This is me, munching, realizing that I should maybe disguise myself a little – so that if he does come out and see me, he won’t, you know, freak out and have a heart attack or something.
Just your regular dude, hanging out on the street, eating his breakfast.
But what if he comes out the building when I go off to buy my disguise?
I weigh the dilemma up in my head for a minute, and decide it’d be better if he didn’t realize what was going on.
On my way here, I passed a shop that sold cheap baseball caps and sunglasses. The owner was just sliding the shutters up, so I go back and buy a plain black cap and some Wayfarer knockoffs, and I put them on. Inconspicuous like.
Just as I’m about to get to my waiting spot, I see that he’s right there at the front of his building, leaning against one of the tiled columns.
Reading his book.
The plan was to follow him around a bit. See what he gets up to in his day.
But this guy, he doesn’t seem to do anything apart from read that book. And by the looks of things, he’s going to be there for a while, standing comfortable there in that morning slice of warm, golden light as the city wakes up around him.
I watch him for a few minutes.
Now that I can see his body fully, the rest of our physical similarities come fast. He’s the same height, he’s the same build.
But even so, he seems to take up more space than I do.
And even though you can’t see it, you can sense this invisible forcefield around him, and it gives him this power, this authority.
At this rate, I could be standing here all day.
So I walk up to him.
And I say, That looks like an interesting book.
T
HIRTY
-S
EVEN
Me and Erin, we used to take it in turns to go around each other’s houses after college. This was when we were around sixteen.
Erin was this blonde-haired, blue-eyed metalhead, with pale white skin, who was constantly twirling her hair round and round, round and round.
The first day we met she was slacking off in art class, doodling on a piece of paper and rocking backwards and forwards on her chair, while Mr Hallam was talking to us about composition in photography and the golden mean.
When I turned to see what this penduluming thing in my peripheral vision three desks down was, I was smacked in the face with a scrunched-up piece of paper.
The face on me must have been funny, because she was creasing up silently.
Outside, she told me she was sick of her mum and dad fighting all the time.
I told her my dad had cancer.
We’d hang out in our bedrooms, listen to music, watch films.
Spend hours snogging, nothing else. Partly because at least one of our parents was always at home, and partly because I’d never had sex before, and to be honest I’d never even had this kind of thing with a girl before.
I was just amazed she didn’t find me and my slanted eyes ugly.
One afternoon, this was in the summer, just as we were about to finish our first year of college, we’re outside the main building and she says, Hey, my parents are out tonight. Wanna come round?
And I say, Sure.
We ride the bus to her house, and at this point we’ve been going out for a few months already, so we’ve got into a kind of easy rhythm.
She opens the front door, I kick off my shoes, and we go up to her bedroom.
Same as usual.
But after we make out to a soundtrack of Incubus for a little bit, she reaches down my body and grabs my dick, a first for us.
And instead of fist pumping the air and shouting in my head, GET IN THERE MY SON, all I can think of is this article I read in Loaded magazine, illustrated with a bar chart and everything, that ranked guys’ penis lengths by race.
And how the men with the smallest dicks in the world were Asian men.
And I’m thinking, Shit, what if she pulls my trousers and my boxers down and sees what’s under there and laughs?
What if she says, Is that it? So what they say about Asian guys is right, after all.
