Friday, March 4, 2011

Untitled

Chasing the dragon:

Shanghai is a grey messy mist, concrete and glass accentuates it hips;
curves with neon
amalgmated metals

She is big and clumsy in her movements; swaying back and forth across
the river some sort of growling, howling
sky filled with smoke and
horns, meats cooling over fires....
yet I must be the real monster
because to me you sacrifice
so many of your daughters

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Visa Run:
Oh, the adventure has begun again in earnest. It started at around 11am today at my bar. I'd been sick for about 3 days with fever, a real mean nasty burn a hole in your head leave you soaking wet one moment, shivering cold the next, aches, hallicinations, burning, burning up in the cold inky
blackness, shadows turned to spiderweb turned to tunnels, not stopping, fever dreams, hallucinations.
Maybe I died that night.
Maybe I died the next.
I know I passed out on a Friday in my bed covered in sweat and stink. Later on Sunday when I came too I saw my maid had come and left me medicine.
Chinese pills called Buffrin, yellow 2 times breakfast and lunch blue before bed. After I took a few I felt better then I had in weeks.
I was alive.
Later in the afternoon a Chinese girl came to check on me, we played DR the rest of the day sick and in bed, alive and on top.

Monday 2.28.11
I woke up first at 6 am, strange dreams of my grandmother, on my mothers side. Dreams of her as a corporate macot for a company called Synergy. .
I woke up smelling still like the girl from the night before. After getting ready I rushed to my bar around 11:30am. Walking down the street to the subway station, gray cold out fruit stands red with vibrant oranges, grapes with a need of a little polish, women and men on bicycles with maskes covering their faces as they peddled by in massive numbers, thick coats and scarves bundled up against the last febuary morning chills.
It's quiet on the strets, the occassional honk but silent and the silence is so loud its rings off the hubcaps of the yellow expo cabs vans, of the run down bumpers of the shady red cabs and bounces back across the green neon for hire rof top mounts of the *dash* cabs, always on - even if there are people in them
My walk takes me past the bank, 3 sex shops, 4 fruits stands, 6 convience stores, several coffeeships and restaurants finally after passing countless people in parkas, marching army guards, old people people with canes, young school children with red bandanas on thier necks, some wearing blue caps, some bareheaded, some clutfhing their friends, arm and arm down hauai hai lu and I reach the Shanghai library, 10 line.
I pay my 3 rmb and ride through 3 stations, I'm pushed by the onslaught of people, so many faced, pale shanghai style with elegant features, fat wide and broken tooth day laborers, the occasional  lao wei like myself lost in translation, heaphones on listeniung to music, pretending their somewhere else.

To get to work I exit the train and walk through xintandi, the tourist area of old Shanghai style housing. Converted and gentrified by the local goverment to have shops, Philipino bands, bars, kiosks and beer gardens.
To work and it's a rush through the traffic that never really stopes even at the lights., Strange shaped cars, Citroens and expensive shaped cars - Maseratis, Bentleys, Ferraris all jostle with cheap shaped cars BYD's and vw taxis swerving around each other, no seatbelts or turn signals, bouncing around like blood vessesls in a magnified artery.
Yp in the elevator the little Ayi, cleaning as I ride up to the 6th floor she never bothers me and I but briefly smile at her. She must be about 60 on her hands and knees with a dirty cloth polishing the scratched bronze plated metal at the base of the elevator door.
In a moment I get off the elevator, strangely noting that our paths won't ever cross again  - not socially not over dinner or hopt pot, no jazz - just one moment where we shared a space as she cleaned the metal near my feet,
Out the elevator to the right walking past the empty eyed hostess.
The anticipation of the days adventure starting to sting like a nick from a close shave.
At noon a package arrives filled with 15k HKD, 20 minutes later 6k RMB was wired to my bank account.
I was to fly in HK by the way of Shenzhen, booking arranged by an associate, visa run of the damned.
My Visa for China had been expired by 5 months, a tremendous, horrendous and icredibly ridiculous feat of bold face craziness. Off all my friends I was the only one who had ever taken it that far. For five months I had been living in fear of arrest and deportation. Every knock at the door was answered by a girl while I waited perched on the ledge of my 3rd floor window, 10,000 RMB of cash in the side pocket of my blazer - ready to make a run for it, it was either that or a pissible 10 day detention followed by a 5 year ban from China and I just couldn't do that.
So I waited it out, did nothing - my usual MO.
During the middle of my 4th month of being a fugitive I happened to stumble on a Visa website, they hever had a case like mne before but for 13.300 RMB