Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  “When you’re a kid in upstate New York, the first winter you grow up to the point your rosy little cheeks reach doorknob level, you are subjected to a rite of passage more gruesome than ritual circumcision, more painful than tribal tattooing.

  “One cold day an older kid comes along and says, “You should stick your tongue on that doorknob.” Reasonably enough, you ask him “Why?” He tells you because then your tongue will stick to it, and this will be an interesting experience.

  “Well, so it is; it’s just one of many interesting yet very painful experiences life has in store for you. For your tongue really does stick to the freezing metal. And even at that early age before most of us have learned a lot about public embarrassment, you have to feel kind of silly, particularly since you can count on an appreciative audience congregating pretty well as soon as you’ve uttered your first “Aughk!”

  “Before you know it there’s talk of boiling water and scissors and all kinds of other helpful suggestions, not to mention a certain amount of unkind laughter. Effective ripostes are all but unavailable to the victim, as well, what with this doorknob in your mouth.”

  Eddie was right, and his account brought back vivid memories of glistening snow crunching underfoot, of rosy faces and of seeing your breath rise in clouds into the crystal clear air, of excruciating pain and humiliation.

  Hot water would probably be the answer, actually, but I reckon if you just hang in there for awhile without losing your poise, your body heat would eventually loosen the bond between you and the door. As far as I know, however — and as Eddie agreed — no one had ever waited that long. What generally happens is that the victim, either out of panic or else terminal embarrassment, finally tears himself away from the door, breaking free at the cost of a thick layer of skin from his tongue. And, wow, does it ever hurt.

  “You’re kidding,” said one of the new faces, a tool pusher on leave from some oilrig offshore Indonesia. “You made this up.” He made a disgusted face, as if to say “I’m from Missouri, and you can’t fool me,” though his accent told you right away he was a Texan.

  “I’m not kidding,” Eddie replied. “In fact, you can almost count on somebody else in the crowd of little onlookers trying it, himself, within minutes — though usually on another doorknob, because this one’s got an icky flap of skin already adhering to it.”

  “Anyway, you’ve lost me,” said the other new face, a dealer in tropical fish from Salt Lake City. “I thought you were going to tell us the secret of hangovers.”

  “Yeah,” added the tool pusher. “But any dude who would stand there and talk this kind of crap isn’t going to know shit from shingles, I figure.”

  The Texan from Missouri’s attitude left something to be desired; even Leary, normally the most unflappable of men, raised an eyebrow. Eddie, however, remained to all appearances unperturbed.

  ”That’s right,” he continued, “I was talking about hangovers. The really funny thing is, you seem compelled to do it again and again for at least three years running. It’s as though each time winter comes along, you remember that first amazing experience, and you can’t believe it actually happened that way. It seems completely ridiculous. So you do it again, and you find it did happen that way, after all.

  “After two or three seasons, of course, you yourself graduate to initiating younger tots into the Mysteries.

  “So, you see, it’s like hangovers. Basically, you know it’s a stupid thing to do, to drink too much, but it seems so much fun and so innocuous at the time, and maybe all your associates seem to feel it’s a fine idea, so you go ahead and booze your brains out. It’s only when you wake up that you find, to your surprise and acute distress, that you have poisoned yourself once again.”

  You could see he hadn’t convinced them; everybody wasn’t saying things like, “Oh, yeah; now I see.” In fact, they were staring at him a bit blankly, and not saying anything at all.

  Eddie looked at me for support, and I said I could personally vouch for the accuracy in every detail of what he had related.

  “When was the last time you performed this little trick?” asked the fish man suspiciously. The tool pusher snickered in a nasty sort of way.

  No doubt caught up in the warmth of beery camaraderie and shared experience, Eddie revealed something he said he’d never admitted to anyone before: “I was nineteen years old, and working on a construction gang in Vermont. I’ d told my buddies more or less what I’ve just told you, but they wouldn’t believe me. I said try it, then. They wouldn’t. A while later, when I was alone, / tried it. It was like some kind of weird compulsion. And it worked.

  “Dinky Toy!” bellowed Leary. “Put a doorknob in the friggin’ freezer for Eddie, here. Gosh! This I’ve gotta see.”

  Dinky Toy hadn’t really been following Eddie’s exposition, and she didn’t know what all the laughter was about. She assumed a ‘doorknob’ had to be some kind of fancy mixed drink, and she asked Leary how to fix it.

  Thinking fast as he scanned the bottles on the wall behind the bar, the fish man created a brand-new cocktail right on the spot a token, he said, of his admiration for Eddie’s very entertaining story. The ‘Doorknob’, he told Dinky Toy, was composed of equal parts fine Kentucky bourbon, for good old-fashioned common sense, Camp Coffee, to keep you alert, and Curacao, just to make it taste better. You should stir it with ice, he said—don’t shake, for fear of rattling its brains. Finally, you top it off with a nice gob of vanilla ice cream, to soothe the tongue. Oh, yeah, and you had to add enough of the liquid ingredients to fill a large highball glass, otherwise the booze would be overpowered by the ice cream. “Now, you can bring one of these for our Mend Eddie,” he told her, “and have a drink yourself.”

  Eddie, demonstrating he was still the little Eddie his mother had known and loved even when he came home with his tongue bleeding, actually drank the concoction. With gusto. Truth to tell, you had to suspect he would stick his tongue on a doorknob today, if you gave him half a chance. Maybe that’s why he had to move to the tropics, to get away from temptation.

  The girls had revived somewhat, by this time. Big Toy had poured another tequila, but the others were content to sip away at soft drinks, being on the whole faster learners than us menfolk.

  Eddie, I had to notice, was doing a fair amount of cuddling with Noi, the new waitress. You could bet that if his wife Lek were to get wind of these carryings-on, Eddie would think being stuck to a doorknob was pretty good times, by comparison.

  Meanwhile the tool pusher was boozing the way offshore oilmen in Bangkok will booze. At the same time he was noticing some of the finer points of Dinky Toy’s carriage and general manner, and he was buying her colas just about as fast as he was buying himself beer. You could see they’d taken quite a shine to each other, all in all.

  I guess it was Eddie’s night for confessions, and perhaps his moves on Noi were in anticipation of some hangover to come, because next thing he was telling us how hangovers tended to make him very amorously inclined. ‘Horny’, is what he called it. This struck a responsive chord in the assembly which freezing doorknobs had not. It quickly became evident that Eddie had pointed to what might well be a universal experience, if a sample population of four was anything to go by.

  ”So why is it? When I come up with a real hangover — I mean about a fifty-megaton number — I always feel horny as hell?”

  “Same with me,” said Leary. “And I used to wonder about it, too. Then somebody told me why: it’s instinct, or genes, or something.”

  “Jeans?” said the tool pusher. “Naw, it’s miniskirts.” He was gazing over the bar in admiration at Dinky Toy’s undeniably fetching attire.

  “No, no—friggin’ genes. You know deep down inside your gosh-darned cells you’re going to die any minute, and your body’s trying to tell you to spread your seed quick, like, before it’s too late. That’s the survival of the species. Some kind of instinct, you know; stronger than hangovers.”

  It looked as though
the tool pusher was suffering acute intimations of mortality, then, the way he had taken to carrying on with Dinky Toy. Of course you could see she wasn’t exactly fighting him off. Being a smooth operator and a man of no small parts, the oilman had already showed her how he could open a beer bottle with his teeth, and then how he could drink the whole beer straight from the neck, no hands, without pausing for breath. Now, he claimed, he wanted to show her how to make a hero sandwich the like of which had never been seen outside certain privileged circles in Lubbock, Texas. Quite swept away by the attentions of this dashing blade, Dinky Toy let him behind the bar and back into the little kitchen.

  Nobody really missed our toolpushing friend, but it wasn’t much later that Dinky Toy came out of the kitchen and asked Leary if he could join them in the back for a minute. Leary wasn’t gone five seconds before a sudden booming noise made the fish man start and spill his beer. It was only Leary laughing, of course, but a stranger couldn’t have known that. Next thing Leary was out and bellowing at Eddie: “Oh, gosh. Haw! This is a job for you, Eddie.” Leary looked delighted.

  This time all of us crowded into the kitchen—even Big Toy, who moved away from the tequila bottle for the first time all evening. The tool pusher was bent over with his head in the refrigerator. Closer inspection revealed his tongue was stuck to the metal lip of the freezer compartment His ears were a bright red, but we couldn’t see his face very well.

  Calm in crisis, telling everyone to move back a little, please, for fear of inducing panic in the poor unfortunate, Eddie took control of the situation. He asked Noi to boil a kettle of water, and told Big Toy to see if there was any morphine in the first-aid kit.

  At that moment the Texan made a kind of nasal sound — something like “Uungh-aagh!”—and he jerked his head away from the fridge just like a big trout throwing the hook. Anyone who was there that night and who told you he didn’t wince is a liar. Of course there’s nothing that says you can’ t wince and laugh at the same time. And Eddie had been right you do leave a hefty patch of skin stuck to the metal. I’d forgotten how icky that was.

  The toolpusher never did get his hero sandwich, and he unceremoniously turned down Eddie’s very magnanimous offer of a Doorknob, despite its no doubt palliative properties. He paid his bill and departed, leaving Dinky Toy in a sulk. She had liked him, at least until he proved himself a total idiot One way and another she let it be known she figured Eddie had had something to do with it all — young romance nipped in the bud and everything, that is.

  The fish man bought a round for the house, and Eddie, accepting this reformed skeptic’s compliments, beamed. “I told you; it’s human nature. Hee, hee. They’re never going to learn.”

  I dared say he was right I noticed at the same time that Eddie was drinking a Mekhong soda, though he’d already had several beers and a Doorknob. I had heard Eddie himself say that anyone who drinks Mekhong whiskey and Singha beer in the same night is either suicidal or a moron.

  A DAY AT THE BEACH

  I am collapsed out in a beach chair, drowsing, looking at the girl draped across that big inner tube floating in the shallows. Looking at her dark tanned skin, oily taut smoothly tight. Tight, almost, as the black rubber skin of her inner tube. The fine long lean muscles of a go go dancer. Her skin glistens, salt water beading on what I have a hunch is aromatic coconut oil. Coconut oil always makes me salivate. This girl makes me salivate, she is so self-conscious in the sun as she rocks gently in her inner tube, eyeing me, pulling at her toes, pushing back her glossy black hair, squeezing water from it. She pouts and points her toes at me. She has delicate feet unusual in a Northeastern Thai bargirl. (She looks Northeastern.) Normally she would have feet like hooves, unshod for generations, strong ugly Lamarckian feet evolved by peasant children of the soil. But these dark brown feet pointing at me from the inner tube are gracile brown pink-soled appendages which nicely finish her smooth fine-boned legs. She rolls over on her tummy, the inner tube bucking and rearing; she clutches and squirms and writhes back into control of her nautical steed, presenting two gleaming oily globes of delectable flesh embellished by a lime-green string bikini, lime-green against warm brown cinnamon which I know at a range of thirty feet is redolent of coconut oil simmered in the sun and I simmer and salivate and have warm earthy thoughts while the lime-green of her swimsuit and the happy wholesome youth of her smile and teasing eyes make me think of cold lime sherbet, sweet frosty warm things and now I hunger for her, but I also think of Sunantha who is not here. The girl in the inner tube is looking back at me over her shoulder and grinning. She kicks her legs with languid allure, andV m sure I can smell coconut oil.

  “Dink, dink, dink. All the time dink too much,” Sunantha had been saying. I’d felt a dull resentment that might easily have flamed into hot words, had I not felt so subdued by the hard business of continuing to exist at all, never mind getting into a fight. Wedged like a refugee into that ridiculous seat on that crummy bus.

  The talcum powder Sunantha used after my bath was some new mentholated stuff she’d bought at the market. About a kilo of it, dead cheap. A novel sensation, it had been — sort of a cool-hot tingling. One could conceivably have called it refreshing. But the tingling had not gone away. In fact, it seemed to me it was getting more pronounced, if anything. At least in certain areas. Actually, if you were to have asked me right then to report on the current status of this new sensation, I would* ve told you my fucking balls were on fire. There you go. And Sunantha claimed to have spent three years as a nurse.

  “This bus good. Is cheap. Why you want to spend money? No need. Air-condition bus too expensive.”

  Traveling between towns in Thailand, you find a variety of vehicles at your disposal. Westerners, however, almost always use the train or an air-conditioned tour bus. Not only are the latter two modes of transport fast and cool, they have also been designed with the possibility in mind that some people might be more than 5’4” tall. Someone like myself, for example, at 6’2”, is able to find room for his legs, so long as the passenger ahead does not recline his seat.

  But this fine morning I was not on a train or a nice air-conditioned tour bus. I was on a roht doysahn. The fare on one of these buses was half of what it’d cost you on a tour bus. Big deal. Half of just about nothing was just about nothing.

  “You say you want to sail, you want to play windsurf; but you never go since I meet you. All the time dink.”

  ”Drink” I said. “Rr. Drink. Jesus Christ. Rrr”

  How I’d allowed myself to be led onto one of these instruments of gruesome discomfort, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because I was still semi-comatose. Maybe it was guilt. One thing was pretty clear, Sunantha had the idea that a wee dose of discomfort this Saturday morning would be good for my character.

  “Don’t complain. This bus cheap; and you always say we spend money too much. Thai people take this bus all the time.”

  No doubt this was true, but I wanted to point out I was the only individual on this infernal vehicle who by necessity had one knee practically up under my chin, and the other leg out in the aisle where I had to keep shifting it so people could visit up and down the length of the bus. There was no air, even with all the windows open, and sweat had saturated my shirt and was trickling through the waistband of my underwear. The bus wasn’t moving, and the ceiling fans had not yet been turned on.

  Bangkok was hot, that April. Very hot. And humid. The cool season was merely a poignant memory, while the rainy season was still a hopelessly long way away. The heat came down like a hammer. In the little lane outside my house, the scrawny, mangy dogs slipped from shadow to shadow, tongues lolling, avoiding the sunlight like vampires home late from a nocturnal carouse. There was no respite, even after dark.

  I’d been feeling out of sorts, lately, anyway. Sunantha said she figured it was time to get out of town. Time for the beach. She told me I’d had two or three too many hangovers this past month or so, for one thing, and I should maybe stop boozing for a while. H
ere’ s a good idea, she said: why didn’ 11 promise not to drink at the beach? And all next week, too, come to that.

  Unbelievable. We’d been hanging out together for more than a year, but she’d never said a thing. Until now. Suddenly I was some kind of alcoholic or something, and I should watch my drinking. Our relationship was overdue for some review and maybe some redefinition, it occurred to me, by Christ. It wasn’t like we were married, after all. After all.

  It was funny, Sunantha said, that I kept complaining I hadn’ t been sailing or windsurfing or anything since I’d met her. Like she was to blame. But I spent all my time in bars and restaurants, when I wasn’t lying abed complaining about the hangovers which ensued, together with the growing paunch and general flabbiness of spirit which, she said, was causing me to become less endearing than I could be at my best and so on and so forth.

  I could see we’d have to have a talk about things, but I didn’t feel up to it right at that time.

  So let’s go to the beach, she said. She only got the Sunday off work, but one day was better than none. We could take an early-morning bus down to Pattaya, spend the day on Jomtien Beach, and come back up in the evening.

  In fact, the seaside sounded like a good idea to me. I figured we could have our talk another time. So I said “Good idea”, and then I went around to Boon Doc’ s on Saturday night and played six-five-four till all hours with Big Toy, Leary, and Eddie Alder, and came home leglessly drunk. Just for the hell of it, I guess. I didn’t really plan it that way.

  Next morning, with an iron disregard for my protests and promises of some other weekend to come, definitely, Sunantha hauled my sodden carcass out of bed and forced me, quite prematurely, to confront the damage several Kloster beers and an indeterminate quantity of Mekhong whiskey had done to the delicate machinery of body and mind.