Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

by Juliann Garey

  I gently tug her wet ponytail so she has to bend down further. “I would like you,” I whisper hotly in her ear.

  She takes my face in her tiny hands and turns my head to the side. “See barman. He make date,” she whispers, and then darts her soft, wet tongue inside my ear before walking away.

  I see barman. He make date. It turns out, however, that Suchin, my girl of the see-through bikini, is very popular—kind of like the hottest restaurant in town. But with only one seat. And so, despite offering to triple her rate, I will still have to wait three days for my turn at her table. I can’t help but think that if this were Hollywood she’d be paying to screw me. But it’s not. And oddly enough, I find being on the other end of the fucked-up sexual power dynamic not only frustrating but kind of a turn-on. When in Bangkok, I guess.

  At about four o’clock, two women of indeterminate age—forty? fifty?—wearing satin pants embroidered with birds and flowers and matching quilted satin jackets, lead a ragtag group of barely post-pubescent girls dressed in bikinis, halter tops, and miniskirts or ridiculous-looking disco dresses into the pool area and line them up as if they’re next in line for a firing squad. This is clearly a tourist-class outfit, so what are they doing here?

  “It’s about fucking time,” says Roy, the man on the lounge to my left. I glean from the conversation that has taken place over me between Jimbo and Roy that Roy is from somewhere in Texas and has come to Bangkok on an all-inclusive sex tour booked for him by a travel agent in Dallas that specializes in such things (and that the Pan Pacific is not above participating). And in general, as things that are included go, the younger, the better.

  I have tried to do as little talking as humanly possible—to project an air of “leave me the fuck alone.” Now, though, I am too curious. And if something worse than Roy and Jimbo and their conversation over my chaise is going to happen, I want to know now.

  “Time for what?” I ask.

  “The pussy parade,” Roy says and throws Jimbo a look that clearly says, Where’d you find this hayseed?

  Jimbo leans over and educates me patiently. “Those women are madams. The girls work for them. If you see one you like, you tell one of the madams and they make a date for you.”

  “Does she chaperone too?”

  They ignore my sarcasm because things are getting serious. One of the madams climbs on the diving board of the pool facing our lounges and yells, “Okay, who want pussy? Who want sucky dick? We got best girl. You want see? Come on.”

  Then she gestures to the line of girls and they walk toward us.

  “Lemme see your titties,” Roy says to the first girl. She is nowhere near eighteen. Not even close. The girl reaches up with one hand and pulls at the strings tied behind her neck. The two little triangles flop down and rest on her pale stomach. Her breasts are tiny—hardly worth covering at all. She has a mole on her left nipple.

  Roy dismisses her with a wave of his hand. I’m sure I hear her sigh with relief. The next girl, who cannot be more than thirteen, moves to the foot of my chaise. With one pull at the strings on the side of her bikini bottoms, she is standing before me bare-assed. She has the figure of a ten-year-old boy and is completely smooth, hairless.

  It occurs to me that, despite my leaving home long before having to endure the humiliating awkwardness of Willa’s transition into womanhood, I am still possessed of enough paternal instinct to feel healthy amounts of shame and disgust at being offered the services of a girl so young I cannot tell whether she has had her pubic hair removed or whether it simply has not yet taken root. Suddenly eighteen seems completely reasonable. Hell, even seventeen. Any hesitation I might have had about Suchin has been banished thanks to this pornographic middle school assembly. I lie back in my chaise feeling downright upstanding.

  The girl knows instantly that I am not interested and ties her tiny string bikini bottoms back into place. The smile drops from her face. Nothing personal. She is just taking advantage of the second or two between sales pitches to rest her facial muscles. She steps to the left.

  This is Roy’s fourth sex tour. He is full of advice.

  “If you’re going to do parlors, you want the ones off Chi Cha-am. The girls are less experienced, but they’re a lot tighter. You won’t even want to fuck ’em in the ass. But you want to get there by three or four. They don’t have the endurance the girls in Patpong do.”

  I am afraid to find out what Roy might mean by “less experienced”—that “the ones off Chit Ha-am” might in fact turn out to be daycare centers doubling as brothels—so, not having booked a “date” at the hotel for tonight, I head to Patpong in search of some empty but prurient adult deviance.

  “You want fucking show? You want cheap beers? Hello, handsome man, welcome please.”

  The man calling me handsome is small and jaundiced, feeble and asthmatic. I’ve been walking around Patpong for nearly an hour and either I’m going in circles or there is a species of sex show barkers that all look alike. I know I will go upstairs and participate or at least observe one of these fabled shows—I’m here, I have to—but I can’t decide which one. So I keep walking.

  “You like pussy shoot balloon?” This is by far the most interesting pitch I’ve heard.

  “Sure, I like pussy shoot balloon,” I say. The little man smiles and his teeth look like the cracked yellowed mah-jongg tiles my mother used to play with. I like him. And his teeth. He takes my arm and we walk into the bar, past the patrons, past the dancers, all the way to the back and up a set of narrow, steep stairs, at the top of which long strands of red and silver beads hang in a doorway.

  “You have good time,” he says, pushing me toward the beads.

  “How much?” I ask and reach for my wallet.

  The man pushes harder. “Cheap. You pay after. You like. You have good time. Very good pussy show. Best in Patpong.”

  There is nowhere to go but through the beads. So I go.

  Call me crazy. Watching a woman smoke a cigarette with her vagina has never been real high on my list of fantasies. Certainly never made the top twenty. Or top fifty, for that matter. Okay, truth be told, the thought never even occurred to me. When I was at the studio, I once green-lit a Vietnam movie that used Bangkok as a stand-in for Hanoi and the director came back with lurid stories of “Ping-Pong shows.” At the time, the idea of a woman shooting little balls out of her vagina seemed exotic. At least to me. Ellen was less intrigued. Particularly when I suggested she give it a try.

  But that was years ago—and in comparison with what I am seeing now, it was amateur night. Vaginal Olympics have clearly come a long way since then, I think, as I sit in the audience at Charlie’s, which turns out to be in fact one of Patpong’s most established sex show venues.

  When I first arrive, the girl on stage is dancing—bored, expressionless, topless. Then, without any fanfare, she stops gyrating, pulls off her gold lamé bikini, and walks to the edge of the stage where an old lady, simultaneously shoveling rice noodles into her mouth and operating the boom box, hands her a cigarette. And a lighter.

  After that the girl disappears. More or less. She lies down on her back, knees pulled into her chest, and becomes a disembodied vagina. Only when she reaches around, inserts the cigarette into her bald pussy, and, lighter in hand, uses her inch-long red thumbnail to flick the Bic and light the smoke do I remember that the pussy has a woman attached to it. And now her pussy is, it seems, puffing away. Of its own accord. It’s wild. In a Ripley’s Believe It or Not sort of way. It’s fascinating in much the same way I found some of the more complicated exhibits at the science museum where I once took Willa to be. I tilt my head to one side and then the other, trying to get a better view of the mechanism. I fully expect to see strings or a carefully hidden set of hydraulics, or maybe a tiny little man—a Tom Thumb-sized version of the chain-smoking, mah-jongg-toothed guy who brought me here.

  Fascinating, but not the kind of thing you want to fuck. I wonder if it’s just me. I look at the men sitting at the
tables around me, trying to see if I can spot a single erection in the group. But it’s dark and many of the patrons seem to be preoccupied with the waitresses who—topless but wearing numbered badges so they can be identified—wander through the audience trying to negotiate “dates” for the night.

  After the girl finishes smoking the cigarette with her vagina, she plucks it, like a flower, from between her lips and the bidding begins. The winner will get to keep the cigarette. Even smoke it if he so chooses. After that the girl pulls on her bottoms, slaps on her badge, and walks off the stage. She is replaced by another girl who squats as if she is going to use the toilet but instead pops the top off a Sharpie. She shoves it into her cunt with all the eroticism of a mechanic inserting a dipstick, and then uses it and her vagina to draw a portrait of one of the drunker, richer patrons in the audience. When she is done, it looks a lot like Baby Huey. He pays a hundred dollars for it. The next girl peels a banana with her pussy. The one after that opens a Coke bottle. And for the finale, the last girl lies on her back, reaches two fingers up in there, and yanks out a string of razor blades that must be three feet long.

  After that the show is over. No balloon. I am slightly disappointed, but the truth is I’ve had enough of watching underage women use their twats as substitutes for household gadgets.

  The mah-jongg guy is waiting for me outside the beads.

  “Good pussy show, yeah? What I tell you?”

  “There was no balloon,” I say, trying to sound more annoyed than I am.

  “What? No balloon?” He does a terrible job of acting shocked and appalled.

  “No. No balloon.”

  “She do cigarette in pussy?”

  “Yes,” I nod. “She did the cigarette in the pussy.”

  He slaps me on the back and winks. “That a good one. You like?”

  I shrug.

  He looks at the dirty tiled floor for a while. I think I am supposed to think he is deep in thought.

  “You want private pussy balloon show?” he says, raising his index finger. I think I am supposed to believe this thought has just occurred to him.

  “Maybe another time,” I say.

  “You want date?” He winks again.

  “Just the check, thanks,” I say, sounding irritated. Because I am.

  Mah-jongg guy stops winking and smiling and trying to make me happy. He hands me a tiny piece of paper covered in Thai scrawl and says I owe him $150. Entry fee plus drinks plus government tax. I could argue with him but I don’t. I just want to go.

  I wander aimlessly around Patpong for a while, passing bar after bar.

  “You want fuck show?”

  “You want see pussy smoke cigarette?”

  I look from one side of the street to the other and then over my shoulder. I’m nowhere near Charlie’s. The man yelling at me has perfect straight white teeth. Apparently, in Bangkok, pussy smoking is not an uncommon skill. For some reason this makes me sad. I keep walking, trying to ignore the fact that suddenly it all makes me sad—the women, the pussy show barkers, the tourists, the smell of the food carts, the old men who sell greasy noodles and unidentifiable meat on a stick, the flashing neon lights, the sound of the Vespas, the thick black exhaust from the cars, visible even at night.

  The drop is sudden, extreme and frightening. Like going over a waterfall you didn’t know was there. One minute you’re floating on calm water in a canoe. The next you’re tumbling, plunging … Now it is just you and the churning water and the rocks just beneath the surface. No one and nothing can help you. Your only consolation is that you’ve been here before. But try telling that to a drowning man.

  I am startled when I feel a hand on my arm. She is young and at first glance pretty.

  “Mister look sad.”

  Then I notice the acne scars. And that she is missing her right thumb.

  “Mister want date? I make Mister happy,” she says, stroking me with her thumbless paw. “I know how suck goooood.”

  It’s still early. Not even midnight. I could hire a prostitute if I wanted. But I don’t. Mister not want. So I put fifty dollars in her good hand. Then I hail a cab and tell the driver to take me back to the hotel. I want to sit at a normal bar and get picked up by a relatively normal woman. I’m rich, I’m American, and I am in possession of all my digits. Is that too fucking much to ask?

  I walk into the giant lobby of the giant Pan Pacific and feel the panic pull up and park in the empty space next to the sadness. The hustle and bustle, coming and going, to-ing and fro-ing—even at midnight—is overwhelming. And everyone here seems to have a destination.

  Normally, I like big, anonymous hotels like the Pan Pacific. Sixteen hundred rooms, Jacuzzi bathtubs, monogrammed slippers, and room-service cards that get collected by some nameless, faceless housekeeping staffer at three A.M. and magically produce eggs, bacon, and hash browns at your bedside anytime you fucking please.

  Ellen loved—loves—bed-and-breakfasts. The kind of place where each room has a name. And a theme. And more often than not, a stuffed bear. Once a year—usually on her birthday—I would indulge this perversion. She would pick some overpriced gingerbread Victorian in the wine country and we would spend the weekend sitting at some elderly couple’s dining room table making small talk with strangers over egg soufflé and cranberry quick bread served only between eight and nine fucking thirty.

  At ten thirty we’d be nodding politely while some chick with a nose ring explained why her soil was so much better than that of any of the other vineyards in Napa. Then we’d swirl, sniff, sample, and spit.

  By eleven I stopped spitting so I wouldn’t have to pay attention to their shit or notice that their wine all tasted the same, and by noon Ellen would wrestle the keys to our rental car away from me and insist on driving. I miss those trips.

  I am feeling very sorry for myself, and thinking about Ellen has made it worse. I am not tired and I don’t feel like watching porn. The giant circular lobby bar, open twenty-four hours a day, is centrally located so as to make it nearly impossible to avoid. Exactly halfway between the hotel’s front entrance and the dimly lit Club A-Nan Roi-Yim (Club of Endless Smiles) where hotel guests or whoever is willing to pay can see elaborate floor shows featuring traditional Thai entertainment of the non-pussy-smoking-cigarette variety. “Smiles,” as it is known on the premises, offers only PG-rated, family-friendly fare. Which is to say that penetration of any human orifice—whether by another human, animal, or inanimate object—is not part of the lineup.

  The first night I was here—too jet-lagged to leave the hotel—I took advantage of my Pan Pacific guest discount coupon and went to the Smiles dinner-theater show. I sat alone at my table in the dark, smoke-filled room, surrounded by mostly Western tourists and a few Thai businessmen, eating my traditional Thai six-course meal. On stage, lovely young women wearing traditional Thai period costumes narrated an abbreviated history of their country while stripping down to their G-strings and then pole dancing to traditional Thai folk music. It was like going to see a titty show at the Smithsonian.

  I haven’t been back to Club of Endless Smiles. I much prefer the impromptu little entertainments inadvertently staged by the guests at the lobby bar. Chrome, black leather, and mirrors all the way around, it emits a comforting corporate blandness. The lobby bar is always the path of least resistance—which is always my favorite kind of path.

  I sink onto a squishy barstool and order a vodka. I feel the panic recede a millimeter or two. The first icy-cold sip slides down my throat, past my esophagus, and into my stomach, where I feel a painful but pleasant burning sensation. Physical pain is not only preferable to the other kind but often welcome. Distracting, soothing—pain I can sink my teeth into.

  The couple is already arguing when they sit down on the barstools to my left. She is very tall and icily blonde and everything about her is long—her legs, her fingers, her hair, which she gathers up into a self-knotting bun.

  “I’m happy to lie to you if that’s what you
want, Donald, but eventually you’re going to have to—”

  “Catherine?” His voice is soft and sad and his suit is black. He is blandly handsome in a forgettable Brooks Brothers sort of way. “Please try not to be a bitch?”

  She shrugs and takes a long sip of her drink. She puts her hand on top of his.

  “I’m not trying to be mean. He was my friend too.”

  Donald yanks his hand away. “No, you sat at the same desk. You exchanged information about commodities and currencies.” Donald is yelling, or at least raising his voice enough to give me sufficient excuse to look over and make eye contact with the woman.

  “Donald, come on. Stop yelling,” she says, gripping his sleeve.

  “You were colleagues. You were not friends,” Donald says quietly. “Ben was my friend. And I know him. I knew him. He was having a genuinely good time. It was the right move. He was happy. He wouldn’t have …”

  I can’t tell yet whether they are married or just good work friends in mourning. They say nothing for a while. She orders another drink. And one for him.

  “He was crazy, impulsive,” she says, turning to look at him. “That’s not the same thing.”

  Donald bangs his glass on the bar. “He hated working at Lehman. You’re saying quitting makes him crazy?”

  Catherine bangs back. “No, I’m saying … because he left in the middle of the night … without telling any of us. And why did it take him almost six months to get in touch?”

  I know I am staring but I can’t look away. I am riveted by Ben’s story and by their differing versions of it.

  “And fine. Yes,” Catherine says in a tight, angry whisper I have to strain to hear, “because my friend Ben—who I shared a desk with for four years—was not the kind of guy who would just jettison his MBA and a VP job to live in a shack on the beach and teach econ to a bunch of stupid rich kids who couldn’t get into a decent college back home.”

  And it is at this moment that I realize that is exactly what I want to do. I am tired of wandering. I want a home base. Or at least a shack base. To be part of a community for a while. Of bikini-clad coeds. Suddenly I realize that everything happens for a reason. Everything is connected. Everythingisconnected. Everything. Is. Connected.