On the trip after that he managed to add just one name to his collection – a pretty waitress called Yu. She was a sweet little thing and Dave did worry that she might be underage but she showed him her ID card and she was actually twenty one. She was painfully shy and although she let him pay her barfine and went back to his hotel with him, she wouldn’t let him in the bathroom while she showered and insisted on the light being off before she would get into bed with him. She was what Dave called a starfish – a girl who just lay on her back with her arms and legs out while she waited for him to get on with it. Her heart clearly wasn’t in it and under normal circumstances he would have asked her to leave but she was the only Yu he’d ever come across and he wasn’t sure that he’d ever find another.
On the next trip he failed to add any letters to his list, and the trip after that was also fruitless. Dave began to wonder if he’d reached the limit. He figured that perhaps there were some letters that he would never get - hardly surprising, I guess, because I doubt any Thai would think about calling their offspring ‘W’ or ‘P’ or ‘X’.
He did get a ‘P’ eventually, but only by bending the rules slightly. A younger Thai will add the word Pee in front of the nickname, as a sign of respect. So a young girl might refer to an older girl called Da as Pee-Da. Well, he was sitting in a beer bar off Walking Street in Pattaya when he heard the girls talking to one of the mamasans, referring to her as ‘Pee-Joy.’ The mamasan was in her early fifties with large breasts and a cute smile so he persuaded her to let him pay her bar fine and take her back to the hotel. It had been some years since a customer had taken her out and as they walked out of the bar together, all the dancers cheered and applauded. Pee-Joy was grateful for the attention and repaid Dave with the most amazing sex he’d had in a long while. She had worked the bars of Pattaya for more than twenty years during which time she’d picked up a few tricks most of which she was more than happy to share with Dave. He’d planned to be with her for only an hour or so but she ended up staying for a week, moving out of his hotel room only because one of her three foreign husbands had arrived from England. The entrepreneurial Pee-Joy had two other foreign husbands, one in Germany and one in Sweden. All three thought they were paying for her four-bedroom house in Jontiem, her pick up truck and paying to put her two children through university.
It was around this time Dave started telling people about The Alphabet Game, and he was surprised to find there were other guys around who had been trying the same thing, though none of them came close to his score. That was when he heard about Vee. Dave ran into a Norwegian guy had been looking for a Vee and had actually found one. The bad news was that Vee was a ladyboy dancing in the Cascade Bar in Nana Plaza. The Norwegian guy said he considered barfining the ladyboy but eventually decided against it and was still looking for a Vee to add to his collection.
Dave wasn’t a fan of ladyboys but, like most guys who made repeat visits to Thailand, he’d been in the odd ladyboy bar; just for a look-see. He’d had the occasional ladyboy dancer sit next to him and done the obligatory checks to see what their breasts felt like, but that was as far as he’d gone. This time he decided it was worth a visit , so he drank half a dozen bottles of Singha beer in The Big Dog’s Bar for Dutch courage and then made his way up to the Cascade Bar.
Cascade is one of the biggest bars in Nana Plaza, done out like a grotto with fake rock walls. All the ‘girls’ are ‘guys’, though it has to be said that some of them look just like the real thing. In fact many a tourist has wandered into Cascade and wandered out with a ladyboy on his arm and no idea what he was about to let himself in for. Dave knew the score though, so he took a seat at the back and ordered a beer. Even before a ladyboy waitress had taken his order, Dave was surrounded by a group of the more aggressive dancers all insisting that he allow them to join him. “Vee,” said Dave, “I’m looking for Vee.”
The girls started shouting for Vee and a tall ladyboy with waist-length hair appeared. She was just under six feet tall in her heels and had a tattoo of a butterfly on her left ankle. She sat down next to Dave and he bought her a drink as he decided what to do next. The problem was, the whole point of The Alphabet Game was to have sex with the girls, or at the very least, sexual relations, according to the Bill Clinton definition. And Slick Willie had pretty much determined that being the recipient of a blow job wasn’t included in the definition of sexual relations. For Vee to count, full sex had to take place. Now the way Dave tells it, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of him letting Vee’s dick anywhere near his back passage. Which meant that to get Vee on the list, he was going to have to do the business.
So Dave sat in the bar and drank another three beers as Vee manfully played with Dave’s tackle and eventually Dave felt a stirring down below. He paid Vee’s barfine and they headed for a short-time hotel in the plaza. The beer helped dull Dave’s senses, but there was still no getting away from the fact that Vee was a ladyboy, and a very well endowed one at that. In fact, Vee’s dick was a good two inches longer than Dave’s and about twice as thick. Dave had Vee lie face down on the bed but try as he might he just couldn’t get hard. Part of the problem was that face down, with Vee’s enormous breasts hidden, there was no getting away from the fact that the rear view was very much that of a Thai male.
Well, Vee realised that things weren’t going well so she decided to help things along. She gave Dave some very enthusiastic oral and a few minutes of breast massage but instead of turning Dave on it actually had the opposite effect because Vee’s erection was pretty impressive and very discouraging. In fact, Vee got so excited that she offered to take Dave’s virginity for free. Dave declined, but then had a bit of a brainwave.
He told Vee to get dressed and took her down to Rainbow Four, which has the prettiest go-go dancers in Nana Plaza, mainly to satisfy the Japanese clientele who frequented the bar. It took him a while to find a dancer who would agree to go with Dave and Vee, and even then the girl insisted on three thousand baht for short-time, double the going rate. The girl was Annie, a bit on the plump side with large breasts and soft white skin that had yet to be adulterated with tattoos. Dave paid Annie’s barfine and took her and Vee back up to the short-time hotel, much to the amusement of the reception staff. Dave didn’t have any condoms with him so he had to buy one. The reception staff offered him two, but Dave said that wouldn’t be necessary, which turned their amusement into confusion.
Back in the room, Dave went about his mission with military precision. He had Vee lie face down on the bed with a pillow under her groin, which he figured would offer easier access. Vee helpfully offered some KY Jelly that she had in her handbag but Dave drew the line at applying the lubricant and asked her to do it.
Once Vee was prepared, Dave stripped and had Annie undress. Annie went down on her knees and gave Dave a blow job to get him started, and once aroused, he and Annie lay down on the bed. They caressed, they kissed, they licked, they stroked, and then just as Dave was about to explode he rolled over, mounted Vee, thrust himself inside her and came like a rocket. He pulled out, taking care not to lose the condom, then rushed to the bathroom and spent the next fifteen minutes in the shower. When he finally felt clean, he went back into the room and found Vee and Annie dressed and waiting to be paid. He fumbled the money from his wallet and thrust the notes at them, not wanting to look them in the eye. After they’d gone, he showered again and then he went back to The Big Dog’s Bar and downed another half a dozen beers.
That was Dave pretty much finished with The Alphabet Game until about three months after the Vee incident. He was sitting in Jool’s Bar just about to get stuck into a steak pie when one of his mates turned up and told him about he’d met a girl called Q. Dave immediately put down his knife and fork. It turned out that the girl was actually named Cue, but that didn’t worry Dave in the least. Cue counted as Q and the fact that Cue was definitely a girl made him even more determined to find her and add her to his list.
The problem was that
Dave’s mate couldn’t remember exactly where he’d met the girl, other than it was an upstairs bar in Nana Plaza. He was sure about the name, though. Apparently the girl’s dad was a pool fanatic. He had a son called Ball and had named his daughter Cue. Cue was a dancer, and pretty, the mate said, and that would make it even harder to find her because a pretty go-go dancer could be barfined several times a night. Dave wasn’t deterred though, and once he’d finished his pie and chips and downed a couple of bottles of Singha he went off to the plaza.
Looking for a go-go dancer in Nana Plaza when you don’t know which bar she works in is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. There are literally thousands of them plying their trade and they are in and out of the bars like jack-in-the-boxes, off to a short time hotel with a punter and then back before their hair had even dried. That was something Dave had told me the first time we met – never go with a dancer who had wet hair, it was a sure sign that she had just had sex with a customer. Anyway, he didn’t find Cue on the first night, or the second. And he didn’t find her on the third night, either. But he did find a Zed.
Zed was a waitress in G-Spot, a plain-looking girl with dark skin and a snub-nose. Dave didn’t give her a second thought as she took his order, but when she returned with his beer he noticed her name tag. Zed. He asked her if that was really her name and she said yes. She explained that her mum had two girls and she had called the first one Ay. After the second daughter came along the doctor had told her that she’d never have any more children so she had called her Zed. It was a nice story, but Dave didn’t care about that; all he cared about was adding Zed to his list. He immediately offered to pay her bar fine, but she refused. He asked her why but her English wasn’t very good so he had to call the mamasan over to explain. As it turned out Zed had just turned eighteen and was a virgin. At first Dave figured that the mamasan was just trying to up the price but no, young Zed had never been kissed and was determined to stay that way.
The mamasan explained that Zed had just started working at the bar and had come with her aunt, who was a stunning dancer. The aunt was duly summoned and she sat next to Dave and professionally pumped him for a lady drink every ten minutes regular as clockwork. Dave knew the girls made their money in three ways – a basic salary, a commission on lady drinks, and on the money they got paid for sex. Once Dave had made it clear he wouldn’t be paying the aunt’s barfine, she made sure she didn’t lose out by knocking back tequilas as fast as she could.
Zed’s story was pretty typical. She was from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia, and her family were farmers who struggled to make a living. She had a sister who used to work in Nana Plaza but she had fallen pregnant and was now living back on the family farm with her six-month-old daughter. She had two brothers who didn’t work and a father who had walked out years ago so it had fallen on Zed to be the breadwinner and the aunt had taken her along to G-Spot. Working as a waitress meant a salary of about five thousand baht a month, but with tips and commission on drinks she could earn three times that. She slept on the floor in her aunt’s room and didn’t eat much which meant that she could send home almost ten thousand baht a month, which would go a long way in Surin.
Dave wasn’t discouraged by the fact that Zed was young, and a virgin. He figured that all girls started off like that, but eventually they were all neither young nor virginal. It was just a matter of timing. The problem was that Dave only had another week before he was due to go back to England and he was worried that he might lose Zed forever. She might well get fed up with working in a go-go bar and find a job closer to home. Again he wondered if it was a question of money. He started negotiating with the aunt as she knocked back shot after shot of tequila. He wanted to know how much it would cost to take Zed’s virginity. Her aunt thought that fifty thousand baht – about a thousand quid – might swing it, but when she spoke to Zed it was clear that she wasn’t interested. The girl just didn’t want to have sex. Period.
The aunt – her name was Lek - started to get a bit annoyed with Zed. The aunt seemed to think that it was a good deal and that Zed should accept it because her family needed the money. She pressed the girl so hard that eventually Zed burst into tears and rushed off to the toilets. At that point Lek had offered Dave the choice of two other virgins, either of whom would have slept with him for half the money he was offering to give Zed. Dave wasn’t interested. Zed was the one he wanted though, truth be told, it wasn’t the girl; it was the name. Eventually Zed reappeared, her eyes red from crying. Dave wondered if Zed would lower her defences if he got her drunk, but she only drank Coke. The aunt, however, was a real pro and continued to knock back tequila shots with gusto.
He asked Lek what Zed’s problem was and she told him that Zed was determined only to sleep with a good man. A kind man. A man who would marry her and take care of her and her family. Dave realised that if he was ever going to have sex with Zed, he would have to become that good man. The only snag was that he was heading back to the UK in just over a week. He chatted away with the aunt, using her as an interpreter because Zed’s English was pretty much limited to ‘yes’, ‘no,’ and ‘what you want to drink?’
Apparently Zed’s family lived in a run-down shack miles from anywhere and much of the money Zed sent home was spent on improvements. The house, Dave decided, was the key to proving to Zed what a good-hearted guy he was. So he suggested that he take Zed home for a few days. The only places he’d been to in Thailand were Bangkok and Pattaya, and while he’d heard stories of what life was like up country he’d never been.
Zed and Lek had a quick discussion in Thai with lots of nods and grunts and then the aunt said that yes, he could take Zed home for a couple of days but Lek would have to go with her and Dave would have to pay their barfines for two days and give them three thousand baht each as well. Dave did a quick calculation in his head – four barfines was two thousand and four hundred baht so the total outlay would be eight thousand and four hundred baht, which wasn’t far off two hundred pounds. He asked Lek how they could get to Zed’s home and she said the best way would be to hire a minibus. The round trip would probably cost about ten thousand baht. Another two hundred quid. If that meant he’d get his way with Zed he figured it would be money well spent, so he agreed. The two girls both squealed with joy and hugged him and Zed kissed him on the check which Dave took as a good sign. Lek said she’d arrange the minibus and driver and that they could leave the day after tomorrow. Dave spent another couple of hours in the bar, during which time three other girls from Zed’s village asked if they could tag along. Dave figured the more the merrier. He left the bar at one o’clock in the morning and Zed gave him another hug and a soft kiss on the cheek which he took as another good sign.
The minibus left Soi 4 on Thursday morning at eight o’clock. The minibus had seen better days and so had the driver, a wizened old guy with leathery skin and a huge mole on his nose. Zed and Lek sat at the back and the three dancers accompanying them sat just behind the driver which left Dave a row of three seats to himself so that he could spread out. He’d checked out a map in his hotel and it looked to be about five hundred kilometres so he reckoned it would take about six hours to get there.
As it turned out, that was overly optimistic. They crawled along at below forty miles an hour. When Dave asked Lek why they were going so slowly, Lek spoke to the driver and discovered that one of the tyres had a slow leak and the driver was looking for a garage. It seemed incredible that the driver had set out on a five hundred kilometre drive with a faulty tyre, but for the next hour and a half they crawled along until they reached a garage where an elderly mechanic spent half an hour working on it. They picked up speed then, but after another half an hour the driver decided he was hungry and stopped to eat at a roadside restaurant. The girls were also happy to eat but then, as Dave had discovered over the years, Thai girls were always happy to eat.
They stopped twice more for food on the way to Surin and once for fuel. The minibus ran on some specialised
liquefied gas which could only be bought at certain filling stations and the one they went to already had several dozen vans lined up so they had to wait for an hour to get served. The upshot was that the drive took almost ten hours in total and it was getting dark when they arrived at Zed’s home.
It turned out that Zed’s family didn’t actually live in Surin, which is a pretty large city with a population of about 50,000. Surin was about fifty kilometres away from her house. The nearest ‘town’ was about twenty kilometres away but ‘town’ was stretching it. According to Lek there was a post office and a small government office, two banks and a three-storey department store but not much else.
Zed’s home wasn’t even a village; it was just a ramshackle collection of wooden shacks either side of a potholed, dusty road. They pulled up in front of a wooden house on stilts and the driver walked around and pulled open the sliding door for them. Zed’s home was built of teak with a corrugated iron roof and sheets of corrugated iron over half the windows. As Zed ran up to the house calling for her mother, scrawny chickens wandered around and a couple of mangy dogs looked at Dave disinterestedly. The girls began pulling their bags out of the minibus. On either side of the main house were two smaller wooden shacks, not much bigger than garden sheds.
“What’s the story with the windows?” Dave asked Lek, pointing at the main house.
“No have windows,” said Lek. “No money for windows. Zed’s family very poor.”
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