Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  I began to enjoy it. It was the feeling of interconnectedness, and the first realization that loneliness was not the right word to describe the farang's isolation in Bangkok. The farang is in reality not alone because Buddhists themselves seem not to believe in loneliness.

  On the single TV screen, meanwhile, there appeared an image from a different universe: a mosque, in front of which a Thai Muslim stood being interviewed, a look of tense fury in his face. Then a road, a ruined house, burn marks along walls. A Thai army unit strolled through the main street of a village. A suddenly gathering unease in those images, with the sound turned off, the palms of the far south waving in a hurricane wind. Heads had been cut off in revenge attacks, as well as hands.

  And there are times, too, when looking into the street you remember how recent all that commercial hedonism is. Bangkok made her fortune with the Vietnam War, for it was that war that made her into a pleasure capital. She was once surrounded by wars, dictatorships, Communist genocides, and she put herself forward as the slutty Cinderella of South Asian cities, the only one where there was order, pleasure, no-hands restaurants, and a capable branch of the CIA. And now there was a new war, but this time it was internal and therefore something of a secret. The Muslims in the South were beginning to stir.

  Lek lowered rolls of guaytio noodles toward my lips, and I noticed that each mouthful was carefully watched by the other farangs gathered there. The men in the Arsenal shirts watched this manuever closely, licking their lips. For them, it was a pornography of servitude. They had a whole lexicon for these girls. LBFM, for example. "Little brown fucking machines." It was sometimes difficult to be in the same room as these people, over whom, I thought, these aristocratic women lorded it with a natural, supple superiority. They must have thought of the men as "big white fucking machines," and only the mutual bawdy humor saved them both from a very severe critique. Lek then said something interestingly chauvinistic.

  "You European, you always put down your glass like this."

  And she slammed down the beer glass at my table.

  •

  The Buddhist idea of the self is dependent on the doctrine of annata, which means "the absence of self." Nothing in the universe has isolated selfhood because nothing is truly alone. A mind arises only because it is entangled with other beings, and Buddhists call this web of connectedness "dependent arising."

  It's a startling idea, that there is no self lodged inside one's nervous system. That there is only a web of things which causes everything to arise. The individual's life is a dream dominated by unconscious chain reactions. A man and a dog are not so different, feeling their ways through sex and thirst, summers and winters, old age and death. They both know suffering, that all-important Buddhist idea known as dukkha. They both have little to hope for.

  As the Buddha put it, with his supple and disarming realism: "Look to your own salvation, and with diligence." It is the same prophet who, when asked what he was, answered modestly, and without any reference to a divine lineage, "I am awake."

  But there is one objection to Buddhism which we cannot get over. If I do not believe in reincarnation, why struggle to achieve something—freedom from desire and suffering—which will happen anyway when I die? Won't that happen soon enough, and won't the annihilation be total, everlasting, and completely satisfactory? It's strange that no religion can accept the finality of death and plan accordingly—except Taoism.

  THE BRITISH CLUB

  I went almost every night to the hotel bars, and especially when my check finally came. I particularly liked the Nai Lert Park and the Grand Hyatt on Ploenchit. The Nai Lert Park for its ancient gardens traversed by ponds and its grove of phallic lingams devoted to the earth goddess Tuptim, and the Grand Hyatt for its underground wine bar ensconced inside a blown-up pastiche that looks from the outside like the British Museum coated with white chocolate. I suppose I am attracted to grandiosity, especially false grandiosity. In that respect I am quite Thai in my tastes.

  At the Nai Lert I wandered around the gardens without spending a penny, sifting through the lagoons and islands in search of chance encounters or just a snatch of overheard conversation. The hotel was always full of glamorous people, but it also offered anonymity. There were frequent trade receptions, social dances. A hotel is like a train, a place where you can lie about yourself to your heart's content. You can tell a man sitting next to you that you are the Baron of Prinzapolka, and he might well believe you purely because you are both on a train. I noticed that these Bangkok functions were filled with frauds and pranksters, Westerners on the lam who were free to make up whatever they wanted about themselves. There were lords and princes and barons left, right, and center, and the Asians couldn't tell if they were real or not. A farang is a farang. Legion were the number of people here who had fled from home after staging fake deaths or other insurance scams. There was even a well-known American detective based in Thailand and in New York by the name of Byron Bales who specialized in tracking them down.

  With time I perfected the art of extracting drinks from these characters, because their vanity is boundless and they need a listener at their side. They'll buy you a drink or four. You can find them at any hotel bar, dressed in kilts and windbreakers, tuxedos and corduroys, in ill-fitting shorts and Indian-made suits, their faces like smashed pumpkins, the right hand shaking, of course, their ties askew. They are like colonial officials in an awkward posting. Their thoughts are clear. Nice girls, treacherous natives, bloody awful weather. I was sure that I was beginning to look like them, because whenever I sat down at one of the bars in the Sheraton Grande, for example, or the Westin on the other side of Sukhumvit, or at the Black Horse at Asoke, they would lift their eyes for a moment and say, "Wotcha," as if I were a known factor. At the Nai Lert they were the grander imposters, and they would always try to sell you something, usually themselves. Tall, thin men in lovely suits would shake my hand and say "Lord Coggan," or "Viscount Bellamy," until my accent made them think I might be on to them and they slipped away with a little laugh. On occasion, I tried to pull off the same thing myself. It was surprisingly easy with Asians and Americans. It was as if the grandiosity of the hotel decors, all the chandeliers and the gold railings, the Intakul-designed flowers and the bowls of toasted nuts made this parade of deception easier.

  There were those times when McGinnis put in his boutonniere and took me as a guest to the British Club, to which he had made his employer buy him a yearly membership. Although its fees are modest and its facilities even humbler, the British Club brought out all his arrogance, and on its premises he went into a brief Flashman mode, yelling at people and doing jackknife dives into the pool. The club, however, did not possess the inflexible codes or the haughty atmosphere which would have made such behavior funny. It was delightfully matey and faintly seedy: perfectly British, perhaps without knowing it. The squash courts and pool area were like a Butlin's holiday camp in the Britain of the early seventies. Massages were available from an old couple—" blind," as the members added. The clubhouse itself was a trim white villa with dark-blue shutters. Inside, a wainscoted lobby with oils of the queen and a slightly dusty droplet chandelier made you feel deliciously oppressed at once. Behind was a decrepit cricket ground bordered with thickets of bamboo. On the ground floor of the clubhouse, meanwhile, stood the Churchill Bar, with a frosted-glass image of the old bastard and his cigar. Last orders at 10:00 p.m.—in Bangkok!—and rows of sports shields above the bar itself. We would sometimes stand there dead drunk and try to decipher them. The Hong Kong Football Club, the University of Edinburgh, the Harlequin Football Club, at whose shield McGinnis would often point with a terrible ginned-up finger and say, "Those boys have my motto exactly. Numquam dormio!"

  The drink to have here was of course the gin and tonic, but gin and tonics made McGinnis impossible, as he sat by the pool under the parasols and boasted of all the Bangkok characters he knew and who knew him: "Shrimp" Chauvain, for example, the diminutive Englishman notorious
for photographing hundreds of barely legal girls in the backstreets of the city and turning them into calendars. But I was pretty sure that he didn't know Chauvain, and that the tall stories of him and Shrimp on the rampage were versions of things he had heard in bars and remodeled to suit his own purposes. Shrimp's stories are local lore; McGinnis had latched on to them as he remade himself, cell by cell, as failures do when they have reached a certain age.

  One day as we were sitting at the pool, pretending to be successes, a Thai attendant came up to us and said, wai'ing politely and bowing, that Mr. McGinnis's membership was no longer current, that it had been suspended for "nonpayment." He regretted that as of that time he would be unable to serve us any further drinks, or anything else for that matter, and that furthermore Mr. McGinnis and his guests would no longer be permitted to use the grounds of the British Club. He made some expressions of regret, of embarrassment, but none of them were capable of damping the rage that now burst out of McGinnis. A failure who has been slighted is far worse than a woman scorned, especially a British failure who is being asked to leave the British Club, which in terms of its facilities is one of the most cramped in Bangkok.

  He drew himself up, as failed men do when they have been slighted in a mortal way. We were hardly alone at the pool. A dozen much more successful Britishers looked up coolly from their newspapers, because everything had been overheard. Their look was that measured sadism held back to the point of complete reticence that the British have perfected when witnessing the misfortunes of a man they have judged to be annoying. "You fucking limies," McGinnis began.

  McGinnis's failure consisted of an inability to work with group dynamics. He wanted so badly to belong to this group, but as soon as they snubbed him his real hatred for them exploded. It was eloquent, as tirades against one's own people always are. Unlike hatred, self-hatred is perceptive. I later realized that McGinnis's membership had been suspended because he had been fired from Cyclex and was living on his savings. "Look at them all," he whispered to me on his way out. "None of them has had a hard-on in a decade. They're all drunks. Fat, badly dressed drunks. We're the ugliest men on planet Earth. Only our women are uglier. All right, I'm going. There's no cunt in here, anyway. None. I'm going back to Maida Vale."

  "Goodbye, sir," a smiling manager said to us.

  "I am joining the French Club today," McGinnis cried.

  "There is no French Club, sir."

  "Well, the Danish Club."

  "I don't believe there's a Bangkok Danish Club, sir."

  "All right, the Eden Club."

  "I hope you have a wonderful time there, sir."

  "They have what you don't have—namely, splendid cunt!"

  I heard a shocked Thai waiter say to the receptionist, as if behind a hand, "Sounds anti-British to me, sir."

  So it was farewell to our only bastion of home, a place so over-the-top in its Britishness that it threw the entire exercise of being an exile into vivid relief. Farewell to those lofty paintings upstairs of the First Journey of the Victory, to the illustrations of the Uniforms of the Scots Guards 1971, to the Wordsworth Lounge and beef-and-barley soup. Farewell to baked avocado prawn mornay in the Churchill Bar and last orders at ten; farewell to the trophies of the Floodlight Tournament and the Chairman Cup, the Rysecombe Cup and the Davidson Cup, the clock of cricket balls under the mango trees and the sight of the Jack flapping above the whitewashed terrace.

  But meanwhile I wondered why McGinnis always mentioned the Eden Club, as if the Eden was some sort of reference for him, and why he never hesitated to point out that Shrimp Chauvain kept a John Wayne costume there. At this point, however, I didn't ask him what he did at the Eden Club. I wanted it to be a dark spot in the mind, a place I'd get to eventually when I had degraded a bit.

  •

  I went to Lumpini Park as the mornings got hotter and the rainy reason approached. It reminded me of the London parks I grew up with, Lammas Park in Ealing, or Walpole Park opposite it. The park is a Victorian idea, generous and nostalgic, and new ones will be few and far between. It expresses a view of human nature which has passed away. Strolling, promenading, doing nothing but taking the air, admiring bushes and flowers. But also simply breathing, thinking, and occasionally committing suicide: the park is a place where one does all aimless things that one should be doing anyway. Or it was. Now hordes of joggers tear around the paths, assemblies of the elderly do their Tai Chi on the lawns, and schoolkids pass out on yaa baa under the trees. The noble park has rapidly become squalid.

  I came in the morning to read the papers, and then again at night. At that time the park, named after Buddha's birthplace in Nepal, was filled with karaoke machines. I couldn't have imagined a park filled with karaoke machines, or seen the point, but there they were. Lumpini resounded to the din of karaoke machines. I walked around the two slime-green lakes, the Chinese Style Clock Tower, and the Outdoor Gym. There were men sitting by the paths having their hair cut, fingering mahjong boards, sleeping on mats. There were long lines of people doing group aerobics, hundreds of them all synchronized together, and there was a moment in the day that I relished above all others, the moment when the National Anthem was played at 6:00 p.m. The National Anthem was composed by the king and sounds like a Maoist marching hymn of the forties. When it is played every day at six, everyone has to freeze, stop in their tracks, and observe a respectful minute of immobility. In the Outdoor Gym, men stopped with their weights in midair, their faces contorted; the aerobics groups and the Tai Chi practitioners similarly went into suspended animation. It was like a spell. And one could keep walking all the same, the only moving person in the whole park, the only animate man among the spellbound.

  After the National Anthem, I walked down to the Suan Lum Night Market, entertained by the hookers of both sexes who patrol the park's perimeter fence, women to the east, men to the west. The metallic, inelegant towers of Rama IV Road faded into the soft hour of menace that brings in tropical nights, and a surcharge of electric light burst out of the air. The human face turns colorless in this light, the eyes look rapid and overexcited. I passed through the Night Market with light fingers and indifferent appetite. I was rarely tempted by the Thai rock bands in the beer garden and the tourist pavilions of "Ayutthaya antiques," though I must admit I was drawn for some reason to the tawdry reproduction of an ancient Khmer library made of fiberglass which served as the HQ of the market's Tourist Police. I passed through this gatelike structure, through its gold spotlights, and remembered that Suan Lum would soon be razed to the ground to be replaced by a hotel, a mall, and an exhibition center. It was a thought worth holding for a moment: this fake reproduction of the past would soon be consigned to the actual past.

  I sometimes went to Safari Steak opposite the Joe Louis Puppet Theater or the Seafood Plaza at the market's northern edge near the Lumpini boxing stadium, after which I could wander through the Plant Nursery and then go to watch the early bouts of muay thai at the stadium. I loved the Lumpini stadium not for the boxing itself but for the mulberry trees of great age looming over the outdoor cafés around it. They cast shadows which reminded me of summer days, and one could sit under them for hours without remembering for a moment that it was night.

  THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

  On the first day of Songkran, Farlo took me to Silom. We sat in Barbican, in Patpong, one of my favorite bars in Bangkok, while water bombs and wet flour filled the air, and he told me about his marriage and his financial affairs, which were more complicated than could be imagined. With a forgiving sadness I tried to imagine where I would be in my late fifties: here, in Asia, married to a peasant girl in Cambodia, doing what Farlo did? We sat next to an Australian couple, and from time to time he leaned over and said, "May I ask if you've considered a peaceful break in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia? None of this, like." He motioned to the street above. "Just tigers and a few land mines. There's nae golf but I can take ye shooting deer with automatic weapons. The name's Mickey. I have my own place in
the foothills. Clean water. English spoken. Four separate bird-watching accommodation towers. I'll do ye a rate." And he passed them his card, which read Cardamom Adventures. "The wife's local. She cooks a mean lok-lok."

  From the basement windows, the largely Japanese street was revealed at knee level—the black façade of the Aoyama Club, the Alpha Member Club with girls in ball gowns, Milano and the Enjoy Club, and Marmelade. Outside Pandora the girls held out menus of services to men stepping out of wet limos. Farlo looked around at the bottles of wine in casements along the walls and the small film noir paintings with wide-open and slightly disbelieving eyes. He never seemed quite at home in Bangkok. His hands, crossed over each other on the black tabletop, looked completely Khmer, like those of a farmer in the region where he lived. His thumb itched. He said "Ay" a lot, shaking his head instead of nodding it. "Ay, another day of love. That's what my old lady says every morning. She says it in Khmer and it sounds good."

  The Songkran crowds swelled. Mama-sans stood by the doors with nightmare faces, under notices in kanji which neither Thai nor farang would understand. The subtle segregation of races, of languages, as if each has their erotic proclivities which cannot mix. "You can't be sad here," I thought aloud. "Infuriated, but not sad." It was a geisha district bathed in the color red, and that fleshy color settled inside the mind like a soothing reminder of the body's placidity.

  That night, McGinnis was taking us to a party. We were going to meet him on Suriwong. We walked for a mile. Under shady trees like those of a European boulevard, down crooked Soi Tarntawan, where the smoke of roasting corn filled the air, past the Solid Club and doorways of half-sleeping girls, until we came to the streets of gay clubs with their predictable names: Fresh Boy and Balls, Hair Gay and Love Me Tender. We went into Boys Town for a while and watched lads in white underwear dancing on a small stage. I noticed the sign for Balls, which I had seen from a taxi a few weeks before. It turned out to be a comfortable sports bar with a lovely shrine next to it. It had an outdoor terrace at which sportily dressed middle-aged farang men sat calmly with their boys.