Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

even tried to get the clerk to come down on the price. Brazenly, she remarked:
    “Old man, if you're not some kind of sex fiend, you must be engaged in black market trade in condoms.”
    “I'm both a sex fiend and a black marketer,” he shot back naughtily, looking directly at the woman's scarlet lips.
    Over the three months of summer, he netted forty-eight hundred yuan. And as his purse grew fatter, he grew more cheerful and physically robust by the day. Joints that had turned rusty limbered up, as if newly lubricated, and his eyes, which had seemed frozen in place, were now filled with life. And once his eyes and ears grew attuned to the sights and sounds of his new environment, the torch of intimacy, long extinguished, ignited anew. After he had taken his wife to bed more than once, to her incredible astonishment, she asked him, “What sort of tonic have you been taking, you old fart? Trying to kill yourself?”
    At ten-thirty every morning, he climbed onto his bike and rode over to the cottage, where he first cleaned the place up, dumping all the trash from the previous day into a plastic bag, which he made sure to double-knot. As someone who placed great importance on social conscience, he would never throw his trash just anywhere; no, he carried it into town and properly disposed of it in a trash receptacle. After cleaning up the place, he replenished his stock of drinks, snacks, and other items. That done, he locked the door, picked up his stool, and found a place to wait for the day's clientele, leisurely smoking a cigarette to pass the time. His taste in cigarettes had improved. In the past, he'd smoked only unfiltered Golden City, but now he'd switched to filtered Flying Swallows. In the past, he couldn't bring himself to look his clients in the eye; now he studied them intently. As he gained more experience, he found he could pretty much predict which couples were likely to use his service and which were not. Most of his customers were birds on the prowl, intent on enjoying each other's bodies illicitly; but once in a while a curious married couple or two people in a committed relationship dropped by. There were at least a dozen repeat customers; he always gave them a cut-rate price, usually 20 percent off, but sometimes as much as 50 percent. Some of his customers were the talkative type, and after they'd finished their business, they'd talk his ear off; others were the bashful type, who took off as soon as they'd handed over the money. His storehouse of knowledge about the sex life of young couples was greatly enriched, thanks to his ears alone. The endless variety of sounds, male and female, emerging from the cottage created at least as many pictures in his mind, sort of like throwing open a window onto a vast panorama. One seemingly sickly couple bounced and thudded around the bus so noisily you'd have thought it was a pair of mating elephants in there, not copulating humans. Then there was the couple who started out by shouting and carrying on and ended by slugging it out and smashing beer bottles. But there was nothing he could do about it, since breaking in on them at a time like that could bring nothing but bad luck. The man emerged with a bloody head, the woman with her hair looking like a rat's nest. He felt sorry enough for them to give them a freebie, but the man actually grandstanded by tossing a hundred-yuan note on the ground before strutting off. When he ran after him to give him change, the man turned and spat in his face. The man had thin, sparse eyebrows, sunken eyes, and a mean look; one glare sent old Ding scurrying off abjectly.
    With the arrival of autumn, the poplar leaves began to fall and pine needles darkened. Fewer and fewer people came to swim in the lake, seriously affecting his business; but no day passed without a few clients, especially on Sundays and holidays. This gave him a chance to take it easy, and income was income, even though there might be less of it. It all added up. He came down with a cold about then, but that didn't stop him from going to work. Not wanting to part with his money for cold preparations, he let his wife cook up a pot of ginger soup. He drank down three bowlfuls of the stuff, then covered himself from head to toe and sweated it out. You couldn't ask for a better folk remedy. His plan was to save up as much money as possible for his old age while he was still able. Now that the factory had given him all the severance pay he had coming, the