Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (16 page)

Of course, the newspapers managed to track down his foster father—a wizened, leather-skinned man standing behind the metal-grille door of a small, badly kept single-story link house in a bad part of Kota Bharu. The photographs show the tiny cement yard in front of the house, the rusting, disassembled handlebars of an old motorbike, a pile of deflated tires, an empty cage that might once have contained a few chickens or a medium-size dog, and a clay pot full of weeds. The stories describe how, from behind the bars of the door, he shouts obscenities in Hokkien at every visitor. He is not used to company; he does not welcome strangers. One reporter recounts being physically chased from the house by this old grandfather wielding a broomstick.
Now we know where Gary gets his tendency for confrontation!
the journalist mocks. It is a hilarious image: a frail pensioner, barely five feet tall, chasing a young fashionable journalist from his shabby home, little more than a shack, wielding a broomstick. It makes readers laugh—this whole affair is not very serious at all. That’s what these provincial people are like; their lives are hard but at the same time (let’s admit it) slightly comic. The harshness of their meager existence makes them act in strange ways. You can’t really blame Gary for behaving erratically, for he can never escape his roots. He is a superstar who drank $1,000 bottles of champagne at the age of twenty-two, but at heart he is still a small-town ruffian—a miscreant who will never be able to change. His whole life from start to present has been ridiculous.

Gary tries to remember if this little old man ever used a broomstick to hit him: rattan cane, broken table leg, plastic bucket, worn canvas boot, strip of car tire consigned to scrap—and, yes, a stump of a broomstick. He would use any banal domestic object that happened to be in his field of vision at the time of one of his tempers, but he never used his hands or fists, as if he was afraid of making contact with Gary directly, as if even a sharp blow with the back of his hand might involve a split-second touch of Gary’s skin. Gary had just turned eleven when his mother died and he came to live with this man, the skinny hunchback cousin of hers, a man who could barely support himself in retirement, never mind a hungry, growing child. At the age of sixty-six, he was still working part-time in a scrap yard to support himself, so it was no surprise that he did not take
well to the arrival of a child in need of looking after. It was no surprise, too, that he beat Gary regularly, for he was already an alcoholic long before Gary arrived.

But this is not a tale of misery; it is a tale of comedy. Because there is something amusing in the gradual unearthing of Gary’s life, for sure there is. Everyone who reads these news articles says, Oh, how terrible, how sad, what a horrible boy he is, what a tragic story, but they laugh too. They snigger at the calendar of scantily clad girls that hangs on the porch of Gary’s foster father’s house, the kind of cheap freebie that you get when buying gas or beer, clearly several years out of date but still hanging there because its owner is a dirty old man—can you imagine, a grandpa his age looking at pictures of young girls like that. When there is an interview with one of Gary’s childhood acquaintances on TV, viewers make fun of his accent, for it is very unsophisticated. When rural Chinese people speak English, it sounds as if they are speaking Hokkien.
An den I got say him, ey, why you want lie me, I no money oso you like dat one, ah? Many people, ah, they don like him is because he no money ma, so he got steal people handphone, people money. One time I got say him, ey, why I don do anything oso you lai kacau wo? Just say like dat oso kena wallop one
. The viewers don’t mean to be rude, but even when this guy speaks Mandarin, it is so thick with Hokkien overtones and also mixed in with Malay words that it is really funny to listen to—you don’t even know what language he is speaking!

Once you have seen and heard these comic snippets from his past, Gary’s recent antics seem pretty hilarious too. Watch again the video of him beating up the man in the luxury bar in Shanghai: He is swaying and unsteady, raising his fists as drunk people do in films. When he lifts the wooden signboard overhead and brings it crashing down on the man’s body, over and over again, he looks as if he is the villain in an old slapstick movie or even a cartoon, where people fall from great heights or get crushed by falling weights and all you do is laugh at them. His body is tiny compared to that of the inert fallen victim’s—a seagull pecking at the corpse of a walrus. The single word on the sign flashes before you.
WOW! … WOW! … WOW!

Gary himself feels like laughing when he sees these images. Surrounded by newspapers strewn across the floor of his hotel room—his agent has every single newspaper and magazine delivered daily to his room as punishment for the mess he has gotten the whole company into—he sees just
how ridiculous this situation is. If he were not the subject of these stories, he would be eager to read all of them, because there is a sense of unreality about this whole affair—no one could possibly be so idiotic. Every day he would want to get the cheap newspapers and magazines with colorful covers and ask himself, chuckling: How can someone so famous be so goddamn stupid? He would be fascinated but, frankly, he wouldn’t take any of it seriously.

And when he zaps through the channels on TV and sees people he knew in past times, he begins to giggle. Here is one, a boy who extorted money from Gary for two years, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The money Gary had was not even worth the effort, but the boy did it anyway, he and his band of friends, until the day Gary pushed him into a monsoon drain. And now here he is, showing off his fat fleshy nose, which he claims Gary broke in a fight. He is wearing the uniform of a fast-food restaurant—the first KFC to open in that small provincial town. When he speaks to the journalist, he tries to summon up long-suppressed pain, his eyes narrowed, his voice anguished, as if the event traumatized him, but the camera picks up a hint of a smile even as he talks about how Gary always had a “dark soul” and how everyone feared him. This guy who spends his days serving fried chicken and coleslaw and his nights racing scooters with his Ah Beng friends around a small town in the north of Malaysia—he is so proud that someone has come all the way from Taipei to ask him questions and put him on TV. He is ridiculous; he makes Gary want to laugh out loud. LOL LOL LOL.

Gary’s foster father appears on TV again. Now, that really was a comic arrangement if ever there was one. Gary never addressed that man properly, barely had a conversation with him, yet he is being described as Gary’s
“closest relative.”
The two of them spent their entire lives avoiding each other, timing their respective arrivals at the house in order to minimize the chances of seeing each other. Gary remembers the huge relief he felt whenever he came home and found the place empty and the dread when he heard the front grille creak open in the night. Often he would come home and find his foster father slumped in the lounger made of plastic strings, his mouth open, trails of dried spittle tracing the line of his jaw down to his bony collarbone, like sea salt on rocks. His head was rounded at the back, the feather-thin white hair rising up in a wispy tuft, his nose pointed like the beak of a turtle. He truly did look like a comic-book
animal—an Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle. The first time Gary got thrown out of school (the exact misdemeanor is forgotten now—probably for smoking on school grounds during morning break), he did not think about what would happen if he came home early. His foster father hit him, said it was a waste of money sending him to school, he should just get a job serving tables at the coffee shop or carrying sacks of rice. As he raised the shoe to beat Gary, his jerky movements and bony arms made him look just like a make-believe animal. Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle, Old-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle. Alone in his hotel room, sitting amid a sea of comic-book memories from his childhood, Gary feels like laughing, laughing, laughing.

Laughing until he cries.

This endless pantomime tires him, but now, thank God, there is a break. The celebrity news on TV moves on to someone else—an older pop singer who fell to the floor at a meet-and-greet session last night, and now people think she is pregnant. Gary knows her. To the public, she seems like a stuck-up woman, but he feels a certain closeness to her because she gave him generous advice when he first moved to Taipei. When he was struggling with voice coaching and trying to break into acting at the same time, she said, Don’t worry, one way or another you will be a big star—you have no other option in life but to be a big star.

Ha-ha, he said. Maybe I don’t want to be a star.

She said, There is no other possibility for you.

They share a love of spicy beef noodles, and when she played her concert in Malaysia, she spent much time eating at neighborhood street stalls in order to experience the delicacies Gary had recommended to her. In an interview with the local press, she referred to him as her “surrogate son,” and even though they are not that close, Gary knew what she meant, because he, too, felt in a small way that she was like his mother. He knows that she is indeed pregnant and that the father is a rich married man who will not leave his wife, and she is very unhappy. At the age of forty-six, she believes she has lost her charm and has resorted to plastic surgery, which lends her beauty a harsh, tense quality. The cameras wait outside the hospital day and night, making her even more miserable. But here’s the problem: Her sadness brings relief to Gary. Every moment the news concentrates on her, he is able to take time out from the ridiculous spectacle of his own
life. He wishes the news to remain focused on her misery, but he knows that, sooner or later, the loop will come back around to him. For the fact is that her fame has all but diminished, whereas he is still a huge star. Or at least he was until a few days ago.

He turns the TV off and stares at the blank screen. His hand twitches, resisting the urge to turn the TV on again. He cannot bear the sad ridicule of his life, but at the same time he is used to it now. He wants to see those people from his past, see what has become of them—laugh at them the way others are laughing at him. But he manages to resist the temptation and instead logs on to the Facebook page that his record company maintains for him. He is not allowed to respond personally to any messages. Whenever he makes a statement to his fans on this page, it is in fact the PR department that writes the words:
I’m deeply sorry for all the embarrassment my behavior has caused. Knowing you are all there to support me has touched me deeply and keeps me strong. My problems have brought me closer to you all. Thank you, thank you
.

The messages of support stream in from all over Asia. Girls of fifteen, sixteen, refusing to give up hope on Gary.
I will always love you no matter what you do, because you are a beautiful human being. I refuse to believe Gary has done any of these things—his enemies are liars liars LIARS. Gary is an innocent of love’s dreams! Gary is a victim! I LOVE YOU GARY YOU ARE MY SPECIAL FOREVER
.

He thought that he would be reassured by these messages, but he is not. Instead, they make him angry. He hates his fans. They refuse to see the truth; they are blind to how rotten his life has become. They still believe that he is a pure, innocent person who can make their pathetic lives happy and bring meaning to their paltry existences, when in fact the only sensation he is capable of provoking is disgust. He loathes them for needing him in this way, for needing him to supply them with dreams. He closes his eyes and feels their neediness weighing down on him like monsoon days, heavy and unmoving, ready to engulf him. Like everyone else, his fans think that the stories they read in the magazines and on the Internet are a joke, a fabrication of events not to be taken seriously. But they do not realize that even if they are exaggerations, distortions, made-up stories by pathetic people with no lives of their own, they are true in one respect: He has always been a disgusting person.

He kneels on the floor and looks at the patchwork carpet of papers and magazines strewn across the floor in front of him. He surveys what lies before him: all the words and images that sum up his entire life. The room around him is filthy—clothes cling to the silk upholstery like rotting vegetation, and there are dirty plates and cups everywhere. No one has come to clean the room in three days. Maybe it is because his manager has forbidden anyone to come in. Maybe it is because the cleaning people are afraid of Gary and fear that he will hit them or even sexually assault them. He is suddenly very tired, but climbing into the bed on the other side of the room seems too much of an effort. His limbs ache, and his face and neck feel clammy. He lies down on the floor, trying to find a soft pile of carpet, but the newspapers and magazines are too densely laid out and he ends up lying on top of them, curled up on his side in a little ball. They make a loud rustling noise every time he moves.

So in some ways all the reports of Gary’s troubled, mixed-up life today are a simple continuation of his troubled, mixed-up life before. We would all love to believe in a fairy-tale story of a village boy made good, becoming a world-renowned figure while retaining his simplicity and integrity, but the nature of our modern world is that everything is corruptible from the beginning; Gary is merely proof that purity and decay are entwined, that beauty is another form of depravity. Vanity has its price, and Gary is paying it right now. Every single one of his remaining concerts, including the major events in Shanghai and Beijing, have been canceled, and even the smaller venues in Xian and Fuzhou have been postponed indefinitely. Already, one of his major sponsors has canceled his endorsement contract, rumored to be worth RMB 10 million. Even as we speak, the posters of him smiling and drinking a can of soda are coming down from billboards across Asia. Others are certain to follow: You can’t advertise wholesome cow’s milk drinks if you are an alcoholic. No one will employ him anymore, and his young career appears to be over. His innocence, which was his Unique Selling Point—in fact, his Only Selling Point—is now lost, and there can surely be no comeback. Like a brilliant show of fireworks, he dazzled for a while but now leaves us contemplating the dark night sky. What will he do now? Might you turn up at your local real estate office a couple of years from now and find that Gary is your broker? Quite possibly. But should we be sad? Clearly not. He wanted this life, so we should not pity him for being where he is. Nor should we mourn the loss of his
talent (though therein lies another debate: Was he actually talented or only pretty?). Others will soon come along to replace him, and others will fall just as he has. In a few years no one will remember him. So let us now leave this unfortunate young man to survey his broken career in peace and isolation. He deserves that much.