Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 21 Macau: Not for Boys Only

The three-night weekend just before the Chinese New Year in Macau was a going to be a boys’ trip, not like the overnights across the causeway into the Kingdom of Rhizobia, or the trips to Bali or the weeklong jaunts to the Gilis. Macau was a boys’ trip because it was just too seamy. The nus ladies thought that everywhere they turned there’d be love for sale, with the trappings, too—for instance the sex tourists, the girls from all over the world to service them, the pretty boys to fill in the gaps, the inescapable signs of trafficking, not to mention the gambling, narcotics, and every other nihilistic pursuit of some male fantasy of an Asian Las Vegas wannabe. In the cheap hotels they could afford, there would have been no respite, and the girls just didn’t want a part of it, they said, until they changed their minds. The young men, boys really, painted pictures of the elaborate festivities that the girls shouldn’t deny themselves, and of the city’s other charms, like the pastel churches built 400 years earlier under Portuguese rule or the modernist apartment buildings from the 1930s.

When the girls found some discounts that made a stay at the historic Hotel Lisboa affordable, and then decided to go along, it was on the condition that the boys—whom they knew would be gambling and maybe worse—keep their distance, and meet up with in Macao only for the shuttle back to the airport.

The boys decided on the Hotel Holiday, away from the high-priced waterfront, choosing to sleep cheap and bet dear, and travel by foot and taxi to the old-world piazzas where the elegant casinos were found. Having flown in late and avoided gruelish airplane food, they planned on finding dinner along their walk toward the city center where a lazy doubleheader of gambling and whoring awaited them.

For Max, it was more like a hockey game, scoring a hat trick but spending time in the penalty box for brawling. Also, there was no poker. How could he have missed that there was no poker?

On the crest of a little hill in the Santo Antonio district, a hole-in-the-wall ceremoniously called Maître Jacques beckoned Max in particular, whose appetite for anything French left him always on the prowl. Jacques presided over his six linoleum-covered tables, crowded so close together that his customers had to turn sideways to navigate between the chairs. Jock, as his clients called him, had emigrated when his family was young, believing that they all had to be fluent in Mandarin and the ways of the Chinese in order to survive in the coming millennium. For his wife, that would be no problem, as she was Macanese, and for his children, the magic of the human brain would take over if they were immersed. For him alone it would be hard. He brought along years of restauranteur experience, and he maintained at his little place the highest standards of French cuisine. One of those was simply to enjoy eating. When Max and his two friends walked in, Jock was carrying on two conversations with guests at different tables, and throughout the course of Max’s meal, one departing guest after another came to give Jock a kiss on both cheeks, and to kiss his wife, the sous chef, too. Committed to the best raw materials, he’d found no alternative to importing them from France. Wine, oysters, cheeses, of course, and the goose liver for his signature fois gras. Two hours after the boys arrived, they filled up on Alsatian wine, bacon-dusted salade, foie gras, lapin chasseur with mushrooms and shallots served in a large cast-iron pot, and several samplings of other dishes, and plenty of his wife’s bread to go with them. Their bellies expanded beyond comfort, begging to leave, they accepted Jock’s offering of a small bag of his colorful macarons, and then said goodnight. By then it was very late, midnight, but the casino never sleeps.

One stood out among the others, its mango façade and gaudy lights calling them. When the three boys went inside, they were greeted by a parade of Chinese and light-skinned Southeast Asian girls, and a small crowd of Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian men observing the girls march back and forth on a seventy-yard course through the hotel casino’s basement shops—a fruit stand, several clothing stores, a pharmacy, a jeweler, a photography studio, one specializing in fine Chinese ceramics, and another in cookies, cans of soda, and condoms. The girls were all very well made up, teetering in fuck me pumps and almost vacuum-packed into tight dresses. They chattered with each other like so many schoolgirls as they gamboled back and forth. The men gathered at one end of the track and the girls walked up to within a yard of them, beckoning the Asians with fingers and words, trying to making eye contact, while not so much as glancing at Max and his Caucasian friends. Occasionally, one girl walked off with one of the men toward the elevators just beyond the entrance to the gambling halls where Max and his friends soon disappeared.