The Thong Also Rises

by Jennifer L. Leo

  The boat is slim, curlicued at the end like the proboscis of an exotic insect. There are about twenty of us in various stages of heat-induced delirium, traveling on Thailand’s Andaman Sea. About half are foreigners, there for the dubiously pure experience—to my left is a big blonde with a German flag sewn to her backpack and an alarming tropical disease on her leg. When I squirm away from her on the narrow plank seat, the boat rocks to and fro, provoking scowls from the tourists and smiles from the Thais.

  I consult my English-Thai pocket dictionary. Law diou, I say to the boatman, attempting an elegant diphthong. I gesture to the shore. He looks through me like a window. My condition is not yet desperate enough for a pantomime, so I distract myself by following the movements of an elderly Thai lady seated to my right, cool and content in the generous shadow of her lampshade hat. I watch as she takes out a wooden box, removes several ingredients—a green leaf, a white nut, some black paste—bundles them together and stuffs the whole package in her mouth. In seconds she has it chewed down to a manageable wad.

  The lady feels me watching. She projects a gob of blood-red saliva that shoots six feet past the side of the boat, turns and motions that I ought to try some. I politely decline in that nodding way I’ve seen Thais do. I’d read that betel nut chewing is a respectable pastime of older Thai women, yet don’t think I’ve quite come of age.

  First lesson learned in Thailand: Be ye not well-hydrated on a lollygagging longboat. The gentle lapping of the river against the boat’s hull is as dangerously hypnotic as a self-help CD: Relax, let go, it whispers. Allow every part of your body to become heavy, verrry heaavy, releasing anything you are holding on to.

  I do not relax. I double-cross my legs, recruiting about twelve different muscles in a team effort to barricade my bladder. How I will later stand and exit the boat is a bridge I will slosh across when the time comes.

  We near the Phranang shore. Only later am I fully able to appreciate the massive rock formations jutting out of the water, like giant elephants lumbering across the sea. Right now I have my eyes locked upon a little structure next to the pier. I can just make out two letters painted on its door: WC. I stare at it as if it were a sacred mandala.

  I am the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, as Immovable as a Mountain.

  The Thai lady takes a tea kettle out of a basket.

  I am a Fortress, a Locked Trunk buried in the earth.

  She pours some tea into a glass—

  I am a Frigid Housewife, a Dead Whale.

  —and holds it out to me.

  Dang.

  I dare not shake even just my head. I have reached a pinnacle upon which I teeter, a dilemma that has followed me throughout my life: I must choose to either keep my dignity or cut the ties that bind me, between the discipline of holding back forever and the flagrant flinging open of the gates to freedom.

  I waver. I try not to wobble. I hold on for a life-altering moment while mumbling something to the German girl about keeping a eye on my stuff. I can’t hear her response because I am diving into the sea, relief spreading through my body before I even hit the water.

  When I surface, I have been born again under a lucky star. I swim, victorious, toward the fabled white sands of Phranang, just another American fool, slogging out of the water and over to where my new German friend waits, pissed off, with my pack. “Danke schön,” I say, as she stomps away. I decide to sit on the beach and dry off a bit before I look for the night’s bungalow. As I watch the stars sidle out, one by one, I feel as though I have just untied a heavy anchor that had weighed me down forever. Vast populations are fluttering in my bloodstream: dragonflies and butterflies and golden honeybees of love. The nerve endings on my skin spring to attention, exuding pheromones from every pore. The me of yore—the harlot, the trollop—would have planned ahead, would have snatched up that yummy little treat back at the teahouse with whom to indulge in my randy persuasion. Alas! I am as unaccompanied as a clam.

  I’m watching the waves, and the sparkles inside me appear to be floating there as well, as if a galaxy of heavenly bodies had been flung across the sea. Then, a humanoid form rises up from the water, glowing from head-to-toe. I frantically pat myself for outgrowths of dementia. Is that a narcotic rush I’m feeling? Maybe, back in Krabi, some upcountry opium had been sprinkled in my tea! The last time I’d tripped was during a peyote ritual gone awry, the one that had manifested a ten-thousand-fold hallucination of my high school algebra teacher, Sister Ursula. She’d sprouted Hinduesque undulating arms, her millions of chubby hands each grasping chalk, and a great omnipresent mouth that bespoke: There are Vastly Compelling Reasons to find the Roots of Unity.

  The sparkle-clad figure is heading my way. I leap to my feet and run like the dickens, an instinct that has served me well when I’ve listened to it. I run along the beach, toward a tall, rocky outcropping. I find a cave. The fragrance of incense and a soft, flickering light beckon me into its recesses.

  Dang!

  Scores of wooden penises—in a multi-culti rainbow of colors and dimensions—are wedged, stacked, glued with melted wax to the surface of a candle-lit altar. These are the most alert save-the-race likenesses I’ve ever seen, their angles of repose ranging between 45 and 90 degrees—a sort of Kama Sutra lesson in geometry. Some are decorated with squiggly Thai script. Others are rather banged up, evidence of past abuse. I spy a contingent of thumb-sized red guys with black helmet heads, all lined up in military formation, a forearm-sized member presiding over them. Meanwhile, humongous phallic shadows waltz across the walls of the cave. Something inside me churns.

  “Penises,” I bellow, as if the word could open a magic door.

  “Pardon me?” a deep voice answers behind me.

  I jump. It’s a man. A Brit, by the sound of him. He’s dripping, must’ve just come from an evening swim. He wears the teeniest, tightest cutoffs I’ve ever seen on a man. Ignoring this unnerving stylistic detail—Is it a Euro thing? I wonder—I notice his hazel eyes and dark, well-groomed beard. He smiles and holds out his hand.

  “I’m Noland,” he says. “I saw you running, figured you were another Yank who’d fallen off her trolley. Or perhaps you’ve come to place an offering on the altar?”

  “Melinda,” I say, and shake his hand. It is warm, wet. “I’m afraid I don’t have a, um, phallus with me. Do you have one I could use?”

  Noland laughs. “The Thais call this the Princess Cave,” he says. “The local fishermen pile these little beauties in here to honor the sea goddess, hoping for good fortune at sea. And in the bedroom, of course. Thai legend has it that she gave birth to a man, whom she created to be her lover. He would come down to the water to meet her and they would frolic in the waves.”

  I shiver. “I could’ve sworn I saw somebody, glowing, in the water…”

  “’Twas I!” Noland says. “Covered in phosphorescent plankton. Dinoflagelletes, specifically, with flagellating tails.”

  “Flagellating tails?”

  “Like sperm,” he says, rubbing a thumb and forefinger together in a circular motion. “A bit slimy, yet kind of tacky.”

  He’s looking at me intently.

  “The dinoflagellates, I mean,” he says, reddening.

  We talk some more. Noland tells me he is an anthropologist, taking a break from field work in Malaysia. Came to Phranang to do some writing.

  “About life in the bush?” I ask.

  “Poetry,” he says. “Letting all the smells and tastes and everything I’ve absorbed for the last eight months float up to the surface, burst out of me and onto the paper.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say. “I think some of those dino-flago numbers got into the drinking water. I’ve been sending home cryptic postcards about being brainwashed by squids, buddhas, and Thai beach boys.”

  “Lovely!” says Noland.

  And he is. Lovely. Especially lit by candles and surrounded by penises, which I stare at to avoid flagellating into his eyes. My heart is throbbing as ecstatically as a
rave dancer, replicating itself in all the errant places of my body that I’ve been trying to ignore for the last several weeks. That little emergency vial of rationale I keep on the top shelf of my mind, the one that comes complete with a subliminal tape-loop of my shrink’s voice, which to listen to is equivalent to wearing a chastity belt—I feel it explode from the high-voltage current coursing through me.

  As my last few shreds of decency and restraint take flight, I have an idea:A compilation of phallus terminology! It will be my life’s work. I immediately get started on a mental list: Peter, Prick, Rod, Demon Stick, Dong, Manhood, Boner, Tool, Schlong, Old Betrayer—

  “Would you fancy a swim?” Noland says, vaporizing my data. But a swim is a sportingly grand idea.The reformed me (struggling to climb back on the wagon) knows I must stop dicking around, spit spot. I’ve got to get out of this penis palace before I do something rash. The sea ought to be safer than a cavern teeming with one-eyed snakes.

  “Aye,” I say.

  I don’t know about you, but my favorite time to appear publicly in a bathing suit is on a moonless night on a secluded beach on a remote island. I didn’t always feel like that…say, forty years ago…but now my cellulite is more like celluheavy, and the last Fonda workout I did was with Henry not Jane.

  —Phyllis W. Zeno, “Everybody Out of the Pool!”

  I take deep breaths, reminding myself of all the unsexy things that my shrink said lay in wait for me if I don’t change my sexy ways: Loneliness. Alienation from society. Bad credit forever (though I’m still puzzling over its connection to sex). Deviance is a symptom of self-hatred, he’d once said ominously. Why, then, does the deviance factor make the consequences seem so sexy? So outré? Why do I so love this feeling of hating myself?

  We walk down to the water’s edge. I’m not wearing a bathing suit but my underwear and bra could pass as one.Though it’s dark, I duck behind a palm tree. Unbuttoning my shirt and my fly in front of a man is just too suggestive. For the first time ever I’m not trying to whip myself into any more of a lather than I am in already.

  The sea is warm and calm, the glowing clouds of plankton creating a magical soup. I wade in hesitantly, shy. Shy-like. Noland grins at me from just beyond, bobbing on the surf. A fetching merman.

  “Look at this,” says Noland.

  He shows me something he’d learned on a trip to West Africa, how to play a water drum. He splashes a Congolese rhumba while I attempt water ballet. We discuss scholarly topics, such as the mating dances of the Trobriand Islanders. After a while, we stop talking and listen to the surf’s rise and fall. Inhale, exhale. Diastole, systole. I look down at myself. I am shimmering like a tiny city, glowing with the self-generated light of millions of creatures. I look over at Noland and he’s glowing, too, and suddenly I’m aware that his sparkles and mine seem to be calling out to each other, our own little emissaries, our very polite diplomats. Hello! I see you! they say. I see you too! then bowing to each other, Thank you (bow). No, please, thank you! For a long time, Noland and I just float, side by side, as tiny alliances are formed between us.

  Then Noland mentions he is leaving. He’s taking the late boat out of Phranang in a few hours, back to Krabi to catch an all-night bus to Singapore.

  Dang.

  “I was wondering,” he says, “if you’d fancy coming along?”

  On rare, perfect days I move through space as if propelled by a benevolent force. No matter where I turn, it is all is so crushingly gorgeous, and my one true purpose is to dip into each shiny poppy bowl and suck nectar like a butterfly, see myself reflected in everything with wide-eyed familiarity. This, according to Shrink #7, is evidence of a narcissistic disorder run so amok, it has its own House of Mirrors. I am not a narcissist! I cried, as he nodded and scribbled into his notebook. What would you say, then, is influencing your behavior? #7 queried. I thought for a moment. I’m blinded by science, I said. He gave me that inscrutable shrink look. I wanted him to understand. Can’t you see? I said. I’m caught in a convergence of love and molecules! All that is good inside me is inspired to divide and multiply, a bazillion cells of beneficence splitting off into infinity.

  Noland and I sit under a palm tree, dripping single-celled organisms, while I debate whether or not to abandon the enchanted inlet of Phranang, which I haven’t even seen by the light of day. I remind myself that the tsunami wave of lust roaring from the horizons of my veins is not a psychologically sound reason to catch an all-night bus to Singapore with a man I’d just met in a penis cave. I counter that it has to do with expanding the perfection of the experience, increasing its chances of staying fixed in my memory without some bum luck busting in and taking over. Like being eaten alive by flophouse bedbugs. Or getting the runs. Or running into those three Aussies in Bangkok, whose vacation pastime is to go from village to village, sampling and comparing prostitutes. If I loiter about this penis voodoo cave much longer, I will likely end up as an instrument of the sea goddess, my sole purpose being to beget more lovers for her enjoyment. Or find myself addicted to the love sparkles in the water, forgetting who I am and where I came from and never, ever be able to leave.

  Armed with a dozen rationalizations, I leave at 9 P.M. to catch the all-night bus for Singapore.

  I could report how Thais like to watch 2 A.M. machine gun videos on buses that take mountainous turns at 45-degree angles, threatening to pitch themselves into the lush gorges below. I could explain how two people in the back of a bus can share a blanket and feel a sudden chemical reaction take place. I could hypothesize how lust isn’t a nasty thing. Or maybe it is. Isn’t it about being a pilgrim of the flesh, making devotional offerings to the molecules of another? Molecules that—like those throat singers in Tuva—chant your name and the name of the universe, multitonally, so they sound as one?

  It’s a scientific theory, anyway, that Noland and I will thoroughly test.

  Melinda Misuraca earned an M.F.A. in writing at New College in San Francisco, where she teaches in the graduate writing program. She has completed a collection of short fiction and is at work on a novel.

  CHRISTINE MICHAUD-MARTINEZ

  Travel Light, Ride Hard

  Padded underwear, anyone?

  ON MY FIRST TRIP TO CAIRO,I HEADED STRAIGHT FOR the Giza Pyramids with my heart set on a camelback tour. After reading T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I considered myself an expert on all camel-related matters. “Horse better for you, madame,” the local Bedouins advised flashing golden-toothed smiles. But a horse just did not fit my idea of an exotic desert trek. I had come to the desert and I would ride a camel.

  After lengthy negotiations, one of the Bedouins agreed to rent me Habibi, a tall, beautifully adorned male camel (in spite of my insisting pleas for a she-camel—Lawrence would never ride a male, claiming they are stubborn and much more difficult than females).Then, out of a cloud of dust, appeared a skinny dirty little man astride a skinny dirty little horse. “Ali will be your guide,” the Bedouin declared, “Ali very good man.” My guide’s bony face broke into a wide tobacco-stained smile.

  I settled as best I could on the large wooden saddle strapped over Habibi’s single hump, rearranging the colorful folded blankets used for padding, and careful not to mess up my proud camel’s pompoms. As I searched for the nonexistent stirrups, Ali encouraged me to ride Bedouin-style, insisting I tuck my right foot under left my left knee (or was it the other way around?) “Lie back,”Ali then instructed before clucking his tongue. “What?” I shrieked as Habibi jerked his rear up, nearly catapulting me head first into the sand. Like any self-respecting camel, Habibi had got up by first unfolding his hind legs and then his front legs.

  With no harm done, I followed Ali’s horse up the first sand dune. “Ya madame, anti yaani, you’re a natural!” my guide cheered as I cantered smoothly behind him, feeling like a true Bedouin girl, already over-confident. Satisfied, Ali turned around and whipped his horse into a mad gallop he would keep up for much of the ride and that Habibi needed lit
tle convincing to imitate.

  Until I had mounted Habibi, my riding experience had been limited to about half a dozen horseback rides on beaten trails. I soon discovered that a camel’s gallop has nothing to do with a horse’s smooth run where you only need to let yourself get carried by the momentum of the horse. I was riding an earthquake! Ali was already too far ahead to hear my desperate cries for help, and Habibi ignored my English, French, and Spanish swears. I remembered Lawrence writing about Bedouin riders who controlled their camel by squeezing its neck between their thighs. With my life depending on my ability to perform fancy Kama Sutra perched atop a twelve-foot-high galloping camel, I searched for other options.

  Riding Habibi was like riding an electric bull. Only this wasn’t Wild Bill’s Rodeo Bar and no one would buy me a beer if I got flung off more than six feet away from my raging mount. Holding on for dear life, I rode around the venerable pyramids with my left hand on the saddle, my right arm stretched up above my head and my shoulders thrown back. With my goofy Gilligan hat and khaki pants, this did not go without entertaining every other rider I met. “Hey! You cowgirl!” one guide shouted through his chuckles, as I raced by him halfway off my saddle, my right arm still up.

  Two hours of this led me to a very important conclusion: Thongs are not suitable camel riding apparel. With only thin quick-dry pants between my bare bum and the rough saddle of a galloping camel, I was left looking as if I had slid across a hundred yards of carpet on my bare behind.

  I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.

  —Gilda Radner

  In fact, the bruise was so bad that a week later it still had not healed and was threatening to fester. A (sorry) disciple of the “travel light” philosophy, I only carried thongs on my trips. Wearing those would never allow my seeping bruise to heal or even form a scab. I needed fullback cotton underwear.