Trishaws and Dirty Hands (2000)

Lived there for three years, of blurred edge days; those smoke filled days of huts and dirt roads, trishaws and dirty hands. It shouldn't have been special for me, not distinguishable I mean. I was always in such places, cities surrounded by shantytowns, with dust bunnies (not to mention dust mites) fighting for living space. This boy seems to have lived everywhere.

The list comes out; Thailand, Laos, Nicaragua, Mali... I can't help but pause. Then came Sri Lanka. I arrived at the airport late at night, long after the sun's heat had left the wet wind that swept through runwayside palm trees. My father hugged me and asked how the flight went. I said it was fine and we got in the car.

* * *

The kids would leave the international school after three, trailing out for hours as if they had nowhere of interest to go. Nothing to do but hack butts in the back room of Perrera's store, where I went between school and a chauffeured ride home.

Leaning back between a makeshift cable-spool table and a wall of rusty cardboard boxes, I can remember the sticky taste of the local Gold Leaf I smoked. Everyone smoked Gold Leaf or Marb lights, 'cause all the other cigarettes went stale before they got from the docks to the street. Even with my then bronze skin, smoking local butts, we couldn't do it like them. Like turned up ancient roots, blown inside from the caked alleys, the men would appear to buy a single wretched cigarette with coins that didn't clink. All of us, even the Koreans, the Indians, the boys from upper class Sri Lankan families, we had our own packs and we bought by the pack. Once you make that distinction, we might as well have been the royal fuckin' family hanging in seedy London pubs. Even clothed in smoky shrouds, we could not blend in. We were like tourists in Tiananmen, Barbie in Bosnia.