A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “So did you or didn’t you get laid in the four months in London?” asked Ross, looking away from the dart board.

  Crosby slowly shook his head. It was a gesture that spoke volumes of what he had gone through in the past four months, and even Ross was moved for a moment. Then he threw his darts and the moment passed. Such was the length of time in which compassion was measured in Bangkok. He walked up to the dart board, counted his score, and pulled out the darts.

  “I bet you weren’t the only one. ...I mean who wasn’t getting laid,” said Ross, trying to comfort Crosby. Even though Crosby flogged T-shirts and operated a fly-by-night date-matching service, Ross kind of liked him because he was a good drinker. Crosby could hold his booze and therefore was more deserving of compassion than someone who didn’t drink or passed out.

  “I’m afraid it’s become a way of life for most men,” said Crosby. He ordered Ross a drink.

  “Why don’t they just leave?” asked Ross.

  He watched Ross down the free drink in two gulps.

  “They wouldn’t know where to go,” explained Crosby. “After a week without sex it gets easier. Your energy goes into other things. By the time you hit the four month corner, you don’t even think about getting laid. It never enters your mind.”

  Ross leaned with both hands on the bar and stared for a long time at Crosby. “Let me tell you what I think about this theory.” He belched, cleared his throat, and roared at the girl behind the bar for another Old Granddad.

  “About this theory,” said Crosby, reminding Ross of the lost train of thought.

  “You guys had an empire. A great empire. The sun never set on the British Empire. But you never got seriously into getting laid. The English never missed fucking; because they never knew what they were missing. All that time in places like Eton and Harrow. Boys buggering boys. If you had gone to co-ed schools like normal people you would have made Thailand a colony two hundred years ago. Only someone who had gone to an all-boys school would have taken Malaysia and left Thailand. Even the French had the good sense to take Vietnam. They knew the country was full of women. But you guys took Malaysia. Why? Because you wanted rubber plantations instead of getting laid. You wanted to make money and to hell with fun. Anyway, that’s my theory.”

  Ross’s first dart missed the board and stuck in the wall.

  “Ross, you should have your oil checked. Your motor’s running a little hot tonight.”

  “Did you hear the rumor the Navy was staging a coup against the Army?” asked Ross.

  “I heard the Army closed the port and that someone bombed Channel 7 and that there was a curfew and that UFOs were hovering above HQ,” said Crosby.

  “Did you hear the Army killed a farang?”

  This caught Crosby’s attention, and he swung around on his stool. “Yeah, anyone we know?”

  “Someone who was around Banglamphu. The government says he was a tourist. Radio 108.3 said he was a monk.”

  “Where did you hear this?” asked Crosby, spinning around and slipping off the bar stool.

  “It’s just another unconfirmed rumor. Bangkok’s swimming in rumors. Soon the streets will be teeming with Shitemper Sewertums. A very rare fish rumored to be released by the Third Hand to frighten people to stay inside and not fuck women on Soi Cowboy. But what am I talking about? My hilltribe darling is not working. She’s out demonstrating for democracy.”

  “Did I tell you that Denny Addison has done a film about my secretary? A girl named Toom. She lived in England about ten years. Addison thinks this film is even better than the other one. I can’t remember the name,” said Crosby.

  “The Unexpected Answer,” said Ross.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Quite a nice piece on Bangkok,” said Crosby.

  “You think Addison banged that katoey ?” asked Ross. “Or maybe he banged your secretary?”

  “The only people getting banged, Ross, are those poor bastards at Sanam Luang.” Crosby made his right hand into the shape of a gun, put it to his head, and dropped his thumb.

  Ross looked thoughtfully into the mirror, watching a go-go dancer shuffle her feet on the stage. She wore a pair of scuffed high-heels. “Why would Tuttle look for Daeng?”

  Crosby shrugged. “I don’t know. But when you come up with the answer it might be worth putting on a T-shirt.”

  There was a sense of doom; a feeling this search would never reveal a reason for such an action. To discern the motive of a man looking for a bar girl in the streets of Bangkok as soldiers were shooting people in the street had as much chance of succeeding as visualizing the color of the wind.

  “Just one more thing, Crosby. I hope he finds her. I like a girl who hears distant voices she can’t understand. I have to drink a great deal to reach that stage myself.”

  7

  THE TENSION BETWEEN the Army and crowds of demonstrators had been building for weeks. Snow had a feeling that something was about to break in Bangkok while hanging out in a shopping center parking lot in California. He prided himself on never missing a coup, a blood-letting, or being one of the first into the palace to see Mrs. Marcos’ shoes.

  Snow had been sitting with his legs folded on the molded plastic chair. On a clear, blue California morning, he was reading a letter from Robert Tuttle and several of Trink’s Nite Owl columns from the Saturday Bangkok Post; he stuffed Tuttle’s letter inside a copy of TV Guide ringed with watermarks from his favorite coffee cup. At that precise moment, a biker had rammed into his parked Winnebago trailer, shaking the breakfast table and knocking a plate off an overhead rack. The plate shattered in the kitchen sink. Jennifer had been standing two feet away cooking pancakes in an electric skillet and watching a Star Trek rerun on television.

  Snow had pulled back the curtain, put on his glasses, and peered out the trailer window.

  “A fucking biker just smashed into our Winnebago. You got that? Slam, banged right into us. And he’s not even fleeing the scene. I hate fucking bikers. Piano wire. Drape piano wire across every intersection in the world and when the lights switch from red to green, you yank on the piano wire until it is taut and invisible and wait for the heads to roll, man.”

  “Ugly. Violence breeds violence,” Jennifer had said, flipping over a pancake.

  He had continued standing at the window and burning up inside with anger. “Would you look at this. The asshole’s giving me the finger. He looks like a white trash skuller.”

  “What is a skuller?” she had asked, another pancake in midair.

  The biker had drummed his hairy fists against the Winnebago. It was as if the Hunchback of Notre-Dame had gone to hell and back on too much speed and had mistaken the Winnebago for a massive bell. Snow had thought that this was the new America—a prototype post-modern police state with 200 million sheriffs and 50 million fugitives. One of the fugitives was at his door. Snow let the curtain drop over the window.

  “I’m buying a gun tomorrow. A .357 magnum. If I had a gun, I’d shoot this fucker. I’d kill this louse, scumbag, skull, shithead.”

  “Maybe it was an accident. And he’s letting off some steam,” Jennifer had said.

  “And JFK was killed in a hunting accident in Dallas. This biker is a dangerous criminal. He should be boiled, peeled and sold as dog food,” Snow had replied.

  There had been complete silence except for the crackling sound of oil bubbling in the electric skillet. The biker had stopped banging his huge fists on the side of the trailer. They were parked in the corner of a huge LA shopping mall complex. Lawlessness was making Snow crazy with loathing and fear. Sure, he had told himself, there were assholes in Bangkok, he had run into them at HQ, he had walked the Alley of Revenge, but he had never thought about carrying a gun. In Southern California gun ownership was a difficult habit to kick; it was up there with other addictive habits like smoking, alcohol, watching TV, or shopping. The usual suspects invited to participate in TV encounter group therapy. Snow had let the curtain drop back and watched Jennifer working over the ele
ctric skillet. The full reality of American living had flooded through his consciousness at that moment. First his home had suffered a vicious, unprovoked attack by a demented biker. And as a victim of crime, he had received no emotional support from his woman. Wait a minute, he had said to himself. Let’s have a close look at the woman cooking my breakfast. She is forty-one years old, gray strands of hair are swept back from her face, and blue veins rise like canals on the back of her legs. Camping out for the night at HQ Crosby had once said, “Fucking a white woman is a step away from homosexuality.” Snow had flinched and felt a shiver run down his spinal column. That chill had returned as he had watched Jennifer cooking breakfast.

  “I can’t believe this, our home has been assaulted by a biker and you keep on cooking pancakes like nothing ever happened,” Snow had said, his eyes looking at her blue veins. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  He couldn’t say anything but he was thinking about something else. What haunted Snow was one of his own axioms he had put in circulation at HQ—a man can only be in touch with his reality when he sleeps with someone his own age. His one-liner had ended up on a T-shirt sold by the now defunct “Y-Not Bar.” He had remembered that Crosby had half-a-dozen of that particular T-shirt in his collection, and each year doubled the price he would take for selling one to Snow. Crosby had refused to acknowledge that Snow’s claim of ownership of the one-liner entitled him to a big discount. Crosby had also stolen Snow’s all-time favorite—“Life is short time”—and run it on the front of the Pussycat Bar T-shirt. This was after Crosby had promised not to steal it and Snow had believed him and told him anyway. Snow hadn’t spoken to Crosby for six weeks after that theft was revealed one night in HQ when one of the Tommys wore it to work.

  In Bangkok many hardcore farangs—the lifers—had a gross, nightmarish fear they would be forced at gunpoint to jump the bones of a woman their own age. They had structured their lives in such a way as to insulate them from the experience of two sets of old bones and flabby flesh struggling under the sheets to copulate. The “Y-Not Bar” T-shirt had captured this fear of copulating with old meat.

  “Not until you tell me what a skuller is.” She was toughing it out and he had not liked the pressure.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” Snow had said.

  How did he explain skull bars in Patpong and skullers who inhabited them? He couldn’t just come out and say they were blowjob bars. He knew she would want full details, a moral audit, the kind of accounting which he would fail. Why did any farang go to a skull bar and watch teenage peasant girls giving blow jobs to old men wearing T-shirts and their trousers around their ankles? No way was he in the mood for that question after what the Hell’s Angel had already started. So he had lied.

  “A skuller is a kind of guy who runs a Harley into a parked Winnebago and then flips you the bird and pounds his ham-sized fists against the side of your home.”

  “I never heard that before,” she had said. “Does that expression come from Bangkok?”

  “Sort of,” Snow had said sheepishly.

  “Do they have Hell’s Angels in Bangkok?” Jennifer had asked, turning over the last pancake. Star Trek had faded to the credits and Jennifer began to load one plate with pancakes.

  “In Bangkok, we have Angels from Hell,” Snow had said, picking up the broken pieces of plate from the sink.

  “You never say ‘we’ when you talk about LA. Only about Bangkok. Then it’s ‘we’ do or have or whatever. The way you talk about Bangkok, I can’t understand why you aren’t back there now.” She had set the plate on the table and poured thick maple syrup over the steaming stack and begun to eat.

  “Hey, man. Where are my pancakes?”

  Snow had watched her eat. She ate slowly as if the fork travelled from some time warp distortion caused by the mad biker’s collision into the Winnebago.

  “If you cooked your own pancakes, then you’d understand how they are made,” she had replied.

  “I don’t care if they come from outer space. I just want to eat a pancake and the process is irrelevant. So cut it out, and give me some.”

  She looked down at her plate, failing to show any indication that she acknowledged Snow’s plea for food. I can’t believe this highmiler is ignoring me, he had thought. High-milers like old cars had been around all the tracks and all the circuits enough times that the odometer had started over again. He thought of another T-shirt one-liner—You don’t need speed bumps for high-milers because you can never get them going that fast. Maybe he could sell it to one of the bars. The commercial opportunity shot through his mind quickly, and he was back in LA, no pancakes, in the presence of a round-eye causing him anguish. In Bangkok no one would talk to her, he told himself. Farangs would scatter when she entered the room because she would demand attention, conversation, and exchange of views. Jennifer was more than a high-miler, she was a high-maintenance high-miler, he told himself.

  Snow had gotten up from the table, opened the door and walked across the parking lot to an International House of Pancakes, parked himself in a booth and ordered a pancake breakfast special. About a minute after the waitress had set down his breakfast and he had picked up his knife and fork, the biker from hell had walked out of the bathroom and come straight at his table. He was early 40s, big shoulders, naked hairy arms, greasy hair, gold-capped teeth, and salt and pepper beard. He had bacon bits rimmed around his moustache as if he had been feeding out of bowl like some wild animal. The first thing the biker had done was to slap Snow across the face. The blow had knocked off his glasses, and rolled him back in the booth. Snow, caught white knuckled, clutching his cutlery, had realized the opportunity to sink the fork into the biker’s kneecap and with his other fist had jabbed the knife into the biker’s thigh. The biker had the pained, embarrassed look of a dog startled while taking a shit, and then his eyes had rolled up into his head, and he had collapsed with a loud scream, striking his forehead on the edge of Snow’s table. Blood had poured from the biker’s head and multiple leg wounds.

  “Excuse me. This man who appears to be a messy eater just had a seizure. You better call for an ambulance,” he had called to the waitress, as the biker lay on the floor, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as if he were about to pass out. Snow had leaned over and picked up his glasses, then had a final look at the second pancake breakfast he was destined not to eat and accepted this as an omen.

  He had walked back to the Winnebago, kicked over the motorcycle of the biker and stomped on the gas tank, putting a foot-sized dent in it. He had opened the Winnebago door, blood dripping from his hands, had gone directly to the sink, rolled up his shirt, rinsed his hands, found his passport and money.

  “Where you going?” asked Jennifer. “My God, you’re bleeding.”

  He had looked up from his suitcase.

  “Bangkok. And it’s not my blood.”

  “Isn’t there trouble there?”

  “There’s trouble everywhere.”

  “It’s because of the pancakes. Honey, I’m sorry.”

  Snow didn’t answer.

  “Are you serious?”

  The sound of an ambulance siren wailed in the distance.

  “I’m outta here,” Snow had said, swinging open the screendoor.

  “You can’t just leave. When are you coming back?” she had asked, as he shut his case.

  “Don’t know.”

  8

  CROSBY HAD OCCUPIED a window seat in the First Class section of a British Airways flight from London to Bangkok. Sitting next to him was the Managing Director of a textile company listed on the stock exchange; someone who was a member of all the important clubs, and knew all the right people in London and Bangkok. Someone that Crosby had decided must have connections with the T-shirt business. He had been raised to believe that you must obtain the confidence of someone you want to pitch a business deal to. When the air hostess asked for his selection for breakfast, Crosby chose eggs Benedict. The eggs Benedict arrived in perfect
condition. Through the light Hollandaise sauce the orange yolks looked as if they were covered by a thin membrane—the hazy film which covered the eye of a blind man. Crosby made a point of voicing this thought to his seat mate.

  “I’m an eye surgeon. In my practice, patients from all over the world pass through my surgery,” said Crosby, lying through his teeth.

  “I’m in charge of our undergarment and foundation export division,” his seat mate had replied, his hand involuntarily adjusting his power-red necktie.

  “Do you make T-shirts?” Crosby had asked.

  The man had nodded.

  “Now we are on to something,” Crosby had said with a wicked smile. “Panties, bras, T-shirts, and a blindman’s eyes.”

  His seat mate had winced and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I have perfected a certain specialized microsurgery technique,” Crosby had whispered. “It has made me controversial. And I have not always been successful. I’m commonly written up in journals. By the time my patients reach me they have tried everyone and every other process. They are desperate. Their condition is hopeless. They have become resigned to a life of blindness. Maybe a pinpoint of light. My colleagues are divided over my techniques. People may make fun of your line of work. Selling panties and bras. But believe me, my friend, such is a minor humiliation compared to being called a medical charlatan, an eye-hole butcher, and Dr. Laughing Gas. To see your name attacked in print is terribly upsetting. To watch defensively as people go on TV talk shows and tell jokes about you. It’s the fashion of the time, to cut down anyone who’s successful. And when you are on the cutting edge of new laser hydro-gas-plasma technology, they come out with knives drawn.”

  “Laser hydro-gas-plasma?” his seat mate had nodded, not wishing to acknowledge that he had no awareness of the controversy.