Not So Model Home

CHAPTER 21


I Now Pronounce You Empress Dowager

When I took Knucklehead to the Bark Park behind city hall to see his dog friends and chase a tennis ball ceaselessly, people gathered around me. Celebrity was infectious. People who hadn’t seen Things Are a Bit Iffy on television or the Internet had been told by friends to watch it, or sent e-mails with links in them. It wasn’t just during the day either that I was really getting attention. On the Internet, hundreds of men seemed to have gotten hold of my e-mail address and flooded my mailbox with everything from well wishes to disgusting and gross proposals involving everything from watching me wrestle another woman in a pen of whipped cream to eating sushi off my body and vomit sex. On top of that, I started going out to the bars every night with Regina in tow. And on those nights when Regina’s seemingly endless energy level began to ebb—or I didn’t want her to cockblock me—I went out by myself, with gay men flocking around me when I went to gay bars and straight men circling when I hit the straight ones. And the men really started hitting on me. Men who had never given me a glance before were now trying to pick me up. Or marry me. One night, a businessman from Taiwan asked me to marry him, come back to Taiwan, and live like a Tai Tai—a privileged lady of means who spends her time lunching and indulging herself while the husband works himself to death to support the Tai Tai. It sounded like a good plan to me. He said he made over $4 million last year (I asked him, “In U.S. dollars?!”), not including bonuses, and I didn’t doubt it when I said good-bye to him at a Mercedes SLS that must have set him back hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe me, being underwater and in debt with four nonperforming condos, a mortgage on my main house, and credit cards maxed out, I gave this proposal a lot of thought. A lot. But in the end, I turned the guy down. After all, I didn’t speak Mandarin, was repulsed by the idea of raw clams (soaked in any sauce), and felt I would get stir-crazy living on such a small island. Of course, I could fly over to Hong Kong to go shopping or Macao for gambling, but Taiwan was just too uncertain to me. What I was sure of was that my constant barhopping to give my ego a boost was really kicking my ass and body when it all came down to it. I looked in the mirror, and I was looking haggard, worn-out, and old. If it’s true that television cameras put ten pounds on you, I feared what it did when it came to years.