Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  He tapped the table. "You're looking over your shoulder. You're looking over your shoulder and what do you see?"

  "I'm not looking over my shoulder."

  "A beautiful blond girlfriend with reproaching blue eyes. Don't look over your shoulder. That lovely girlfriend is busy fucking someone else as we speak. Someone nicer, someone richer. Someone tamer. Someone who does what he's told."

  Since this was altogether certain, I said nothing.

  "I find it surprising that you say you don't pay for it. Whereas in fact your professional standing, your earning power, is constantly being assessed by women. They never marry beneath themselves. Have you not noticed that?"

  "It was my choice to come here."

  "Well, there you are, then." He opened up a glassy smile. "When in Rome do as the Romans." But what did the Romans do?

  "I've been to Rome, too," he laughed. "Awful place to get laid."

  In fact, you couldn't understand Bangkok without considering the difficulty of procuring even the most facile pleasures in Europe and America, and he supposed one would have to add Japan.

  Take Italians. That was a nice relaxed country, wasn't it? No it wasn't. It was a dreary, repressed sexual police state. Thailand, he went on, was filled with Italian men trying to get laid. The clubs were packed with them. Thai cities teemed with Italians because when all was said and done the land of amore apparently didn't satisfy them very much. They were frustrated half to death, and a good percentage of the neon signs in Pattaya said things like Camera Libera and Pizzeria Bienvenuti. Which proved that the Thais at least read them correctly, as they read all farangs correctly.

  "It's not a very salubrious picture. I can stomach a sex -starved Brit, but an Italian?"

  McGinnis was a devious chess player, with hands that shot across the board like crows pecking at meat. He played rapidly, without making mistakes, and his eyes did not move. There was a precarity in his look at all times, something hanging by its fingernails from a cliff. It made you want to tread on those hands to loosen their grip, to see the Englishman in his polka-dot cravat spiral downward toward a distant dried riverbed, fluttering in the wind, turning like a doomed kite until he hit the stones and shattered into rags. It was those dulled, irregular teeth.

  "I am not that poor."

  "Oh, come off it. You don't have a pot to piss in."

  "It's a lovely expression, isn't it?"

  "We are in the East, comrade, and here we must think in the Eastern way. Not the fuckers and swamis and the Beatles. No, I mean seriously."

  "I hate it when people talk about the wisdom of the East. Really, McGinnis, I go to sleep."

  "Yes, yes. But have you considered Krishna's arrow?"

  •

  I looked across the river. I had 476 baht to last me five days and I no longer wanted to know what that came to in dollars. A single sandwich in Manhattan. A toilet roll in Tokyo. A Thai electricity bill.

  "Anyway," he snapped, "is money so very simple? Then why don't you have any? Never mind. I could give you an advance, you know." His eyes brightened. "We could go to the Eden Club!"

  The Eden Club was a "two girl" club on Soi 7/1 on Sukhumvit, and it specialized in role-playing sessions, with hundreds of in-house costumes to cater to every whim. Its main room, McGinnis explained, had a yellow line running down its center, with the women separated into two sections. What did it mean? It was a mystery that had to be solved by the client himself. The owner was a Frenchman who gave you a laminated menu of services. Every session had to be booked with two girls, never one. Two girls, the clients would say afterward. You haven't lived till you've had two girls dressed up as Asian nuns.

  "I don't have that fantasy," I said. "I don't have the nun-despoiling fantasy."

  "I'm just giving you nuns as an example. You can dress them as vicars if you want. Two Asian vicars. Think about that, two corrupt vicars in high heels."

  "I don't want vicars, either."

  "I've heard that Dennis dresses them up as sanitation workers. I like New York cops myself. I have an arrest complex. They have real leather holsters, too." If I wouldn't do vicars, he said, there was something else I could do if I insisted on being so broke. Broke men went to the hotel bars and allowed themselves to be fished up by a class of middle- aged Japanese women who flew over from Tokyo for precisely this purpose. It was quite a trade. At the Peninsula, for example, all one had to do was sit at the bar and make eyes at the middle-aged Japanese women there.

  "What about Krishna's arrow?" I asked.

  McGinnis stirred slightly. He had it all prepared in his mind. "It's that scene in the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna is explaining to Arjuna what his attitude to action must be. Arjuna is about to lead his army against the evil Kauravas on the battlefield of Kuru. The Kauravas are the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra. But they are also Arjuna's cousins, his blood, so to speak. He asks Krishna if it is moral to shoot his bow in anger at them. It is curious, because everyone thinks Hinduism is all about inaction, passivity, renunciation. But not at all. Krishna says, in effect, 'By all means, shoot your bow.' It is in fact moral to act, to be decisive. But it is not moral to attach yourself to the fruit of that action. When you no longer care where the arrow strikes, or if it strikes, you shoot it with unerring determination and accuracy. You become the unattached arrow, liberated from its purpose and effect—but you also become pure action. I wonder if this idea made its way across the centuries to China, so that Lao-tzu could say, 'The highest man is at rest as if dead, and in movement he is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest, nor why he is not. Nor does he know why he is in movement and why he is not.' So freedom, you see, is like being a machine—or a dog."

  EAST/WEST

  At nine, the bar of the Peninsula was half empty. It is a grandiose hotel, rather than a grand one, popular with honeymooning couples, Indian millionaires, trade delegations from Singapore and Hong Kong, single farang women traveling for business, upper-class riffraff of all races, drinkers on expense accounts, visiting entertainers and celebrities, and lonely aging Japanese women on the prowl for Sí Señora. I sat at the bar, looking shabby and out of place, and parsed how much I would have to spend on a single drink. On the far side of the windows the gardens rolled down to the embankment lit with torches, and the piers where the boats came in. The river looked like a sea. In one corner of the bar a very large black woman sat sprawled and fast asleep, decked out in a startling purple outfit with a matching hat quivering with real flowers. She dripped with heavy gold jewelry, diamond rings, and brooches, and the Thai staff seemed afraid to disturb her.

  The hotel bars are where East and West mix their palettes most gaily, on the canvas of sex. There were a number of aging Japanese ladies, heavily made up, dressed in all the right clothes, their eyes hunting for exit doors, and before long one of them made me a sign from the end of the bar, a woman of about fifty, painted red and black like a poisonous insect. She spoke little English and despite her flagrant invitation she was guarded, looking at her mouth frequently in a mirror. There were amazing rings on her hands. She said her name was Ari. Soon we were almost alone in the bar. She looked over at the snoring woman and said, "Arepa Frankin." She said it over and over, seriously, until I understood that this woman was Aretha Franklin. We laughed.

  "Of course it isn't," I said.

  "Yes," she suddenly said in English. "Yes, it is."

  We went upstairs in a mirrored elevator. Halfway up, at around the eighth floor, she took my hand and said something in Japanese. A panic overwhelmed me which she could have seen had she looked. How could I get out of this now, hurtling upward toward our boudoir, hand in hand? We went into a penthouse suite, with unopened packages from stores lying all around it, and I sat on the bed. Ari went to the bathroom and soon I heard taps running, then the shower unit. She had left her handbag on the night table and it was open.

  It's at moments like these, exalted and rarified, that one realizes that almost nothing in one's beha
vior is determined by conscious motives. I lifted my hand and pried into the handbag, knowing there must be money there. It just happened, because it had to, and I felt a moment's guilt, but the taps were running, the suite was overloaded with luxury items, each one worth a month's rent at the Primrose. I pulled out two thousand-baht notes, which felt like they had been extracted from the warm rollers of an ATM only minutes earlier. Then, as I crossed the room, I heard a faint sobbing coming from the bathroom, though perhaps it had been there all along, disguised by the running taps.

  It was then that she came out of the bathroom in a flannel hotel robe, her hair wrapped in a towel and her face bloated. I was caught halfway to the door and she roasted me with a look in which there was no awareness of the possibility that I might be leaving, since after all it was she who picked me up, and she pulled me back to the bed from where there was no escape. I said I had a headache, but she shook her head. No, no, that would not cut it. She slipped a hand toward me, and found Sí Señora, who works for himself anyway. "Arepa Frankin," she said.

  "No, it couldn't be."

  I didn't want to touch her, because I had her stolen money in my front pocket, and you can't touch someone whose money you've just stolen. At least I draw the line there.

  "You come now," she cried.

  Face to face on the bed, kneeling together, clothed, it was a contortion, a ruse. Her hair was freshly washed and dried, for that was what she had been doing in the bathroom.

  As a casual sarcasm, I said, "You should pay me," and I waited to see how she would respond. But she said nothing at first. She wrote down her phone number and took the towel from her hair. It had been dyed a deep henna red. She didn't see the joke, and now she wanted to be in control, as if she had paid me. "I will not pay," she insisted. All right, no pay. "No pay, no pay," she cried. Had I misunderstood all along? We continued to "argue," but it was punctuated by laughter which neither of us quite understood. The more she cried about pay, the more I instinctively fumbled for the few remaining banknotes in my pocket. She had a fetish and it was a cute one—it was vaguely connected to doctors and nurses, to childhood games, to my pretending to be a john. I wish women had fetishes more often than they do, though it is probably just that they hide them.

  In sex, the comedy of misunderstanding between East and West is what arouses Western men so much. But most fantasies are about strangers, not the people we live with. As tales, they are cruel, detached, anonymous; they revolve around submission, degradation, and symbolic rape. The lover who peddles his fantasies too easily is a fake. Fantasies should probably be kept close to the breast, where they belong, because once idly spoken, they are no longer fantasies at all but exhibitionism. It would take a strong personality to accept your real fantasies if you expressed them clearly.

  Intentionally or otherwise, however, the East-West encounter is nearly always redeemed by being slightly comical, but it's not a comedy which has any vicious intent. The Western man is not being mocked, nor is the Eastern woman. It is a difficult waltz to describe, but it could be called a quick, knowing dance of perfectly intentional ignorance. It's a way of making sex innocent again.

  Ari. Her look of fixed concentration. I imagine her sitting in the plane from Tokyo to Bangkok, a blank expression on her face as she goes through in her mind all the exercises of desire she is going to get up to at the Peninsula Hotel. I have heard that they go to all the Asian cities now, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, looking for Caucasian cock. We are not the only sex tourists. And they are looking for the same thing as their male equivalents: anonymity.

  NO HANDS

  I went down through the gardens to the piers, and crossed to the Oriental in one of the hotel boats. Two thousand baht: I could eat a snack at the Bamboo Bar. Even better, I could avoid the Bamboo Bar altogether and take an eighty-baht cab ride to Sukhumvit Road, where I could eat for twenty-five baht and then walk around—for a change—with some disposable income. It didn't seem like a bad plan, for all its imprecision. But it also struck me, as I sat in the boat, that Ari might call the Peninsula security, and I looked behind me nervously during the crossing. Once on the right bank, I went down the side street alongside the Oriental and got into a taxi. The driver asked me where I wanted to go. We were already speeding down Charung Krung toward the expressway, as if he had decided himself. We came to the corner of Silom, the hospitable glitter of gay bars and the great doomed urban spaces that seem to surround elevated roads and their cement pillars. Blue neon carved out the word Balls. Crowds merged at this corner from several directions, like the feelers of giant snails, bombarded by yellow and blue light.

  These crowds poured along wide avenues, unhurried, very unlike the crowds of New York, which are always rushing somewhere. Loitering crowds, slow-paced and inquisitive, as is often the case in hot climates. We rushed down Sathorn, however, and the masses thinned out. The avenue widened, banks and hotels soared up on both sides, and at the entrances to the various complexes stood those characteristic Thai security guards who are always dressed in military uniforms, often white with peaked caps, gold epaulettes, sashes and buttons, and plenty of braid. They stand with the peaks of their caps just above their eyes, hands folded, sometimes holding an illuminated stick to direct traffic. They must think of themselves as the guardians of ebb and flow, the promoters of organic order. And they remind you that it is indeed a hierarchical, orderly society, with Vishnu and the king at the top and rice farmers at the bottom. In the middle of this sleek boulevard, meanwhile, the trees seemed stranded, the remnants of orchards long chopped down, and here and there old buildings flashed by—an old customs house, I think, looking like a ruin as old as Angkor, with cornices smoothed by acid rain.

  It is uncanny how quickly things age here. Thais believe that any building that has been inhabited before them is potentially haunted. Rather than accommodate the possibility of ghosts they tear them down in order to build new, unhaunted ones. It isn't just capitalism that has modified and reshaped the old city, therefore—it's also ancient Thai superstition. By the same token, things are built quicker in Bangkok than anywhere in the world. The skyline changes a few inches every night. The construction sites are perpetually active, their arc lamps blazing across the city without a moment's pause. As we swept into Whittayu, I thought that even this street had changed since I had seen it a week earlier. People walked along with transparent umbrellas, through polluted rain. The buildings shone with gold and palm green. Showrooms, atriums, lobbies in the wedding-cake neoclassic style called satai roman, a whole language of newly arrived, triumphant affluence. It is all put together like a series of boxes within boxes, intimately organized so that there is not one inch of idle space. Long streets of dense commercial packing, shop after shop, commodities and seductions crammed into what look like ribbons of precious metals and light displays. I got out at Soi 2.

  •

  I paced up and down the brightly lit stretch of sidewalk between the gas station at Soi Nana 4 and the corner where the Marriott stands behind a strip of postmodern shrubbery. The Chaerung Pharmacy stands here with cats asleep on its counters and ginseng roots suspended in jars of liquid. The punters come here for their generic Viagra hits, Indian "Kanegra" in four-pill blister packs which they carry off to the Nana Entertainment Complex nearby. Next to the pharmacy, a large pub filled with rentable girls and, a little way down, a sign in cheerfully toxic colors: No-Hands Restaurant. With 1,850 baht in pocket, I wondered about this. It was Ari's money and I couldn't spend it lackadaisically. The door to the No-Hands place was flanked by two girls in silk tunics, in strange hats. They beckoned with fanciful gestures of four hands. Hands, they seemed to be saying, aren't they beautiful things?

  I went up to the doors and they parted slightly, four hands shimmering around me. It looked like a normal restaurant, with circular tables and cushion seating close to the floor.

  The restaurant itself was arranged like a saloon. I might have expected elegant Japanese businessmen, but in fact
the tables were occupied by Englishmen dressed in the international uniform of Englishmen in the tropics: an Arsenal shirt, camouflage shorts, sneakers, diver watches, and ribbed socks. It's a terrible look, depressing and alarming at the same time. Why do among the wealthiest people in Europe invariably look so shabby, so downtrodden? We know that they do it on purpose, that they are having us on. Are they trying to make everyone miserable? Thais call them "pigeon-shit farangs." The Englishman's reputation for dash, you think mournfully, is now two generations dead, and moreover the English always hang together in a herd so that the effect is magnified and you cannot get away from them. They are good-natured to talk to, but don't expect any refinement. They whine and cajole and complain and tell dirty jokes. At best, they are middle-of-the-road, bland, filled with a cow- like resignation. But at the same time their sense of superiority is without dents, as always—the English proletariat has always thought of itself as immensely superior to all other life-forms. I got a table for myself. As soon as I was reclined, I felt all the guilt and adrenaline shed. I bathed my face in a hot towel.

  The format is that you are not allowed to use your hands for any operation. Instead, you are fed by a waitress who kneels beside you and feeds you with a pair of chopsticks. This neatly inverts the usual relationship between diner and server, because although the "service" is greatly increased, so too is the diner's helplessness. The Westerner, in particular, feels quite uncomfortable with this arrangement, because he is naturally inclined to think of service as subservience. Not so in Buddhist Asia. Here, service implies no ignominy at all. It is neutral, light. My server brought me pla-duk, catfish.

  She cut it up for me and began parceling it out into my mouth as I lay there on one arm, trying to keep my head straight. The No-Hands experience was clearly surrounded by humor, little eruptions of embarrassment. When I tried to raise a napkin with my left hand, Lek cried, "Ah!" and stopped me. At that moment I thought back to McGinnis's complaints about Rome. Could one imagine a No-Hands Restaurant in Rome, what with spaghetti and pork crackling and so forth? Did they have No-Hands brothels here as well? They almost certainly did. I wondered if they had a No-Hands bank. That would be a better idea.