Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  At that Eddie raised his empty glass and waved it, not too subdy, in Trevor’s direction.

  “Have another, Eddie,” called good old Trev. “Just put it on my bill.

  “You, too,” he said to me.

  “So where was he?” I asked quietly.

  “At the beach with Dinky Toy.” Eddie’s lips didn’t even move, though with his contempt for Meow’s linguistic talents, I don’t know why he was afraid of her lip-reading English at a distance of twenty feet

  “He’s been rolling around to Boon Doc’s of an evening, as well, and spending some time with Dinky Toy in that booth down in back, maybe practising Thai, who knows?

  “What I do know, however, is this: if I was him, I’d go to Manila next time. Less complicated. Healthier, too, chances are.”

  After Trevor’s Thai lesson finished, he came over to shoot the breeze for a few minutes. In spite of all the female company he’d been enjoying this time out, he was saddened at having to return to Kuwait for yet one more tour of duty as a bachelor.

  Meow and Lek tried to console him by promising to write often. After all, this would afford Meow a good opportunity to practise the English they were teaching her at A.U.A. Lek could help. And Trevor had given Meow a beautiful set of English-language books and tapes as a going-away present. And he’d promised he’d write. Meow was so happy.

  We were happy Meow was happy, and it was thoughtful of Eddie not to mention Dinky Toy’s similar state of joy, inspired by her new dress and the promise of a letter as soon as Trevor got back to Kuwait

  Back to minister to the automotive arteries of that desert emirate — a worthy calling, but a lonely one for a single man with a somewhat indiscriminate enthusiasm for the opposite sex. Back to engineer traffic and, you had to imagine, to commune with his computer late into the nights, seeking the specifications and exact whereabouts of his ideal mate.

  Trevor was going back a bachelor still, true. Nevertheless, he was not entirely the same man who had arrived some weeks earlier, carrying his print-out and harboring illusions of life’s sweet simplicity and the supreme power of reason. He was learning that existence wasn’t always as amenable to rational planning as he’d believed. And he still had his moustache, which further indicated a new maturity. Who knew how wise he’d be, and what new lessons in life would present themselves for his further edification next time he appeared in Bangkok — this time after three years as a single man in Kuwait.

  Eddie told me he had come up with a new theory. The world is really nothing but a gigantic computer, and we are each of us little programs being run in the Cosmic Consciousness, this consciousness being probably new at the game and furthermore trying to operate without a manual.

  “Yes,” he said, “Trevor is going to get married. A woman is being duly chosen for him by the Cosmic Consciousness. All that time Trev has spent with computers and correspondence might just as well have been devoted to Space Invaders; his marriage is being selected by forces beyond his ken. And the process is almost finished. The field of possibilities has been narrowed down to a finite set, though exactly how it’s going to turn out not even the Big C.C. knows as yet.”

  For the time being, in any case, all was harmony at the Cheri-Tone. There was a cheery snatch of some broken-hearted love song from Lek, as she cleaned up in the kitchen. Meow was caressing her language books and no doubt dreaming of long conversations to come. Even Nixon was chuckling in what could’ve passed for a benign manner.

  Trevor came back from a shopping trip, a litde later, carrying among other things Thai language books and cassettes. Now, when he got tired of communing with his computer on those long, lonely nights in Kuwait, he could hold conversations with his tape recorder, instead.

  He also had a bottle of champagne.

  “This is my last morning,” he said, only the merest hint of a defensive note in his voice, in keeping with his new maturity and self-assurance. “I know what I told you about champagne breakfasts, but I’ve decided we’re to have one anyway.”

  “Anyway? Anywayl” snorted Eddie. “’Anyway’, my eye.”

  But Trevor didn’t get it.

  FEEDING THE DUCKS

  Bernard Baxter was from Seattle, and he had been married three times. He was recently separated from his third wife, and this trip to Bangkok was to celebrate. He’d never been to Thailand before, he told us. Thai women, in his opinion, were on the whole the most beautiful he had ever seen. They were so delicate, so graceful. So fine-boned, so smooth-skinned. So feminine.

  “That’s what’s wrong with American women,” he said. “They’re not feminine. All this so-called ‘feminism’, they should call it anti-feminism. They all want to wear the trousers and have hair on their legs, too. When they’re with area/man, they can’t hack it, and the next thing out come the claws and, whiz, it’s off with your balls. And your dick. Let’s all be equal, they’ll tell you, and if I can’t have real cojones, then neither can you. It’s all verbal, of course. They ‘re experts at it. My first wife could do it with about three well-chosen words: snip, snip, snip.

  “I’ve had three wives and they were all castrating bitches. Over the years, I’ve lost more balls than a blind golfer.”

  Bernard wasn’ t entirely sober, and this idea of a blind golfer got him laughing so hard he choked on his beer. “But your Asian women — that’s what it’s all about. Can’t get any more feminine than that.”

  As if on cue, a striking specimen of this touted Thai femininity appeared and without so much as a by-your-leave planted herself on Bernard’s knee. “You muttah-fry?” she asked him, grinning impishly and squirming deeper into his lap.

  “Muttah-fry?” said Bernard. He hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. But if she wanted him to muttah-fry, then it was clear from this whole manner he wanted to do it, or be it, or whatever it was the admission “Yes, I muttah-fry” might entail.

  She was lovely. Long jet-black hair fell straight down her back to the dimples in her cheeks; she had flawless tawny skin and there was lots of that in evidence, as was usually the case with dancers at Shaky Jake’s Gogo Bar. Oh, yeah — Bernard was agreeable. And if, after all, she didn’t want him to muttah-fry, then he wasn’t going to do it. Or be it, or whatever.

  “I think you muttah-fry,” she stated, a note of censure in her voice throwing Bernard into a mild panic.

  “What’s she talking about? What—am I ‘mortified’; is that what she means?” He looked at Eddie and me. “Okay, I guess I should be mortified, when I think about it — what with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl on my lap, and me old enough to be her father and not feeling what you would call at all paternal towards her. Yeah, okay; I’m mortified. In fact, my daughter is older than her.”

  He put his arms around the girl and nuzzled in the hollow where her neck met her shoulder, just to show us how mortified he really was. He breathed in so deeply it looked as though he was trying to inhale her, dancing togs and all. “You buy me a cola,” she said, and he sneezed.

  It was like the scent of blood in shark-infested waters: no sooner had Bernard ordered a cola for the young lady than a couple more of Shaky Jake’s prize fillies moved in, both of them showing signs of acute thirst. No problem, he told them; there is cola enough for everyone.

  Before you knew it, he was as popular as could be and, thirst slaked for the time being, his covey of new-found friends returned to the dissection of his character. The expression ‘muttah-fry’ recurred often, as did some phase in Thai I couldn’t quite get — tat Hang pet, or something.

  Eddie explained to him that ‘muttah-fry’ was actually ‘butterfly’, and that the ladies were accusing him of being inconstant: of having a proclivity to flit from fragrant flower to fragrant young flower, drinking deep of their nectar before screwing off and leaving them desolate.

  The girls were giggling now, as the one on his knee made snipping motions with her index and middle fingers.

  “What’s this?” Bernard inquired.<
br />
  “She says you’re hers, and if you play around, she’s going to clip your wings.” The fragrant flower in question proceeded to snip more graphically at Bernard’s nether regions, the better to illustrate Eddie’s commentary. “Only she doesn’t mean your wings,” Eddie added.

  “You’re kidding.” Bernard might have been trying to smile.

  “Naw. Your Western women, they just do it with unkind words and feminist cant; these little ladies, on the other hand, use more tangible hardware. Like scissors. No anesthetic.”

  Bernard winced. Reflexively he tried to cross his legs, but this was pretty well impossible with the girl sitting on his lap.

  “That’s right,” Eddie continued. “It’s kind of a tradition, here in Thailand. Happens about ten times a year, on the average. Nine times out of ten it’s some wife who reckons her husband’s playing around, and she doesn’t like it. Normally, though, it’s just the penis that goes missing; the ladies probably figure that’ll make it even more frustrating.”

  Eddie had obviously made a serious study of this phenomenon. Knowing what he did, then, you would’ve thought he’d want to be a bit more discreet about certain of his extra-marital associations, given his wife Lek’s regard for Thai tradition and culture in most other respects.

  “Oh, no; ha, ha,” Bernard was saying. “I’m no butterfly; not me. Far from it.” While he was sealing this pledge with a kiss, I asked Eddie about that Thai phrase.

  “Tat Hang pet” he said. “Sure I know it — it’s slang; it means ‘feeding the ducks’.”

  ’Feeding the ducks’, it turned out, was a popular euphemism for the unauthorized removal of your husband’s or boyfriend’s private parts. Eddie told us the expression was a fairly new one. “I’ve been told it dates back a few years to when a young man and his wife were headed upcountry together on a train. While the guy was having a snooze, his wife was having an attack of pique, in the course of which she lopped his cock off. He woke up somewhat distraught, and wanted to know where his penis was. Out the window, it turned out, so he pulled the cord and the train stopped and pretty soon everybody was looking for his missing part.

  “As the story has it, somebody found it, but it was in a duck’ s mouth, and the duck wasn’t about to relinquish such a tasty snack without a chase, and it was a merry time had by all chasing the duck all around the place while the amputee kept asking anybody who’d listen if the doctors could sew it back on and the wife kept saying she didn’t care if they couldn’t.

  “I don’t know how it all turned out eventually, but chances are the duck emerged as the happiest one of the bunch.”

  “With the possible exception of the wife,” said Bernard, “if she was anything like my three exes. My God, what a story. And they really do this?” He was looking at his girlfriends with new respect.

  “Listen, you see that girl over there? The skinny one with the nice bottom; you see her? Tottering along in high heels, buns going in all directions?” Eddie said.

  If you asked me, that described about half a dozen individuals within easy eyeshot, but Bernard said, “Yeah. Oh, yeah; she’s a real beauty.”

  “That she is,” Eddie agreed. “She did two years in prison for a wee job of amateur surgery she performed on her husband.”

  Now, this was news to me. What did Jake think he was doing, anyway? By all means hire an ex-con, do a public service and all — you’ve got my admiration. But hire a feeder of ducks to work your gogo bar? You might just as well hire a firebug as night watchman in your fireworks factory, or maybe a child molester to run your orphanage. Let’s spread this little rumor, I thought, and watch the customers abandon this joint like the place was on fire.

  “You’re kidding,” I told Eddie.

  ”Don* t you remember that story?” he asked me. “The young salesman? His wife found he had been keeping a couple of minor wives on the side, and she whipped his dick off? Being a modern housewife and having no ducks in the yard, she threw the thing into her electric blender and pureed it, pretty well ending any realistic hopes of reattachment.”

  “A trifle vindictive,” I suggested.

  “Quite so,” Eddie agreed.

  Bernard was staring at the alleged perpetrator in horrified fascination. “What’s her name?” he asked Eddie.

  “Her name? Why, it’s * Yeow’. Which is probably what her husband said when he woke up without his dick, though he wouldn’t necessarily have been addressing her when he said it.

  “As luck would have it, however, the very doctor who got to look at Yeow’s handiwork also had a patient who had been pestering him for a sex-change operation. The doc figured this was as good a time as any to grant this gay blade his fondest wish, so he called him up and told him to come right away and bring his dick with him. I believe that was the first penis transplant in history.”

  “Did it work?” said Bernard.

  “I don’t know for sure. You can’t always believe what you read in the papers, but a couple of weeks after the operation I read an interview where the salesman said he was as happy as could be, and that it worked as good as the old one, maybe better, and was his wife ever going to be pleased.”

  “What? You mean he actually went back to his wife?”

  “Naw. I guess he wanted to, but she went to jail, and I read he was murdered by a girlfriend sometime before she got out.”

  Now that Eddie had related this astonishing tale, I did remember reading about it, and I recalled that’s the way it all happened, if you could believe the papers. And this was that very lady in the flesh. Yeow.

  I had to go out to make a few phone-calls, and when I got back I found Eddie dicing with the cashier for drinks, and Bernard standing all alone at the bar. What’s this, I wondered; has Eddie scared him off Thai womanhood altogether? But such was not in fact the case.

  ”I’m waiting for Yeow,” Bernard told me. “She’s changing into her street clothes now. You know, she speaks pretty good English. I’m taking her to Pattaya Beach tomorrow.”

  Yeow came out all legs and gleaming teeth and sweetness, dressed in a short flame-red silk dress. She looked smashing, and Bernard slipped a possessive arm around her waist, beaming proudly.

  After they had left, Bernard’s first girlfriend of the evening came over, craving still more cola. She looked at me sadly and said, “Your friend, he muttah-fry.”

  What could I say? It was true.

  Eddie had left off dicing with the cashier, which was just as well because the cashier probably couldn’t have drunk any more anyway.

  “Bernard the Blind Golfer,” I said. “How many times did he say he’d been married?”

  “Three times,” Eddie replied. “Funny how it turned out tonight, wasn’t it? With Bernard, I mean. Kind of makes you think.”

  “It’s unbelievable. The woman behind the story of that first transplant — here, working at Shaky Jake’s. And then Bernard actually takes her out!”

  Eddie stared at me, eyebrows raised to the extent I had to think he was signaling surprise. “You mean you believed me?” he said.

  “You’re telling me it was malarkey?”

  “The story was accurate in every detail but one — the lady in question was not Yeow.”

  “But why...?”

  “Hey. I just wanted to make it more interesting for him, add a little spice. After all, the poor guy’s just escaped a bona fide ball-buster, the third time in a row, and this is his first trip to Bangkok. He deserves a bit of excitement

  “I just hope he won’t be too disappointed if he learns the truth.”

  INSTINCT, OR GENES, OR SOMETHING

  It had just turned Happy Hour when I got to Boon Doc’s. There were two new faces at the bar, as well as a couple of the regulars. Pretty normal for a Monday evening, except for one thing: there were girls draped about the joint like a collection of Salvador Dali watches and spoons, the way they clung to the contours of their various places of rest. It was as though someone had said, “I’ve got a hundred buc
ks, here, for the best study in languor, so go to it.” Keow, sprawled over there, looked as though she might ooze right off her seat and onto the floor under the table. Noi the new waitress was collapsed on the far end of the bar, face hidden in her arms, great mane of glossy black hair spilling over the counter.

  It turned out Big Toy, the cashier, had had a birthday party the night before, an occasion which had coincided with a visitation from a squad of U.S. sailors up from Pattaya. One thing led to another, I was told, and before you knew it the ladies, normally almost teetotal, had shown those young tars a thing or two about sailing three sheets to the wind. And now their ships had passed in the night, and they had hangovers, never mind it was Happy Hour and there were customers who could’ ve used the sprightly company of winsome young creatures such as these specimens were known to have been in times past.

  Big Toy was sitting at the cash, just about awake; she had half a bottle of Kratingdaeng stimulant cocktail within easy reach and a shot glass of tequila with salt and lime on the side. Dinky Toy was behind the bar polishing a glass, again and again.

  Leary was there; his booming voice had hit me as soon as I had come in the door: “The older we get, the wiser we’re supposed to get. Gosh. That’s right. And the wiser we get, the fewer hangovers we get, okay? Well, that’s just wrong. What is true is this: the older we get, the more the gosh-darned hangovers hurt, so fear of pain can accomplish what your wisdom may not.”

  Leary could make this sort of thing sound really deep—like a law of nature, even. It didn’ t hurt that he had a voice that would’ ve made Moses sit up straight.

  Always the heretic, Eddie Alder felt he had to offer a different version of The Way Things Are. “A hangover,” he said, “is actually the same as sticking your tongue on a doorknob.”

  This pronouncement was greeted with a loud silence. Being from Alabama, originally, and having spent the better part of his adult life in Southeast Asia, you couldn’t expect Leary to know about tongues on doorknobs. In fact, no one at the bar, aside from myself, had any idea what Eddie was talking about. He and I were the only ones out of the lot who had spent our boyhoods enjoying proper North American winters. Eddie had to explain.