Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  The way she saw it, she would be at the top of her game in a country that paid better than any other. When she finished, after a couple of years, she would still be under thirty years old. She would retire to her brand-new house with carport and giant wide-screen TV, decorated internally with photographs of Chanya in Amerika. The whole village would be proud of her and give her face. She would be a queen, and everyone would approve of the way she took care of her family. Maybe she would have a baby? Unlike most of her friends, she had not fallen pregnant to a Thai lover at age eighteen. She was childless and went along with the more recent fashion in that she liked the idea of having a half-farang child, who tended, according to the latest fad anyway, to be more beautiful than Thais and with lighter skin. She had no particular desire to marry, although a Buddhist ceremony was not out of the question. She knew enough about farang men to know that the father of her child was unlikely to stick around. Indeed, the chances were he would disappear the day she told him she was pregnant, which was fine by her. The function of a husband was to provide. If a woman had money, what did she need a husband for? She could satisfy her sexual needs anytime she liked, although she had always practiced Buddhist meditation and expected to become more devout once her working days were over. She would probably give up sex altogether once she retired. It was a very long time since she had enjoyed it or even thought about it other than in a professional sense. Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure she ever had felt any real passion for a man. Sex was boring. It was paytime that made her heart skip a beat.

  She has insisted on a window seat in the Thai Airways 747, and her first view of America is the New England coastline. The gang chose for her to fly west, with a short stopover at Heathrow Airport in London, so for most of the journey, there has been only blackness out the window as they fled the sun. Now, though, the sun has caught up, and eight thousand feet below, the New England coast looks as pristine as when the Pilgrims first arrived. She had no idea that America could be breathtaking in its natural beauty, so it’s quite a surprise to behold that aquamarine lazily lapping at a jagged line of rocks that reflect the morning light with the brilliance of diamonds. She has never been out of Thailand before, never seen a northern landscape. It looks so pure and unspoiled.

  The big moment comes when she reaches the immigration booth and a tall, stern farang in uniform checks carefully through her passport. The minder from the gang is in a parallel line, watching, ready to jump her if her nerves let her down. (Oh, solly, solly, mister, my sister she very emotional, I take her go sit down over there.)

  But her nerves do not fail: Chanya rides this dragon. Chanya owns big pair mighty balls.

  Here is the benefit of choosing the right mafiosi and of generally knowing what you are doing. Plenty of girls get caught at this stage because the passport is poorly forged, or there is something wrong with the visa. Not with these guys. Although he seems to try quite hard (when he pierces her with those cold blue eyes, it is obvious he knows what she is, but she keeps her cool and gazes steadily back), the immigration officer cannot find anything wrong with her papers and lets her through. Now customs wants to search her bags because she has arrived from Bangkok. Here again many girls get into serious trouble because the gang has slipped something into their luggage, trying to run two scams at once, but not this group. The only item the customs officer examines closely is her secondhand laptop, which she bought in Bangkok mostly so she could send e-mails to all her friends and family, especially her sister at Chulalongkorn University, but also because part of her American plan is to keep a diary. The officer lets her through, and all of a sudden she’s in the country. There being no Buddha statue to wai to in this pagan land, she places her hands together near her forehead, facing in the direction of Thailand. Translated directly from the Thai: Say good morning to Chanya, Amerika.

  She and her minder take one of the shuttle buses to catch the connecting flight to El Paso. He watches her pass to airside, then disappears. Another minder, not Thai but Texan, meets her off the plane in El Paso. He is red-faced and balding with bad skin, and a sour odor seeps from his body, but she can tell he’s a professional by the way he discounts her charms and gets down to business. On the way to the massage parlor he explains that the advantage of jet lag is that she’ll be fresh and alert in the middle of the night, so she’ll start working the graveyard shift in a few hours. Better get some sleep. He lets slip that she is the first Asian woman to work for this particular outfit.

  The first Spanish word she learns is coño. It means “cunt,” a word women of her trade employ a lot, including in Thailand, but the Mexican women in the massage parlor use it all the time. It punctuates everything they say and sounds unspeakably filthy. Most of them are bilingual in Spanish and English but prefer to speak in Spanish. They tend to have families on the other side of the border and to know one another from Ciudad Juárez, where they have boyfriends and husbands who work as grunts in the narcotics trade. Chanya has mentally prepared herself for any kind of American man who hires her—she really hadn’t thought that the other women would be a problem. She sees at once it’s a cultural thing but has no idea what to do about it. She was lovingly brought up by poor but devout Buddhists, and she herself never violates any of the strictures except one. The Buddha requires of his followers that they find “right employment.” Chanya made a decision to postpone complying with that one because prostitution offered better money than any other work and made it easy for her to comply with some of the other Buddhist strictures, especially the ones that dealt with showing respect to one’s parents. In the Thai interpretation that meant providing for them if they were too poor or old to provide for themselves. It also meant providing for her siblings until they were old enough to work, an event that could easily be delayed indefinitely. Chanya never steals, hardly ever tells lies, cultivates good thoughts and lovingkindness, never takes drugs, doesn’t drink too much alcohol at this stage in her life, tries to see the best in people—including her customers—and most important of all keeps her mind as free as possible from defilements. All of which, together with her outstanding good looks and fantastic figure, infuriate the hell out of her colleagues, especially when more and more men ask for her services.

  After a week she has made her first important decision: Whores here all demons.

  In other words, they are impervious to compassion or any Buddhist salvation. When they die, they will return to the hells whence they came and remain there for tens of thousands of years before getting another crack at the human form, which they will probably make a mess of all over again. “Idiot compassion” is a novice stage in Buddhist doctrine. Chanya passed that phase a long time ago. She encloses herself in an impermeable mental shield that translates as aloofness but gains her some respect. The demons had seen her as something frail and pathetic, a tasty morsel dangling at the very end of the food chain. Now they see she is something else, a different animal entirely. Coño. She pays no attention to their religion, which seems important to them but strikes her as a barbaric product of one of the lower hells, full of torment and anguish that lead nowhere: Chanya fucks demons.

  After less than a month the offers of marriage start to come in. It amuses her that the Texan male courts in a way that would be instantly recognizable in the East. He tells you how much money he’s got, shows you around his “spread” just like a bird showing off its plumage, and treats you like a princess in a cage. Some even had the sense to feign humility: “Aw, you know, it’s just a li’l ol’ spread, I ain’t rich exactly—but a’ course any woman takes me on full time is gonna get half sooner or later. I’m getting on a bit, you know.”

  The frontier between marriage and prostitution was as hard to pin down in the United States as it was in Thailand, apparently. Some of the spreads were gigantic in the Texan tradition, but she doubted the owner had any real intention to share. As her fame grew, more and more red-faced men from out of the jungle (she is still very Thai; for her, anything that is not city
or suburb is jungle) arrived in the massage parlor’s parking lot in big SUVs. Her boss doubled her fees and told her the five thousand dollars would be paid off in three months instead of six, when she would be free to leave. He was an experienced pro and realized she was just too hot to keep. The feds would be around sooner or later to take a more expert look at her passport, maybe check with the ID database in Thailand on which fingerprints were recorded.

  Marriage, she now decides, is not out of the question, but she sees through the men. She sees the meanness behind the charm, their assumption of a future of unchallenged dominance that arises from her being Asian, serene, and eager to please. For her part, if she is looking for anything in particular in a man, it is a Thai sense of fun. Money is important, but without fun life simply is not worth living. Although she enjoys a laugh and a joke with some of the customers, she isn’t having a lot of fun, not with the Mexican women developing a homicidal rage toward her. The boss sees it too and hints that she should probably leave as soon as the three months are up—those women have mean connections. Anything can happen in El Paso. Maybe she could leave even sooner—he increases her hourly fee again. Within a record two months of her arrival, she is free to leave.

  Vegas is the place to go for a woman like her. She knew this even in Bangkok. When she first sees the town from the Greyhound bus, she recognizes the vibrations. Using her connections within America’s Thai mafia, she has no difficulty finding a job with the biggest of the city’s agencies. The agency is so well organized, American style, it even holds an induction course. Chanya sits in a seat in a conference room of a large hotel, along with about fifty other young women, most of whom are not Caucasian.

  She has often heard prostitution referred to as an industry but has never seen it treated like one before. The platinum blonde who stands facing the new recruits is a masterpiece of modern surgery: tit enhancements, stomach tucks, nosejob, face-lift—the lot. She is over forty, though—way past active service—and has surely been shunted over to the human resources side of the profession. No surgery could do much about her voice, which is sandpaper and steel:

  “It’s like this, and in this order. I don’t want to hear about any of you getting the order wrong, so if you have a learning disability or poor English, write it down. I provided paper and pencil on each desk.”

  1. The john arrives in Vegas. He has heard about our services and asks the cab driver how he can contact us on his way from the airport.

  2. The cab driver has one of our cards like this. [It shows a lurid Asian girl with huge bare breasts on one side, the telephone number on the other.] You will notice that there is a code number on the card. Each individual card has a different one.

  3. The john calls the number, and the operator asks for the code on the card. This helps ensure it’s a real john and not a cop. It also means a payoff for the cab driver.

  4. The john states his preferences, i.e., race, breast size, height, blow job only, hand job, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, special services, all of the above, etc.

  5. The operator takes down his hotel details and calls him back in his room to make sure he’s really there.

  6. If he is where he says he is, the operator tells him the price and usually adds that the girl will be there in twenty minutes.

  7. The operator calls the girl on her cell phone and tells her where to go. She also calls one of the bodyguards to meet her in the lobby of the john’s hotel. This is important. You do not go to the john’s room or even call him until the guard is in place. You tap the guard’s cell number into the autodial feature of your own cell phone. If at any point there is a problem, you press the autodial number, and the guard will be up at the room in double-quick time.

  8. You make contact with the guard and then call the john on the hotel phone to come down to meet you. You do not go straight to his room.

  9. The john tells you what he is wearing. You and the guard both check the john when he appears, but he will not see the guard. You approach, you will call him either honey or sweetie, you will not use any other term of endearment.

  10. The john takes you up to his room. He must now pay you the base fee of two hundred dollars. You do not make a move until you have pocketed the cash.

  11. You now tell him to take out his cock. This is important. If he is an undercover cop, he will not take out his cock. If he refuses, then you leave the room. If he is not a cop, he will take out his cock, which you will work on for a few moments.

  12. You then tell him to lie on the bed while you strip. After you have stripped and he has ogled you, you explain that the price given by the agency was merely for turning up and stripping. If he wants more, he has to pay. You will have your own scale of fees for services, starting with hand jobs and going all the way up to ass-fucking. What you charge at this stage is up to you—obviously the young and stunning will charge the most. In any case, you are advised not to begin your service until you have got your dough.

  13. The rest is up to you and your creativity, but always use a condom for oral, vaginal, and anal sex. From time to time we plant men on you to check for quality control. Any girl who does not roll her own condom on the john will be fired.

  14. An elegant exit is always a good idea. Be polite at all times, but a good exit gives the possibility of repeat business. A repeat customer simplifies things, and of course you know by this time he is not a cop.

  At first she feels much less isolated than in El Paso. There are plenty of Asian women on the Game here—Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Malay, Indian, Pakistani—more or less every Asian race is represented. If they are less popular than blondes, that doesn’t seem to matter, there is plenty of work to go around. Here the men are all tourists from other states—the whole of Nevada is a revolving door, millions are flown and bused in every week. Every customer comes with those bulging, moist, expectant eyes of a man who has escaped from his prison for a week or two—or a day, or an hour.

  Almost all the other women are American citizens, though. Many were born there, others have immigrated and stayed long enough to take the oath of allegiance and generally behave exactly like other Americans. Practically every one of them is on drugs. The white women tend to claim, perhaps truthfully, that it was drugs (mostly coke, crack and meth, sometimes heroin) that drove them to the Game in the first place. They needed the big bucks to feed their big habits. The Asians and the blacks often claim it was prostitution that drove them to drugs. Everyone agrees that to survive on the Game in America, you more or less have to be on dope of one kind or another. Pretty soon Chanya understands what they mean. The men hardly trouble to ask her name, there is no repartee, no fun—even less fun than in Texas. To her it makes no sense at all, since imposing a layer of misery has no effect on the popularity of the trade. On the contrary, it may be the puritanical monotony of the working week that drives the men to seek relief in Vegas: not raging bulls, exactly, more like cows waiting to be milked.

  She becomes a production-line worker, if a highly paid one. It is exactly what the men expect. They really need to be disappointed—she can see them starting to tell themselves how sorry they are as they put their pants back on, how they will try to live better lives and buy their wives a new dress. Her good looks and superb figure are only minor advantages—generally the men are too rushed and furtive to notice.

  She starts to drink regularly, usually a couple of tequilas at the end of a session to keep her head level. She stays more than six months, long enough to save thirty thousand dollars, then takes a bus to Washington. One of her friends from Bangkok has called her. Wan arrived in America soon after Chanya and found work in a Washington, D.C., hotel where the Game is very well controlled. There is a sauna and massage spa attached to the hotel where Chanya can work.

  In Washington it takes Chanya a week to realize she has dropped into a whore’s paradise. The hotel where Wan works owns five stars, which means diplomats, high-rolling secretaries, heads of security, a
nd others stay here. But before Chanya has time to apply for a job, her friend introduces her to a Thai diplomat named Thanee, a light-skinned man in his mid-forties with obvious Chinese genes who belongs to one of maybe a dozen very wealthy families who control Thailand. Chanya has heard of his family, who are often in the news in Bangkok. The patriarch, who is still just about alive, made a lot of money in the opium trade while it was still legal, or semilegal, but his eldest son showed true commercial genius by investing his share of the family fortune first in electronics, then in telecommunications. Thanee is a second grandson who showed no interest in business but demonstrated a flair for diplomacy. With his connections it was inevitable that sooner or later he would land a plum job in Washington. He is part of a permanent lobbying group looking after the interests of the Thai economy—well, the interests of Thai patricians, actually.

  The negotiations are very short, and he and Chanya close the deal with hardly more than a smile. Wan finds an excuse to leave them alone after about five minutes. It is such a relief to speak her own language and to be with a man who understands where she is coming from, she almost loses her professionalism.

  There is no hurry to get her to bed. He takes her to a Thai restaurant off Chinatown, where he urges her to choose her favorite dishes. He orders a bottle of white wine to go with the raw prawn salad, and a bottle of red for the duck. He makes her laugh with some Thai jokes, but at the same time his sophistication is pretty intimidating. He not only speaks English perfectly; he owns a kind of smoothness that seems to impress, even frighten, the waiters. He is a master of both cultures, something that leaves her almost speechless with admiration. Best of all, they understand each other perfectly: there will be no misplaced passion and no offers of marriage with this guy. They will proceed back to his apartment at a leisurely Thai pace, their private party will begin with her massaging him slowly with aromatic oil, little by little intimacy will develop, he will not force the issue but will wait for her to signal she is ready. She will stay the night, they will breakfast together, perhaps they will have sex one more time before he pays her generously. She will allow herself to fall in love with him in a very controlled way. They are as far apart within the Thai class system as it is possible to be, so neither of them is going to develop unreasonable expectations. On the other hand, both of them will greet each other with affection and a degree of relief at their next assignation. She will almost certainly become one of his mia noi or minor wives in Washington.