Then it was off to Bugis Street, where we were initially accosted not by girls but by young boys, some of whom looked no older than eight, each carrying a noughts-and-crosses board. For a dollar they would challenge you to a game.
‘I’ve got to have a go,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty good at this – we played it sometimes at school. I was the acknowledged champ,’ I boasted, fishing out a dollar and nodding to a small kid who had approached with a challenge.
‘Don’t waste your time, Simon,’ Ronnie laughed, ‘No ang mo in history has ever won at tic-tac-toe.’
‘There’s always a first time,’ I said, with immoderate self-confidence. I was good at board games, from chess to silly little noughts and crosses, and I prided myself on not often losing.
Ronnie turned to Dansford. ‘It’s not every day you meet a true sucker. I’m putting ten bucks on the kid and I suggest you do the same.’ Both produced their money and the kid said something to Ronnie. ‘He wants to do the same,’ Ronnie laughed and nodded to the kid, who promptly produced ten crumpled dollar notes, counting them carefully before placing them beside the two ten-dollar notes on the pavement table outside a bar. ‘We’ll have to buy a drink. If you lose, you pay for them as well as the kid’s Coca-Cola,’ Ronnie said. ‘He works this patch with the permission of the bar owner.’
Three games of tic-tac-toe later, much to the amusement of the other two, I’d lost ninety Singapore bucks and the cost of the drinks. ‘Never mind, Simon, the kid is probably his family’s sole supporter,’ Ronnie consoled me with a laugh.
As we moved along, the street seemed to overflow with beautiful young girls collected from the far corners of Asia – Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Indians, Sinhalese, Laotians, Nepalese and, of course, Chinese. They stood outside the neon-lit bars touting for customers, most wearing the smallest possible bikinis, their slender figures gyrating and grinding or even playfully humping a telephone pole or colourful pavement umbrella still open despite the hour. It was a human smorgasbord impossible for any red-blooded young male to ignore, or as Dansford exclaimed, ‘Hey, hey, hey, yeah, man, maybe they didn’t graduate from Vassar but they sure got everything a gentleman could possibly need for his delectation.’
It was a predictable reaction and I recall thinking much the same thing the first time Ronnie brought me there. It was blatant exploitation of poor and unfortunate village girls with no other prospects but selling their bodies and was therefore reprehensible and inexcusable. But this was Asia, so it wasn’t in the least sleazy. The girls giggled and competed with each other in a lighthearted way and seemed to possess an instinct for recognising a first-timer.
‘Hello, handsome man,’ one would call out.
‘You come my bar, darling?’ another would cry.
With one or two exceptions, the girlie bars were much of a muchness. You stepped from the neon glitter of the street through a canvas curtain into a place named Jungle Jim’s, or the Beachcomber, Bangles or Texas Cowboy, the most improbable being a bar called Christmas Carol’s. There were simply dozens of these places. An attractive girl would pull back the curtain that covered the doorway and say, ‘Welcome, handsome man. Come, I show. Inside you can have evee-thing you want.’ Then, after touching her crotch, she would draw her forefinger slowly up towards her navel. ‘Girls very beautiful, very tight, she will make very happy for you special tonight.’
Inside, the music would be very loud and on a stage in the background would be a dozen or more girls gyrating round metal poles to the beat of the music, some topless, others in tiny bikinis, all eyeing the customers. When one caught your eye she would hook her thumb into the top of her skimpy bikini bottom and pull it down so that you caught a split-second glimpse of what was on offer, whereupon the mama-san would emerge. She was invariably an older, plainer woman and usually well known to Ronnie, whom she would greet like a long-lost brother. ‘Too long no see, Ronnie!’ she would shout above the music. ‘Where you been, hey? You bring nice friend. For sure they have good time! I have new girl, very beautiful all for you friend; Cambodia, also Vietnam, you will see.’
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the mama-sans and the welcoming dialogue were more or less interchangeable and Ronnie knew them all by name: Rosie, Dolly, Suzie, Dorothy, May, and the one at Texas Cowboy who was called Holy Mother Mary. They were hard women who ran the girlie bars along strict lines. There was a barman serving drinks at a bar that seated a dozen or so girls and their ang mo clients: soldiers, sailors, tourists in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and businessmen in lightweight safari suits that were almost the expat uniform.
I recall one exchange with a mama-san on my initial visit to Bugis Street. Ronnie had introduced me. ‘Dolly, this is my friend Simon from Australia.’
Dolly was overweight, very short and almost as broad as me, and she looked as though she could pack a mean punch. ‘Ah, Australia! I like Australia man, very kind, very nice. You have kangaroo … Hop-hop, very funny, you lucky man have such kangaroo, big, strong, maybe like you. I also have girl she can hop-hop for you, Simon, she very beautiful hop-hop girl.’
The procurement procedure was the same at every bar: if you selected a girl for a short time or for the night, you paid a bar fine. It was one of two standard amounts you paid to the bar for the time your ‘new girlfriend’ would be absent. There was no sense in pointing out that this was illogical, given the purpose of the girlie bar. You were also expected to buy her ‘lady drinks’ – either cold tea or a watered-down version of whatever she requested, which cost three times what you paid for your beer or Scotch. No girl would allow you, on pain of death from her mama-san, to leave without buying her at least two, but usually three drinks. ‘I must know you, darling. You tell me. What you name? Where you come from. We have happy time. You buy drink for me. We have happy talk.’ Drinks at the bar were a highly profitable sideline both for the bar and the girl, who received half of the cost of every lady drink she could get out of a customer.
The local punters who knew the ropes negotiated the fee for the girl’s sexual favours, or ‘further activity’, as it was euphemistically sometimes called by expats, but the tourists, sailors and visiting business types foolish enough to go into a girlie bar alone paid whatever the girl could extract over and above the usual price.
In my case, and again with Dansford, Ronnie warned us not to get too carried away. ‘We’ll have a few drinks, check out the chicks, but leave any serious decision until last, until we get to the Nite Cap in Victoria Street West. Their girls are the ones who set the standard. Besides, the transvestites come into the street at 11 p.m. You won’t want to miss them because you’re otherwise occupied.’
With Dansford in tow, we hit the Nite Cap just before eleven o’clock. While I suspected, and still do, that Ronnie got ‘squeeze’ from Aunty May, the mama-san, he was correct about the girls. We’d ended up here the night of the Town Club lunch, and while we’d seen some lovely young creatures along the way, these Nite Cap girls were something else again. This was where Ronnie’s Suzie Wong, Moi Moi, worked, but on that particular night he hadn’t sought her services, as we were involved in a ‘last man standing wins’ competition, my bloody stupid attempt to prove I could take him on drink for drink after having behaved like a bit of a moralising arsehole at the Town Club.
By the time the three of us arrived at the Nite Cap, Dansford was pretty drunk. Knowing we would be accompanying him on his first Bugis Street girlie bar soiree, Ronnie hadn’t gone out to lunch, and I never drank during the day, my first on this particular evening having been after the kid had beaten me at tic-tac-toe. Dansford, however, had been drinking since lunchtime.
Aunty May met us, accompanied by three truly pretty girls. Two of them – Veronica and Moi Moi – were known to Ronnie and me; the third was introduced as Swallow and was obviously intended for Dansford.
I’d already done my share of client entertaining with Veronica and Moi Moi over the months I’d been in Singapore, and had taken Ronnie’s advice an
d picked Veronica as my permanent late-night minder. She was paid regardless of whether we slept together. I had discovered, as Ronnie had suggested, that a good massage, a cup of hot green tea and a couple of hours’ kip with your pretty minder on the alert for your guest was much the best way to deal with the client’s night of adventure.
Dansford, ever dapper, declared that Swallow was a splendid choice but, alas, he needed to go to the john urgently. Remarkably polite as he was, he bowed, and I caught him by the back of his collar just in time to stop him crashing to the floor. Drawing himself up to his full height and leaning slightly backwards with just the hint of a sway, he excused himself to Swallow and asked Ronnie for directions.
‘You have to go out the front, turn right then right again and into the lane beside the building and it’s there at the back, a white door with a big “M” painted on it. Would you like me to show you?’ Ronnie volunteered.
‘No, pal, I’ll find it,’ Dansford declared with the stubbornness of the inebriated, then turning to his girl again he said, ‘Now you stay right there, honey. Dansford Drocker will be back ’fore you know it. Ronnie, you see she has any damn thing she wants t’drink. Now don’t you fly away, honey baby. Dansford’s got big eyes for his little Swallow!’ With these immortal words he left and did not return. He was as drunk as a lord but still managed to string his sentences together, whereas I would have been a mumbling fool.
After twenty or so minutes I became worried. ‘Should we go and look for him? He may have passed out in the toilet,’ I suggested.
‘I’ll go,’ Ronnie said. ‘I should have insisted on going with him.’
Ten minutes or so later he returned. ‘No sign of him.’
‘Shit! What now? We better go and look for him.’
‘No point,’ Ronnie replied. ‘No one on the street will tell you if they saw him.’
‘Huh? Why not?’
‘A drunk is good for business. They won’t hurt him but they’ll take his money – just his money, nothing else. If anything else is taken, the cops get really nasty.’
‘C’mon, Ronnie, we’ve got to do something,’ I said, my agitation showing.
Ronnie spoke quietly to Swallow, and she left and returned shortly with Aunty May. After Ronnie explained the situation, she nodded and said, ‘I send.’
She murmured something to Veronica, who kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I be back, Simon,’ then she turned and made her way to the door.
‘She go find, she good.’ Aunty May waited with us. A short time later Veronica returned.
‘He go with Destiny,’ she said, smiling.
‘Oh my God!’ Ronnie exclaimed.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ I asked, concerned.
‘No, no, Dansford’s quite safe. He’ll take him back to Raffles.’
‘He?’
Ronnie laughed, whereupon the girls and Aunty May all giggled. ‘Destiny is the most beautiful transvestite in Singapore,’ he explained.
‘Oh, Jesus, what now?’ I said. ‘He’s pissed – will he know?’
Ronnie shook his head. ‘Probably not. They’re very clever. He’ll claim he has his period but has other ways to please. The main thing is he’ll take his fee for …’ he chuckled, ‘whatever, then put Dansford in a taxi back to Raffles. Destiny has a reputation to uphold.’
‘Ronnie, we don’t say a word about this to anyone, you hear? Promise me, mate.’
Ronnie sighed. ‘Of course, but Dansford probably will. If he doesn’t catch on, he may brag he had the prettiest girl in Singapore. Believe me, Destiny is gorgeous. We can only hope he is too drunk to recall his name, otherwise everyone will know.’
‘If he brings it up with either of us, what do we do?’
‘We tell him discreetly. Let’s hope he doesn’t do it in the company of others. Destiny is known throughout Singapore. Some of his … er, conquests have been notable visitors.’
It was several months later that Dansford raised the subject. ‘You know, Simon, I was pretty smashed, but that first night we went out together and I lost my way coming back from the john, I met the prettiest gal I’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh?’ I said cautiously.
‘Yeah, but that’s the thing. She had her period, but, man o’ man, she still gave me the best sex I’ve ever had.’ He grinned. ‘I have no idea of the various ways and means – I wish I could recall them – but it was a complete education without her even performing the main event.’
I forced a knowing grin. ‘Do you remember her name?’
‘No, that’s just it, I don’t,’ he said regretfully. ‘But, damn, she was good.’
‘Did you pick her up on the street?’
‘Well, yeah, I suppose I did.’
‘Probably a good thing then. When they say they have their period, it’s usually because they may have … you know … something else.’
‘Damn, I never thought of that,’ Dansford said.
‘If you see her again, mate, best to keep your distance,’ I advised.
As if to confirm that he would henceforth keep to the straight and narrow, Dansford married his Chinese housekeeper, a plain-faced, pockmarked Cantonese woman with all the low expectations of men her station in life had afforded her.
He asked me to be the sole witness to the registry-office wedding and of course I agreed, but only after we’d had a bit of a talk.
He was the scion of an old and notable Boston Irish-Catholic family and I couldn’t see a Chinese peasant woman being welcomed by them when his contract expired and he returned home. He was in his mid-forties, and if the grog didn’t get him, he’d be an excellent ad man. ‘Dansford, have you thought this out? What about your family back home? I mean, what about when you return?’ I asked.
‘Simon, good of you to care, but America the brave is no place for the timid. Unlike MacArthur, I shall not return. Bill Bailey can’t go home.’
The subject was never brought up again.
When it came to signing the marriage register, Dansford’s Chinese wife turned out to be illiterate, so her thumbprint appeared on the marriage certificate together with her Chinese name, which translated as Wing. Dansford named her Chicken Wing and insisted that it appear on the certificate, although he was careful never to let the Wing brothers hear her name.
It says something for Dansford Drocker that he married her even though he could have had Chicken Wing provide all the same services without doing so. She could never appear as his wife in Singaporean social circles, and if he informed his Boston family that he’d married an illiterate, heathen Chinese woman, which seemed unlikely, I can’t imagine they would have been happy. But to his credit he insisted that as Chicken Wing did more than could be expected of any servant, she should, as he put it, ‘have the dubious honour’ of being his wife. When it was inappropriate to refer to her as Chicken Wing, he would simply say, ‘My good and excellent wife’.
Chicken Wing put him to bed when he arrived home, usually well past midnight, then got him to work punctually by 9 a.m. looking starched and perfectly presented or, as we might say in Australia, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She never complained and may even have regarded herself as being in a fortunate position, with plenty of time to herself, money to spend and no meals to cook – he couldn’t face breakfast and was never home for lunch or dinner, even on weekends. I must say, I never once heard him complain of a hangover, although I have no doubt that almost any part of the inside of Dansford wasn’t a nice place to be first thing in the morning.
Despite taking Chicken Wing as his wife, Dansford remained quintessentially American. The only concession he made to the local culture was to learn Singlish, the local patois, and this was only because Chicken Wing spoke very poor English. He made no attempt, or very little anyway, to understand the local scene, dismissing the differences between cultures as inconsequential. ‘Chinese are just folk, like everyone else. Not so different to us. Like everyone they hanker after the miracle of the American way. We’ll give it to them strai
ght, no tonic or soda water, straight Kentucky bourbon. No need to fuck with perfection.’ Dansford Drocker sincerely believed that the American way was several notches above anything else civilisation had to offer, and if he liked a layout or a campaign, he complimented it in one of two ways: it was either ‘straight Kentucky bourbon’ or ‘spam from Uncle Sam’.
Dansford’s theory may have been correct for Pepsi-Cola or Wild Turkey, where the product’s American qualities were the attraction, but it didn’t apply to all things emanating from the fifty states of the union. The perfect example of this was the Texas Oil Company, for which we were invited to pitch, already long established in the Asian market and not emblematic of New York.
Texas Oil was my first opportunity to win a big local account with my own creative pitch, working with Dansford Drocker as the account supervisor. If we won, Dansford would be responsible for all the advertising for Texas Oil.
The local Texas Oil chief, Michael Johns, invited us to present our credentials just two weeks after Dansford arrived. He specified that we make the pitch in three days’ time and to front up at the Texas fuel refinery for a briefing the following morning.
Johns was a large, lumbering Texan beginning to go to fat, an ex-marine who wore a Stetson and cowboy boots and who when dressing formally added a silver tie toggle, a fawn, twill-work tasselled shirt and steer-horn silver belt buckle. He was now, after three marriages, a bachelor and was known to have an eye for the ladies, not only in expat society, where they called him Big Loud Mike, but also in the girlie bars, where he was predictably known as Cowboy Tex. This all came to us via Ronnie, who knew everyone and informed us the Texan boss of Texas Oil didn’t like being called Michael Johns but much preferred his nickname or simply ‘BLM’. When in his cups, which was fairly often, he was known to lament, ‘Man cain’t change his name. The goddamn name my pappy and mama give me ain’t good, man! When them two names’re throw’d together like that – Michael Johns – they sound like some goddamned limey faggot.’
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