Private Dancer

by Stephen Leather

  He turns into an animal when we get to the Plaza. And he's got a thing about katoeys. I reckon he might be a closet gay but he's scared to admit it. I mean, when all's said and done, katoeys are men. They might be transsexuals, they might have their dicks cut off, but they're still men. And it's not regular sex he has most of the time, it's oral and anal and that smacks of homosexuality to me. How do I know? Because Jimmy boasts about it all the time, that's why. It's like he's proud of it.

  Rick and Matt are going the same way. There probably isn't a girl in the Plaza that Rick hasn't been with, and now he's working his way through the katoeys. Jimmy and Rick kept telling Matt how great it was in bed with katoeys and eventually he tried one from Zombie. Now I think he's on the turn, too.

  I try to steer clear of the three of them in the Plaza. They're okay in Fatso's, but I find them a bit sad when they're in the Plaza. Jimmy's too stoned to talk and Rick's chat-up technique is to stick out his tongue and lick the tip of his nose. Matt is okay, but he tries too hard to impress the other two.

  I actually started getting fed up with the bars after I'd been here for six months or so. After a while they all start to look the same. And most of them play the same music. It's not unusual to walk out of one bar with a song playing and to walk into another bar to hear the identical tune. I don't know how Jimmy and Rick and the rest can keep going night after night. The girls, too, start to look the same. Not because they've all got black hair and brown eyes, that's not what I mean, it's more their attitude. ‘You very handsome. Where you from? Where you stay? Buy me drink? Pay bar?’ Every man is a potential customer, and once they've worked out that you’re not interested, they move on.

  Most of the time I don't go into the bars these days, I sit outside. It's more civilised, and there's less pressure. I sit and drink a coffee or two before heading home, it's a great way to unwind. Some of the girls have become friends, too, because they know I work in Bangkok, they know I'm not the same as the tourists and losers who just come here for cheap sex.

  My favourite bar is Spicy-a-go-go. They've got a big outdoor bar with two televisions where they show all the English football matches. It's a great spot to sit, you can see everyone who comes into the Plaza and there's a hamburger stand close by if you fancy a snack. I know the owner and if he's not too busy he'll often sit down for a beer and a chat.

  That's where I met Troy. Troy isn't the usual type of bargirl, she never hustles drinks, not from me, anyway, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone pay her bar fine. She's pretty, just over five feet tall with shoulder length hair and eyes that always seem to be laughing. Perfect teeth. Almost all the girls you see in the bars have perfect teeth. They never seem to go to the dentist either. It must be the diet. No processed sugar or the fact that they eat lots of fruit.

  Anyway, Troy used to come and sit outside whenever she wasn't dancing. She'd just sit and watch what was going on, maybe chat to another of the girls. She never approached customers, and the first time I asked her if she wanted a drink she just shook her head. It wasn't as if she was playing hard to get or anything, she just wasn't interested.

  She told me later that she could live off what she earned as a dancer, and she was happy with that. She didn't dance naked, or even topless. The way she explained it to me, if she worked in a local restaurant, she could earn two thousand baht a month, maybe two and a half thousand. If she could get a job in a department store, she might get three thousand baht a month, but for that she'd need a school leaving certificate, and she didn't have one of those because she'd had to stay at home and take care of her younger brother when she was eleven. But if she danced in Spicy-a-go-go, she could earn four thousand baht a month, plus commission on drinks. Even without hustling drinks, that would give her an extra couple of thousand baht a month. Troy said she could live quite easily on six thousand baht a month, and still have money to send back to her family.

  It made economic sense to me, and I respected her decision to work in the bars but not to prostitute herself. She told me that she didn't approve of what went on in the bars, but that she had no choice. She was nineteen years old with a limited education, what other choice did she have? I felt so sorry for her.

  The first time I met Troy I tipped her five hundred and she couldn't believe it. She tried to refuse, but I made her take it. I told her I wanted to help her. The next night I paid her bar fine and took her to dinner. She didn't even know how to use the cutlery, kept watching me to see which spoon or fork I used, and then copying. I took her to a German restaurant in Soi 4 and she let me order for her. I only realised later it was because she couldn't read the menu.

  The third night I paid her bar fine and took her back to my house. We talked all night and she slept in my bed. We didn't make love, we didn't even undress, she just lay curled up next to me, her arms around me as if she didn't want to let me go. When I woke up the next day she'd cleaned the house from top to bottom and had cooked me breakfast, a sort of noodle soup with chicken. She stayed with me the whole day. She wouldn't let me pay her, either, she kept saying that she was happy just being with me. Eventually I managed to persuade her to take a thousand baht.

  PETE

  I'd arranged to see Joy in Zombie one Saturday evening. I'd been in Pattaya updating our hotel listing and collecting menus from new restaurants and I'd called her to say that I'd be back in Bangkok over the weekend and asked her to get the bus down.

  I got to the bar just before ten o'clock and it was rocking. There were several dozen girls dancing on the two stages, most of them naked, and it seemed that every farang in the place had a girl on his arm. Or thigh. There was a whiteboard on the wall close to the girls’ changing room which listed the numbers of the girls and which dancing shift they had been assigned to, and there was another column that listed the girls who had been barfined. There were more than thirty names. A typical Saturday, in another couple of hours only the oldest and ugliest girls would be left.

  Joy came running up within seconds. ‘Pete, Mon die,’ she said.

  I didn't understand. Die has several meanings in Thai. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Mon die lau. She die, Pete.’ Die lau. Dead.

  I was stunned. Mon was living in Surin, in the family's house. I'd seen her when I went to visit with Bruno and Pam and she looked fine. And Joy was smiling broadly, as if she was telling a joke.

  ‘Ubat het?’ I said. Accident?

  Joy shook her head. ‘No. Mon kill Mon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  She was still smiling. It was a happy, open smile, or at least that's what it seemed. It was unreal, what she was saying appeared to have no connection with the expression on her face. I kept expecting her to start laughing and for her to tell me that she was playing some sort of joke on me. ‘Mon kill Mon? Khar tua tai?’ Suicide?

  Joy nodded. ‘Yes. Mon khar tua tai.’

  ‘How, Joy?’

  She mimed a rope around her neck and mimed pulling it up.

  ‘She hanged herself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The smile was typical Thailand. She was doing it to put me at my ease, to soften the impact the bad news would have. I understood, but it was still disconcerting. Sunan came up and she was grinning, too. I told her how sorry I was and she shrugged as if what happened wasn't important. I'd always liked Mon. She always seemed more honest and open than Joy and Sunan. I mean, I loved Joy, I really did, but I'm not sure that I trusted her. Not one hundred per cent. But I always felt that Mon was telling me the truth. Maybe that was because I didn't know her as well as Joy, so there was less for her to lie about. That's part of the problem with Thailand, after a while you begin to think that everyone is lying to you.

  I took Joy out for dinner and as we ate she told me what had happened. She said that Mon had been arguing with her husband and that she'd got upset and hanged herself in Joy's bedroom. Joy had found her hanging there and had cut her down and tried to give her the kiss of life. ‘I try
very hard, Pete, but she dead already. I cry a lot.’

  It still hadn't sunk in. I remembered how Mon had smiled as she'd danced, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be showing off her body to dozens of strangers. She had a good body, too, softer and rounder than Joy's, a woman's body rather than a girl's. She was always so alive, so full of fun, I couldn't believe that she'd taken her own life. And what about her daughter, Nonglek? She'd doted on the little girl. Surely no mother with a young child would kill herself.

  ‘What about Nonglek?’ I asked. I knew that Joy loved the little girl, too. She'd often brought her along when she saw me during the day. We'd go shopping with her or go to eat ice cream. I loved watching Joy take care of Nonglek, I could see that she'd make a great mother herself.

  ‘Father take her to his village,’ she said. ‘He say he not want her stay with my family.’

  I could hardly eat, and what did pass my lips had no taste. I ordered another gin and tonic, my sixth since we'd sat down in the restaurant.

  ‘Joy, you told me that Mon's husband had gone. You said they didn't live together.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. He come back to talk with her.’

  ‘And because of that she killed herself?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn't something else?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don't know.’

  I put my head in my hands. It didn't make sense. It didn't make any sort of sense at all. This was a girl who'd worked in a go-go bar, danced naked in front of strangers, slept with men for money. She'd been married, had a child, separated. How could an argument, no matter what was said, make her kill herself?

  Joy put her hand on my arm. ‘I miss Mon,’ she said.

  ‘I miss her too,’ I said. And I did.

  Joy smiled.

  After we'd eaten, Joy came back to the hotel with me. She stayed for two days and then went back to Surin. I had to fly down to Phuket and wouldn't be back in Bangkok for a week. Joy wanted to go with me but it wasn't on because head office was always really tight on expenses and there'd be hell to pay if they discovered that I'd taken a girl with me. Especially a bargirl, albeit one who'd given up work.

  After she'd gone, I thought a lot about Mon. I couldn't understand why she'd kill herself. There had to be something more to it than just an argument with her ex-husband.

  Extract from CROSS-CULTURAL COMPLICATIONS OF PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND by PROFESSOR BRUNO MAYER

  The first case of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Thailand was reported in 1984. As was the case in the Western world, the disease was initially prevalent only within homosexual and drug-talking populations of the country, but by the late 1980s heterosexual sex became the main method of transmission. Estimates of the total number of HIV-infections vary between three hundred thousand and one million, but as testing has only been carried out on a limited basis, no accurate figures are available. There are also difficulties in assessing the number of deaths caused by Aids due to the reluctance of the Thais to admit the existence of the disease. Cause of death is more often than not listed as pneumonia, cancer or opportunistic infection rather than the virus. Indeed, many sufferers refuse to acknowledge that they have Aids because of the stigma which is attached to the disease.

  Realising that the large number of prostitutes working in the country could facilitate transmission to the local population, the Thai authorities instituted a programme of education during the early 1990s in an attempt to teach sex workers that it was in their best interests to use condoms. Free condoms were provided to sex workers and they were encouraged to use them at all times, even with their regular boyfriends.

  Many bars and massage parlours have instituted HIV testing of their girls in addition to their regular checks for sexually transmitted diseases. Some bars will not allow girls to work unless they have a medically-certified clean bill of health, but generally the checks are voluntary and paid for by the girls themselves. As a general rule the girls are checked for STDs once a month, and for Aids every three months. There is no central collection point for statistics resulting from these tests, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the incidence of HIV infection has been rising rapidly. The bars and massage parlours are reluctant to talk about the number of HIV positive prostitutes, but it is considered to be between one per cent and twelve per cent of the girls employed as sex workers.

  If a girl is known to have acquired the virus, she is dismissed, but of course there is nothing to stop the girl going to work in a bar which does not insist on its girls being tested. Generally speaking, those bars which service the tourist and expatriate community are more likely to insist on Aids testing than those which are frequented by locals. It is thought that this is partly responsible for the rapid spread of the virus through the Thai population as a whole. Statistics suggest that up to ten per cent of Army recruits are now HIV positive and two per cent of women giving birth in Bangkok's hospitals have the virus.

  Because of the stigma which is attached to the disease in Thailand, those girls who develop symptoms rarely seek medical help. Instead, they choose suicide. There has been a sharp rise in the incidence of suicide among bargirls over the past five years. Suicide is common among the girls in any case because of the psychologically damaging nature of their work and the tendency for the girls to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, but it is believed that Aids has now become a leading cause of suicides in Thailand.

  JIMMY

  Aids? It's an attitude of mind. I've been here for years and I've never heard of a bargirl getting it. Not from sex, anyway. They test all the girls in the bars and any that are HIV positive are kicked out. It doesn't happen very often, and when it does it's because the girl was injecting drugs. All you have to do is check for needle tracks and you're safe. The idea that you can get it from sex is one of the big con jobs of the age, it's a scare story spread by religious nuts and women who want to scare their men into being faithful. Look, if Aids really was a problem it would have gone through the bars like wildfire. And it hasn't. End of story.

  I've never heard of a farang getting it, either. I've been screwing without a condom here for more than ten years and I've got nothing worse than a dose of clap. Okay, I got gonorrhea of the throat once, but that was my own fault. But Aids, no. I took out a life insurance policy a couple of years ago and I had to have a blood test for that and I was clear. No problemo.

  The guys in Fatso's talk about Aids a lot, and we're all in agreement. Poofters get it, and intravenous drug users. And there's a good chance that a baby born to an HIV-positive mother will get it. But a good old bonk is as safe as it's ever been. Am I sure? Hell, I'm positive.

  PETE

  Joy said she wanted to go home for a few days to see her father. He was becoming a monk, she said, and she said he wanted to divide up his belongings. I didn't quite understand what she meant. It was something like a will: he was giving his land and the house to his children, almost as if he'd died. ‘Pete, I think he give house to me,’ she said earnestly. ‘Everybody in my family very angry. I not oldest, but Father love me a lot.’

  I tried to get her to explain why her father was becoming a monk, but she just shrugged and said that was what he wanted to do. It didn't make any sense to me. Monks didn't work, and Joy was always telling me how poor her family were. She was equally at a loss to explain why he was giving away all his worldly goods. He was only about fifty-five years old.

  Joy didn't seem interested in talking about it, all she wanted to do was to celebrate her good fortune. We went to Zombie and she kept buying drinks for her friends. Well, she ordered the drinks and the chit went into the beaker in front of me, so it was actually me was who was paying.

  Joy seemed to take pride from the fact that she didn't have to work any more. Girls would come up and pay their respects and every now and then she pat me on the arm and say ‘five minutes’ and rush off to speak to someone. She was working the room, making sure that everybody knew she was there
and that she wasn't working. Now she was a customer, spending money rather than earning it.

  Whenever she came back she'd put her hand on my thigh and kiss me on the cheek, marking out her territory, I guess. And whenever another girl sat too close to me or started flirting, she'd speak sharply to her in Khmer. I was flattered by the fact that she appeared to be jealous, and I tried to tell her that there was no need, I only wanted to be with her.

  We stayed until the bar closed and then we walked around to the Dynasty Hotel. We made love, but her heart didn't seem to be in it, and later, when she lay in my arms, she began to cough. I got her a drink of water but it didn't seem to help. ‘I sorry, Pete, I sick,’ she said.

  She rolled away from me and curled up into a tight ball. I put my arms around her again and held her. She kept coughing. I asked her if she wanted some tablets, I had some left over from the last time I had 'flu, but she said no, she had her own medicine in Sunan's room. I told her that I didn't want her to go, that I wanted her to stay the whole night and she said okay, she'd stay. The coughing continued, and you want to know the weirdest thing? I think she was faking it. It didn't sound like a genuine cough, you know? And all evening, when she'd been drinking and smoking and talking with her friends, there hadn't been a single cough.