Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  You got the idea Big Toy and Dinky Toy also wanted to know the answer to this question, because by now they were both polishing glasses with furious intensity, half leaning over the bar, bracketing Dexy like two mimes doing KGB agents, avid curiosity pretty well obscuring any concern they might have felt for the poor guy.

  “Number Thirty-seven,” croaked Dexy. “You know; from Smokin’ Sal’s... And I was gonna send her to hair-dressing school.”

  If the way Dexy looked right at the moment was the result of that offer, then you had to get the idea #37 didn’t want to go to hair-dressing school.

  Dexy shifted on his barstool and winced, putting a hand gently on his thigh and uttering a quiet but potent obscenity. Then he winced again because his first wince made his face hurt. But you could see this threatened to lead to an infinite regress of wincing and no end of pain, so he opted for impassivity once more, and his voice dropped to a rusty whisper: “She had a goddammed straight razor in her purse.”

  No matter how immobile Dexy tried to keep his face and no matter how level his tone, you got the idea this straight razor in #37’s purse had been a big surprise, as far as he was concerned. Personally, though, if that little ice-cube crusher had been one in a crowd of a hundred bargirls, and you’d asked me which one was likely to be hiding a straight razor somewhere on her person, there would’ve been little or no hesitation before I told you “#37.”

  “She took a swipe at my... at my.. .Here!” Dexy pointed an indignant digit at his nether regions.

  I suppose that’s one drawback to a woman who’s three feet tall, or even a bit more, as #37 was — when she starts swinging a straight razor, the targets of first opportunity are somewhat unfortunate ones, at least from the point of view of the guy whose targets are hanging right there within easy reach.

  “She just missed, too. Took a dozen goddammed stitches to close up my leg. Dozen more in my face.

  “And I liked that girl, never mind it was like sleeping with a gravel crusher. Goddammit. Why’d she ever want to go and do like she did?”

  Trying to talk without moving any muscle in his face the way he was, what should’ve been a fairly poignant or maybe even downright heart-breaking utterance sounded more like the voice circuit in a cartoon robot.

  Maybe the same thought had occurred to Big Toy and Dinky Toy, because they were having trouble keeping merry looks of delight off their faces, from what I could see. In fact, they gave up trying, and retired to the other end of the bar for a minute to chirrup away, every now and then firing something akin to looks of malicious satisfaction up towards Dexy. Dexy didn’t even notice. But if he had, he probably would’ve told you it was more evidence they were all in it together. These women.

  “Women!” he said. “I’ll be glad to get back to the platform. There I was, talking to a few of the boys down at Skipjacks, and there was this girl, one of Skipjacks’. And Thirty-seven, she cuts this girl— I don’t really know this girl, don’t even know her name, I’m just fooling around, being friendly, like. She cuts this girl across the face and then whips the razor back and slashes her right across her tits. Jesus, there’s blood everywhere and the girls are all screaming...

  “Some of us are lookin’ to grab Thirty-seven, only she’s turned into a regular little tornado with that there razor, and no one is real happy about getting in too close. Finally I move in on her, though, and I’m trying to tell her she’s gonna get herself into big trouble, and she’s never gonna get to go to hair-dressing school if she’s not careful, when she catches just a piece of my face with that thing. Well, I was surprised—it stopped me cold, for a minute, and that’s when she went for my...

  “And after all the times I laid awake all night listening to her grinding her teeth. And I paid for dentists and everything. You just never know.”

  Dexy had to fly back to Jakarta in two days, he told us, and then it was back out to the oil platform for another month of ‘sour’ — to complement all the ‘sweet’ he’d just enjoyed in Bangkok, of course. In fact, you got the feeling he was ambivalent about going back, this time, just as he was ambivalent about staying. So he drank twice as much as he usually did, which was already twice as much as anybody else ever could, and he concentrated on not wincing too much.

  Eventually, he got quite maudlin, and he and Leary swopped tales of the old days and traded wisdom on Life and Women, with Leary generally taking the ‘pro’ side of things, and Dexy arguing the’con’. Nobody had ever seen Dexy pass out before; Leary and I carried him into the back room where Doc kept a cot for those nights he couldn’t go home.

  Doc never did show up. In fact, nobody had seen him since before the Orphan Party.

  IV.

  Eddie signed up for a Tae Kwon Do course on Sukhumvit Road two days ago. And he’s already popped a knee while demonstrating a round-house kick, half-pissed, at Boon Doc’s yesterday afternoon. Right now he’s going around on a cane, his leg all taped up. He also has a plaster on his cheek from where he hit the edge of the bar as he went down. His eye was already black, but I believe it’s even blacker, now. Added to the scars and bruises of his violent encounter with Dexy the other night, all this gives Eddie a certain dash.

  When I dropped around the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse today to check on the martial artist, I found his wife Lek and his sister-in-law Meow in rare good spirits, what with this visible evidence Eddie is apbun, a klutz, just like they’re always trying to tell him. For my part, I am impressed by Tae Kwon Do as a true killer art Stepping back out of range of his cane, I tell Eddie it’s truly terrifying to see how a rank beginner like himself can beat somebody up, even if it is only himself, doing quite serious injury without even trying very hard.

  Big Toy has inaugurated her regime as Manager-in-Chief of Boon Doc’s Bar by shortening Happy Hour to only an hour, showing us a literal-minded side of herself never apparent before. She has also put a piece of tape on a tequila bottle identifying it as her own personal preserve. In all fairness, of course, she’s entitled to a therapeutic hit of cactus juice now and then. Though Doc’s wife never wants to come around to the bar — it’s not polite — Pin nevertheless inquires into the provenance, present disposition, and likely fate of every single baht and can of bug-killer in the place, at least to hear Big Toy tell it. Pin tells Big Toy how she trusts her like family, and then she switches on the 1,000-watt bulb and gets out the rubber hose and she goes on asking questions till all hours, it matters nothing to her Big Toy’s closed the bar at 1:00 a.m. and has to get up at 10:00 in the morning to start getting ready for the next day.

  Big Toy tells me Pin has been looking at prospectuses for American universities for young Sam, and she’s done a lot of talking to the insurance people, never mind anybody who really loved and admired Doc is thinking it’s a bit premature to start counting the life-insurance money.

  The police have found Doc’s car on Jomtien Beach. His clothes, together with his wallet, were on the front seat There was about ten baht in the wallet, or so the police say, as well as his driving license and resident’s card. The car keys and Doc himself were nowhere to be found.

  The insurance people probably have little human feeling about it one way or the other, but they think it’s too soon to take Doc out for the count And they are rooting for it to be alive he is, naturally enough; what insurance company in its right mind wants to cough up a pile of life insurance, no matter how much Pin thinks Sam should go to university in the States?

  There are little things... Like for example: it’s funny Doc’s passport hasn’t turned up anywhere yet. That is really funny, when he kept all his personal documents—his birth certificate, copies of his driving licenses, life insurance policies, and so on — so meticulously in order and all together there in his strongbox. This is what Big Toy and Dinky Toy tell me, anyway.

  Or probably he just forgot he had his passport in his bathing suit that day on Jomtien Beach when he decided to go swimming for the first time in twenty years. Who’s to say? Stranger things
have happened.

  And there’s the poster from the Orphan Party. There was something odd about the wording of that thing. Leary agrees with me. “It was like Doc was trying to tell us something,” he says.

  Trouble is, the poster got thrown out long ago, and we can’t remember exactly how it went.

  Anyway, Dinky Toy eats all the grasshoppers she wants to, these days, and there’s no one says “Don’t.”

  Leary has come around to say howdy to Eddie, and to convey Dexy’s compliments.

  “Ugh. It stinks out here!” Lek has just emerged from the kitchen. “I thought it must be you, Leary.”

  “Waddaya mean?” Leary is indignant. “I even put on an extra dose of the old Sheik of Araby, it’s so friggin’ hot today.”

  Dexy’s away for his month of sour. Leary tells us Dexy never pressed charges against #37, and he paid the Skipjacks girl for her medical expenses and her pain. He also squared things with Big Turk, who runs the place. Still, it cost Dexy a baht or two to get #37 out of jail. He’s put her in a clinic, leaving instructions they’re to straighten her out and fix her goddammed teeth while they’re at it. But he never wants to see her again, he says.

  “Yeah, that’s right, and that’s not all—old Dexy’s gone and adopted three of those little critters. Those orphan kids. Just before he left for Jakarta. Good old Dexy. Heart of gold.”

  Eddie doesn’t believe this, not for a minute. But I can tell him it’ s true. Just before Dexy passes out, the other night, I overhear him tell Leary this: “Hey, listen; do you think Nancy’s got a couple more of those kids lying around? Maybe I can do something. Goddammit.” And as luck would have it, Leary still had some of the forms behind the bar.

  Leary figures Dexy knew what he was doing. “Got a head for his likker, old Dexy has; what he’d do drunk, he’d do sober.”

  That’s what Leary says. But if you ask me, this foster-fatherhood is going to be as big a surprise to old Dexy as the time he woke up in Singapore married to a Chinese hat-check girl (or so she claimed, anyway). Or the morning he came to in Aberdeen and discovered the ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ tattoo—the one he still wears on his right fist.

  GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

  “It’s a symptom of the crisis of modem civilization — an expression of pathological alienation.” Ernest was raving, his diatribe accompanied by suitably exaggerated gesticulations.

  Looking on, a waiter had somehow interpreted it all as an order for one more Singha beer, another Kloster, and a plate of nuts. Since we didn’ t argue the point, he decided we were probably going to be around for a fair spell of boozy palaver to come, and he turned the music up to serious good-time levels.

  “What did you say?” I shouted at Ernest.

  “The noise!” he screamed back. “It’s driving me nuts!”

  Massed unmuffled motorcycles scrambling at the traffic lights, amplified fruit vendors cruising the laneways at daybreak, music cassette vendors drowning out the traffic with their samples...

  My friend Ernest had only been in Bangkok for ten months, and he had some kind of thing about noise pollution. “It’s not just all that stuff — motorcycles and everything. Oh, no. Now people actually seek it out. It’s a sickness.”

  I couldn’t hear what he was saying very clearly, so I waved the waiter over and asked him to turn the music down.

  ”They crave music,” Ernest continued. “What do they do to relax? Like there wasn’t enough noise in this city already, they go to nightclubs where the music is so loud your beer goes flat. Or they go to discos, which are worse; they can turn your brains to jelly. The disk jockeys all went deaf long ago.

  “People can’t talk to each other any more; they don’t want to talk. At the same time, they’re uncomfortable with silence. If everything is quiet, then they start to think, and people don’t want to think. They can’t handle it. There are too many horrifying things to think about. So they need insulation. Insulation from each other, in case somebody says something significant, and insulation from their own thoughts, in case they scare themselves to death.

  “But if the music’s loud enough, there’s no problem. You can’t talk and you can’t think. It puts you into a kind of trance. Like drugs.”

  Heaven preserve us from drugged trances, I agreed, and swigged at my beer.

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Ernest “They can’t even get from their ‘home music center’ to the disco without a portable cocoon of noise — have you noticed how many Walkman stereos there are around these days? If you want to talk to one of these zombies you’ve got to use semaphore first, just so they’ll lift an earphone and come out into the real world for a minute.”

  Ernest was really on the boil. Over-wrought, you might have said. By this time he was sweating beer almost faster than he could replenish it

  “Ernest,” I said gently, “if you want to talk about the Crisis of Modem Civilization, then just imagine what the world would’ ve been like if the Walkman hadn’t been invented, and for every Walkman we instead had a ghetto-blaster. There would be your crisis.”

  “Listen, there’s something seriously wrong,” he told me. “It’s getting totally bizarre. Take the other afternoon, for example. I went to meet someone in a gogo bar. He said I’d find him in the video section.

  “There were two gogo platforms, each with half a dozen girls working out to fifty-megaton music. Just behind one of the platforms there were a number of booths equipped with headphones. There was a customer installed in each booth, headphones on, staring at the video, utterly oblivious to the dancers and the crashing music. Alienation? Stick intravenous drips in their arms, put an endless tape loop on the video and they’d stay happily mummified forever, swaddled in layer upon layer of noise and music and flashing light.

  “Then this guy I was meeting wanted to stay there and talk. Talk! You couldn’t hear yourself think. All the lights were flashing, and the video was blinking away, and the girls.

  A classic case of noise fatigue. My advice to Ernest was to get out of Bangkok. I suggested he go down south and find himself a deserted beach with palm trees and listen to the sea for a week or two.

  I saw him again a few weeks later. He didn’t look much like a man just back from a tropical idyll.

  “There is no refuge,” he pronounced, seeking refuge in a large glass of Singhabeer. “I’m a mess. I don’t belong in this world; I’m some kind of anachronism.”

  He had gone to Koh Nai Fun with his fiancee, Noi. “It was a long bus-ride,” he said, “but not too uncomfortable, I suppose. We took the ferry to Koh Samui and then a taxi to where we were to get a boat to the island of Nai Fun. The landing was in a picturesque little fishing village, and we sat waiting for the boat under a cashew-nut tree. Through the coconut palms and the red and yellow flowering shrubs along the road, the sun sparkled on the sea. You could hear birds and surf and the sounds of children playing—balm for the soul.

  “Then a pick-up truck parked on front of us, and a loudspeaker proceeded to blare advertisements for fish sauce. This went on for a good twenty minutes.

  “I couldn’t believe it; no one seemed to mind. How is it there are fines for littering the pavements, and you can go to jail for deliberately polluting the rivers, yet if someone wants to fill the public air with aural rubbish, it’s no problem?

  “Noi was looking her usual serene self. I asked her what she thought about the fish-sauce vendors. ‘Oh, Ernest,’ she tells me, ‘it was making me think of my home in Lumphun and when I was a little girl. I miss my home so much.’

  ”This racket is the stuff nostalgia is made of? I asked myself. I didn’t understand. Then Noi told me how there were loudspeakers in the middle of her village and how every morning at sunrise they’ d broadcast the local news, the upcoming social calendar, messages from the temple, and so forth. Everyone would rise with a warm sense of community, moving to their daily chores through a common medium of noise.

  “Maybe that’s what I’m missing,” said Ernest. “The ea
rly conditioning.

  “The boat finally came to take us away to Nai Fun. It was a beautiful island. We got a fine bungalow for 40 baht per night, and we headed for their thatched dining pavilion as soon as we had unpacked and showered.

  “What a scene: towering coconut palms silhouetted against the twilight, surf foaming on the white sand beach, nothing around but a few thatched huts — no cars, no motorcycles, no discos. This was it—this is what we had come in search of. My asylum. I turned to Noi. ‘Ernest,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know the sea was going to be so noisy.’ Noisy? It’s true, there was a lovely surf crashing up on the beach not too far from where we sat. ‘Is this noise going to go on all night?’ She looked quite concerned.

  “A number of other people had meanwhile come in to sit at neighboring tables, and I was diverted from my intended panegyric to the natural music of wind and sea.

  “Two of the gentlemen were smoking some sweet-smelling herb. They looked like castaways — skin burnt dark, shaggy hair bleached out by sun and sea, dressed only in ragged shorts. Then, from an embroidered Shan shoulder bag, one of them produced a thing of horror. It was a Walkman. But the full enormity of the horror dawned only as I watched them proceed to wire up two little speakers to the infernal thing. And those speakers were ‘little’ only in the sense of lekphrik kee nooylike those tiny ‘mouse-shit peppers’, the ones that can make Thai cuisine so interestingly lethal. They were powerful.

  “Can you believe it? First they invent the Walkman so people can go around turning their brains to putty without being being a public nuisance. Then they sell speakers for them. Voila The ghetto-blaster’s been reinvented.

  ”I could forget my apology to Noi for the surf; you couldn’t hear the surf anymore. I thought of asking the castaways to turn the thing off, but I looked around and everyone else was bobbing their heads and snapping their fingers, and I didn’t think it would make me too popular. Even Noi was giving a suspicious twitch or two in time to the beat.