happy together again

Watching Wong Kar-Wai's film Happy Together again brings back memories. First there are the memories of earlier days in San Francisco, hanging out with Frankie at Café Flore, gossiping about Hong Kong movie stars and learning to say “you’re handsome” in Cantonese. We talked about travel a lot, too, and always international, of course. The film is all about travel and everything that goes with it: beauty, longing, excitement, loneliness, lust, boredom, adventure, mishaps and misunderstandings. So then I’m remembering my trip to South America which was partly inspired by the movie, but more specifically by my desire to runaway from reality and to go as far away as I possibly could. In the film, two men from Hong Kong live out their tumultuous relationship against the gorgeous backdrop of Buenos Aires. They are travelers, but stranded, which heightens their beautifully dysfunctional relationship. Or at least it seems beautiful when paired with the glamour shots of Buenos Aires decay and the roar of Iguazu Falls. Ho Po-wing and Lai Yiu-fai continuously treat each other horribly, but then get back together based on their willingness to “start over.” I didn't travel with an impossible boyfriend, but I definitely traveled with my own set of impossibly mundane problems. I was trying to escape a dead end job, ever-present loneliness, and of course, myself. I wanted to start over, too, and there’s something about a foreign country and thousands of miles that makes it seem like a possibility.
Walking to the obelisk at sunset my first night in Buenos Aires, I was holding on to the dream of reinvention. Everything was a shimmering pinkish-purple color that night, or that's how I remember it anyway. The clouds were pink, and everything was shiny and glowing. Yes, that's it. I sat there with everybody else looking at the beauty, feeling the beauty. It was the newness, the foreignness, the otherness that I loved, and that left me empty. And then there’s that question already, what am I doing here? I didn’t find any answers back at the dusty and drab, Hotel Maipu. I remember everything inside the hotel as being some shade of the color brown. But somehow even that became beautiful in the dim, distant lighting created from some unseen skylight, bathing everything in a lost grandeur. Or at least that’s how a gay man would write about it in a novel. There was no front desk, just a couple of elderly men sitting on opposite ends of a torn up leather sofa for hours on end. My room faced the street which was so loud and congested that I just wanted to stay in bed. Reading a left-behind copy of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, I got so depressed. And then there was that rash on my hip which made me think I had caught some nasty disease. Unfortunately, I didn’t leave my hypochondria at home. There’s a lot of things that don’t go away just because of different times zones, continents, and languages. I didn’t really go out at night and what’s a young gay male traveler doing if he’s not going out? I attempted a couple of times, walked by a couple of intimidating looking bars. Now I can’t remember if I was afraid of being out alone at night or just afraid to go into bars with loads of attractive men because of my low self-esteem. I mean what would I say to their questions? No, I don’t really know why I’m here. I’m just waiting form something unexpectedly beautiful and exciting to happen to me which could only happen here and would never happen at home. It will happen here because I’m different here. Obviously that was a lie because I couldn’t even make into the bar to have this imaginary conversation in reality.
During the day, I thought about Happy Together and tried to track down some of its landmarks. The cruisy bathroom at the train station was first on my list, of course. It’s portrayed with comic melancholy in the film. Yiu-fai goes there because he’s lonely and horny after Po-wing breaks up with him. I can relate. Certain aspects of cruising reality are so real in the film, like the guy pretending to fix his hair in the mirror but we all know what he’s really there for. It’s busy when I go in, so I’m excited, but I know I’m just falling back into old patterns and it’s more melancholic than comical. Later I peak in the window of the Bar Sur where in the film Yiu-fai works as a doorman and runs into Po-wing again after they’ve broken up. It was empty when I walked by, closed, too early in the day for the tango dancers to be putting on their show and it didn’t matter anyway because it’s just a fancy tourist place where I would never go. Although, according to a journal entry written while in Buenos Aires, I did want to learn the tango. I guess that’s inspired by the film, too. In a beautiful scene, Yiu-fai and Po-wing practice the tango in the run-down communal kitchen of their building. I guess what I really wanted was a man like Yiu-fai. What I got were three drunken guys. Walking down the deserted street, I pass them sitting on the sidewalk, drinking from bottles and looking for trouble. And no surprise they whistle as I walk by. It’s a shock, although it shouldn’t be. What else would they do but whistle when a queen walks by? They’re just playing their part. But it’s a call back to my reality. Something like that didn’t happen in the movie. And I haven’t escaped anything by coming to Buenos Aires and I never will escape myself. I’ll always be this and only this no matter where I am. Not that I’m trying to escape being a queen, but I just wanted to be different. I didn’t want to have any experiences that I had before, but that’s all I was having. My film and travel fantasies were cracking.
There was a transportation strike on the day I was leaving, and I thought I might not make it to my next stop, Santiago de Chile, where I was now desperate to get to. Now it wasn’t myself, San Francisco, or the United States that I needed to escape, but Buenos Aires that was keeping me down. I hadn’t really talked to anyone accept for a guy I met in the cruisy bathroom at a mall who wanted to take me for a drive, but I refused because it felt risky. The remnants of Happy Together that I found in Buenos Aires were flat and blank without the camera lens and soundtrack to weed out the dirty, noisy, bright white background of reality. My own movie of Buenos Aires is tired and lifeless and not anywhere near to the reinvention of myself that I’d imagined when fantasizing about the trip. It was all so much better in the movie. But still I’m not ready to give up on that dream of reinvention. Now I just need to go back and do it again, do it better.