~~~
‘Where is toilet?’ I ask one of the ladies serving drinks, in a grammatically incorrect but uncomplicated English I’m hoping will be more easily understood than the Queen’s version .
‘There,’ she says, pointing to the side street.
‘Good,’ I reply, as I get up. ‘I come back, free cocktail.’
I quickly make my way out of the bar, walk up a ramp that leads to a staircase entrance to the Hollywood Discotheque, then make a sharp right turn around the discotheque and into the core of Soi Easy. I scamper past several bars, hardly noticing them. The toilet is about half way down the Soi; when I get there I fish out a few coins from my pocket and let the attendant at the entrance pick the required 5 baht out of the palm of my hand, before going in.
A couple of minutes later I walk out with my equilibrium restored; except, instead of turning left I turn right, and by the time I realise the error I am at the back of the Soi, being confronted by two very effusive ladies in front of the Secret Erotic Club.
‘Inside. Free,’ one of them says.
She gives me a sweet smile, the persuasive power of which only a male of the human species could fully appreciate. I manage some resistance, but am overwhelmed when the second lady clasps my hand, pulls aside a curtain and ushers me into the club.
A dazzling array of lights and sounds greets me. Before I can compose myself, a drinks-lady hurries over, grabs my arm and sits me down on one of the couches that line the walls. She places a coaster on a small table in front of me and pulls out a menu from somewhere behind her back.
‘Drink?’ she asks.
Only a few metres away, four Thai ladies are dancing around a number of poles fastened into a stage that juts out from the wall across the room. White bath towels are demurely wrapped around their torsos, as if they had just come out of the shower.
‘Local beer,’ I reply, reluctantly averting my eyes from centre stage. ‘Chang.’
As the drinks-lady moves off with the order, I survey the surroundings in a more relaxed manner. The room is fairly small for a club, perhaps sixty feet by sixty feet, and is dimly lit, except for the stage featuring coloured spotlights. A number of tables and red-cushioned high stools are scattered around. Slow, seductive music, of a volume allowing ordinary conversation, fills the space. A few other Western men are dotted around the room, some with Thai ladies in skimpy clothes beside them.
‘Hello. What your name?’ One of the bar-ladies from a cluster in another corner of the club has made her way towards me; she edges up close and rubs her ample breasts against the side of my chest. She is a short curvaceous woman with the thick jet black hair typical of Thai women, which extends well past her shoulders. It emits a sweet, intoxicating aroma.
‘Eddie,’ I reply. ‘What yours?’
‘Mana. Buy lady-drink?’ she asks.
Before I can reply, the drinks-lady has returned. I wonder if the two of them have an ESP connection and whether they’ve performed this double act before.
‘Yes, okay.’
A few seconds later the lady-drink and a bottle of beer arrive; in return I reluctantly part with a sizeable amount of money, even by Western standards.
‘Cheers,’ I say, and we clink glasses.
The four dancers are now moving fervently beside their poles. They simultaneously release their towels to the floor revealing narrow tube tops stretched from half-way up their thighs to their belly-buttons. They gyrate a little more, and then pull the bottoms of the garments up to fold over the tops. There are no clothes underneath. One of them returns the garment to its original position, steps down from the stage and sidles up next to a man on one of the couches. He looks delighted with his changing circumstance. Another dancer sits down on a small sofa, placed to one side of the stage, and parts her legs.
‘Where you from?’ Mana asks, diverting my attention away from the stirring activities of the dancers.
‘Australia,’ I reply. I pick up the bottle of beer and take a decent swig. We clink glasses again.
‘You like Thailand?’
It’s hard not to with an attractive dark-haired Thai lady curled up beside me and several naked dancers strutting their stuff on stage, but I realise our language differences would make an accurate answer impossible to convey.
‘Yes, I like Thailand,’ I say, keeping it simple.
The dancing ladies continue to warrant attention with their swirling lithe bodies, and striking dark eyes which intermittently make contact with mine. Mana grasps my hand and places it on her thigh. I take another large swig of beer, and turn my face towards hers. We kiss for a moment, sending swirls of delightful energy to my groin. I turn back a few seconds later to relive the experience, but we’re interrupted by the drinks-lady who returns with the menu. She hands it to me while Mana strokes my chest and nestles into my neck. I’m already feeling the need to empty my bladder, so I tell her I don’t want another drink.
‘No, no,’ she says, pointing to the items on the menu. ‘You want go upstairs?’
She gestures to a staircase a few metres away, which is adjacent to a toilet with a ‘not working’ sign etched across it. I look closely at the menu. It lists the costs of taking one of the bar-ladies upstairs for a ‘short-term’ encounter: 500 baht bar-fine (a typical cost of taking a lady away from her regular duties in a bar or club for a short time), 600 baht for the hire of the room and 1,500 baht for the lady’s pleasurable company in private and air-conditioned surrounds. That adds up to a total of 2,600 baht, or around $85.
I look at the dancing ladies on stage with their flowing, lustrous hair, the luscious Mana enthusiastically embracing me, the staircase leading up to a private paradise, and the door to the out-of-order toilet. Money, ethics, desire, alcohol and a quickly expanding bladder, conspire to make my next move laden with conflicting emotions and needs.
But it’s my bladder that wins out. I let go of Mana, stand up and stride towards the exit, through the curtain and back into Soi Street. I hurriedly make my way to the toilet I had previously engaged, and pull out some coins while in mid-flight. I hand them to the attendant and find the nearest vacant urinal before relieving myself of much of the local beer. When finished, I amble out in a much more contented mood; this time I make the correct turn and find my way back to the Honky Tonk Bar.
narratorAUSTRALIA Volume One Page 23