Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  “I figure it was the Sandbox that was getting him down. Five years in that environment would be enough to give anyone heart attacks. Probably make your hair fall out as well.”

  “I had breakfast with him just last week,” Stack told me. “We met at Boon Doc’s. I got tucked into the home fries and sausages and eggs, but he told me he was skipping breakfasts because he was trying to lose weight. Next thing you knew, he started rummaging around in his bag; he put together a multicolored pile of tablets and capsules of all shapes and sized, and proceeded to wash them down by the handful with a large Singha beer. It turned out he’d wolfed 2000 mg. of vitamin C, two aspirins, a megadose or so of vitamin B, vitamin A with carotene, a large dollop of vitamin E, some ginseng and bees-pollen tablets, three varieties of anti-malarial pills, two Valiums and a Lomotil and maybe some more I can’t remember. Volume for volume, I reckon he ate more than I did.”

  Sid was always dieting. He’d quit smoking; he didn’t drink tea or coffee. He always had a new theory about what either caused or else cured cancer, heart attacks, back pains, and hangovers. He wouldn’t eat refined sugar.

  Sid wasn’t the real name of this prematurely middle-aged seeker after eternal youth; it was Chauncey. Chauncey Davis.

  “You knew that ‘Sid’stood for’Siddiqi’, didn’t you?” asked Stack. “Yeah? And you know what siddiqi means?”

  I knew; I also knew Stack was going to tell me again anyway.

  “It means ‘friend’ in Gulf Arabic. And that’s what they call their local white lightnin’ — siddiqi, or sid for short. Thai’s just about your best friend, living there in the Gulf.”

  Sid had had a real taste for the stuff, if you could believe what he and his friends had to say. He had been of the opinion that all that home-made wine and beer was full of impurities. You keep drinking it and you wind up with everything from wrecked kidneys to arthritis, he’d tell you. So he drank sid. “It’s just alcohol,” he’d say. “That’s not going to hurt you.” Of course he was just about the only one in the Gulf that believed that.

  But when he was in Bangkok he never touched anything except beer, and not too much of that “It’s hard to drink too much of this Thai beer,” he’d say ,”no matter how hard you try. It’s great stuff.”

  On the whole, though, his behavior tended to border on the neurotic. His buddies from the Sandbox told us one tale that might be taken as the story of his whole life in microcosm. Apparently, he’d suffered from an aversion to mosquitoes almost phobic in its intensity. Before leaving the Middle East to come on this last trip to Thailand, he’d taken precautions sufficient to make his defenses against baldness and cancer seem positively lackadaisical in comparison. He’d stock-piled several tubes of repellent, a quantity of mosquito coils, and, the ultimate weapon, an electric gismo which emitted the sound of a lady mosquito in heat, and which was supposed to fry the sizzling Siren’s excited suitors in their droves. All this for just a short stay in downtown Bangkok.

  Upon arrival, his buddies left him to erect his defenses and went to sleep off the flight. After a couple of days, they realized that no one had heard from Sid since, and no one had seen him around his usual haunts. So they went up to his room at the Posie Hotel to investigate. Sid answered the door wrapped in a bath towel; the curtains were drawn and the place was in gloom. He was alone. He muttered at them to come in, and then shuffled back to his bed, climbed in and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He looked distinctly petulant.

  As he told it, he’d no sooner moved into the Posie and unpacked his Maginot Line when a kamikaze mosquito of no small nerve had dived in through it all, found Sid in the shower, and had bitten him in the most unfortunate place possible, from his point of view at that time. And it seemed there were sound medical grounds for his aversion to mosquitoes after all, because the one daring solo attack had caused a delicate part of his anatomy to swell magnificently and become quite gruesomely discolored.

  “What’s there to do then?” he’d lamented. “Who’s going to believe it’s only a mosquito bite?”

  It does not reflect well on Sid, and we should never speak ill of the dead, but his friends had to report that he actually pouted, at this, and sank even deeper into his sulk. This was not the holiday he’d worked and sweated for. When they sought to console him by suggesting, kind of mirthfully, that there was a funny side to the story, Sid went so far as to grind his teeth and roll his eyes fearsomely, at the same time suggesting in immoderate words they go seek their fun elsewhere.

  “It was like a judgment,” Stack remarked.

  “What? The mosquito bite?”

  “Maybe that too; but I mean Sid’s death. If you looked at his anxiety quotient, he’d been middle-aged from back about the time he was weaned onto bottle feeding. When you think about it, he devoted his life mostly to trying to ensure he’d live long enough to enjoy it some day. That’s how he could quit smoking, quit eating breakfasts, work in the Sandbox for five years and all the rest of it — he was deferring his pleasures, just like he was deferring marriage and a family. Deny yourself now, so you can enjoy things later.”

  What Stack said was just so. Sid had been sacrificing a good chunk of his youth to provide for his later years, it’s true. More remarkably, however, he didn’t even know what he was looking forward to enjoying when he got there.

  He had to have his nest-egg, there was no doubt, and he had to be healthy enough to enjoy it when he finally got it First, it had been $80,000 he’d been aiming at. He’d planned to quit as soon as he reached this target, move to some more congenial clime, and settle down. So he saved his eighty grand. Then he decided what it was he really needed was $120,000. You’d ask him why, and he’d just look a little blank and say: “You can’t do anything with $80,000; you really need $120,000.” But why? Hedidn’tknow. But he did save $120,000. Did he then shake the sand out of his boots and move to Thailand? He did not. He decided to shoot for $200,000. When it came right down to it, however, it didn’t matter if he had $200,000 or $2,000,000; it was all the same thing — he didn’t have the foggiest idea why he needed it in the first place. But as long as he was bitching and binding and aiming at his next savings target and coming out to Thailand on the occasional carouse he didn’t have to think too much about what it all meant

  “It was security,” said Stack. “That’s what it was all about. He wanted security for when he was too old to work.”

  Security? I told Stack how just the week before we’d gotten together for a drink, and Sid had wanted to talk about his new plan.

  He’d decided the best thing he could do would be to come to live in Bangkok and buy a bar. “You say he knew what he was doing? And that it was security he was after? Buy a bar. He might as well have told me he planned to take his nest-egg and set fire to it, or maybe give it to a passing tout to invest for him.”

  Stack allowed as how I had a point, and he’d buy me a last drink in recognition of my astute grasp of the human condition.

  The joint we were in was closing, so we made tracks to Boon Doc’s for a nightcap. The place was pretty well empty, an inspiration to all would-be Bangkok bar owners. We were greeted by B ig Toy, the barmaid that night and the agent of Sid’s untimely demise.

  As Thai women go, you could say Big Toy was gigantic, and the sobriquet was to distinguish her from her colleague Dinky Toy, a rather smaller specimen who worked at the same establishment. Dinky Toy was at the other end of the bar, wearing black tights under a black skirt and looking less than happy.

  We bought Big Toy a drink and had her send another one down to Dinky Toy. I proposed a toast to Sid.

  Both of these ladies had been riding in the tuk-tuk with Sid when the unfortunate incident occurred. They’d been out shopping and were on their way back to his hotel for a drink before dinner. Dinky Toy was on Sid’s knee, and Big Toy was on the seat beside them — a pretty tight fit, since Sid himself was no pygmy. Not bothering to slow down, the tuk-tuk driver made an abrupt 90-degree turn into the little
laneway leading to the Posie Hotel. Obeying some impulse that linked her cosmically with the kamikaze mosquito, Big Toy chose just that moment to lean over and give Sid a big hug, perhaps meaning to thank him again for his largess on their shopping trip. The various forces involved, both physical and metaphysical, combined to overturn the tuk-tuk at speed, right on the outside of the corner.

  I guess Sid never had a chance to see the humor in it all. The last earthly thing he would’ve noticed was the sky being darkened by a large falling body, that body being named Toy. He wasn’t really crushed, in the clinical sense of the word, but his neck was broken and he was dead —just about as dead as a Saturday night in Riyadh. Crushed to death by a falling bargirl, as his friends would forever after have it.

  And Dinky Toy was more than somewhat annoyed with her friend; the smaller lady had had serious designs on Sid. In fact, she’d had some idea he and she were to have been married. At least that’s what she told the police and the people at the Posie Hotel when she tried to claim the contents of Sid’s safety-deposit box. It’s true, anyway, that she’d been seeing Sid during his holidays, not to mention writing to him in the Sandbox faithfully for the better part of a year, expressing what was undoubtedly a very real affection for him.

  Whatever else she might have had in common with Sid, however, she was not one to defer her gratifications. Big Toy told us Dinky Toy had, in the past months, pawned all her jewelry and borrowed money from everyone she knew, spending and gambling away the proceeds with abandon. Why not? Enjoy it while you can; it had looked as though the future was going to take care of itself quite nicely, and the notion of being Mrs. Siddiqi had been very much in her mind.

  And now look. She was so fed up she was even hinting she shouldn’t have to pay Big Toy back the money she’d borrowed. After all, her hopes for the future, her security, had been most unkindly crushed to death right at the height of his earning power, and who was responsible? After all.

  But Big Toy was unrepentant “Dinky Toy never think of the future, really. She should be more like Sid — work, work; save, save. You don’t know what trouble tomorrow bring.”

  Stack and I nodded at this timely observation, and thought deeply about Life and about how the bar was closing and how the next morning there were jobs to go to.

  Dinky Toy finally came over and gave us a quiet “Hello”. There seemed to be something on her mind. After a couple of moments of hard thinking on it, she came up with an exasperated expression and said to us: “Why couldn’t Sid be more careful?” She punched Stack in the shoulder, not too hard, and then she grabbed Big Toy in a clinch and did some sobbing.

  Big Toy was patting her and saying “There, there” or some such thing in Thai, and we could see they were well on the way to becoming buddies again, so we got out of there and went home.

  BILLBOARD

  Bill ‘Billboard’ Cockburn (pronounced ‘coe-burn’) was a legend in his own time. This was the first occasion, however, we’d seen him in the flesh. So to speak.

  Billboard was up on stage at Manny’ s Fresh Market, and that part of his anatomy which had earned him his moniker was aimed in our general direction as he took a bow. There was a message scrawled across his buttocks.

  BADMAN’S FREE HOI

  BAR SAT.

  “What does hoi mean?” asked Bob. Bob Slocum was Eddie’s friend from Pittsburgh, and he’d taken his first trip to Bangkok in celebration of his recent divorce.

  “Clams,” said Eddie. “One of its meanings is ‘clams’. It’s other meaning is also clams, but those items are what you call your ‘bearded clams’.”

  Just looking at Billboard’s message, it wasn’t clear which variety was free on Saturday.

  Manny’s Market was a standard version of the ‘upstairs bars’ that attract so much foreign currency to the fair city of Bangkok. The place reminded you of an arena, with lots of seating around the central bar, which itself surrounded a large, brightly-lit rectangular stage. Much smaller rooms with discreet access were available for customers who wished to indulge in their own private shows. The stock-in-trade of this establishment was a sizable herd of exceedingly comely and very young upcountry girls. These employees removed all their clothes and most of their inhibitions as well, and pranced about together in rough time to popular tunes of the day, giggling and goosing one another. ‘Dancing’, is how the management described it.

  The show was attended by a crowd of sleek tourists, men and women both, who affected various degrees of shocked interest and disbelief. There was also a sprinkling of local roues. Tourists and locals alike sat drinking and being sat upon by more young girls, some of whom were dressed in skimpy wraps of gauzy material against the cold of the air-conditioning. Others were covered in nothing but goose bumps. Bob had one of each - one in gauze, one in goose bumps — perched on his knees; they were warbling “Cola! You buy me co-la!” He seemed to favor the one on his right knee, a vivacious thing with dimples all over the place. Neither Eddie nor I had just arrived in Bangkok, and we were not buying colas; we were not so popular.

  For fear that sophisticated audiences would tire of non-stop jumping up and down by large numbers of naked girls, the program included ‘shows’ — a variety of edifying performances which punctuated the fleshly stampede at half-hour intervals. For starters, there was the ‘ping-pong girl’, the ‘bananagirl’, and the ‘blowgun girl’. The latter individual knew things about trick shooting Annie Oakley had never thought of, and, at a range of fifteen feet could explode balloons held by very impressed customers, never once putting out an eye by accident. There was a lady who for the price of a cola would squat down and inscribe a personalized marker-pen message on a sheet of paper without using her hands. Two already clean and rosy girls got into a shallow basin and gave each other baths and things. Then you had the ‘cigarette girl’, who flirted with new kinds of cancer, and the lady who could open beer bottles by means most novel, in most people’s experience. You found it hard to imagine anyone would ever knowingly take this particular artiste into a private room unless, maybe, he needed a bottle opener.

  Finally, just in case you’d forgotten what it was all about, basically, there was the ‘live show’ proper; this was announced by a lovely little gamine, pretty staightforwardly, as the ‘fucking show’.

  Normally, I believe, you would’ve expected the act to include a rather reluctant young Thai male who, after some amount of workmanlike encouragement from his fair partner, would probably manage to poke and smirk his way through a series of athletic maneuvers culminating in a shamefaced withdrawal, privates grabbed in a towel and hurried away from the public eye.

  This night, however, our attention was drawn to the stage by a sudden startled murmur from the audience. A middle-aged Western man had appeared in the lights. This was unusual, to say the least—one did not see Westerners on the stage of a sexotic bar in Bangkok. Especially when they were completely nude. Completely nude and not at all abashed on that account. Even more especially when he sported an arse as wide as a billboard and carried a belly that would’ve made the whereabouts of his feet a mystery, if he hadn’t taken it in faith they were still there on the ends of his legs. Sandy-haired, clean-shaven, he had a figure and a manner that declared him to be a creature of prodigious appetites.

  Far from being abashed, this arresting figure sauntered to center stage with all the confidence of Ronald Reagan about to address a meeting of the D. A.R. At the same time, he managed to convey the swashbuckling 6clat of an Errol Flynn — you could almost hear the rattle of sword and the jingle of spurs, even though, of course, he wore no sword or spurs or anything else either.

  He stood there in the spotlight, entirely self-possessed, not even at a loss as to what to do wi th his hands. You felt nothing would ever nonplus this perfect master—not even the two Western ladies who were sitting right at ringside, across from us. One was blonde, the other brunette, each of them attractive examples of womanhood bloomed in its mid-30’s or thereabouts. They wer
e intent on our living legend; strangely, though, they were not goggling in wonderment, the way the others were. There was something clinical in their calm smiles and steady gazes. Maybe they were pretending to be sociologists, I thought.

  “Look at those two broads over there,” said Bob. “What do you think they’re up to? The brunette reminds me of my wife. My ex-wife. Cold as a fish. What’s she think she’s doing here, anyway? Look at that — they’re sizing the guy up like he’s a piece of meat on a supermarket shelf.”

  The object of their study, after a couple of moments, was joined by a tiny girl of exquisite proportions, and Bob left off being rankled by Western women with steady gazes, for a while. He watched as the big man gave his partner a courtly bow, gathered her to his embrace, and sank to the wooden platform.

  Billboard had finished his routine and was in the corridor outside the toilets putting his clothes back on. I asked him to accept our compliments and join us for a drink. Billboard said sure, make his a soda with a twist of lime. “That’s all,” he said. “I haven’t had a real drink in seven years.”

  Billboard was the proprietor of Badman’s Bar, a quiet sort of establishment over across town, no sex shows, and a long-term resident of Bangkok. Not only was he a reformed drinker — a teetotaler — but he’d sworn off tobacco six years before, he told us. Then he’d divorced his wife, vowing never to remarry. He’d even stopped drinking tea and coffee, this past year or two. He still liked to eat, though. Eat and perform in bars. All in all, and now that he was dressed and otherwise composed with his glass of soda, he did have a healthy, clean-cut sort of appearance about him.

  “So do you pay them; do they pay you; or do you just call it even?” Bob asked.

  “We just call it even.” Billboard laughed. “My work permit doesn’t allow me that kind of income.”

  He obviously felt that the intrinsic rewards of his avocation were sufficient in themselves. It seemed that he provided this service all over town; well known in a lot of these places, he’d drop in at three or four of them in the course of a normal week, and lend a hand with the floor show, free of charge. It was like a hobby, he said. At the same time, he’d get in a plug for his own bar — maybe just the name and the happy hours, or, like that night, an ad for the Saturday special.