Here Comes Your Man

   You are a cashier girl at a run-down supermarket in a run-down town.

   It’s been eight months now since you started working there, but you hardly noticed it. Not. You are simply too numb to care. Too deep in this. Too dark to see. Too desperate to get it. Too slow to react. Too fragile to complain. Too timid to ask questions. Too shy to fail. “This is Life”, you say, with a capital ‘S’. ‘S’ as in Shit. ‘S’ as in the work is shitty, the pay is shitty, the people there treat you (accordingly) like a shitty.

   ‘S’ as in I am a big-ass loser, would you want a plastic bag or a paper bag?

   But it’s better than not having a job and staying at home, waiting for Ma to marry you off to a bored, tub-of-lard, soon-to-be-a-drug-addict Zakaria from the Feldas.

   That asswipe degree in IT?

   Total waste of time. Should’ve joined Lina, your courageous, tomboy best friend in high school, and went to enroll in MISC instead. That way, by this time, you could’ve been sailing on a big ship to three-fourths of the globe, seeing exotic sights, eating exotic food (‘though your stomach most prolly couldn’t handle it), getting sleazy hits from desperate, available sailors. The ‘it’ girl they jerk-off to in crowded shared latrines.

   Oops, be careful there, sonny. You don’t want to drop your soap in here.

   Ha-ha.

   Pop culture references. Cool, useless fact-of-junks that’s good for understanding Hollywood movies and why they do or say what they do or say. Stuff that you get from reading all those cheap tabloids and sordid magazines that the supermarket put close to the cash registers, luring customers who wait in line to pay to buy them as “impulsives”.

   Impulsive.

   Spontaneous. Unpredictable. Wild. That’s a good quality to look for in a man.

   A man.

   You need a man. You need a man desperately. You need a man right now.

   But working as a cashier girl gets you nowhere and it gets you no such man. Especially in this dank, south-of-nothing town, and especially at this hellhole of a job. All you get here is more work for less pay. More people over the weekends, more people over the sales seasons, the holiday seasons, the festivity seasons. More people throwing their cheap junks at you to screen for the price, and then for you to bag, and then to complain that the stuff that your store sells are expensive or defective or of low quality.

   You don’t know how you managed to put up with that kind of shit everyday for the past eight months. You drag yourself out of bed every morning at half past seven so that you won’t be late for work (damn, that place starts at 8:30 AM and closes at 10:30 PM from Monday to Monday, back to back, and it still manages to pull in more money than a loud sack of freaking nothing), you jump on a bus that plays Hindi songs all the time, you arrive, you punch your time card, you sit and you have breakfast with the girls (those gila batang bitches), you gossip, you get scolded by the boss (he’s such a typical Chinese towkay, you can’t stand his talk about money, money, money, and making more money, and time is money, and growing your money, and money fucking that, and money fucking this), and you sit at the cash register for long hours until painful boils and chaffs appear on your skinny, bony ass, and you close the accounts (one-half of your brain strain a tendon from all that maths), and you go home utterly bonkered.

   But then, at home and in bed, you try to go to sleep early so that you can go to work early tomorrow (not that you like to come to work, but still), but you can’t, ‘cause your job sucks, your life sucks, your work uniform makes you look fat (orca-fat), you are tired of fending off advancements from this zit-faced asshole at work (you nearly gave in! you even thought of considering all of his “better” side!), you haven’t seen your (successful college) friends for months now (they are avoiding you, you throw nasty bitch fits), your shift schedule says that you will work during most public holidays, you can’t afford to buy a Kancil tho’ everybody has one, your cell phone is already so outdated, your hair is flat and frail, you are sad and depressed and you can’t fall asleep naturally without masturbating to the cold, blank ceiling, and you don’t have a man.

   A man.

   You need a man. You need a man desperately. You need a man right now.

   You want to be touched by a man in all the right places. You want to be told that you are one hot-ass mama, that you make him squirm, that you rock his socks at night. You want to be so close to a man that you can smell his breath, his skin and his crotch.

   But instead, your case is:
      “Dik, do you have that cream for itchy athlete’s crotch?”
      “Yeah, Aisle 4. Next to the Ibu dan Anak cough syrup.”

   You decide that you’ve had enough of that shit. You want a man, a real man. One that you can touch. One that you can talk to. One that you can slide a picture of him in your padded bra. One with lust, desires, dreams, and a huge hand phone debt (AFUNDI madness, post-paid plan), just like you. One with real-life problems, like what to wear to Atuk’s kenduri, or what goes with this shirt and that tudung, or where’s Pa?

   You want a man.

   Urrghmmmph… you want a man.

   You want to be the star of his camera phone movie, where you pose seductively, you strip enticingly, you smile suggestively. You want to put him under your spell and you drag him by the nose to the waterbed, and down to the floor, and up on the stairs.

   Urrghmmmph...

   You want a man who wants prolonged foreplay before the climax, a man who wants elaborate appetizers before the main dish, a man who wants acoustic version of the famous song before the rockin’ and rollin’ kick-ass encore, a man who wants to see you strut around in the hotel room in a fancy, expensive lingerie before you let him ravages you like a starved animal, a man who comes twice and gets it up like a flagpole.

   Urrghmmmph…

   You are about to explode. Beads of sweat forming, spine tingling, sensational. Your body shakes like a pimped ride. The suspensions raised, bumps, spoilers and hot rods. You are about to see God in the nude, the light of divinity, the holiness of holiness. You are free-falling. The adrenaline is making you moist. The parachute is tangled, the panties are all twisted. The moon, the sky and the stars, a giant supernova, a big bang.

   BANG!
   Dried, salted cuttlefish peppered with sugar and spice, and a garden shovel.
      “Today got 15% discount, ah? Labor Day?”
      “Only if you have coupons from The Star.”
      “Aiyoh. I only read Sin Chiew. Cannot ah?”
      “Cannot lah, apek. Where got coupons there.”
         (Unmarried, middle-aged, Chinese, horny, sells fertilizers.)

   BANG!
   Pampers Soft™, powdered baby milk, today’s Utusan and a pack of Dunhill.
      (A young father. Wife waiting in the car. Baby crying in back seat.)
         Sleepless nights for days on end.
         Humdrum sex, a Friday night routine, a pain.
         Everyday he loves her less and less. Less and less.

   BANG!
   Two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey®, and a box of SAFE™ facial tissue.
      (He’s dumped her. She’s heartbroken. She’s lost. She’s damaged goods.)
         She’ll never see You’ve Got Mail the same way again.
         Or Sleepless in Seattle.
         Or When Harry Met Sally.
         Or Casablanca.
         Cry, baby girl, cry.
         But don’t you push Love away.

   BANG!
   A roll of recordable CD-Rs, a handful of Hong Kong comics, and a bar of soap.
      What’s with the big fat thumb-drive necklace, you big fat nerd?
      A fashion statement, is it?
      Ooh, I’m a big fan of computers, ooh.
      Ooh, I’ve finished Gran Turismo on the hardest setting, ooh.
      It’s good that you’re buying lotsa soap, ‘cause you fucking need ‘em.

   BANG!
   Two cans of mackerels in tomato sauce, Pepsi, and a pack of AA batteries.
      What’s wrong, tough guy? Got kicked out of Paradise?
      Did your lovely wife…

   “Excuse me.”
   “Yes?”
   “This is rather embarrassing, but do you know a shop here that sells bicycles?”

   You look up.

   You look up expecting to see the sweaty, greasy face of a panting out-of-towner (a school teacher, a civil servant, transferred from the city) who has lost his way while jogging, got too tired to jog back home, looking to buy a cheap bike to save his dignity (the doormat) from having to resort to calling a taxi or hitchhiking on a vegetable truck.

   You look up expecting to witness a famous village idiot in the act of making a total jackass out of himself by screwing around other people’s head with a series of stupid, fucked-up questions like “Why’s water wet?”, “Haze: what would MacGyver do?”, “What’s a French tickler?”, or “Why did Judas rat to the Romans while Jesus slept?”.

   You look up expecting to be made a complete fool by an unemployed dickhead who gets his high from racing tricked-up Yamaha RXZ and disturbing cashier girls at work. You expect him to wink his filthy disco light eyes and hang his forked snake leather tongue out, and he expects you to unbutton the fly of his tight corduroy and have his monstrous balls dangle down from your chin, penis grazed, licked and sucked.

   You look up, but you see none of those.

   Instead, when you look up, you see a man.

   A single, young man.
      Two cans of mackerels in tomato sauce? (His lunch, dinner and supper).
      Pepsi? (To drink on the road as he drives his new GEN.2 all over town).
      AA batteries? (For his Discman, to listen to Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne).

   A young executive. A junior engineer. A fresh-faced overseas grad. A good son to his mom and pop. A role model to the kid brothers. A bachelor who lives all alone in an empty apartment, starving, bored, listless on a Sunday. An eligible candidate. A man.

   A man.

   You need a man. You need a man desperately. You need a man right now.

   “Uhm, I’m not sure. Lemme think…” you say, buying some time, holding his attention hostage. You gracefully attend to his items, you scan them gently (the machine is a gentle beast, you treat it with love and care), you press the print button softly (it’s a baby), and you read the total to him (“RM17.90”) with charm and elegance.

   He hands you a twenty (your fingers touched) and you return the change.
      “Paper or plastic?”
      “Plastic, please.”
         (You notice that he says ‘please’. You melt like butter.)

   You imagine him staring down your uniform and having a full good look at your modest cleavage while you bag his items on the register, even though you know that you don’t have anything substantial to show (12-year old A-cups) and your uniform doesn’t have any opening or slit big enough at the top to enable him to stare down into.

   You imagine him catching himself in the act and moving his gaze away to look at something else; the freshly baked, warm, puffy bread, the soft, round, pointy brown muffins, the moist, trickling, glistening glaze of the chocolate (milk) cake, the wholesome presence and weight of the sweet watermelons, the oddly Freudian shape of golden ripe papayas, wrapped in wired silk and soft cotton; the forbidden image of your womanly nirvana that he just saw now, haunting him in everything else that he sees.

   You imagine him being a good husband, a good father, a good role model to the kids. You imagine his face and the faces of your kids: (you name them if they’re girls) Nadra, Noris and Nadia, and (he names them if they’re boys) Faizal, Fairuz and Farris. You imagine the babies having his ears, his nose, his forehead, and you imagine the babies having your eyes, your chin, your complexion. You imagine decades of blissful marriage. You imagine cold shoulders and jealous rage. You imagine the fantastic make-up sex. You imagine him struggling in the kitchen, cooking you dinner on Mother’s Day.

   You imagine loving him, kissing him, carrying his disease, nesting his babies.

   “Do you think one of the motorcycle workshops at Medan Jaya sells bicycles?”

   “I’m not sure”, you say, handing him the bag. “Have you tried Tanjung Batu?”

   He smiles. “No, not yet. I should’ve tho’”, he says quietly, shaking his head.

   You return his smile.
      But you are looking down when you return his smile, you stupid!
         It must’ve escaped him, your precious, shy-girl, kampong smile!

   What a waste. You blew it.

   He says thanks and he walks away from you --the lonely, desperate, orca-fat cashier girl at a run-down supermarket in a run-down town. You see him moving farther away from you (but you want him to stay awhile longer), his steps longer, his pace faster. You see him reaching for his shiny, new car keys (will he take you for a ride?) and inserting them into the door. You realize now (biting your lips) that he is moving on with his eligible bachelor Life, and you are stuck there with your shitty cash register Life.

   You sigh.

   What a waste. You totally blew it.

   May you make some other lucky (brave) girl happy (orgasmic), you wish him.
   May you have a (sex) fulfilled life with a truly (more) beautiful girl, you go on.
   May she find you the Love (Catch) of her (Gila Batang Slut) Life, you add.
   May you… and you stop, because all this loser talk is making you teary-eyed.

   You quickly turn away from him and his GEN.2 and you return to what you do best: staring into the empty, pointless void that is your Life. You don’t think you can stand it, seeing him leave, hearing him leave, knowing him leave. You close your eyes, you cover your ears, you numb your mind. With fright, you wait for the sound of his car to start (your glass heart to shatter) and you wait for the engine to rumble (the pieces to scatter all over) and the car to finally gallop away (your prince in white shining armor has galloped away, he has galloped away, gallop gallop gallop) and leave you behind.

   But you hear none of that. You wait, and you hear some more, but nothing.

   You turn around, and you see him coming back. The man, he’s coming back.

   Oh, no! Here he comes!

   He!

   The man!

   The man who will set you free. The man who will release you from the shackles of capital-‘S’ Life. The man who will make you yodel and dance and roll down a hill. The man who will shower you with, uh, last-minute gifts. The man who will make you cream in your jeans. The man whose half-a-minute semen will be in your eyes, stinging, acid, pungent, exothermic. The man who will set your heart (pussy) on wild (fucking) F-I-R-E.

   “Sorry, but do you have a plastic straw for the Pepsi?”
   “Sure. Here.” F-I-R-E! F-I-R-E! F-I-R-E! F-I-R-E! F-I-R-E!
   “Ah, that’s great. Thank you. Now I can drink and drive.”

   You better make eye contact. You better say something cute. You better make him remember this moment all throughout his day. You better make him remember you.

   You better make your move N O W.

   Before the office teagirls or the cleaning ladies at his workplace make theirs.