How had I missed this river of life right next to me? In the pavilion, a few kathoeys were making merit, throwing unbelievably sultry and flirtatious looks left and right. One of them genuflected before the altar of candles, and as her ass rose up I saw the gold letters juicy emblazoned upon it—it's a popular American brand gimmick. She lit an incense stick, prayed with great concentration, and I watched her lips move in the shade. When she had finished, I followed her out onto the crowded path of fish sellers, which was awash with dirty water, and watched her buy a catfish. The word juicy waddled its way through the lines of fish tanks. Juicy herself was making merit. Her nail extensions were painted lobster pink, with small Thai flags articulated upon them. She was highly aware of my pursuit.
Swinging her awkward, exaggerated male hips, she swanned down to the monastic school and the cluttered market adjoining the river. There is a small pier here and a flight of stone steps leading down into the water, like at a temple in India. The river suddenly opens out, wide and milky-pale, with wintry-looking trees on the far bank, probably exhausted by pollution. On the pier stands a curious statue of a uniformed sailor, with wide-open eyes which stare out at the Bangkok side of the river. On the steps, hundreds of pigeons mass, waiting for pickings. How Felix would have loved it.
And here was Juicy with her bagged catfish, tentatively climbing down toward the lapping waves in her stiletto heels. She opened the bag tensely, lowering it toward the water, and the fish inside did a nervous flip. Life or death? The open river or the wok?
The fish flopped out and darted into the floating plants. A great mass of them writhed there, feeding on chunks of bread which the monks were throwing into the river as well. A seething cauldron of excitable catfish, with a few liberated eels wriggling among them.
Juicy shuddered and looked up at me. She winked, and her high cheekbones, insolently powdered, her garish rouge—not to mention the word scrawled on her bottom in gold—made her into an apparition. In her I suddenly saw the farang men who also lived here, who were tiny moths circling a flame which she also incarnated in her way. Vulgar, beautiful, hard. The sex of someone who has no sex, who liberates catfish and who knows that she will be reincarnated as something else. A frog, perhaps, or even a man.
"Bai nai?" she called over.
It was at this moment that I remembered why I liked Buddhism, despite being unable to adopt it: because there was no drama of love at its heart. Love simply didn't insinuate itself into its view of animals and people, who were seen coldly and clearly for what they are. The misery of love didn't take center stage at all. It was breathtaking, when you compared it to us, who are taught to believe in love from day one, who believe in love as a sort of birthright. We don't see ourselves as coldly as that. We think our lives are great, meaningful dramas defined by love—and of course they are nothing of the sort.
And as dusk fell and Juicy went off with a haughty, failed smile, I thought back to the rivers I loved, to the Chao Phraya, and to the East River, and they seemed all quite identical in the end. Can rivers be reborn, too? Can catfish? Cities? At the same time, it was curious that I had never put two and two together with regard to the monks embarking and disembarking at Pier 10 all those years ago; that I hadn't realized they were of course the monks of Wat Rakhang. They had been companions of a sort, but I had never thought of them as real. They had been like painted figurines of another age, and I had underestimated how living they were.
So I thought of them getting off the water taxis at Wang Lang in their toga-like robes in whatever year that was, holding their plastic umbrellas and mala rosaries and looking up at the lost-looking man drinking a gin and tonic on his balcony, the new arrival in their city perched on his tiny corner of impermanent paradise, as if to ask, with a certain amusement and distance, "Is that a lonely man?" EDGMEN
Bangkok Days Page 22