by John Burdett
Why did Pichai decide to ordain? While he was alive I never asked myself this question, his progress on the Path seemed so natural, like a tree growing. And yet, even in Thailand it is not common to lose a cop to Buddha. Now that I am looking back at his life I see the pattern.
Sons of whores learn about manhood from our mothers, especially farang manhood. For my mother the farang was a Discovery Channel of exotic foreign travel, cuisine so mysteriously bland you had to concentrate to taste anything at all, and above all a great experiment in psychosexual manipulation which she perfected to a form of high art, eventually achieving through an almost imperceptible alteration of tone the kind of cash bonus that in lesser practitioners would have required at least a tantrum.
Not so Wanna. More traditionally Thai than Nong, Pichai's mother went to work in the bars soon after dumping Pichai's Thai father for being a "butterfly" (a technical expression amongst our women meaning he screwed anything that moved). She vomited the first time she slept with a farang and beheld that whacking great erection more suitable for a female water buffalo than a woman, and never really developed her skills to their full potential. Nong teased her that she belonged to the "dead body" school of seduction. Not that it mattered. Petite with pale flesh that was a gourmet delight to the touch, Wanna was-still is-exquisite to look at, and your farang is a sucker for the visuals.
Pichai divided his mother's customers into Masters and Slaves. What was peculiar, in his eyes, and gave rise to a profound doubt as to the soundness of the farang mind, was that his mother never altered her attitude of unconquerable indifference. A White Master who sought to protect her and dominate her (with assurances that her life was now saved) she rewarded with exactly the same shortlist of grunts and moans as a White Slave who would declare himself on the brink of salvation when she permitted him-quite literally-to lick her ass.
As her English improved she reported back to Pichai the substance of her customers' love babble. To look for nirvana in someone's crotch, now that really is dumb. For Pichai the horror was that these spiritual dwarfs were taking over the world. I think it was the profound disillusionment which arose from these insights that drove him onto the Path. He had about him the noble soul's willingness to act on even its most bitter perceptions; unlike me, he was never afraid to slash at the bonds, once he saw them for what they were. Maybe he didn't love me as much as I loved him?
11
Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious. Here I am back on Sukhumvit in an Internet cafe, having tapped out "Bradley/jade" on the AltaVista search engine. The web site is called "Fatima and Bill's Jade Window" and consists of a black background with white text, a slowly turning jade artifact in an oval in the center of the screen. One William Bradley confesses to being owner of the site.
The artifact is a parabolic phallus which glows softly with a green-gold light, a perfectly balanced shape rising from crude rock, tapering elegantly until it reaches a smoothly polished head. There is nothing more to Bradley's web page except an e-mail address and a short text extolling the mystic qualities of jade. The same text appears in Thai, above the English.
It is the finest penis I have ever seen, whether in stone or flesh. Now Bradley is beginning to intrigue me. Jade is the most spiritual of stones. Properly worked and polished, it gives a mystic glow which seems to come from its heart, an echo of nirvana. How would an American marine understand such a thing? True jade lovers tend to be Chinese.
It is easy to trace the Internet service provider, who is based on the other side of town, in Kaoshan Road, but it is three minutes to midnight on the day of Pichai's death and I need to drown myself in people. In the narrow soi outside the Internet cafe tarot readers sit cross-legged over the cards which their clients-invariably anxious girls who are not having much luck tonight-have drawn. I walk smartly past them to Nana Plaza, which is transformed. I cannot believe that Bradley was not a regular here, and who would forget a man like him?
"Handsome man, I want to go with yooo," a girl in a black tank top calls as she leans over the palisade of the first bar, when I'm turning into the Nana courtyard from Soi 4. The plaza is flooded with white men and brown girls. Australians with guts so huge they look about to give birth stand grinning with arms around girls no bigger than their legs. Americans reminisce loudly about the night before, Germans keep saying ja, ja and Dutch walk around like old hands. There are plenty of East Europeans and Russians, too; Siberia is directly north of my country, and ever since the fall of the USSR there has been a steady stream of men and women with pale skins and heavy vodka habits. The men come to buy and the women to sell.
"I don't like work here, but papa me have car accident, must send money," a girl is saying to a tall, skinny Englishman. "Oh, that's awful," he says, as he pats her butt.
The atmosphere is something between a festival and a hunting lodge. It's that time in the evening when the girls make an extra effort, before the 2 a.m. curfew when the cops close the place down, and the men sense the increase in intensity, like wildebeests sniffing lion. Everyone is drinking Singha or Kloster beer ice cold straight from the bottle, and wherever you look there are television monitors. Larry King's suspenders scream from a lot of them. Even the guy who sells fried grasshoppers from a stall near the Buddha shrine owns a TV monitor on which he plays old Muhammad Ali fights and scenes from the siege of Stalingrad. Mostly, though, the screens show Manchester United playing Leeds to the boom of every kind of music from a thousand speakers.
I squeeze past some excited Italian men to climb the stairs to the second tier, which is a U-shaped collection of go-go bars looking down on the courtyard. As I pass each bar a curtain is whipped aside to show naked or near-naked girls dancing on elevated platforms, usually to Thai pop. Girls in bikinis try to drag me in, but I'm focused now on the Carousel, which is one of the biggest.
There are two revolving platforms, and all the girls dancing on them are naked. At one of the stand-up bars a farang is arguing with a girl in traditional Thai costume.
"I tell you I tired, no have power mek boom-boom."
The man cocks an eye at me, then back to the girl. "And may I ask why you are so tired tonight?" The accent is Swiss German. With a twist of his head the man adds: "Why do I torture myself with such questions?"
I order a beer and watch the girl pull a sulky face. Gaunt and petite, about twenty-four, although to a farang she might seem sixteen. She catches my gaze and shrugs: farangs never understand anything.
"She was probably looking after her baby all night," I offer. Bar girls are rarely exhausted by twenty minutes of sex with a customer. The farang's eyes brighten.
"You have a child?" To me: "She never told me this."
Don't ask me why, but almost all the girls have one child, usually at age eighteen.
"Of course I have baby."
I watch the Swiss. Perhaps he took the girl out a couple of nights ago, made love to her casually-and finds himself haunted by her. His calculations so far have had to do with the practicalities of taking her back to Switzerland: the envy of his friends set against the disapproval of his mother; the pleasure of her body beside him every night against the social problem. And what about table manners? She probably sits cross-legged on most chairs and eats with a combination of fork, spoon and fingers.
As she turns the back of her head to me, I smile. Most of the girls are forever wrestling with their thick black hair. Often they tie it back in a ponytail, and a lot of them have taken to ripping the rings off condoms and using them as heavy-duty elastic bands, which is exactly what this girl has done; not a trick likely to win approval at the dinner tables of Zurich.
Now the Swiss has to factor in a child. But perhaps the child would not come with her?
"How old? Boy or girl?"
"Boy, him six." She beams proudly.
The Swiss looks at me with suspicion. "You know this girl?"
"Never seen her before." The Swiss is in his late thirties, balding and hurt. His face carries
all the pain of a recent failure. Why has he come to Bangkok? To demonstrate continuing virility? For the simplicity of hired flesh? Now, within less than a week of landing, he is planning a relationship far more complicated than anything he's tried before.
"At least let me pay your bar fine and take you out to dinner," he tells the girl. "I want to talk to you. I want to know something."
"What you want to know?"
He stares at her, blinking self-consciously behind his thick spectacles. "I want to know why I've been thinking about you for the past forty-eight hours."
The girl brightens. "You think of me? Me too, I think of you." Not a bad performance. Nong would have made more of the moment, though, I reflect loyally. My mother still possesses the trick of projecting instant warmth. She would never have allowed herself to get as skinny as this girl, who looks like a yaa baa fiend, nor would she have been so slow to see an opportunity for an overseas trip.
I give the man a congratulatory nod. You wanted her, now you've got her. What more could one possibly ask of life?
I take a photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and watch while the mamasan tells the Swiss how much he has to pay for the beer and the girl.
"It's strange the way they call it a bar fine," he shares with me, "as if one is doing something wrong."
When the Swiss has paid up the mamasan takes his five-hundred-baht note and brushes all her girls with it, for luck. I nod to the mamasan to come over. She looks at the picture. Not a man one could easily forget: huge, black, shaved head, good bone structure, a pleasant mouth and a brilliant smile. American, not African. No, she's never seen him before, she's sure she would have remembered, but she's not been here all that long.
Turnover of labor is going to be a problem. Bradley was in Bangkok five years and had probably made his own private arrangements with women a long time ago. Men grow tired of Nana surprisingly quickly. Girls come and go.
I doggedly try all the bars, showing Bradley's picture to mostly older mamasans who look as if they've been around for a while. No one remembers Bradley and I'm tiring by the time I return to the Carousel. The huge bar is packed with the usual collection of Caucasian men and Asian women. On a TV monitor on a wall bracket two white women are serving a gigantic black phallus. On the big screen which covers one wall Manchester United are playing Real Madrid. Those girls who are not attending to a client are watching the football. There's a yell of female approval as Beckham scores from an impossible angle for the second time in five minutes.
All the men are watching the show on the largest revolving stage, where a woman in her early forties, naked except for a pair of cowboy boots, lies on the floor shooting darts from an aluminum tube she has inserted in her vagina. Customers hold up balloons for her to hit, and she rarely misses. Her name is Kat, a friend of my mother who lived with us for a while when I was young. When her act is over she makes a tour of the bar, still naked but holding a cowboy hat upside down for tips. The hat is full with twenty-, fifty- and hundred-baht notes by the time she reaches me. I toss a fifty into the hat.
"Can I talk to you backstage?"
She smiles. "I have another show at the Hollywood in twenty minutes. Come round to the changing room as soon as I've finished here."
I watch her finish her tour, which she completes with great dignity, as if she were doing a job of work as valid as brain surgery-or law enforcement. As soon as she has disappeared through the artistes' door, I follow, pushing my way through a crowd of naked women who are waiting to go on. By the time I reach the changing room Kat is already dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a tiny pack on her back, that same professional expression on her face.
"How is your mother? I keep meaning to visit, but Phetchabun is so far away."
"Five hot hours in the bus. I don't go as often as I should myself." I take the photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and hold it up. I'm sure I see a flash of recognition before the inscrutable professional mask returns. "You know him?"
She purses her lips, shakes her head. "No, I don't think so. I'm sure I would have remembered a face like that."
I put the photo back in my pocket. "That's what everyone is saying, everywhere I go."
"What happened, did he murder someone?"
"The other way around."
A tensing of her facial muscles. "Ah! An American?"
"A marine."
"Then the FBI will be all over the city. You can sit back and relax, let them do all the work."
"They have to work in conjunction with me. They don't have any investigative rights in Thailand."
"You could have fooled me. I thought America bought the country years ago, it's just that no one's told us yet. Well, you must excuse me, Sonchai, fame and fortune await me at the Hollywood."
I follow her out of the dressing room and back down the corridor full of breasts and buttocks. I continue to follow her out of the bar onto the terrace and call her name. She turns and I make a face. Her features harden, but she delves into her black backpack and takes out a card. Without looking at me she scribbles an address on the card and gives it to me. She turns to smile. "I live way out in the sticks these days-city rents were killing me." She walks quickly away from me.
The card is printed in Thai and English and reads: "Kat Walk Enterprises, Private Entertainment, Floor Shows, Cabaret with a Difference." There is a telephone number which carries the local prefix and is probably that of her agent, and her web page address. The address she has scribbled on the back is of a very distant suburb, hardly Krung Thep at all.
I walk along the balcony which looks over the courtyard. The bar on the corner is dedicated to transsexuals, who like to make up in public at mirrors on a table on the balcony. I catch a glimpse of a long feminine neck, softly molded moon face, hard bitchy eyes as I slip past and down the stairs to the courtyard. There are so many half-naked bodies now, white male and brown female, it is difficult to move. "Hello darlin', how are you? Are you lonely?" It is one of the transsexuals, full-bosomed and pouting. I shake my head.
Lonely? An incurable state, unfortunately. I push past sweat-drenched T-shirts to the street, consider with weariness the task which lies ahead. Nana Plaza is only the seed at the center of the mango; there are thousands of bars in side sois and disused lots in every direction, particularly on the other side of Sukhumvit all the way to Asok, which is to say one stop on the sky train: about five acres of brown flesh for rent to a similar quantity of white. East meets West. How can I disapprove when I owe my existence to this conjunction?
It is forty-one minutes past 1 a.m., hot, muggy. With resignation I take one of the yaa baa pills from my pocket. I've lost touch with the market, but as far as I can remember the blue pills tend to be laced with heroin and give a pleasant, opiated high. The crimson ones are mixed with fertilizer and produce a lot of energy at the expense of making you more than a little crazy, with a poisonous hangover the next day.
I return to the plaza to order a bottle of Singha beer, which I use to swallow the pill. It's crimson. There's a lot of night left.
12
They came from the north and the south, the east and the west. Krung Thep was not only the biggest city, until recently it was the only modern city we had. They came from the plains and the hills. Most were ethnic Thai but many were tribespeople from the north, Muslims from the south, Khmer who sneaked over from Cambodia, and plenty were technically Burmese who lived on the border and never paid it any mind. They were part of the greatest diaspora in history, the migration of half of Asia from country to town, and it was happening at an accelerated speed during the last third of the twentieth century. Men with iron muscles and the dogged heroism of unmechanized agricultural labor, women with bodies ravaged by continual pregnancies, they possessed in full measure all the guts, all the enthusiasm, all the naIvete, all the hope, all the desperation necessary to make it in the big city. The only thing they left out of account was time, of which they knew very little apart from the rhythms of nature. The sadistic v
ivisection of life into hours, minutes, seconds was one of the few hardships never inflicted by the soil. Deadlines, especially, were the source of a new kind of anxiety. Stress? Its urban version was strange, alien, insidious and something they had no way of dealing with. Yaa baa was a poison whose time had come.
The fishing industry was the first to succumb. No longer a question of bringing fish to predawn markets for people to take home and cook, these days the fight to net the fish was only the first step in a semi-industrial process that required critical timing to ice it, pack it, freight it; the most lucrative fish were those kept alive and flown to restaurants in Japan and Hong Kong, Vancouver and San Francisco. The job of scaling fish for local restaurants was another of those peculiarly stressful tasks which had to be completed between 1 and 5 a.m., just when your body rhythms told you it was time to sleep. The job couldn't be done without yaa baa.
Truck drivers were next. The brave new world required nonstop driving the length and breadth of the country, with Bangkok as a hub, and sometimes interminable journeys down south, over the border and down through Malaysia as far as Kuala Lumpur-a journey of more than a thousand miles. Nobody thought of doing it without yaa baa. Construction workers, too, felt the call. Hard work was not the problem, it was the pressure, the deadlines, the relentless weight of money that pressed on all projects, the night work, the dangers at high levels, welding with gas at night on the thirtieth floor of some new office or luxury apartment building. Safety regulations were primitive and not well enforced, you had to stay awake to stay alive.
Other industries followed. Bar girls whose job it was to dance from 8 p.m. into the small hours of the morning, policemen on night duty, students needing to stay awake for exams-this stress was alien to the Thai way, and required chemical treatment.