“Eat this!”
She’d fed me khao torn, rice porridge, with extra garlic and two raw eggs; she’d massaged me from end to end, bathed me, balled me, bathed me again, and sprinkled me all over with talcum powder.
Then she’d slipped into a loose batiked shift that tied up behind her neck and clung to her curves rather appetizingly, never mind I had one foot in the grave, the cheery reds and oranges glowing against her fine skin. She tied her long black hair up in a pony tail with a piece of bright red net fabric. She looked excellent in anything she wore.
And now we were at Ekamai bus station, sitting on the Pattaya bus. At this early hour there was already a mob of Thais milling about, youngsters, for the most part, waiting to embark for various points upcountry. The Westerners would appear later, at a more civilized hour. Thais like to set off early, before the heat of the day rises. So far as I was concerned, however, there was no time before the heat of the day, that April, especially with a hangover. I wanted air-conditioning. I craved air-conditioning. And I needed a smoke. And some sleep. But I’d quit smoking, and sleep was going to be out of the question, I figured.
“I brought the nail-clippers,” Sunantha informed me.
What relevance did nail-clippers have to a dying man, I had to wonder; pretty well nothing had been further from my mind at that moment than nail-clippers. Suddenly I felt a sharp object enter my ear, a particularly jarring sensation, given my general state of being. The sharp object turned out to be Sunantha’s fingernail.
“I’ll clean your ears tonight,” she said.
Great. Sure. Now everything was okay, now I had that to look forward to. I found myself getting pissed off, and at the same time ashamed that I was, for some reason. Which pissed me off even more. I was conscious of Sunantha’s steady regard, conscious of her awareness I was out of sorts, of her ongoing campaign to empathize completely, to merge her being with mine, to possess me to an extent that weighed down like a vast heavy blanket of guilt and dread.
I was smothering. When was this christly bus going to get moving, anyway?
“Do you want a drink? Do you want me to call the boy?”
She couldn’t just leave me alone to come to terms with my misery. If she could only learn to leave me alone. She just didn’t know when to leave some distance between us. It was probably a cultural thing, I thought; Thais simply don’t recognize the same need for privacy, for some private space in which to be alone with oneself. Even when your self was bad company.
“I’m going to get a Coke,” she said. “Do you want something? A Green Spot?”
“For Chrissakes, I’m okay; just leave me alone, okay?”
“A beer?”
Sure. Have a beer. Fail the test That’s what I should’ve done, I thought. Only I didn’t want a beer. I really only wanted to be left alone to meditate on my sins.
The problem was this, I decided: she was warm and bright and funny and pretty, but she didn’t have enough interests. She had one interest, primarily, and that was me — my whereabouts and general welfare at any given moment My fingernails, my ears, my mood, my drinking habits... If we were to stay together and have kids, just the thought of which caused a great weight to descend on me, the brunt of her interest would shift to the children, I supposed.
I felt Sunantha take my hand, and I experienced a flash of irritation. After a moment I gently disengaged myself. “It’s too hot,” I said, feeling like a bastard when her face tightened with hurt and she turned away.
The big orange buses stood shimmering in the exhaust fumes which rose from their idling motors. Rank upon rank of torture machines, chromed grills grinning, waited to be stuffed with happy funseekers fleeing the city. Pai tee oh, the Thais called it — tooling around having fun, that is to say. Extravagantly decorated with bright enamel colors and chrome trim, these magical machines were in the business of gleaming and glinting in the morning sun, promising sweet memories of distant places and good times to come. That was how it was supposed to be, anyway — how it was supposed to grab you.
Already I could hear the pounding jungle sounds of the big conga drums young Thais traditionally traveled with. Drums and castanets and, sometimes, guitars. They’d start up before getting on the bus, keep the jam session going till they got to where they were going, and then keep it up till it was time to leave for home again. A locus of group identity and audible assurance everybody was having a good time. Very audible. Convention just about demanded it. The young men would keep the beat going in shifts, while both girls and guys would periodically rally around the drummer to dance. The rhythm could in fact be hypnotic, intoxicating, especially if it was accompanied by regular infusions of Mekhong whiskey.
In the early morning in the middle of a heat wave with a hangover, though, the effect was different. It was driving me crazy. I was teetering on the edge of sanity, while Sunantha was gabbling in excited Thai to some kids in the seat behind us, and I was promising myself I’d get off this nightmare express and take a taxi home when the bus pulled out and we were on our way. I thought about throwing myself from the moving vehicle, but the impulse passed and I sank back into despair.
I think I will betray Sunantha if I ask this girl to come sit with me in this place where only an hour ago Sunantha sat. But maybe if I ask her to come back up to the Sugar Hut and drink a cold drink with me it will be okay, because that is my place and not Sunantha’ s. Then I think of V.D. and I think I must use a condom. I don t like thinking about V.D. and I don t like using a condom. What would Sunantha do if I got VD.? Jesus. And now there’s AIDS; what would I do if I got AIDS and gave it to Sunantha ? I´d pretty well have to marry her, wouldn’t I?
Now I see the girl is getting impatient; she does not want to float around in this inner tube all day and why doesn’t this stupid farang, this Western ninny, stop making eyes and writing in his little book? He should come down here and talk to me and take me to his hotel and fuck me and give me money. Maybe he’s on holiday from his big job in the U.S.A. and will stay here for a week and we will come here every day and play in the water and he will drink beer on the beach and I won’t have to go sit in the bar trying to make strangers come in and buy drinks. Then when he goes away he will give me a beautiful present maybe some gold chains and some more money and I will get Bon the cashier to write nice love-letters for me, not thirty-baht ones but the fifty-bahl ones that are two pages long and tell him the times I think of him everyday and ask him when is he coming back. And he will come back next year and ask me to marry him and I will go to live in the U.SA. and I will have two maids and two cars and I won t have to talk to strange men if I don’t want to. Or maybe he’s from Switzerland. Lek at the Caligula Club says Switzerland is very beautiful. Maybe he will buy me that nice dress Lek and I were looking at yesterday. It was only 300 baht.
The noise level on the bus was amazing.
The driver had some Thai rock ‘n’ roll going full tilt on the stereo, while at the same time the drums and castanets were jamming away at the back. There was something in the Thai national character, I reflected, that led them to crave noise. Anything that was supposed to be sanuk, ‘fun’, was defined by its vehicle of noise. I guessed we had to be having a ball, then. I looked at Sunantha, and saw she was falling asleep. Noise? What noise? she seemed to be saying. She and I lived in different worlds, I thought, not for the first time. Our life together would be a constant grinding of cultural gears.
Behind us and across the aisle were a gaggle of teen-age girls. Very pretty girls, excited and happy. Unfortunately. Their lively chatter was a significant part of the general bedlam which imprisoned me. ‘Lively chatter’ doesn’t quite do it—it sounded as though somebody had just tossed a grenade into an aviary, or maybe even bombed the whole goddamed zoo. Their ringleader, a doe-eyed cutie-pie with bangs and dimples, was twice as happy and twice as excited as her nearest competitor. I was trying to find a better simile than “like a distraught parrot” when I inadvertently slipped off to sleep. I wo
uld’ve told you it was impossible, but I definitely dozed off for a few moments.
He can be a homosexual, can he? Why is he all alone? But he is looking at me and I can see he is interested in me. I think he has a nice face, though maybe he is a little old. And he has a pretty big stomach, but he looks strong and healthy. What is this ‘AIDS’ everyone is talking about? You have to be a homosexual to have it, Lek says, and the men get all skinny and tired-looking, and this man looks healthy and rich. Maybe his wife is dead and he is lonely. Why doesn t he come down here to the water? Now I´m giving him a big smile. Is he shy? He’s writing away in his book, maybe he is a teacher. Do teachers in the U.S.A. make a lot of money? He looks very intelligent and kind maybe I will go up and ask him if he will rub oil on me. But he looks so serious and polite, how can I just go up and talk to him? Why doesn’t he come down here to swim? Looking at me and writing in his book.
Writing in this book full of pointless thoughts and very little punctuation, what Sunantha doesn’t know wont hurt her and realistically speaking the chances of getting AIDS, especially if I use condoms, is minimal, about the same I’ll bet as having a big shark come up and eat me here in this beach chair.
I’d definitely been asleep, right up till when the distraught parrot banged on the back of my seat and shrieked “You! You!”
My eyes opened to find a cellophane packet of something that looked a lot like dried and pressed cowflaps being thrust at me.
”You eat! Good! Aroil”
Sunantha said something to the Good Samaritan in Thai, and she subsided into her seat, the object of much admiration on the part of her companions — she’d baited the foreigner and lived.
Awake again, gritty-eyed with misery and fatigue, I said to no one in particular, “My fucking balls are on fire.” Which was true.
“Why you say ‘fu-king’ so much today? It doesn’t sound very good.” Sunantha sounded enough like my mother to piss me off some more. I thought about having a cigarette, and became conscious of a piteous kind of mewing which, it turned out, was coming from my lips.
“You sick?” asked Sunantha. “You want to stop bus?”
I couldn’t get back to sleep. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, deeply and regularly, counting odd numbers in and even numbers out. I got up over a thousand nine hundred and fifty before we rolled into Pattaya.
Just the fact of being off the bus and away from the drums and the maddened jungle birds and having no knee under my chin was making me feel much better. And there was the sea. Beautiful.
Pattaya Bay was calm, but further out I could see there were whitecaps. Jomtien Beach, south and around the point, would be perfect; it would be a fine day for sailing.
Aside from bargirls, Sunantha was about the only Thai woman I knew who wasn’t all but heliophobic. Sunlight darkens the skin, and dark skin is ugly, as any Thai will tell you. Pattaya Beach bargirls will sunbathe, of course; they’ll play in the sun because they don’t care if polite Thais think they’re ugly or not, and they know that Western men are attracted to a good tan, so it’s good for business. Otherwise, however, it’s a rare Thai lady who’ll expose herself to the sun except maybe at gunpoint Most of them would just as soon have leprosy as a suntan.
Sunantha was different She’d told me again and again, up in Bangkok, how she missed the sun and the sea, and how she loved it when her skin turned dark, it made her feel so healthy and beautiful. Of course, I had to wonder how much of this was for real, and how much was part of her plan to weave the ties that bind.
On top of that, she was a good swimmer, she said. An unusual accomplishment for a Thai lady. If it was true, I’d told myself. As it turned out, though, Sunantha could swim, and that morning I rented an eighteen-foot catamaran and we sailed out from Jomtien Beach towards the island of Koh Larn.
What I liked about catamarans was their easy speed, their grace and ease of handling. Not wishing to alarm Sunantha, however, I’d neglected to tell her my experience as a sailor had been limited mostly to mono-hull dinghies. I had taken catamarans out a couple of times before, of course. Never in exactly these conditions, mind you, but what the hell; a sailboat is a sailboat, right?
Sunantha and I hung from our toes traps, leaning hard against the wind as we flew along, one hull of the cat in the water, the other, our perch, lifted in stylish defiance of the wind which sang in our sails. We flew, we stormed, we shot from one swell to the next, creatures as much of the air as of the water. With one hand I had the mainsheet hauled in tight, while with the other hand on the tiller I worked the rudders, feeling for the perfect synergism of wind and sea, coaxing the last bit of speed from our craft.
My hangover was a thing of the past, swept away in the stream of briny exhilaration.
“I am so freeel” Sunantha’s joyous scream tore from her lips and whipped back at me. She was grinning like an idiot, holding the end of the jib-sheet across her straining thighs. She’d never looked more beautiful.
We sheered diagonally down off one big swell, and I suddenly had to let the mainsail out a touch and thrust the tiller over to avoid plunging right into the base of the next wave, big as a house. The bow of the far pontoon dug in ever so slightly, an abrupt tug merely hinting at the awesome power hidden in those massive volumes of water as they swelled and rolled. I’ll be darned, I thought; I’ll bet you could turn somersault with this thing, no problem.
Hardly had this idea entered my mind when, skimming the water like a gull, we crested another big one, skated down the far side, and plowed right in with the starboard hull.
”This is lovely, lovelyl” Sunantha was yelling as, with a casual disregard for her epiphanic delight and my seamanship both, we were grabbed and hurled arse over teakettle into the sea.
Sunantha hollered in outrage, and I had a pretty clear idea what was bothering her.
“It’s only jellyfish, for Chrissakes!” I screamed, my legs and lower torso on fire. “Don’t for Chrissakes panic!”
In fact, she wasn’t for Chrissake panicking, as she pointed out to me in fairly calm tones. “Jerryfish?” she asked. “You mean maangaproonl Are they dangerous?”
No, this kind wasn’t really dangerous. No more dangerous, I’d bet, than her cut-rate mentholated talcum powder, I told her as we clambered up on the lower hull.
We stood to hold on to the higher one.
“Are we okay?” she asked.
Fortunately, we hadn’t actually turned turtle; we were on our side with the sails flat in the water. I uncleated the jib. “No problem,” I said.
I was impressed and pleased at her sang-froid. Not your typical Thai lady, in my experience. I told her we’d simply get the boat righted, and it would be back to the beach for some nice noodles. Sure, and cold coconuts, if she wanted. No problem. The stings would burn for a while, but they would go away. No, there’d be no scars.
I hoped that’s all there would be to it, anyway. If we had been in a dinghy, I would’ve had no misgivings whatever. This was a catamaran, however, and I had never capsized a cat before. There was no centerboard to stand on, for one thing, for leverage to roll the boat upright. But I could see I’d better do something soon, because if the boat did go right over, with the mast underneath us, we’d for sure never get it righted again. We would have to wait for who knows how long, on a day like this, waiting for help. As we rose and fell on the swell, I could see the beach a few miles distant, and the hills around Sattaheep half obscured in the haze behind it.
But I didn’t want to pass on any of these reservations. If Sunantha started to panic, things would be a mess.
”Does this happen often?” she asked in a matter-of-fact but rather disappointed tone of voice. I got the feeling all exhilaration had pretty well passed.
Oh, sure, I told her; all the time. No problem. I unlashed a couple of spare ropes from the canvas deck and spliced them before going into the water to tie the line around the mast. There were no more jellyfish, I was pleased to report to Sunantha when she expres
sed concern for me.
Once back standing on the lower hull, rope around my waist,
I threw myself back as far as I could, hoping my 190 pounds of
weight would be sufficient I repeated this maneuver again and
again, standing on tiptoe at the very edge of the hull before throwing
myself back in the attempt to gain maximum leverage. Before long I was bruised and bleeding from rope-burns, at the same time I was swearing profusely in two or more languages.
Sunantha told me I shouldn’t use bad language, which comment elicited from me a colorful oath in French, one I hadn’t thought to utter in years.
Sunantha stood on the hull as well, tugging futilely at a bit of the rigging, trying to assist. “We need help,” she suggested finally, without specifying exactly where this help was to come from.
About then I suddenly felt some give. Definitely, the mast and sails were lifting. A wave caught us just right, and I heard Sunantha give an exuberant cheer as we fell backwards into the water; the starboard hull came down with a crash and the mast snapped upright, sails flapping wildly in the wind.
Then the wind caught us and capsized the boat again. The mainsail slapped down to cover us both, and I felt Sunantha kick against me as she swam out from under. When I popped up beside her I heard her ask me why, and did I really know what I was doing? I could tell she was annoyed. Annoyed but under control; let down but willing to be fair. Fair enough, I supposed. I felt a little deflated myself. I told her how we needed to get the bows pointing into the wind this time, or the same thing would happen when we got the boat righted again.
“Why didn’t we do this before?” she asked, reasonably enough, but I didn’t have a good answer.
So we both kicked and pushed and managed to swing the catamaran around into the wind. I told Sunantha to stay in the water kicking, while I got up on the hull again and had another go at sawing myself in half with the rope trick. In the course of time we did get it righted again, and this time it stayed up.
Bangkok Knights Page 21