by Lucy Taylor
In the silence that followed, he could hear the wild wind keening like a madwoman across Lake St. Clair, and he wished he were out there, plowing along in the dark and the cold the way he did when life got to be too much, not really caring if the ice held him or not, yelling out drunkenly as the snow pelted his face, just him, Eddie Pitrowski, alone in a black and white universe with a bottle of Jack in his hand.
No, I can’t do this. I won’t do this. No fucking way.
He took a deep breath. “Fuck yeah, Danny, I’ll help you. Hell, what are friends for?”
««—»»
“Holy shit, how did she do that?” Danny said as Ping-pong Girl winked and undulated offstage.
“A ping-pong show ain’t nothing,” said Kurt. “Wait ’til we get to Chiang Mai. Then you’ll see some effing sights!”
Kurt was always raving about Chiang Mai, a city on the Ping River in the northern part of the country that he’d first visited during his tour in Vietnam. Liked it so much he’d been back a couple of times since. Said Chiang Mai was where the really hot girls were, the hardcore stuff, down n’ dirty.
“I see a sight I like right now,” declared Danny, sliding off his stool and putting his arm around the curvy, foxy-eyed bar girl who’d been caging over-priced drinks from him all evening. “How about it, honey? Ready to show an old man a good time?”
The girl giggled and made the wai gesture that was familiar by now, palms pressed together, head tilted. She took Danny’s hand and they adjourned upstairs, where rooms could be reserved by the hour.
After Danny left, Eddie and Kurt drank their way through the lesbian show and the dominatrix skit and laughed when a ruckus broke out between a blond, Nordic-looking dude who was loudly contesting his bar bill to a couple of hot little numbers in slinky, Day-Glo dresses and matching, drop-dead red lipstick, who’d been glued to him like he was the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic. The guy threw down some baht, which evidently wasn’t enough, because the girls pursued him out of the bar, hurling words at his retreating back like poisoned darts.
About that time Danny came back with his girl, who he introduced as Lek. He was grinning as he explained he’d just paid the mama-san for a ‘long time’ meaning he’d bought Lek’s time for the rest of the night and could now take her back to the hotel.
“Isn’t she the prettiest little thing you ever seen?” Danny beamed as Lek tee-hee’d and covered her mouth, batting lashes black as squid ink.
When they came out of the club, looking to hail a tuk-tuk, Eddie saw the Nordic guy rolling around on the ground with the two hot little numbers kicking the shit out of him.
“What the hell?” His instinct was to help the poor guy and he started toward them.
Kurt grabbed him. “Leave it alone, man.”
“But those bitches are kicking that dude in the nuts!”
“Look at the Adam’s apples and the biceps,” said Kurt. “Those are katoeys—female impersonators—and they’re tough sons of bitches. You do not want to eff with ’em.”
A couple of foot patrol cops pushed through the crowd then, stocky, grim-faced men whose brown uniforms fit their muscular bodies like sausage skins. They wore badges identifying them as “Tourist Police.” When the ladyboys saw them, they took off, sprinting into the alleyway behind the bar.
“Goddamn, that’s the best show I’ve seen tonight,” said Eddie, watching them race off in their towering high heels.
««—»»
The following day, rain was pouring so hard it felt like the entire city of Bangkok lay at the foot of a waterfall. The four of them cabbed over to the Grand Hyatt on Rajdamri Road where, during a liquid brunch of Mimosas and Bloody Mary’s, it was unanimously decided to follow Kurt’s suggestion and travel to Chiang Mai.
Lek didn’t want to be left behind, so Danny, against all advice from Eddie and Kurt, opted to bring her along. At the bar where they’d stopped for cocktails on the way to the bus station, Eddie tried to ask her if she’d be able to get her job back at the club in Bangkok, but she just smiled like a southeast Asian Mona Lisa and snuggled up to Danny.
“You gotta get rid of her,” Eddie said, “She thinks she’s your girlfriend,” but Danny said, “She relaxes me. I like having her around,” and Lek, getting up to visit the lady’s, lost her balance and dumped her drink into Eddie’s lap, which caused Kurt to laugh so uproariously he blew beer out his nose.
The rain and the drinking slowed down the pace of their departure, forcing them to catch the last northbound bus of the day, a local that lurched to a stop at every village and rice paddy and didn’t arrive in Chiang Mai until the following day. Lek had been to Chiang Mai and recommended the Lucky Star Hotel, a neon-drenched silver tower across from the Ping River, but Kurt said the place was a firetrap and looked like it had been constructed out of tinfoil. He checked into a seedy-looking low-rise hotel a few blocks away called the Mandarin Orchid.
After the endless bus ride, Eddie wanted to stretch his legs, so he agreed to meet Danny and Lek later at the hotel bar and moseyed up Lai Kroh Road by himself. He stopped in a club for an eye opener and, several drinks later, found himself in a rent-by-the-hour room with an albino hooker who moved with such lethargy and languor he figured whatever drugs she was on were even better than the shit he’d scored back in Bangkok. Her skin was talcum white, her nipples almost invisible. She ghosted on top of him, weightless as fog, and just as he was going to town, really into it, something shifted and the creamy pallor of her skin, so sensuous at first, began to appear corpse-like and horrifying. His erection flagged and he found himself thinking of the China White and how it would liquefy when heated, the cloudy whiteness of it filling the syringe, the prick of the hypo into Danny’s vein, liquid death leaking in, his best friend dying in his arms.
He rolled away from the woman and crawled onto the floor, dizzy and hyperventilating. The air conditioner was blasting away, but he felt feverish, delirious, like he might puke. His girl sat back on her haunches, looking peeved at being so unceremoniously unseated. If he was having a heart attack, he got the feeling she might not be in any hurry to call the Thai version of the EMT’s.
After a few minutes, he revived enough to get dressed and splash some water on his face, pay the woman, and head out to meet Danny and Lek, but he’d forgotten the name of the hotel. The streets all looked identical, as similar as the computer generated byways of some generic Asian city in a video game. He meandered past rows of open air stalls selling charcoal grilled chicken, fresh flowers and diamond-shaped dumplings sizzling in grease, and noticed a number of people crunching some insectoid delectable that looked like fried grasshoppers. He passed a bustling arcade full of restaurants and stores and paused to stare in the window of The Numbah One Noodle Shop, where customers hunched before fly-speckled windows, slurping from bowls heaped with tangles of silvery, shoelace-thin noodles.
Unsure which direction to go in, he turned in a circle, feeling like a fool for being so utterly lost.
A stiff drink, he decided, would help clear his head and reorient him.
His hotel might be impossible to locate, but he had no trouble spotting a bar. The nearest one was The Joy Palace, across from the noodle shop. He hurried toward it like a desperado fleeing a posse.
As he ducked inside, a tall, overweight American in his late thirties, wearing baggy shorts and a flamboyantly patterned shirt was barging out. His red-brown hair was shaved down into flat bristles, and his small, furtive eyes darted back and forth under doughy lids. He stared at Eddie openly and rudely, then leaned toward him and stage-whispered, “I wouldn’t bother coming in here, I was you. No action.”
Eddie took in the array of skimpily attired young women lounging around the back wall and said,—“Well, you ain’t me, mister. I think those girls look damn fine.”
The guy crowded closer, forcing Eddie to inhale the reek of his garlic lunch. He spoke in a gruff, yet circumspect voice, like he and Eddie were part of the same unsavory conspiracy. “They
’re not bad—if that’s what you’re into.”
Well, what the hell else would I be into, Eddie thought. Then he remembered the brutal katoeys beating up the guy in Patpong and concluded that this dude must have a predilection for ladyboys. He actually grinned, because the mental image of the pudgy flat top getting it on with some skanky, stiletto-wearing chick impersonator was so hilarious.
“Yeah, well, I’d be careful about that kind of action. Could be dangerous.” He started to move on, but the big-bellied dude was now staring at him as though transfixed by some magic words Eddie had unwittingly uttered.
“Yeah, you understand, all right. I can tell. Careful—that’s the ticket.” He tried to take Eddie’s arm. “Let me buy you a drink, and I’ll give you the names of some people around here you can trust.”
Huh?
Eddie wasn’t in the mood for creepy cloak and dagger. He shoved the guy aside—it was like elbowing a Humvee—and rather than proceed into the bar, made a beeline out of it. In his agitation, he glanced upward and suddenly recognized his hotel, the ‘Tinfoil Tower’, jutting up out of the swarm of low rise establishments surrounding it.
A few minutes later, he found Danny and Lek at a table in the lobby bar, sipping frou-frou strawberry concoctions that looked like something you’d serve to kids after an Easter egg hunt.
“About time you showed up!” Danny said when Eddie lurched in. “I was afraid you got lost!”
“Me? Never! This is me, Eddie Pitrowski you’re talking to! I got a G.P.S. hard-wired into my brain.” He pulled up a chair. “Where’s Kurt?”
Danny pantomimed aiming a camera. “Out trolling for local color. Thinks he’s gonna be an I-Reporter for Fox News, go viral on You-Tube or some such.”
“You-Tube!” exclaimed Lek.
Danny said, “I been trying to tell Lek about the good old days in Detroit, like when you and me and Kurt stole that crate of .38 specials from the crew of Angels at the Rocking Horse Inn and that time we almost got shot-gunned cartin’ off TV sets during the riots in ’67.”
“Good times, all right,” Eddie said, while Lek smiled and nodded. Eddie had the feeling Danny could’ve said, “Lek, this is the guy who came all this way so he could hotshot my ass to kingdom come,” and gotten the same enthusiastic response.
Danny had just launched into a story about the time he and Eddie and Kurt were out ice-fishing and Eddie fell through and almost drowned, when he suddenly stopped talking. His face took on an ashen sheen. He began to cough so violently that his head whiplashed back and forth and he gripped his throat like a man trying to strangle himself.
A couple nearby stared at him, then got up and moved away.
Eddie glared at them. “That’s right, don’t get too close! Swine flu! Highly fucking contagious!”
“You crazy?” Danny gasped.
Eddie felt like an asshole. He offered Danny a glass of water while Lek tried massaging his back, but he shrugged her away. “Quit pawin’ me! Go find somebody who ain’t dying.”
Lek shrank back, looking like she’d been slapped. “Want help you, Danny,” she said, the kindness and sadness in her voice making Eddie feel bad for the way he’d urged Danny to ditch her.
Sallow-faced, eyes streaming, Danny rasped, “There’s nothing anybody can do for me.” He looked at Eddie. “Shit, I thought this last hurrah in Thailand was a great idea, but I’m sick and tired of feeling like a fucking piano’s about to drop on my head. How much more time I got, man? When we gonna fuckin’ do this thing?”
Eddie gulped, his mouth so dry he felt like he was swallowing nails. “Tomorrow. But hell, nobody’s sayin’ we can’t postpone it.”
“Fuck postponing. Let’s just get it over with. Right now.”
Eddie felt a stab of panic. He lowered his voice. “We can’t, Danny. It’s too late for me and Kurt to change our tickets. We gotta be in the air before anybody—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Before the maid comes to clean the room and finds a stiff with a needle in his arm.”
“You gotta hang in there, man. You got enough pain meds, right?”
“Yeah, but they make me feel dopey. That nurse I used to date, LuAnn, scored me some liquid Valium, but the one time I shot some, I slept for a day. Don’t have time now for any twenty-four hour siestas.”
“Better be careful with that shit,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, don’t wanna cut short my promising future.”
Eddie gestured to the Pepto Bismol pink cocktails. “There’s the trouble right here, this sissy shit she’s got you drinking. You need a man’s drink.” He stuck his hand in the air and waved it at the bargirl like he was hailing a cab. “Three whiskeys down here!”
“I’ve had enough,” Danny said, with such finality that Eddie wondered if he was talking about more than the drinks.
He took Lek by the hand. “C’mon, honey, let’s go back to the room. See can we have some—what’s that word you use?—sanuk?”
Her face brightened. “Sanuk!”
“What’s sanuk?” Eddie said.
“Means having fun,” Danny said. “Least I think it does.”
As she passed Eddie, Lek pressed her palms together in the wai gesture and bowed, as though she were expressing gratitude. “Jai dii,” she said and touched Eddie’s chest.
“Jai dii?” Bewildered, he looked at Danny.
Danny shrugged. “No idea. But she said it to me, too. Probably means dumb white dude.”
««—»»
After Danny and Lek left, Eddie slammed another whiskey, which tamped down the restlessness and quelled some of the anxiety that clawed inside his chest like a caged rat. He thought about visiting a massage parlor—maybe even getting a massage— but didn’t think he was good for another go-round this soon, so he ambled out of the bar and swayed up the street, assaulted by the color and chaos. A half-naked man in a blue and green sarong squatted at a table, gutting fish. A flock of dusty children galloped after a soccer ball. An old woman slouched in the shade of the awning next to the Numbah One Noodle Shop, drumming her fingers to the beat of some pop-Thai song while a gaggle of winter pale tourists looked over her stock of knock-off Prada handbags and Armani sunglasses.
The heat plus the alcohol he’d consumed left him feeling transparent and floaty, like everything was underwater and he was drifting along on a warm, pungent current of seawater. He thought about finding a songthaew to take him up into the mountains that rose cool-looking and green outside the city, but the need to distract himself with women and booze was too urgent to compete with such a placid indulgence.
Drawn by a cool gust of air-conditioning, he wandered into a narrow, bamboo-paneled bar with a dancer gyrating on a small stage and a row of girls slouching against the wall. The place looked oddly familiar. When he realized he was back in The Joy Palace, he started to do an about-face, but then a girl at the bar caught his eye. She wore khaki slacks and a blue cotton shirt, and her curves were pleasingly generous. After so many variations on the theme of straight jet hair and boyish hips, she struck Eddie as uncommonly alluring. He claimed the barstool next to her, proclaiming grandly, “Sanuk, sweetheart, when’s your turn to shake that sexy tush?”
The woman turned to him. She was a westerner in her early forties, with piercing blue-grey eyes that appraised him scathingly. “Did you just use the word ‘tush’?”
“Hey, I was just funnin’ with you,” he said, embarrassed by the gaffe. “I knew you weren’t a dancer. You’re too—uh—too—”
“Old and overweight?”
“—nicely dressed, I was gonna say.”
“Right.” She sighed in that long-suffering way women often adopted around Eddie and began scribbling in a spiral notebook that lay open on the bar in front of her.
He ordered a beer and made small talk. The woman ignored him and continued to write, which puzzled Eddie, since he thought he was being the epitome of charming. He decided a proper introduction was in order and stuck out his hand. “Name’s Eddie Pit
rowski. Born and raised in Detroit.”
She gave his fingers a gingerly squeeze. “Ilsa Jacobi.”
“American?”
“From L.A. I live in Bangkok now.”
“I just came from Bangkok—helluva place!” The bartender set a Singha in front of him and he took a thirsty pull. “What’re you doing in Chiang Mai?”
“Working.”
She turned back to the notebook. Eddie leaned closer. “You writing about Thailand? ‘Cause if y’are, maybe I could help you with that. Give you an American guy’s perspective.”
“I’ll bet that would be riveting.”
He tried to see the page, but it was at an angle and partially covered by her hand. “So what are you writing? A journal? My ex-wife used to journal. Women like that kind’a thing.”
She put down the pen. When she shifted on the stool to face him, her blouse parted slightly and he could see the swell of a breast, the lacy trim of a black bra strap.
“Not that you’d be interested, but I’m doing an expose on child trafficking for The Bangkok Times.”
“A reporter, eh?” said Eddie, barely listening. Had she said her name was Ilsa or Elsa? He was trying to guess her bra size. A hefty chest, probably a 36 or a 38C. Bodacious and blonde. His type of gal.
“So what’re you up to later, Elsa? I’m staying over yonder at the Lucky Star Hotel. Maybe we could meet for a nightcap, do some clubbing, take in some sights.”
She slammed the notebook shut and faced Eddie—who was wondering what the hell he’d said wrong—with tigerish green eyes.
“You may have somehow overlooked this, but along that wall are fifteen or twenty young women who, for a pittance, will accommodate your every stupid, selfish, egocentric whim. So why the hell are you hitting on me?”
He tried his most ingratiating smile. “I’m not hitting on you, honey. I like talking to you is all. Now this thing you’re writing, what’s it about?”
“I just told you.”
“Don’t think you did.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t remember because you’re drunk on your ass.”