The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  A.E. Peoria and Marcel leave the hotel, and the mild hallucinogen laced with amphetamines is taking effect, the Oriental music ding-donging, sounding like the French song “Frère Jacques” to Peoria. Peoria thinks that’s pretty hilarious, and they are both talking, fast, talking back and forth and over and under each other, and the blocks pass by like nothing. On Patpong Road there is a Thai teenager with baggy pants and a skateboarding decal on his shirt, handing out flyers, and Marcel approaches the Thai teenager and says they would like to see a show. A.E. Peoria says, Wait a minute, Marcel, the guidebook says never trust the touts, never go with a tout anywhere, and then they are walking up to a second-floor club. Never go up to the second floor of any club on Patpong. Marcel says that is the very reason he has chosen a tout and that he has gone up to the second floor: because the guidebook says no. You must not ever pretend the guidebook has wisdom, Marcel says.

  They are sitting in the back corner and they are the only two men in this club and a horn blows when they walk in, and a woman walks out onstage and starts a performance; she takes a cigarette and smokes it with her pussy, she puts a straw in her pussy then puts a dart in, and from across the stage she shoots a green balloon and the balloon pops; she takes a Ping-Pong ball and pops it up, and then she does one that Peoria has never heard of before. Peoria is called to the stage, and there is a green bong with water at the bottom and a bowl filled with weed. The Thai woman sits on the bong and says, Light me, and he lights the bowl of the bong and the water starts bubbling up when her vagina begins to suction the marijuana in. This goes on for fifteen seconds, until the translucent bong is now filled with smoke, and the Thai woman stands up and quickly covers the bong to keep the smoke in. Then she takes her hand away and puts the bong to Peoria’s mouth and he inhales the hit, takes it down, and he can feel it work inside his head and he falls backward. He can’t see where Marcel went, but the girl who is onstage is now walking over to him. She has a collection jar and Peoria puts a few hundred baht in, but as he reaches in his pockets, he is swarmed by other Thai girls, and none of them are pretty; they are just female, they are the women who have been broken by selling themselves and are now in their late twenties and thirties and too old to make a good living doing straight-up sex, so they must debase themselves like this, taking vaginal bong hits and smoking Marlboros from their twats. He is getting clawed at and is nervous and he can’t find any money—he knows the money is there but his hand in his pocket keeps going down and down like his arm is rubber and plastic and it could keep going through his pockets until it reaches the floor. He starts to yell, Get the fuck off me, feeling all the tentacles of five Thai girls, zombie squids with slanted eyes. They want his money, that’s all they want.

  Marcel and the tout come charging back to his rescue. Marcel starts slapping the girls and pushing them and kicking them like mangy dogs, screaming at them in French, “Allons-y, allons-y.” The girls are recovering the baht notes on the floor and the tout and Marcel usher Peoria out of the second-floor club.

  The street brings the hallucinations back to a manageable level.

  “This is not the place that I wanted to bring you,” Marcel says. “It is a few blocks more.”

  They start walking, this pair, and there is another neon sign that says “Farang Vilvage,” which Peoria thinks is supposed to mean “village.”

  The word farang is familiar, he thinks: it means “foreigner.” It is like those few Thai phrases he’s learned—soi dee kap, thank you, or hello, one of those two, whatever one it is.

  The girls inside are taller than those in the other massage parlors he’s been in.

  Marcel is handing over money, and then the host and a tall girl are grabbing Peoria by the arms and pushing him into another room. Water is spilling down over him now, and Marcel is in the same room with another girl. Marcel is giving Peoria a sign, the A-okay sign, and Peoria is surprised that despite the drug, he’s got an erection. The girl goes down on him and starts to suck away.

  It is the most amazing blow job he has ever experienced. It is something about the mouth, about the throat, about the grip of solid hands.

  Marcel is laughing hysterically, and even the laugh sounds like “Frère Jacques.”

  “You see, you see how good this is?”

  The tall girl then says to Peoria, you want to blow me now? And Peoria starts to laugh and doesn’t understand, until she lifts up her skirt and there is a penis.

  He remembers what that other Thai word means—ladyboy, ladyboy, ladyboy—and Peoria gets up and says no thanks.

  Marcel, what have you done?

  But he’s not angry, because the spike is good, and Marcel says, okay, we will have them blow each other. They both sit back and watch the two ladyboys give each other blow jobs, for a good fifteen minutes, then Peoria says, I’m tired, man, I’m tired.

  They are trying to wave down a tuk-tuk, and they get one. The man who steps out of the tuk-tuk is an Arab gentleman in a nice suit.

  The Arab gentleman in the nice suit is not getting out of the way. He is engaged in a conversation with the tuk-tuk driver, an argument, scary tonal highs and lows.

  Peoria feels an onrush of the psychedelic fear—the corners of all objects and shapes in his sights pop out, the carriage top of the tuk-tuk taking the neon colors from the signs and the puddles of dead rainwater in the streets and reflecting them back in lines and patterns that jump out at his retinas like a magical net capturing imaginary sea creatures, dancing on a slimy coral reef.

  Accented English of the Arab and broken English of the tuk-tuk driver.

  “My tip, my tip,” says the tuk-tuk driver.

  “Too long, too long,” says the Arab. “In circles you’ve driven me.”

  “No, no,” wails the tuk-tuk driver.

  Marcel, stringy brown mane, bouncing, hunched energy of a five-foot-seven man, raises his left hand above his shoulder and, in a swooping pass with his crusty melanin-spotted and freckled paw, strikes the Arab gentleman on the face.

  A bright flash on the slap’s impact. A.E. Peoria knows that his pupils are well past dilated, both shallow and gaping shiny black holes, and it’s as if he’s watching a panel in a comic strip. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the bubble words ZAM WOW speed off quickly.

  “Marcel, dude!”

  The Arab gentleman, shocked, looks at Marcel, and now it is Arabic and French screaming.

  “Allez-vous en!” and Marcel is shooing the Arab gentleman away from the tuk-tuk, kicking at his heels, arms now windmilling, light touches on the nice suit. Peoria hears a rumbling, a gurgling coming from Marcel’s throat, as if he’d adjusted the treble dial on his own voice, and Peoria can hear the scratchy expectorate forming like angina crackling in a blood vessel, and the sound-expanding properties of the hallucinogen allow him to hear each molecule of the phlegm convalescing into a blob darkened by the red inner walls of Marcel’s esophagus, up past the tonsils, and the image flashes through Peoria’s mind as if he is standing right in front of the jaw and staring down the gullet of Marcel. The blob of spit and mucus flies out with a whoot. The Arab gentleman, arms raised in surrender, is backing away from the tuk-tuk when the loogie takes flight and lands solidly on his lapel.

  Peoria grabs Marcel and dives into the back of the tuk-tuk, holding on to him. The tuk-tuk driver is laughing, and Peoria yells, Go, go, and the tuk-tuk driver starts off and speeds down the street. The Arab gentleman is running behind them, yelling and spitting and screaming, swatting the back of the tuk-tuk, its weak diesel engine accelerating to the speed of a man sprinting, and finally, to a nice twenty-two miles an hour, which leaves the Arab gentleman standing on the street corner, screaming obscenities foreign to Peoria’s ear.

  “To the Oriental,” Marcel says, sitting up.

  “Thank you, sir, soi dee kap,” says the tuk-tuk driver. “The Arabs here are bad, very bad. They come for the Russian girls an
d they are very cheap. No money they give us. The girls say they smell.”

  “Yes, of course, my friend,” Marcel says.

  Regaining composure and seriousness, Marcel turns to Peoria in the back of the tuk-tuk.

  “You are listening, Mr. Peoria, to what he is saying? We from the West, we say everyone is equal, that there are no differences or that the differences are a matter of ignorance. This is fantasy, this is fantasy. We have the Arabs in Paris and you must treat them like that—with spit and kicks. They talk of human rights, these Arabs, and this is the most disgusting of subjects. We are all human, oui, we are. But that is where it ends. The Arabs, you see, think they are better than the West, that is what they think, and like Nazis, they would enslave us all under their sultans and dashikis. They would treat us all like they treat their women, you understand this? This is how they treat other beings that threaten them, these Arabs. They treat them like slaves if they can get away with it. They come here and treat Mr. Tuk-Tuk as if he is a Pakistani servant cleaning the shit off the bowls of the Royal Palace in Riyadh. We are supposed to respect them for it? No, we cannot, we cannot respect them for it. Because we know that they are different—these are traits of humanity, and the Arab is still stupid, he is still stuck with the bedouins, with the nomads. He does not even understand how to use bombs and bullets—they say the Arab understands power only, but he does not even understand what power is today—he understands how to use the clubs, to club his goats and his women, to herd them, and his only power is making more of himself, his only power is fucking his women with their veils off so they produce more like him, they keep coming. Look, they cannot defeat the Jews, ten countries surrounding a speck and they cannot defeat the Jews because the Jews have learned the West’s ways of the bombs and the bullets—the Jews invented them! The Jews have said, No we will not be clubbed like curs, like dogs from beyond the Pale, no, never again. So the Arabs have more children and more children and hope to overwhelm the bombs and bullets with offspring, and this offspring they will call democracy and human rights. Then they will win. And they will go and exterminate the Jews, if they could, with their democracy, they would exterminate them. The Jews know this—they are clever—and the Thais know this. Monsieur Tuk-Tuk, he knows this. Yet your dinner- and drinking-party friends in the West do not know it at all; they want to drown in their fantasy of the liberalism, they want to drown there.”

  Marcel pauses for breath, and as he inhales, Peoria, as if a teleprompter were scrolling across Marcel’s face, sees the words roll by: democracy, human rights, the West, liberalism, ballot box, Israel, free speech, habeas corpus, the United Nations.

  “When your war in Iraq started, we in France, our politicians and our people said: No, you should not. It is stupid for you Americans. L’invasion est une connerie—it is bullshit. We know this of course had nothing to do with morality, the morality of your cause. We French know that this is not what our objections were truly about. It was about the Arabs. We know from Algiers that it is such a foolish game to try to change these minds. We know it is senseless, pointless, and so we offered a warning, and your politicians said, ‘Who is France, on their high horse, with their memories of Vichy, to tell us what is moral? Who are the French, who did nothing while Sarajevo died! You have no high ground!’ And your politicians were correct. We had no high ground; we only had practical advice disguised as morality, disguised as the international community. And this advice was ignored and now you will learn what we have learned: that there is nothing worthwhile, that it is all savage and torture and Islam.” He spat. “Islam.”

  “Oh, you can’t say that about just Islam, dude, all religions are fucked.”

  “Can I not, Mr. Peoria?”

  “I mean, look at the Crusades, look at the Inquisition, look at Northern Ire—”

  “The Crusades! The problem with the Crusades, Mr. Peoria, is that they did not go far enough—they were not successful! That was our chance to rid the world of this Islam, and our forefathers failed at it. Now, with information technology, with such good record keeping, with silly ideas of human rights, the time has passed when you can get away with such a thing.”

  “I don’t know, this all sounds like, I mean everybody is violent. I’m a journalist and—”

  “You need a fatwa!” Marcel screams.

  “What?”

  “You need a fatwa against you, you need a jihad against your name. You need for the ayatollahs and mullahs to condemn you. Then perhaps you will understand, then perhaps your career, which you worry so much about, will be saved,” Marcel says.

  “I think you have to be Muslim to get a fatwa,” A.E. Peoria says. “But that would be pretty cool, I guess.”

  “Cool,” Marcel says. “You Americans and your cool.”

  The tuk-tuk pulls into the arching brick drive of the Mandarin Oriental.

  “Have you looked in your dressers by the bedside?” Marcel says. “There are now two books there at these five-star hotels that cater to all the rich international clients: there is the Christian Bible and there is also a Koran. I will show it to you in my room.”

  The hallucinations are wearing off, and Peoria is left with a general brightening of his vision, a false sense of energy running through his system, keeping him awake as the alcohol exits his bloodstream. He can feel the high coming down and he realizes he needs a drink.

  “I need a drink,” he says.

  “Yes, in my room as well.”

  Inside the lobby, Marcel hits button 16, the top floor, and the soothing music makes Peoria more anxious.

  The two men walk down the hall to room 1614, the corner room, and Marcel takes out a plastic swipe card, thinks about putting it in, then stops.

  He knocks instead.

  A five-foot-nine Thai man, in his early twenties, opens the door. Marcel and the Thai man stare at each other. A soft voice comes from inside the room.

  “C’est toi, Marcel?”

  “Oui,” says Marcel, and he walks into the room, the Thai man stepping out of the way. Peoria follows him in, impressed with what a few hundred more dollars a night can get you at the Mandarin Oriental. The suite is two rooms, a living room with a stylish sofa that leads to an even larger master bedroom with a view of the river and the Peninsula Hotel across it. On the couch is a woman, late thirties, lying in a hotel-supplied bathrobe, untied, left breast open to view under the light of one of the two high-definition television sets—both sets are on, and both sets are airing pornography, which in its repetitive casualness is somewhat disturbing to Peoria’s now fragile mental state.

  “You are standing there like a eunuch, but I know you are not,” Marcel says to the Thai man. “Exit, you can leave now.”

  The Thai man pulls on a pair of jeans, bows, and slips out the door.

  Marcel starts to hunt around the room, moving from one wastebasket to the other, before going into the bathroom.

  “Aha!” he yells.

  He jumps back into the living room, holding two spent condoms in his hand.

  “This is all, two hours I am gone and the man has only filled up two of these? This is not our money’s worth,” Marcel says, throwing the condoms back into the wastebasket.

  The woman, whom Marcel introduces as Valerie, sits up from her languorous film noir pose and looks at Peoria.

  “You have arrived just in time. I was about to fall asleep,” she says.

  Marcel has disappeared inside the bathroom, keeping the door open but turning the water on in the shower, behind a plate-glass see-through stall. The steam starts to fill up the stall, and as Marcel gets naked and steps in the shower, Peoria loses sight of him.

  Peoria goes to the minibar and takes out three small bottles and drinks them. He has reached a point of what might be called a moment of clarity—in the span of two hours he has had oral sex with a transvestite, taken a mild hallucinogen with an obvious non-mild amp
hetamine base, and broken up a shouting match on the street with an Arab. He is taking stock of the evening. It has been a clear case of one thing leading to another. Now he is in Marcel’s hotel room and he doesn’t quite know what to make of it all and is staring at a woman who he assumes is Marcel’s wife. Marcel’s wife, Valerie, has already thrown her bathrobe off, just a little bit more, and is massaging her pussy with a half-smile, seemingly enjoying watching the American’s uncomfortableness.

  It’s all very French, Peoria thinks.

  His response is instinctual—it’s either fuck or flight, either slip out the door, following the Thai male prostitute, who, as the evidence in the wastebasket makes clear, had already made love (is that an appropriate expression here?) to Valerie at least twice, not really knowing what other sexual acts they might have engaged in.

  Peoria, as a modern American male, had been exposed to these kinds of fantasies via the Internet from a very early age. Even before the speed of the Internet allowed users to download highly graphic pixel images and video clips of every debased act there was a market for, he’d been reading erotic stories on what was the most extensive erotic database of stories in English that he’d ever seen. It was quite a collection of stories, this particular website, and it opened his eyes to all manner of perversions by category: teen, bondage and sadomasochism, big beautiful white, groping, bisexual, lesbianism, glory holes, homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, gang bangs, orgies, rapes, violence, snuff, kidnappings, granny porn, MILFs (moms I’d like to fuck), GILFAs (grandmothers I’d like to fuck anally), celebrity fantasies, mind control, incest, interracial, Asian, swingers, nonconsensual, military, extra hair, no hair, smoke. In fact, with all of these stories in such a public and easily accessible venue and seemingly legal—words can say whatever words want to say—he had in his later years wondered if there were any taboos left that he hadn’t seen or read about. He came up with a resounding no: other things, like vomit porn, water sports, scatological porn, fuzzies, plushies (where people like to have sex with stuffed animals or people dressed in animal costumes), had all, at various points, made their way into popular culture, usually in gross-out comedies, and he wasn’t even getting into the hours of Japanese anime he’d watched, with cartoon demons and monsters from other dimensions manhandling and raping unsuspecting Japanese teenagers and children. By the time the Internet caught up to the videos, what he could now watch online didn’t surprise him at all. He had examined, on occasion, the moral implications of this new industry—whether he was some kind of degenerate for consuming the product, and what the effects were on his sex life. Did they give him a false sense of what sex was? And after masturbating to what, if admitted publicly, would seem particularly heinous, he often felt like he’d just eaten a Big Mac and pre–trans fat fries in secret—instant gratification wasn’t very good to the soul. But who believed in souls anymore anyway? Certainly, this trip to Bangkok would suggest a negative correlation with his sexual habits.