. I can write you a cheque.” She whipped out a pen and cheque book. “Got the money from that buyer. They paid a deposit of $5000 and gave it to me first.”
Gosh…. Poh Quee… this woman Is so cheap and ill-behaved…. a scum that you scrap off your shoes
We got through the date, made it to my place, turned to each other, and almost caused bruises on our lips because we were so hot for each other we just couldn't wait any longer. She whipped my top off over my head.
I flipped the sign on the Hotel 81 door of from 'Please Tidy Up The Room' to 'Do Not Disturb'; she closed the vertical blinds and smiled to herself. The copulation was only minutes away.
When she unbuttoned her shirt, her breasts were real small like pathetic. These two little birds maybe hiding from a wind. I didn’t like looking at her without her clothes on like that. It got me kind of jittery. She was being too forward.
Without looking at her small breasts, I scrutinized her trim figure and tight ass as she sashayed down the sidewalk on her high-heels.
Sienna thinks I am a little timid john who needs some encouragement so she tried to tease me seductively.
"Fuck; I'd like to help myself to some of that!" She doesn’t seem to mind that I talked dirty to her. Women like her are trash and loved to be manhandled.
The women employees of the Suman’s office adhered to a strict dress code. They wore navy-blue skirts, white blouses, flesh-toned hosiery and black pumps. In winter they wore matching navy-blue jackets. Being good girls they were elegantly coiffured and wore heavy makeup and lots of jewellery; they left behind trails of exotic perfume as they strutted around the bank attending to business.
I stared at her ass: Sienna's curved and taut. She wore varying shades of flesh-toned pantyhose and black high-heels. Her exotic perfume mingled with the smell of fear and wafted up from her body.
"Who's going first?" Sienna asked teasingly.
"You go; I'll watch."
"Ok. Let you see my money maker!" She grinned impatiently. "Watch,"
The woman slowly lifted her skirt and I watched appreciatively as the hems of the navy-blue skirt crept up the legs. She wore tan thigh-high hold-up stockings and the lace trimmed elasticised welts dug into the white flesh of her thick thighs. She raised her skirt higher revealing a pair of red satin full-cut panties with a small bow in the centre of the waistband.
"This behaviour is sinful and God will punish you for it!" she exclaimed. This woman is so drama.
"Well I believe God helps them that helps themselves," I commanded and bellowed in my loud voice "Shut the fuck up and show me your dirty pillows!"
Sienna was scared this time and looked at me for a second. My expression wore the look of an army commander. She liked it. Liked it when I talked obscenities and treated her like a bitch she was.
Her attractive face was heavily made up with dark mascaraed eyes, rouged cheeks and ruby red lips. Her face was framed by a brunette bob with burgundy highlights through it. She had small soft breasts that thrust out the front of her white satin blouse.
My calloused hand slid up her legs, rasping on her pantyhose, and then disappear under her skirt and fondle her buttocks through her panties. From the way she moaned in ecstasy, I knew her husband hadn't touched her that way in years.
Poh Quee was quite content as the postal worker of XingPost and despite the revulsion she felt at being commanded and ordered by me she had to admit she felt a tingle of excitement when I squeezed her ass.
She looked at my crotch again but still couldn't see anything. She started groping and sucking on my nipples.
Initially, she had a great method of suggesting sex, getting me excited, and telling me to do the Pretzel. Apparently, the Pretzel is the best way to hit her G-spot. You kneel and straddle her left leg while she’s lying on her left side. From here, she would bend her right leg around the right side of your waist—allowing full access to her vagina. She said that this setup gives you complete access to her clitoris for manual stimulation.
With that suggestion, I whipped my pants and light grey boxer briefs down. She stared at my dick. Her mouth dropped open.
"That's it!?" She said as she busted out laughing.
My face flamed. I was paying for forgetting to tell you that I was small. I forgot for just a few seconds how small I was and how big she expected me to be.
When I finally calmed down and caught my breath I said "What do you expect?!"
I was doing an almost full body blush, so embarrassed. But my little dick was still hard...her laughing even seemed to have made it harder.
She told me, "Well I guess it'll be easy to suck you off". She said between giggles, “You were just too tiny to do me any good. No need condom! No condoms will fit you unless I cut the condom into half!"
Furious, I took her by the hand and dragged her into the bed; her heels slipping on the polished floor. For a second, she was caught by surprise at my violent nature. She sobbed and balked at the rough yanking.
I pushed her face down over the pillow and positioned myself behind her. The girl was whimpering and at first I thought she was talking gibberish but then he realised she was praying. This time, I laughed and kicked her feet as far apart as the hem of her tight skirt would allow.
"Just don’t use your fist to fuck me, use your small dick." she begged. “That way, I won’t get hurt.”
Small dick?! Small dick?! All my life, all the men have laughed at me for my small dick, whether I was in the army or at the urinal! I was getting really furious with her now. Whatever I lacked in length, I would compensate for speed and agility and high frequency of my thrusting.
"Hot Damn!" I groaned and pushed the bulge hard against Sienna tight ass.
She sobbed and prayed at the same time, asking all of the saints in heaven to save her. I didn't give a shit about her pleas and prayers; he just needed a fuck to get even with this cheap slut.
"Shut up bitch or I'll tape your mouth," I grunted in response.
I positioned myself between her legs and pushed against her thighs to hold her in place and pressed her torso back down on the pillow. I roughly pulled the gusset of Sienna's panties to one side to expose her pubis. Her pubic hair was neatly trimmed, I could feel the stubble on his fingers as I groped her cunt.
She screamed when I used my hand to slap her across the face.
"Noooooooooooooo!!!!!"
Sienna was quivering with fright and revulsion; praying for salvation and cursing herself for tempting me. I ignored her and positioned the head of his cock at the entrance to her vagina.
I pushed forward and the head of penis was immediately constricted by Sienna’s hymen. My cock pushed against Sienna’s hymen and then he thrust forward hard until there was the sound of my things slapping against Sienna’s butt-cheeks. She howled.
"Oh my God; it hurts! Slowly!!! She whimpered.
That’s the way to do it. Although I have a micro-penis, I made sure that my thrusting was rock-hard solid until the sound of “Thack” flesh slapping can be heard with each thrust. Each thack would mean that my pubis knocking real hard against her buttcheeks. Enough to do physical damage to her buttocks. Sienna felt the man clawing at her buttocks and thighs as his penis quivered and throbbed inside her.
I kept pushing forward until my shaft was completely buried in Sienna’s tight cunt and my pubis slammed against her skinny ass. Sienna exhaled and tried to force herself to relax the muscles of her vagina. The damage had been done now; her chastity was taken and there was nothing she could do about it but to limit the pain she was experiencing. Her head filled with thoughts of sorrow and self-disgust;
How could a micro-penis do so much damage?
She pushed the thoughts aside and concentrated on relaxing her vagina.
As I began to thrust in and out of her in a steady but hard rhythm she tried to take her mind off what was happening to her.
She did not use contraception but she knew that there were 'day after' pills that could be taken by women to prevent them from becoming pregnant.
But she still dreaded the thought of this thug depositing his sperm inside her. She screwed up her eyes and, panting and quivering as I pounded away at her sore cunny, she tried to take her consciousness away from the situation but she couldn't.
Then she felt the man push himself deep inside her and his pubis slammed against her buttocks and he ground himself against her and emptied his seed deep inside her.
She could feel the warm ejaculate splash against the walls of her vagina. At least the man's semen lubricated her vagina and eased some of the pain.
"Oh yeah baby! Fuck that tight pussy!" I howled as I climaxed.
"Ok; when is the next $5000 ready, you cheap slut?" I sniggered.
Well I was high on cheap apricot brandy by the time I got there in XingPost Ltd. He wasn’t too hard to find. Slightly with a tummy paunch and hairline slightly receding. Looked about in his forties. Strutting some brochures down the post office retail shop with a slightly awkward gait. Must have been tired from all that standing.
I stopped and observed for a distance at the XingPost Retail Outlet Shop. You notice, the large sign / billboard at XingPost Post Office or its advertisements it’s on Financial loans at the front area. “ezyCash now offers you a loan amount of up to S$100,000. With attractive interest rates, you don’t need to fell the pinch when repaying your loan.”
Only when you walk further into the shop can you find the parcel services, franking and postage services. Services that hardly give revenue to XingPost.
I pushed the glass door open and I was feeling a little shy. Said, “Hellow.” As he kept on walking and I walked beside him.
He asked, didn’t stop moving. “What? The parcel services that way.” He pointed, without giving me eye contact.
“You offering personal loan?” I said, pretending to read a stand-up banner.
“Sorry, you must be employed.” Poh Quee sized me up, looked up and down. Probably saw that I was a poor guy with tucked out shirt and cheap bermuda shorts.
“What makes you think I am unemployed?”
“You smell like a walking glass of brandy.” That’s because my crotch smells like one too.
“Can’t I drink and still work? I multi-task.”
“Probably,” Poh Quee sighed and directed me to another table with seats. He took out a pen from his shirt pocket. “How much you want for a loan?”
I sat down. Finally his eyes and my eyes met. I drew out his iPhone from my shirt pocket as well. The distinctive Hello Kitty casing drew him. His eyes lit up finally. “Hey, where did you pick up my phone?”
“From PHA. You dropped it there. Your wife said you worked here when she called you.”
“Ex…..” Poh Quee looked away from me again at the mention of Sienna. “Tramp” He muttered under his breath. “So what brings you here?”
“As I said, I need a loan for my house renovation.”
Poh Quee swept his hands across the table to pick up his iPhone. He ran his fingers to check for missed calls and found that they were all from Sienna and cursed again.
“Expecting a call from your clients?”
“Yea. If not I can be fired soon for failing to meet the quota.” Poh Quee pushed the mini-photocopying machine forward and requested for my latest pay slips and identification card.
“Drats. I forgot my pay slip.”
“It’s ok. You can send a copy through this mailbox.” Poh Quee took out his pen and namecard. He reversed the card, paused for a second before he wrote down his mailbox address.
Finally, I relented. “Listen. If you need help, talk to me. We are in the same boat.”
He broke into small laughter: “I don’t know who is weirder you or me.”
I felt nothing was impossible, people can talk to one another if they make the effort. I thought Poh Quee and I could make the effort to befriend each other. I said, “Well, working in Xingpost doesn’t seem like such a bad place.”
“Why do you think Sienna dumped me?” He was on edge. “There ain’t nothing between us now. She clearly is a fair-weathered Pinoy with no scruples or morals.” He pushed the namecard to me. “Just mail it to me. I will process the loan in a few days time and the money will be deposited into your bank account.”
Said, “You can’t live like this. It is hell. If you ain’t sick now, you will soon get sick.”
“God, are you square,” Poh Quee swore at me softly. He looked away. Started drumming away at the table with his fingertips. "XingPost lied about selling of assets and they lied when they said workers' jobs would be safe. I was relegated to a sales position and telling white lies to customers like you."
I said, "Like a marriage going bad?
Poh Quee said, "Nay. Being demoted is never such a total shock because the signs are always there. As a general manager in XingPost I knew there was the possibility that my position would be made redundant. First they hire Pinoys is the first sign. Then after that, they promote their own people to higher ranks. I am top-heavy – old and too high salaried so they slowly redesignated my vocation and here I am, begging you to buy any financial package I have.”
I asked, “So what you have?”
Poh Quee pushed me a few brochures, “Loan of $10,000 or 4X your monthly income, whichever is lower. Minimum annual income of $20,000.Your approved loan amount will be credited directly to your designated bank account.”
I broke into a small laughter, “What’s the catch?”
Poh Quee had this mischievous glint in his eyes, “15 per cent annum. S$300 per month….. I am a legalised loan shark. In addition, I have to do debt recovery by chasing …..”
A rough nasty tap on his shoulder. Poh Quee turned around and a Pinoy (probably his boss, his name tag spelled Bobby Velaquez) signalled him to look behind him. A woman dressed in some branded fashion apparel and dripping with heavy jewellery were looking at some shopping products in the glass cabinet.
“Excuse me. Sorry. I have to serve her now.” Poh Quee got up and left me in my seat. I picked up his namecard and left.
I tried not to alarm him. He was looking at me strangely as I walked past him and I said, “I will fix it.”
I assured him I meant what I said. I said I had to get on now but I would be in touch with him soon. Couldn’t stand to tell him more. I left him there. Too much on my mind.
I emailed Poh Quee on his Facebook. His rest day was on Monday. He agreed to meet me but only on the condition that I am not a faggot who is interested in gay sex. Maybe he thinks I am but at that juncture, he seemed quit desperate to befriend anyone who could lend a ear to his woes.
Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. There has never been any choice for me. If I can save someone, it has got to be Poh Quee.
At breakfast the next morning in this coffee shop at 1:30 in the afternoon. Poh Quee was wearing such a nice sweater and clean pressed faded jeans. His face was washed, Hair combed out. He looked no different. We had large glasses of orange and coffee. He told me all about himself.
How he and Sienna gotten together. How his marriage fell apart when he was demoted from a post office branch manager to a financial consultant.
Apparently, Poh Quee worked in a local government job and have done for about 14 years now. He started when he started when I was 20 and have loved my work since the day he started! He lived for his work!
When he started there he was young and naive. Times were good and things were simple as a post office customer service worker in 1995. It was a homogeneous workforce. As part of the government’s plan to privatise telecommunications services, XingPost was incorporated into in 2003, it was listed in the Singapore Exchange. XingPost Limited was listed on the mainboard of the Singapore Exchange (SGX-ST) on 13 May 2003. In April 2007 Singapore became the first country in Asia to have its postal market fully liberalised.
He had no idea about office politics but oh boy he learnt very quickly when XingPost Limited became corportised. They slowly tried to replace our postal counters with financial products such as minibonds, unit trusts, structured deposits and personal loans and renovation loans, things which would have generated more money and revenue for the shareholders of XingPost Limited.
Sienna and some other Pinoy staff came into Singapore on a work permit. It was more like cheap labour to me. An economic refugee hired by XingPost corporate to depress our locals’ salaries. With Pinoys like her, Poh Quee has been held back from promotions and all sorts just because they didn’t want him. It’s as if his face doesn’t fit in.
“Top-heavy,” Poh Quee explained. “That is the term they used when they assess you in their appraisal. When you are old and drawing high salary, they describe you as top-heavy.”
Slowly, he was relegated to being their XingPost financial consultant to peddle their financial instruments to sell bonds, unit trusts and renovation loans for PHA. They call it a promotion but it is in fact a demotion. Every day, it was a challenge to hit the quota.
Singaporean employers prefer foreigners mainly because of their flexibility to take up jobs that locals avoid, cheaper to hire, work longer hours, were more diligent…. In other words, willing to abused or raped.
He got used to this and occasionally used to let off steam by throwing a hissy fit with the manager who by now is a Pinoy by the name of Bobby. He started divorce proceedings a few months ago, much to the Sienna’s chagrin.
This time however Bobby and Sienna have developed a special relationship. They have the type that they could no bet separated inside work. Basically they could not tell the difference between a working relationship and their personal one. So they started ganging up on people, everyone had their turn. They started doing dodgy things like handing in time sheets with incorrect records and doing basically whatever they wanted in the office.
Poh Quee saw that I had tampered with his iPhone when he saw that I had used the search engine on his iPhone to search for both Suman and Sienna. I had forgotten to clear the cache. Not that he is pissed at me for invasion of privacy. Poh Quee was probably weary and jaded and probably won’t even care if I insulted him directly in his face.
“How’s Sienna? You found her supporting Suman?”
“Busy sucking up to Suman and to whoever Singaporean citizen she can find and marry. Women’s Charter is strong in Singapore. So strong that she will try to use it to her own advantage. And Suman is the politician who has a strong foreigner stand who said foreigners help create jobs and will lose its competitive edge globally if it closes its doors to foreign talent. And whatever Suman spouts, I give him 50% discount…….”
Suddenly, Poh Quee’s eyes lit up. Hit the nail on his head. We had something in common.
“You …. You ok?” Poh Quee asked. “What brings you to Xingpost?”
“I'm here to see a man. To help him.”
“Who is he, may I ask?”
“You. You have a big rat to kill. Vermin to kill. You need help. The Women’s Charter in Singapore is very strong. If you want to divorce Sienna, she will do what she takes to claim half your assets, your house and your money. ”
“Listen. I don’t want you to kill anybody on my behalf. And I don’t even know you. Why the sudden generosity?” Poh Quee was defensive.
“A disgrace. That woman. She’s a tramp.” I uttered.
“She is probably a lot of things, some of them I don’t even know myself. But a tramp…..” he said, trying to stifle his laughter. “How do you get a tramp out of this?”
“A tramp,” I said definitely.
I had tried to make it neat. It was not neat enough.
“I’ll come by day after tomorrow. But if I can’t make it,” I said, “You may not see me again, for a while.”
He asked, “What do you mean?”
Maybe it would have been different if I could have convinced Poh Quee to go away right then and there but when he wouldn’t my life had to go on. I felt it pointing in that one direction that there was no other choice for me.
When I left Poh Quee, he was still wondering at how he could got a tramp and slut out of it.
I left Poh Quee and went directly to the shooting range. I had the Magnum in the trunk of the car in that bag and the other little gun and I kept shooting. I must have shot a hundred times, bam, bam, bam. To that effect just like that. The burning smell in my nostrils. Home again I wrote in this journal:
“Loneliness has followed me all my life. The life of loneliness pursues me wherever I go: in coffee shops, stores, sidewalks. There is no escape. Not to love is to die. All my work hides my essential unemployment.
It is indeed strange. A Government should look out for its own citizens. But this one consistently looks out for the foreign national. If we did not make this complaint loudly in the social media about how we cannot secure a single job in Singapore , our own country, this Government will pretend not to know and continue to sing the praises of the Foreign Talent.
I have this ‘victim’ mentality too. I blame others for my unhappiness and the areas of my life that were way below average. It’s just the easy way out. It’s far too easy to say…”My life sucks because my parents, my boss, my friends and my boss driver make all my decisions for me and they are no good.”.
This is a man who can’t take it anymore. ”
I am not a fool. I will no longer fool myself. I will no longer let myself fall apart, become a joke and an object of ridicule. I cannot continue this hollow empty fight. I must sleep. What hope is there for me?
I drove most of the night watching the world go by. Everybody matched up in pairs, me without. God for a friend to have a friend in my life. I wandered from store to store in the morning to make acquaintance of the shopkeepers. Wandered about all over. On my feet. To be noticed. Smiled at. Exchange a pleasant word or two. Went to the bank. Just wandering along on my feet. I went to the bank, as I say.
Folded them up in a letter, put them in an envelope, addressed it to Poh Quee.
“Dear Poh Quee, this money should be enough to last you a few months. It’s money from the buyer’s deposit. Do not delay. By the time you read this, I will be dead. I am willing to sacrifice for you. Get a hair from Sienna, have her sequenced for HPV. That’s all I can tell you.“
I wrote another letter about my plan to get Sienna infected and reminded to collect a skin or saliva sample from Sienna once the deed is done. I went and wrote down the name of a medical doctor who supposedly does routine personal genomics screening of diseases and cancer. It provides genetic testing services through healthcare providers and health and wellness organizations, with prices starting at $299. This company provides testing for over 1,200 common and rare diseases and traits, including heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases.
All my life, I have been alone…. I am the one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. It satisfied me to give money to the downtrodden Singapore men. I liked to have that power.
The first time Sienna wanted to have sex with me, nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to give her my all. I could imagine all Singapore men’s happiness when they realize what I did for them was revenge and survival for ourselves.
It wasn’t just vengeance for all Singapore men, it was relief, the relief of being able to eliminate one more foreign fucker from Singapore. I would have liked to have endless ammunition to be able to give to all those who had nothing, as once I had nothing.
Most of all, I liked to be able to give opportunities to Singapore men which I would very rarely gave it to women. They could get married and get a divorce and half the assets goes to them later on under Singapore’s draconian Women’s Charter Act. Without money or a job, Singapore men were forced to suffer hunger and humiliation while their women spent their money shopping and cosmetics.
I am sure that most people who work in private sector won't be able to say confidently that they will still keep their jobs once they hit above 40 years of age.
It seems that once an organisation hires foreigners, salaries do tend to get depressed but bosses' wallets are fattened up. Rich get richer, poor get poorer.
I believe that in the future, more and more older Singaporean PMETs working in the private sectors will be losing their jobs to Phillippinoes. This will result in many social issues such as marital breakdown due to financial woes, depression due to job insecurity/loss, and a reduction in quality of life for average Singaporeans due to the many readily available cheaper and younger Indians, Chinese, Phillippinoes who depress Singaporeans' salaries.
To sum up, most foreigners choose to stay here for utilitarian reasons, unlike the reasons why native-born Singaporeans live on this island.
A few days in, I saw a video of a jobless man being dragged out of the park by a police officer without any evident justification and despite my misgivings about staging a protest, I felt for those who were at least doing something. The Facebook comments populated the day the photo was uploaded. I saw the YouTube video of a police officer pepper-spraying 2 young women on the sidewalk which outraged me. “Look, we are twenty years old. We are never going to have a real job. Who would dare to tell them to take it easy? Earnestness was the new counterculture. It became clear that our protest movement was striking a deeper chord in society.
I cleaned the apartment. Put everything neat and orderly. Shaved, changed my clothes.
I posted one Facebook comment using my account, “We come to you at a time when corporations which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We shall assemble here, as it is our right, to let these facts be known.” In my posting was a link to a YouTube video depicting the assassination of former President JFK "We should re-enact a version of this tomorrow at PHA Auditorium!".
I created a bogus Facebook account and uploaded Sienna’s face on it and with a few other pictures taken with Poh Quee from the iPhone.
I posted a photo on my wall and posted on the Facebook page of popular football forum KallangRoar.com.
The photo is a snippet of a Straits Times article from 2011 highlighting the large Filipino turnout at the Singapore-Philippines friendly at Jalan Besar Stadium, but with a red X marked over it.
Posing as Sienna, I commented “whatever some rotten locals here have to say, we Pinoys are here to stay.
and most are working under Us that's why some are bitter cos they are working under Foreigners' while they are in their own Country. Don't blame us for this, if that's the case then 'mabybe' rotten locals 'up there commenting' are not good enough. But don't lose heart, you can improve overtime and maybe start with your manners. Peace.”
I logged on to my own personal account and commented.
"Look at this proud Pinoy FT working in Seagate calling us locals 'rotten'. She refers to Singaporeans as 'rotten locals', calls us 'bitter', and says most of us are 'working under us (Pinoys)'."
I said a silent prayer and hoped for viral to spread the hatred.
Went out in the street again.
“Stop,” she said.
I had almost made it. I had been taking side streets to get to Toa Payoh, carefully walking around Toa Payoh Garden Park, so I wouldn’t run into them. Not yet. Them. The Secret Service. I thought I had found a good street, far away from anyone with a tattoo and dyed hair, anyone with that annoyingly determined and noble expression, but this girl stepped in front of him.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
I stared at her. It was Tara, Adrian Lu’s mother.
I was afraid she’d yell at me, but her voice was actually rather quiet.
“Why?” I asked.
“Don’t do it” she repeated. “Adrian showed me your Facebook message to him.”
What the hell did this mean? Fair? I had worked hard to get to this Hewlett Packard job, I spent my entire youth by helping Hewlett Packard — making money. And it was good. It was good because he could call his mother in Bukit Ho Swee and tell her, “My bonus is going to be a million dollars this year,” and he could hear her gasp over the phone.
“Why not?” I said.
“We should protest and go on strike” she said. “At the most”
“I suffered,” I said. “Other people should, too.”
She gasped and stepped back. Wrong answer. What was I supposed to say?
“Give yourself a chance,” she said. “Give yourself a chance that you need not resort to this. Come on.”
I laughed.
“No one gave anything to me,” I said.
I thought hard. Sienna once told me that her parents loved her when they were around, but she was greedy; she could not explain the greed, but it had resided within her forever, before she had ever held a dollar bill in her hand.
“I guess,” he said. “Every man for himself.”
I was starting to feel that strange dryness in my mouth when I started thinking of these questions. It was time to go meet my destiny before it was too late. I began to step, slowly around her. She lifted her hand. I struck her around the nap of her neck and knocked her out.
The storekeepers were all grinning failure in front of their cramped little displays: Everybody was selling out, everybody looked sad: Business was slow. Life was something you shrugged at. Something you put up with. The books you might have read. The kids you might have loved. All the money you would have made if your mother had been kinder to you. The fun you could have had with a friend. From under their soft gray mustaches they produced little yellow plums of phlegm and recipes for happiness. They kidded me with gossip the high cost of living and the uncertain leather. Suman was speaking in Toa Payoh. No more time. I thought long live death. It is all any of us believes in anyway. Thought long live death. Thought nobody can help anybody Suman can’t help. He can’t be helped. Storekeepers couldn’t they couldn’t be helped they couldn’t. Words to that effect. You don’t take the kid who steals coins from your newsstand and make him your cashier. Hitler is a bum tiddle ym, tum, tum. To that effect. A little diddy from my childhood acres of truth to that. To that effect.
So then I refixed the metal gliders for the Colt .25 on my forearm and split the little kangaroo and the kookaburra too. Lickety split splat just like that after fitting the .38 into my holster. Checking out the Magnum in the back of my belt. Still had on that Army jacket. Couldn’t stop sweating.
To bestow my blessings of death on this man I loved. Admired. The President candidate, Suman Shammugan and this great nation Singapore which taught me how to kill. To finally open that door to so much hate in myself, so much anger, and be inside, loving myself there, was different than Melio with his grocery store. A matter of poise. I wasn’t thinking do or don’t. First time in my life, Unreal. To be in motion going somewhere at last in time. History, as a cut-out almost two dimensional.
It is usually after we have suffered ourselves, one way or another, for one reason or another that we become the wiser for it.
Toa Payoh looked like yellow teeth sticking up from the bite of the river. Rushing past the Squibb Buildings and The Watchtower I was pushed, shoved, blared at, then honked. Stalled and stuttering, in the heat, down the ramp, and onto the long stunted boulevard Kim Seng Road.
No love in my life except death.
I thought Sienna would be terrified. Disappointed in me, too. That for once, this was a manly feeling.
I thought she did not, could not, love him as a man, the President, but as her idol. Some God….. Didn’t see Sienna anywhere, though, and felt so sad but sadder still for Poh Quee. Not to know me as I really was. Ever. Thought Suman would surely recognize me and love me as his assassin. I had some respect for him or why else kill? We would share this out-of-the-way passion. No more corruption. I would make sure. The garbage gets collected because he is a friend to man.
He speaks at a union hall at the corner of the street. Grandstands built out of sections of board painted gray. For the VIPs. Stuff like that. All in straw hats. The crowd cheering, laughing, gnattering. Even from a block away, they seem restless for his love. Gray mice in a cage of shadows. Secret service men everywhere in metallic suits.
Me at three blocks away when I see his limo glisten. It moves a little at a time into the crowd. Like hot lava. Secret service men running along both sides for protection. Cameras clicking, whirr of TVs, and those men with big weapons like bars on their shoulders. A mash of VIPs, and these damn secret service men of course around the President candidate. He makes his way through the crowd with all his excellence adored. Cheering him for simply being there with them, I think they are fools who deserve to be slaves to such masters. Keeping my thoughts to myself. Me with all my guns like heavy wrenches walking slowly toward that mob, boots burn my ankles. Stayed way in the rear near the fringes, slightly hunched over, hands shoved inside of my pockets. Removed them only once to pop a coupla reds. I felt drained. Wilted. Glasses pinching to the bridge of my nose. There would be red marks tonight again on the sides of my nose. I stayed. Stayed back. Out of sight at first out of mind. Must remember be still. Quiet. Sullen for the sake of death.
The red dyed hair was a sign that I was in killer mode and should be left alone. The effect is startling as if I had finally broken with any semblance of sanity and was now totally in the grip of my psychosis.
Deputy Prime Minister Suman has launched into his “We the people” spiel as I applaud every turn of his event.
I now know. There is a power - higher above others - that rests in the light. The rays, they pass through my skin, warming my inner soul. The shine reaches into my depths, and springs my spirit forth in a bounce. From my long sleep I awaken with new vigor, my feet now gripping into the ground; a smile creases across my face. Yet the power that courses within me is nothing like the past, it is a gentleness, a breeze of delight that tingles through my entire body and to the fingertips. I gasp, in a good peaceful kind of shock, for I find within me is a full, abundant well filling with hope. It brims, ready to pour and seeking to fill unto others - not a time does the inner voice seek a selfish glory. It is pure, this spirit, and I long no longer for the darkness that once I called home. Thank you God.
Saw that same secret agent guy I spoke to a week or so ago. On the platform, next to Suman and Sienna’s Tom. No Sienna anywhere. Periscope face of secret agent scanning through the crowd. I duck behind a woman’s bare freckled back to an applause from the crowd.
Suman speaks: “…. And with your help we will go into victory at the polls Tuesday….”
Big applause me moving closer. The closer I get the louder his voice. He steps back. I lunge forward. I have my hand on the gun through my open jacket.
“ ………….You come from many different backgrounds, from many different parts of the world. Asia, Europe even a few from Central America; all ages, young and old; different professions. But you all have one thing in common – you have adopted Singapore and Singapore is now your new home. So, welcome to our family!........Your loyalty – which is your country, who are your fellow citizens and the emotional attachment of you and your family, the places, the memories, where you feel you really belong. I also encourage Singaporeans to make the effort on their part – to help the new arrivals to integrate and to settle in, especially on a personal level.”
Secret service agent motions to his buddy. They are pointing my direction.
I have my hand on the gun: Access to the holster. A numbness. Suman starts down the stairs. He will come down the stairs, toward me. Come toward my gun.
So amiable. Like three frogs in a swamp. That nice thin smile. And hardly any sweat on his face. He is coming toward me in the crowd. The secret agent leads the way, scanning through the crowd. Access to the holster means I can now do as I wish.
Suman and agent and me.
I start to run. “Detain that man”
I am wanted. Suman knows I do not love him as I should. God for the love of one person. Poh Quee.
“Detain that man!”
They are after me I know I can hear them but I am fast and only I know where I am going.
Suman speaks, “We do good from the bottom of our hearts. Regardless of race, language or religion. Blood only has one colour. They are everywhere due to globalisation same goes with Sporean working abroad they are also foreigner. So you telling me a foreigner meets with an accident and requires blood you will tell blood bank to give it the the fellow cos he/she is a foreigner? What logic is that? Treat people like how you wish to be treated.”
Big applause me moving closer.
The crowd loud against its hands claps big paddles being waved. Cries “You said it Mr Suman.”
“We’re with you……….”
The closer I get to his voice, a little dimming my ears all headachey. “And on… to victory next November!”
I am wrestling with this old man he is the corpse of all old men, of death and I am strapped underneath his one good arm so I can barely reach that knife.
Calf of my right foot this knife I bless against the large downrushing palm of the old man.
His hand is stuck against my knife screaming pain and more pain: Don’t kill me Don’t kill me
Why not? The police are coming. I can hear all their sirens.
I cradle him like a lover as he pleads: Don’t kill me don’t kill me
One old man with an open mouth frightened of death.
Someone shouts, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!”
Why not? I’ve pinned him beneath me. I have this gun.
I guess I always had this pretty bad temper. A very bad temper. Why the hell not?
Pain
Shouts.
Well I didn’t like feeling so helpless. I felt so weak suddenly tired and drained as if it had all exploded inside of me and there was nothing left. Nothing to live for blowing it that way.
I put that gun to my head. Well I was going to kill myself. I opened that door.
I said, And Doing This ALL FOR YOU, as I started to squeeze that trigger but my hand was weak from the knife sticking through it. Couldn’t squeeze quite hard enough before this police officer person bursts through the open door with his gun drawn and he shoots me.
Shoots that gun right out of my hand.
Hits me on the wrist so it thudded on the carpet.
Then some other officers came through the door.
My voice croaked inside of me. I pointed a finger at my head went, “Pgghew.” And that’s all I remember.
Riot Sweeps Singapore
One Singapore citizen attempted to assassinate President Candidate Suman Shammugan yesterday, causing panic to the new Citizen swearing in ceremony and sparking unrest in the later part of the day. Presidential Candidate Suman escaped unharmed.
“Apparently, the lone gunman was retrenched as a computer engineer and had to seek a lowly paid menial job.” National Police spokesman Sr. Commander. Zulkarnaen said.
Morny Teo, a security guard who was colleagues with Tan Cheng Juan at Public Housing Authority said he was astonished at the news.
"He basically was socially awkward but not to the degree that would warrant suspicion of mass murder or any atrocity of this magnitude" Teo said. "I did not see any behavior he exhibited that indicated he would be capable of an atrocity of a magnitude like this."
But Singapore Police Commissioner Ray Goh said he "clearly looks like a deranged individual."
"He had his hair painted red. He said he was The Joker, obviously the enemy of Batman," Goh told reporters, referring to a character in the Batman comic and cinematic universe known for committing acts of random, chaotic violence.
The unrest yesterday at Toa Payoh PHA Auditorium was under control and an investigation has been launched, Zulkarnaen said. After the assassin was arrested, another 10,000 strong crowd gathered to protest and sing the National Anthem. Apparently, it was sparked off by a Facebook comment posted, “"We should re-enact a version of JFK assassination on our grandstand during our new Citizens swearing in ceremony in PHA Toa Payoh Auditorium tomorrow!”
“It was a spontaneous action. However, the Singapore Police is now investigating to determine if Cheng Juan was the one who sparked off the riot with his Facebook comment,” he said.
Singapore Police chief Chief Commander Nora Phang immediately went to the scene to try to disperse the crowd who comprised of new Singapore citizens from Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, China and India.
“I am on your side. I want you all to stay in Singapore. Your families are waiting for you.” he told the crowds through a loudspeaker.
One witness said that xenophobia was at the core of the violent unrest.
“This is about national pride, so he was angry,” said a man identified as Kien Boon. “Angry at the world, angry at Singapore’s pro-foreigner immigration policies and causing widespread unemployment among Singapore-born citizens, angry at the income disparity, angry that he has to work 30 years before he can retire while our foreign counterparts need only work for 4 years to retire.”
Then, an hour later, about 10,000 Singaporeans, most who were believed to be unemployed, were later observed outside the PHA, singing the National Anthem and other patriotic songs.
Zulkarnaen also said 100 new citizens from the ceremony were escorted out by 400 Police officers, including members of the elite Mobile Brigade “There is no report of fatalities. The mob only destroyed 12 vehicles,” he said.
There were also reports that the mob set a company building ablaze.
The foreign born new citizens were evacuated by police cars. Four were injured in the clash, including an Indian citizen identified as Wilendra, who is being treated at an undisclosed hospital.
The Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration on Thursday dispatched teams to try to resolve the conflict and mediate a solution between the Singapore protesters at PHA.
“We regret the incident, which was caused by a misunderstanding,” Manpower Minister Iqbal Iskandar said at his office. “We have dispatched a fact-finding team to resolve the matter. The team will monitor developments in the case and prevent similar incidents from ever occurring again.”
The team is led by Simon Chee the director of industrial relations dispute resolution, the minister said.
The incident was just the latest social unrest to take place in Singapore.
Last month, Singaporeans are up in arms over a foreign scholar's derogatory comment that "there are more dogs than humans in Singapore".
The Ministry of Education (MOE) scholar in question, Sun Xu from China, was referring to his unpleasant experience with Singaporeans as he brushed against them.
A rough translation of his Chinese blog post read: "It's so annoying to have gangster Singapore uncles stare at you when you bump into them. There are more dogs than humans here in Singapore."
His comment has outraged Singaporeans, who questioned MOE policies. Some have even called for Sun's scholarship to be revoked.
Two Cabinet Ministers have taken a strong stance against brewing xenophobic sentiments in Singapore.
Mr Suman described the vitriol towards foreigners, especially in online discussions, as “out of our Singaporean character” in his Facebook post on Monday.
"Bad behaviour by a small number of foreigners does not justify spiteful comment about foreigners in general, or all foreigners of a particular race. It does no one good," he wrote.
Poh Quee’s Afterword
I went back to his work because for some reason, Bobby treated me better after the riots broke out. What else can I tell you? Suman lost his Presidency but had to share a coalition with another unknown candidate Chua Kim Poh who is formerly an accountant with KPMG. For a while, I had quite a reputation in XingPost. The boss called me up and said he is leaving his job in Singapore for Philippines because his work permit was rejected and not renewed. Looks like there are major policy changes to these immigrants after he lost his bid!
Sienna came back to meet me yesterday to sign the final divorce papers. Said she is leaving me for Bobby to go back Philippines. Said she will contest me for the house and will hear from her lawyer on a pre-trial conference soon. I took a small saliva sample from a straw she drank from.
By Friday I had totally forgotten about it and around 5:30 my phone rang and it was the doctor himself! I thought wow, this new doctor really goes for the personal service and then it hit me, this must be good. My heart began to race. So he says, “Your wife’s test came back abnormal. There are some abnormal cells. I have no reason to believe it’s cancer but you need to come back in for a biopsy of your cervix. You also tested positive for high risk strains of HPV (the virus that causes cervical cancer)” That rings in my head, biopsy…never fun…. of my what? Now the thing about CIN 1 Type 3 cervical dysplasia is really is the best kind to have. It is supposedly not genetic and it is fast growing you could just one year before you actually develop cancer. Think all that warm milk and not washing your foreskin for 1 week really breeds the virus!
CJ
TRS Writer