Singapore Noir

I do this because, even if others do not realize it as they go about their business, rushing, waiting, doing everyday things, these are stories of the many people in this city that, they say, has no crime and really is without art. There are tales of crime, of sex, and even — most disturbing — of a kind of love.

Mine — ours — is one such story.

Let me relieve us from the very start of a popular misconception about this city: it is not illegal here to think of sex, nor to have sex, or indeed to pay for it.

True, the state is a nanny and the bureaucracy does not know how to let a person live without rules, and so they reduce life to a schedule of permits and licenses to be applied and paid for. They have allowed the seediness and confined it to certain quarters. The upper class are garrisoned with their respectability in other areas, all with rising real estate values. The government assumes the soul is a street that can be swept clean, a garden where order can be established — especially here in the suburbs of the wealthy, next to the Botanic Gardens.

To the contrary.

Now we read the headline allegations and charges involving associations between high officials and people who are trying to sell things to their departments, and of so many men caught with girls who are legally too young to sell themselves. Now we recognize the by-the-hour hotels ensconced among the middle-class neighborhoods, and the young girls from all over the world offering themselves online. Some are shocked. I am not.

There is sin in Singapore, in the very word of it. And one of our sins is sex. Not lovemaking between couples — the government will quickly point to the lack of procreation, an aging population, and an inverted pyramid that spells a demographic half-life. I am talking about in brothels, in short-time hotels at a littered street corner nearby, in massage parlors with flimsy plywood walls separating one customer from another, in karaoke rooms where the lights are dimmed so you do not see the stains on the furniture or notice how ugly the girls are, in toilets at the end of a fluorescent-lit corridor. I am talking about fucking.

I learned this early, after my graduation from university, when I was posted to Vice. Once, an eternity ago, I used to date, and thought there was a girl who might be the one for me. Once I thought lovemaking was something which a man chased after, hunted, and won through charm and the promise of dedication, and that was given to him because of merit of some kind; because a woman thought he was a good man with a good career ahead of him, or liked the way he kissed, or danced, or his sense of humor, or the cologne he wore. There were things we men did to increase the odds, like buying them drinks in a bar. But that aside, it was merit.

I quickly learned otherwise. Money cannot buy you love, but bucks buy fucks.

Look at the working girls. They sing, drink, and smoke, drape an arm around you, let you pinch their legs, laugh at your jokes, act sympathetic when you tell them your silly stories and then try to make you laugh. These girls open their legs and do so many things to clients, strangers who walk in from the street, through a door: I assumed they would be different.

They do dress and wear makeup differently on the job. Short skirts. Hugging tops with steep necklines. High-heel stilettos. Glitter. Bright red lipstick and cheeks. Manicured long nails, in bright red or else black with sparkles. But that is like a uniform. Just as I used to wear a policeman’s uniform, they have theirs.

I met some in other places, off the job, in everyday clothes — when they were in normal makeup, normal clothes, I realized these girls are ordinary. Some are prettier than average. Many are not. I heard them talk among themselves about shopping, eating, movies, father and mother, friends, and hopes for more money, a good life. Some were nice. Others were not. They are just normal. Normal women.

That is what most disturbs me.

Fucking and lovemaking, sin and sacred: what differs is the intention, the psychological element, the context. The dick is in the same place. The mind is what is in a different place. The difference between lovemaking and fucking is fundamentally a question of attitude, and these attitudes can be criminal. The working girls are divided from normal girls only by the mind. Money is just the trigger to move from one mental state to another.