The Old Expat
The old expatriate sat on a bar stool, drinking rum and cokes and thinking about his life. His tell-all of 65 years had been bewilderingly and stupefyingly short, but neither nasty nor brutish as Thomas Hobbes had once observed. It had been mostly smooth sailing, a run-of-the mill cakewalk from start to near finish.
The aging expat knew his life would soon be over. He had two stents in his heart and had reached stage B of congestive heart failure, meaning his left ventricle could no longer efficiently or effectively pump Oxygen-rich blood to his extremities. He had no idea how much time he had left, but with luck on his side he might get in a few more good years before kicking the bucket. By good years he meant ingesting homemade cannabis oil, drinking alcohol, and fucking prostitutes on an almost daily basis.
The old expat, who went by the name of Jerry, had reached this point in his life alone and dirt-poor, living on a social security retirement check of $869 a month. A decade earlier his parents had left him a small inheritance of 80K, but that money had been used to buy two plots of land in Vietnam with his fourth wife, Ngoc Anh. Jerry hoped he might get half of the cash back from the sale of the land, but real estate prices in Vietnam had tanked and he knew he might die before his wife could ever sell it.
Live for today, Jerry reminded himself. But his mind kept taking him back to the past, to all the mistakes he had made and the regrets he still carried with him. Fuck it, he thought. He downed the last of his cocktail and raised up the empty glass to signal another.
The bartender, a pretty Thai girl in her early 20s, smiled and nodded her approval. "One more rum and coke?" she asked loudly, as though she wanted other patrons to hear her.
Jerry nodded, wondering what it would be like to stick his cock in her big mouth. "Hey, you so sexy!" he whooped. "We go boom-boom soon, okay?"
"Nooo, darling! The girl laughed, her brown almond-shaped eyes sparkling in the afternoon light. "Me your bartender, no boom-boom girl for you!"
The girl mixed the drink and placed it on the bar in front of Jerry, napkin underneath. "But if you want girl for sec I help you," she cooed. "What kine girl you lie?"
Jerry stared at the bartender, musing at the mispronunciations of her Tinglish. As an English teacher in Asia for many years he always noticed such errors but had long ago given up the urge to correct them. Jerry ran his eyes up and down the bartender's body, noticing her small breasts and pencil-thin body. The vampish waif didn't have an ounce of fat on her.
"You have boyfriend?" Jerry queried, swigging long and hard on his well drink. The sweet boozy bite of the cheap rum hit his taste buds like a wet dream of anticipatory delight. At this point in the early afternoon Jerry began to feel the effects of the liquor combined with a thimble-sized dose of weed oil he had mixed into a carton of strawberry yogurt for lunch about an hour earlier.
"Yes, me have boyfrien Germany," came the girl's reply. Her long, stringy brown hair reminded Jerry of Peggy Lipton, an American model and actress most famous for her role as Julie Barnes on The Mod Squad, one of his favorite TV shows from the early 1970s.
"You want new boyfriend?" Jerry asked, knowing the girl would flirt with him all day long.
"Nooo, him good boyfren, take good care me. Why you ask me? You want girlfren? That easy for you, darling. I help you meet nice girl Thailan."
