Babs and de la Monè Snog at the Meat-and-Rice Joint
on Leighton Road
He had dropped the Parisian moniker after donning his sequins, crooning carelessly, and walking offstage for the last time. The smell of his last lunch lingering in the crannies of the microphone, it had never seemed so strong, the scent of his breath, even when smoking had still been allowed along the Strip. Nowadays, Carl White seemed a pseudonym apt amidst the environs, for Carl the White, and racist innuendo in general, had gone out of vogue - decades past already - even before pinching bootie backstage.
She still called him Frenchie nonetheless. “Hey, Frenchie,” she’d belch when she stumbled by in the wee hours. Or “Frenchie…” she’d moan in the early morning when he’d grind his coffee beans. “Frenchie, you should close your window,” was a regular comment, for he loved to fry onions with his potato latkes on Sundays. The table would be full of overflowing ashtrays and empty beer cans; he really needed to do his part keeping up the flat. “Oh, Frenchie,” she smirked in somewhat veiled exasperation.
Babs never smoked herself, but when she did, she’d slip out onto the balcony and hope the Filipina maids stacked into the one-room flat on the third floor walk-up across the alley wouldn’t catch her as they peered through their plywood jalousies. A bit jealous, herself, of their communal living arrangements, she would listen to their long-distance virtually-virtual love trysts and catch a whiff of yesterday’s stale tobacco from behind her louvre blinds.
Why did she worry if the domestic workers across the way saw her sneak a ciggie? Certainly, after their long days scrubbing expat toilets and leaning out over thirty-odd stories to check a streak-less window pane, they could not care less about the freshness of her breath across the simmering dumpsters a few floors below. Nonetheless, although she knew she should not, she would do a pre-cleaning before her own helper came along, on Monday mornings. Could she dare - one day - leave the ashtray unemptied?
Monsieur de la Monè, as she would address him on Monday mornings, certainly did not care. He would throw his skid-striped underwear on the massage chair, toss cigarette butts into assorted ashtrays, the toilet, the kitchen sink, even. He was certainly incorrigible, or to use his words: incorruptible.
Or so she imagined. She had never seen him, in fact: it was only the lingering cologne which coughed up the images of a crooning substar landing in a fragrant harbor so far, far away. Rancid Ralph Lauren should release noxious memories of high-school tongue-in-cheek sessions in shopping-mall parking lots rather than stock images of 1970s wannabes from a desert city, whose iconic heydays of dusk and glitter she had never known.
Indeed, she had never been: her working knowledge of Sin City had come in bits and pieces from nostalgic interludes during visa runs at Cotai casinos, which hid any semblance to the seedy days of Vegas wedding runs and chip-less losers lined up in front of pawn shops.
On a typical workday, after bidding a bonjour behind closed doors to M. de la Monè, Babs would usually bump into her coworker Henry grabbing a pineapple bun from the corner bakery. “One?” the baker’s wife would ask while she ripped off a chunk of bread and plopped it into a non-recyclable-plastic plastic bag. “One,” he would reply as he handed her a ten-dollar coin. “Ten dollar,” she would state as if it were a question.
As Henry’s daily commerce wrapped up, Babs would wait at the crosswalk, and they would head over together to the skyscraper that housed their cubicles. On their way to their daytime prism of glass and steel, she would grab her “internationally-renown bad coffee,” as Henry would refer to it.
Henry appeared to be a health-food nut because he was always chomping on sticks of carrots and celery. He said he was trying to quit smoking as he rubbed his paunch which had certainly become more prominent recently. His clothes had become just shy of too-tight, but Henry was determined not to move into the next-size category. So he said. Maybe he was gay.
What made her doubtful was the fact that he too had penchant for Polo by Ralph Lauren, and whereas Frenchie - being French and all - had no excuse, Henry was a self-proclaimed middle-America boy. He had most likely slurped saliva in shopping-mall parking lots and learned about sex while reviewing decades of mouldy Playboy magazines in his father’s neglected basement office.
Henry had no intention of staying in Hong Kong, and neither did she. They were both padding their résumés for possible gigs in New York or London. But what about de la Monè? He probably could not do any better at his age, and in his state, other than landing gigs crooning at Wan Chai tourist bars.
It was at one of those bars where, citing an impending economic downturn, management had decided to hold the end-of-the-year open bar night. Avoiding any provocation to smoke, Henry demurred, but Babs knew she could wait to light up until she got back to her flat. The maids would be all asleep by midnight, for they would have to scamper off to Saturday swimming lessons and martial arts studios for the little ones as the latters’ parents slept off their own open-bar soirées.
No matter. Babs took full advantage of the open bar, and as she staggered out of the MTR just shy of Saint Paul’s twelve dongs, she saw him. Yes, it could only be he: Frenchie de la Monè. In all his glory, he was lingering at the late-night local-food joint. Dressed in black, with a cigarette in his hand hanging out the window. Ralph Lauren riding a steed pervaded the air. Not even the wafts of fried pork knuckle could hide it.
Quickly, as if she had no other choice, she went to the omnipresent convenience store to pick up her own pack of smokes. She fumbled with the non-recyclable-plastic plastic wrap and lit the filter on her first fag accidentally. No matter: she didn’t smoke or hardly, she reminded herself, and, as nonchalantly as possible, tossed the unlit ultralight into the gutter.
The joint was packed, and daring her luck, she held up her finger and said, “One.” As is Cantonese custom she was seated with the one other Westerner: her own M. de la Monè. She smiled at him knowingly; likewise he smiled at her knowingly.
It turned out that Frank lived in a walk-up around the corner. Certainly, no helper had come around to clean that dump, for the helpers lived next door, or perhaps somewhere much, much tidier. Once Frank was snoring, she peered out the window and saw her own apartment, and yes, there he was: the real de la Monè tidying his own apartment. How tidy.
How strange. Babs felt a tinge of regret, and she wondered how she would react. She had never imagined…
Babs headed home, nodded to the wee-hour security guards and took the elevator. Outside the elevator, she turned right, and out popped Henry carrying his trash out of the apartment next to hers. A carrot stick was sticking out of his mouth.
“Isn’t this weird,” he asked as if it were a statement.
