Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  “Dinner was torn yam kung, fresh fish and salad — it was delicious, though I didn’t enjoy it.

  “We turned in early, that first evening. If Noi hadn’t done a lot of tossing and turning and complaining about the surf, I would’ve found it very relaxing.

  “My eyes popped open at first light. Noi was already awake, eyes big and somewhat fearful as she looked at me. ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked. There was something besides the surf — something rather odd. Whatever it was, it was swelling in volume and intensity; in fact, it seemed to be rushing straight towards our little hut.

  “Abruptly the noise reached an ungodly pitch and stabilized just outside. At the same time my head cleared, and I realized what it was. Cicadas. From time to time during our daily rambles, we would hear them start up again, but never, at those other times, would there be anything like that early-morning crescendo of buzzing and whining hysteria.

  “After listening to this phenomenon over the next couple of days, always at first light, I figured out what was happening. There was a wooded hill right behind us, and the insects at the top of the hill would be triggered first by the rising sun, the cicadas lower on the hill successively joining in as the sun rose higher and higher out of the sea, till finally the whole hill was in sunlight, the monster finding its full voice as it stopped just outside our door.

  “Noi was not particularly impressed by my clever bit of deduction. Furthermore, it seemed that both surf and cicadas gave her a pain in the neck. ‘I can’t sleep with all this noise, Ernest.’ How do you figure it? This is the lady who could fall asleep under a tape-vendor’s stall in the middle of a tuk-tuk rodeo. In Bangkok, she could do this; out there in Nature she’s an insomniac.

  “Anyway, we went to breakfast early that first morning and found our head-banging castaways already hard at both the heavy-

  metal rock and the herb. Enough was enough. A few inquiries amongst the locals gave us directions to a deserted beach on the other side of the island.

  “After a fairly hot and grueling hike, carrying our lunch and my snorkeling gear, we arrived at our new refuge. It looked as though it had been landscaped by someone with tropical idylls in mind. Forested hills plunged to a grove of lofty palms which ran the length of the beach; growing out of the sand on the beach a parallel line of mangroves offered shade. The clean white sand was undisturbed by human footprint. The water was calm and clear, and I could see a reef a couple of hundred yards out ‘This is it*, I thought ‘This is where we spend the rest of the holiday.’ Within the first fifteen minutes we had scared up one gigantic lizard, a sea turtle, and a big red jellyfish. An eagle wheeled high overhead. None of these items was amplified, and none was naturally noisy enough to bother Noi. In fact, the only sounds were some discreet observations from birds and monkeys back in the forest, an occasional outburst from a chorus of cicadas, and the gentle lapping of the water’s edge. It was heaven. Lying there in the sun, feeling my mind unclench after all those months in Bangkok, I finally drifted off to sleep.

  “’What the blazes is that? I said, suddenly awake, heart pounding. ‘Oh, that’s Carabao. Mai pen rai never mind. They’re my favorite,’ Noi replied. Anchored off the reef was a little wooden fishing boat. It had crept up while I slept, anchored, and then fired a broadside of rock’ n’ roll which suggested they had to be carrying speakers bigger than the boat itself. It was incredible. After a few minutes, I decided to don snorkeling kit and swim out to look for peace underwater. It was no good; I swear I could still hear the bass vibrations twenty feet below the surface. I would’ve given you $ 100 for a limpet mine. When I went back in to the beach, Noi was lying in the sand, quite relaxed. ‘I wonder if they have the new Carabao album,’ she mused.

  “Ever the optimist, I led us back again the next morning. This time two fishing boats showed up, and we were treated to dueling stereos: Carabao and, I think, Pink Royd blazing away at each other at point-blank range. Maybe it’s a new method of killing fish.

  ”We had come all that way for peace and quiet, and I was going to have peace and quiet if it were to be the death of us. The next day we rented a tent, collected fishing lines and food, and were transported to a little desert island some miles away, with promises our boatman would return in three days’ time to pick us up.

  “So there we were: Mr. and Mrs. Crusoe — marooned, at least for a few days. Unspoiled? This island made Koh Nai Fun look like Hong Kong. Finally, I thought: peace.

  “Then I heard reggae music. Was this a nightmare, I asked myself? Or—much the same thing — was it another disco fishing boat? But no, there was no boat. Okay, then, I’d finally flipped out. But no, Noi heard it too. (Actually, she looked just a little pleased; she hadn’ t been altogether happy with the idea of an utterly deserted island, to start with.)

  “In the event, it turned out to be our castaways from the first beach. They had arrived two days before in search of a fabled jungle glade they had been told harbored mushrooms of unparalleled magical power. They had pitched their tent somewhere, but now they couldn’t find it. Then, while they were swimming, a monkey had made off with their money-belts, and they found themselves entirely destitute, but for their Walkman, their tapes, and a bag of batteries. A boat was coming to collect them in two days, and they didn’ t have even the wherewithal to pay their passage back to Nai Fun.

  “Just to help them out, of course, I bought their Walkman. I made them an offer they couldn’ t refuse. They let Noi choose three tapes, as well, so I finally got my peace and quiet, while Noi had insulation against the noises of nature. I tried laying out nightlines for fish using the speakers as floats, but they didn’t work.

  “During the next couple of days, the castaways would from time to time come cringing, asking Noi if they could have a few minutes with the headphones. The last day, after they had finally left, was wonderful—everything I had dreamed of. Only it was one day, rather than the week I’d really needed.

  “We came back to Bangkok at the end of the holiday weekend. We found we couldn’t get seats on the train or on the tour bus, so we had to ride on those orange thammada buses — you know, the ones with the non-stop drums and castanets and about three stereos going at the same time?”

  ”Good grief!” I said. “How on Earth did you survive that? What is that trip, twelve hours?”

  “Longer,” Ernest said. He smiled strangely and put a bag up on the table. From it, he extracted a Walkman, complete with headphones. “I used this.”

  I was shocked. Ernest, with a Walkmanl

  “Here,” he said. “Put these on.”

  I slipped the headphones on, and he started the tape. Cicadas. Cicadas and surf. A quiet spell, and then some birdsong.

  “The guy with the bungalow let me use his recorder.”

  Ernest was meeting Noi at the Ambassador Hotel, and he had to run. The last I saw of him, he was hailing a tuk-tuk. He was wearing the headphones.

  I ordered one more beer for the road, and asked the waiter to turn the music up a little.

  LOTUS EATERS

  For their own avian reasons, the committee chose that moment to call a plenary session to order.

  “Mao laaohr” cried Nixon with raucous glee, and he did sound ‘drunk already’. “I’m not a crook! Wow!”

  Assorted whoops, whistles, and shrieks of derision greeted this pronouncement.

  “Do you know,” said Eddie, “I’m going to kill all of those nit-witted birds one of these days. Especially Nixon.”

  If you happened to be in the middle of a force-ten hangover, which Eddie said he was, in my opinion there were better places to enjoy it than the patio out behind the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse. For reasons best known to himself, Eddie had five high-spirited mynah birds in cages hanging about the wrought-iron enclosure where his wife Lek and her sister Meow served meals to their guests.

  Eddie, himself, used the area to make notes towards his novel. When existence had little of note to offer, which was sometimes the case, Eddie would wo
rk on expanding the linguistic repertoire of his birds. Or if there were guests he might talk to these creatures instead, dispensing advice on all matters pertaining to survival and the maintenance of one’s cool in the Eastern Hemisphere.

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  “Wonderful,” said Eddie sourly. “We’re filled up.

  “Pot and Dit have taken one lot up to Ayutthaya in the minibus; there are a couple of great big Dutch girls who went out only ten minutes ago with the avowed intention of seeing some real Thai life and finding a source of natural yoghurt. And there’s still a bunch upstairs rolling joints and tearing more holes in their tank-tops, or whatever it is they do when they’re not down here complaining about the heat and the price of cottage cheese.”

  This was Eddie’s livelihood he was bad-mouthing here. “Eddie,” I said, “it was only a short time ago you were telling me there were no guests to be had and next thing you knew you’d have to find honest work or something. C’mon, cheer up. Business is booming.”

  “Well, sometimes it gets to you, you know? I swear, the times are changing, and sometimes I just don’t know how to talk to this new generation. Or whatever it is.”

  Hangovers can do that to you — make you feel as though a generation gap has suddenly yawned between the way you are now and the way you were only yesterday.

  “Oh, yeah,” he went on, “this lot have been to Christian retreats in Kerala and yoga ashrams in Kashmir. They’ve spent as much as two weeks at a time in Buddhist monasteries. They’ ve seen the Taj Mahal by moonlight, and they’ve been robbed in Jakarta. Lost the camera in Rangoon and trekked over some mountains in Tibet you’ve never heard of. Been there; done that. Had dysentery in Lhasa.

  “Yuppies disguised as vagabonds, they leave off worshipping money for weeks or maybe even months at a time, and they come out here for a spiritual booster. They collect countries like stamps and they learn how to say ‘Too expensive!’ in seven languages or more.

  “Normally they become blessed with a pretty good knowledge of the Mysteries after the first month, and then spend the rest of their pilgrimage through the guesthouses and GPO’ s of Asia telling each other how they should be existing and which joint has the best cheeseburgers in Bali.”

  Eddie was in fine form, possessed by a rap which transcended hangovers, a message for humanity which demanded expression; it caused him to draw himself up erect in his chair and it drew stern fire from his eyes.

  A couple of the aforementioned vagabonds in tattered tank-tops and baggy cotton trousers had meanwhile appeared at a table in the opposite corner of the patio. Ever sensitive to emanations of guruishness, they had homed in on Eddie and were straining to hear his words.

  “There they are, sitting in thousands of guesthouses, explaining to each other how to exist, currently being quite turned on to think that existing is actually problematical in the first place.”

  I could’ve sworn one of the travelers actually nodded at this, eyes wide with avid willingness to be made wise. Rather lovely eyes, I noted, set in a generally lovely face.

  Lek appeared from the back to serve this vision and her companion toasted whole wheat, no butter, and soft-boiled eggs. Plain bottled water to drink. Lek came over to refill our coffee cups and to ask Eddie if he thought he might actually feel up to making a run to Foodland for more provisions, a little later. Eddie gave her the kind of look gurus give people when they’ve been distracted by matters so mundane as to be unworthy of comment. Lek gave him another look right back which said you’d better be up to it.

  Eddie practically inhaled the whole cup of coffee in one go, but did not appear noticeably the happier for it. “You’ve got your Siddhartha Joneses and your Siddhartha Smiths,” he continued. “You’ve got any number of up-and-coming accountants and media buyers who’ve discovered Shangri-la, and who are ready to argue that their Shangri-la is better than your Shangri-la, or at least that the guesthouses there are cheaper.

  “Guesthouses! I was down on Khao San Road the other day, and I swear they’re building guesthouses on top of guesthouses. You can hardly walk down the street any more; the postcard racks and breakfast-menu boards have taken over the sidewalks, and the travelers have spilled out onto the pavement. No kidding, there are tables and chairs all over the road, and thousands of tattered ninnies are huddled together out there talking about where they bought their embroidered shoulder bags and about how isn’t Kathmandu a bit spoiled these days, you really have to go to Tibet.

  “Your first impression is there’s some kind of pogrom on, and in a minute uniformed men will set up machine guns at either end of the street, and a loud-hailer will tell the crowd they’ve got just enough time to order a last cottage cheese and green salad before they’re all dead meat Yeah, if only it were so.”

  “Hey, Eddie,” I said. “You’re running a guesthouse, here. Aren’t piles of dead travelers in the streets going to be bad for business?”

  “I don’t care.”

  ilBah-baht baw-baw” said Lek in passing. “Crazy.”

  Just then, affirming my ability to make things come true simply by wishing hard, the traveler with the eyes came over and said hi. I guess she mistook Eddie for the source of the thought waves, though, because she sort of zeroed in on him, asking him if he were the proprietor. She asked this in a voice like a furry oboe, a voice that kind of fizzed and fuzzed way down inside you, somewhere. Her English was accented with an intriguing hint of Scandinavia. She was tall and well-proportioned, and her loose sleeveless top had only a couple of holes in it, and nothing underneath. She was the kind of young lady that grew on you quite quickly.

  Eddie owned up to running the joint and told her to sit down. She called her friend over, and he joined us as well, a 6’4” blond, bearded scarecrow. He was a real veteran of the trail, by all appearances, reduced to these cadaverous dimensions, no doubt, by over-priced cottage cheese and dysentery, and weighed down by heavy Nepalese jewelry and the burden of sailing consort with this goddess.

  Olga the Goddess turned out to be Norwegian and she was a computer programmer. Wolfe, on the other hand, was German and had an obvious love of uniforms, sticking out of a grimy tank-top the way he did, and affecting baggy purple-and-green-striped pantaloons. He was a real-estate dealer from Hamburg.

  “Can you tell us which bus we should take to get to the Burmese Embassy tomorrow?” Olga’s voice fluted and furred and so befuddled me I couldn’t get the right bus number out before Eddie did. He offered this number as though it were a priceless pearl, his eyes so wide and earnest I could see statuesque Nordic beauties reflected on their glistening orbs.

  Eddie seemed quite impressed with this new guest, in fact, and you got the idea he would by no means want to see her gunned down on Khao San Road or on any other road either, come to that. Lek, on the other hand, was lurking in the doorway like a Ninja at work, and when Eddie called for beer I just sat there in awe of his nerve. Even the birds were silent — the calm before the storm.

  Eddie got his own beer and, when the guests said in response to his offer, “Oh, no; it’s too expensive in Thailand”, he said “Don’t worry; it’s on me” and I said “Have you got a Kloster Beer?” thinking I didn’ t want to be entirely sober when Lek finally decided to go into action.

  “When are you going to Burma?” asked Eddie in a faint voice, having chugged the better part of a beer in a fine display of this manly art.

  “Excuse me; what did you say?” Wolfe craned towards Eddie, politely pushing a shaggy mop away from the nearer ear. Olga also leaned forward attentively, her batiked shirtfront, you had to notice, falling away from her abundant bosom.

  Eddie repeated his question, and they told him five days.

  “We came from Koh Samui, and Tuesday we go to Burma,” said Olga.

  “Ja, ja. Burma,” added Wolfe.

  “How was the weather on Koh Samui?” Eddie asked very sofdy.

  “What? What did you say?” Olga leaned forward again.

 
Suddenly Eddie straightened up so fast he almost went over backwards. “Ah, Lek. Hi. I was just talking to these guests, here,” he said, looking vaguely all around — everywhere, in fact, except at the bra-less beauty whom, he would have had you believe, he hadn’t noticed yet. Lek merely collected the coffee cups and returned to the house without comment. But then I didn’t expect her to compliment Olga on what was pretty clearly an all-over tan.

  I finished my beer and said I had to go downtown on some business. Sure, I told Eddie, when he asked me: I’d pick up his provisions at Foodland; it was on my way. I’d come back with the stuff before dinner.

  Wolfe insisted on shaking my hand and saying good-bye, but Olga remained largely oblivious to me. Eddie was telling her about a really interesting place in Burma, not too far from Pagan, but off the beaten path, nevertheless.

  When I came back a couple of hours later, I could smell Eddie’s Burma cheroots, and I knew he must have taken on a fair load of Dutch courage, because in the normal course of events Lek wouldn’ t have let him smoke one of those things in the Cheri-Tone or even fifty meters upwind of the place.

  Eddie was surrounded, now, by several uniformed vagabonds, though Olga had situated herself close enough to surround him all by herself. It turned out, according to the account I got a couple of days later, he’d quickly established his supremacy in this little herd, no matter he was sporting a rumpled but clean khaki safari suit and laced leather shoes. Where this guy had done that, for example, Eddie’d aced him with six months in Kathmandu in 1967. Where that guy, on the other hand, had been there, Eddie had trumped him with a hike through northern India back when villagers didn’t even know what a backpack was. A common theory had had it he was carrying a folding bed. Then he’d finessed one piratical-looking chap who’d crossed illegally into northern Burma — he’d merely related his own adventures under fire in the Shan State and the time he’d been a guest of the famous opium warlord.