by Al Culler
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY: Al Culler on Smashwords
Asiatic Moments
Copyright © 2018 by Al Culler
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Asiatic Moments
by Al Culler
nightlife tales from Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Pattaya and more
Khmer Extreme
Sharky’s, Phnom Penh, as civilized as the bar scene gets in Cambodia. Found a bit of the central bar to lean against, fend off a few of the more unsavoury women, one so far gone she took no notice of my polite refusal to exist on the same planet. She eventually moves away a few yards, settles down to staring daggers for the rest of my time in the bar. Water off a duck’s back.
Women, mostly in groups, swirl through the bar, eyeing me up but getting nowhere fast. Easy if all you want is a quick three hole routine from one of the Vietnamese girls but if you want to plunge right on into the core of the country via one of the hotter than hell Khmer bints, well, you just have to hold tight awhile and wait for the dream zone. Must ruin the minds of the culture buffs that the fastest way into the heart of the land is through some teenage babe running on an excess of desperation and sexuality.
I was down to drinking Beer Lao out of the can, bottles scarce for some reason, the rest of the beer on offer only fit for life in a sewerage treatment plant. Had to gulp it down pretty fast, the ambient temperature in the large saloon not far off sauna levels, something repeated in most Phnom Penh dives. I am maybe the oldest guy there (at fifty), the airplane loads of fat, bald aged sex tourists largely absent compared to Bangkok. Whatever, loads, loads, more femmes than guys and that’s all that really counts, right?
Click, click, click, not exactly bored as there is always an edge to Cambodia even if it’s as likely to be in the madness of the farang attracted to the place as the deep insanity of the ex-brothel gals; one Arabic lout kept throwing pure pulses of evil my way, for some obscure reason. Click, click, click… my brain suddenly tries to leap right out of my head when I clock a ridiculously sublime young lady.
In another - saner and shyer - life I might’ve let her walk right on past but not now. Not with someone who made most movie stars look downright drab and not when I’ve taken the ultimate risk by entering the Heart of Darkness (there is a Phnom Penh bar called just that, but it’s kind of mild and boring before midnight). I tap her arm as she passes, enough effort for her to turn and almost blind me with THE SMILE. Dream land entered,
In Thailand I have enough language to get by, in Cambodia I haven’t a clue – total culture shock. And the most education a lot of the girls get is a clout around the head when they are tardy doing the daily domestic chores. The only language she has that I understand, the heat out of her body, eyes brimming over with beauty and that smile.
A bit of sign language, writing in the grime on the bar top, turns out she is twenty (going on sixteen in my estimation) and has been in the bar scene for a whole week (probably as meaningful as saying this is my first time in a Phnom Penh bar). Needing to keep a grasp on reality I glance around the bar, find the Arab guy about to burst out of his clothes in total rage; synching up with the hooker I’d already rejected. Some people.
I buy the babe (call her K) a drink and some food. The reaction I receive, like it’s the first bit of kindness she’s ever enjoyed. The food looks nowhere near up to Thai standards but it’s cheap enough. She eats like she’s afraid someone’s going to snatch the food away from her but any illusions I hold about her frailty immediately dissipate when some Vietnamese hooker tries to grab part of the action. The look she gives her would-be rival convinces me this is one tough lady (it convinces the Vietnamese, too, who does a rapid disappearing act); just how I like my women. No bar-fines, twenty dollars long time the going rate, we waltz on out of there, a minor delay while she picks up her ID card from security downstairs.
After a bit of an argument, my motorcycle taxi-driver agrees to take the extra passenger – I really don’t want anything to do with the fifty or so male moto-taxi drivers loitering outside Sharky’s – god knows how many of them are pimps. I check backwards that none of them are following us. The bike’s some crap Chinese copy of a Honda step-thru, held together by duct-tape and prayers, but the traffic density scarce in the night and our progress miserly. But ten minutes is enough…
The Khmer style disco’s packed with locals, K drags me over to a table overflowing with young gals. Not a pimp in sight. A holy sight, Beer Lao in a Bottle! K sits just close enough to be Khmer dignified whilst charging my body with a thoroughly sacred heat from her 40kg’s of rolled steel. The music not that dissimilar to Laotian, which does it for me. The gals chatter despite the waves of bass coming from the speakers, suggesting the Khmer men are even more poorly endowed than the Thai’s.
Probably shouldn’t think such thoughts, the next thing I know I’m in the middle of a war-zone. Some wizened Khmer man grabbing one of the girls and trying to punch her face off which brings all her friends out in a frenzy of kicks. A bit more local colour than I really wanted, I try to grab K and get the hell out of there but she wants part of the action.
Click, click, click… total loss situation, if I pile in every Khmer man in the place will want a bit of the Culler carcase. My taxi-driver pops up out of nowhere – the last I’d seen of him he was laid out asleep atop the motorcycle – genuine concern apparently writ deep in his face (and I was only paying him a couple of dollars for a night’s work…). He points fervently at the exit whilst I point equally righteously at K who seems totally transformed into some kind of warrior… and, god help me, all the more alluring for it!
These Khmer guys tougher than they look as I find myself being force-marched towards the exit despite not having paid for my three bottles of beer. The Cambodians seem to have a thing about killing or beating the shit out of each other out of sight of foreigners… Glance back as I reach the exit, catch K’s eye and jerk my finger at the exit whilst the local bouncers wade in with what look like bloody big steel bars, pure inbred insanity distorting their faces. K ducks and dives through the melee with a big grin all over her face as she finally throws herself into my arms. Meanwhile, the moto-driver’s doing a little of jig of impatience, shitting himself that I am getting a view of the real, albeit mostly well hidden, Khmer nature.
It’s one o’clock in the morning, finally a breath of cool air wafting through the mostly darkened city, amplified by the driver’s attempts to break through the 40mph barrier. For some reason K and I suddenly dissolve into hysterical laughter, not the wisest move on a motorcycle that gives every impression of falling apart under us. Back at the hotel, the driver waves off my money, gets the hell out of there
and is never seen again. Weird chap!
Hard steel and velvet, wild moist heat and a kind of almost out of body experience ensues as K and I hit the bed. The gal seems to want to rip my soul out of my body, reconstitute it and make me her love slave for as long as my heart lasts. Far from satisfied with the usual hour of sex, she demands two repeat sessions using every morsel of her body to keep me running. God knows where she spent her youth – a lot of the girls in the farang orientated bars did their training in the K11 brothels, another piece of hell on earth – but I ain’t complaining, all records have been cancelled, shattered.
She’s still there in the morning, clamped around my body as if her life depended on it. I have another day in Phnom Penh – a rather dismal city once away from the riverside where the prices have been racked up accordingly – and no way is she going to leave my side. No passport, of course, so I can’t even entertain the fantasy of getting her on the plane to Bangkok the next day and I don’t have the dosh to survive in the wilderness of the Khmer capital. Bastard world!
Makati Mainline
In Manila Zen is very, very important – about the only way to survive the car exhaust smog to breathe very, very shallowly. Awareness of the unusual also paramount, as even in upmarket Makati, the down and out populace have a penchant for planting small bombs in unpredictable locations. Not your mad terrorist wallahs, just completely out of it animals who together with most Asian DJ’s and wailing motorcyclists can only define their existence by making the maximum amount of noise. Several times, apparently benign Makati streets I’d walked with a feeling of relative security had later been reported as having bombs explode in their midst. Bloody frightening, that.
Throw in the odd, seemingly pointless, military rebellion, not that surprising that most refugees from the Thai experience want to catch the first plane back to Bangkok. But I am made of sterner stuff than that, British stiff upper lip and all that shit… I dress right down, making like an ageing hippy who no-one would bother to rob, maim or mug – just not worth the effort. Hopefully; but you never know in Manila. Get into the wrong taxi at the wrong time – some macho wimp, with a silly moustache and huge beer belly, who’s been given a going over about the lack of money from his wife or mistress - well, any kind of shit can go down. And the same goes for the cops and the louts hanging around on street corners, they all look like they would cut your throat or blow your brains away on the mildest of whims.
Okay, it’s nine o’clock of a Manila evening and I step out of the hotel on to Burgos Street, the wrong end of Makati, a narrow streak of neon amid the chaos of auto’s and strange motorcycle taxis with an extra wheel and ugly carcase added on any which way - there is absolutely no way I would even try to contort my body into one of the awful abortions; their mechanical ugliness matched only by the attitude and appearance of most of the men in the area.
Left, right or straight across the road it doesn’t really matter, the area dotted with almost interchangeable go-go bars, mostly all owned by the same goons. The good thing about the PI, the poverty’s so deep that it’s easy to spot the katoeys, they are so incredibly ugly they will never, ever raise the dosh for a Thai style gender-bender transformation… I duck and dive past a couple of the vile creatures and finally earn street cred by doing a little Ninja move with my hands to fend off one of the faster moving beasts of the night.
Zen, it’s over even before I’ve even figured out what I’ve done. Don’t ask, I don’t know where this shit is coming from, either. I’m feeling high, I’m feeling lucky and I’m running in the Zone where anything can and most probably will happen – always dangerous, because when you’re a fifty year-old single male who actually looks like he’s running loose on the back of a feeling of immediate happiness there always going to be a lot more than one old biddy who’s going to try to ground ya out back down to some kind of dismal reality.
Figure this into your liturgy – who’s going to give you the most hassle, some eighteen year old country gal who’s just arrived in town or some old dear whose sole education was in the defunct American bases twenty years ago and has held a constant, huge grudge against the male population because she never got enough luck to pull her out of the scene? And if you need me to answer that, kindly stick to bible reading, bubba.
No surprise, then, the first bar I step into, half a dozen aged bitches are on me like piranha fish on a displaced penguin. I haven’t been in town for a long time and look odd enough to have the patina of innocence engraved on my soul – important that in a madcap Catholic country. These women insistent and desperate that they have something that could interest me and don’t want to take no for an answer. They contort their faces into surreal sucking motions and feel around in my groin for some kind of reaction but my cock and brain are in total synchrony; they are firmly left flaying against the gods at ground zero.
My incantation for the night, dream on, dream on, and after a while, after a fashion, it works like, well, a dream. Makati go-go’s are a lot more Soi 33 than top floor Nana Plaza, unlikely that you will find some desirable wench demonstrating how far she can thrust a plastic penis up her backside (and thank god for that, right, chaps?). Nakedness – well maybe up close in a darkened corner but on stage not a chance, even g-strings considered risqué though conversely much more a normal piece of underwear in the PI than in Thailand. And I can say this with some authority.
San Miguel beer I can happily take, prices cheaper than in Thai go-gos – but the lady’s drinks are two to three times what you’d pay in Bangkok. And bar-fines – if you need to ask, don’t bother applying. I’m still feeling lucky, but the kick is to be totally indifferent to the outcome; women thrive on a challenge. The key, of course, is to grab a babe before taking too much beer on-board, some guys so far gone on the alcohol their only sane moment of sobriety after months in-country when they wake up in the church wondering what the hell is going down and hoping that the bint next to them is the bride’s mother and not the actual future wife…
Swirling flesh half hidden by nightwear on the stage at the end of the long, narrow bar – par for the course in Makati – and scowling waitresses; a couple could be real knock-outs if they readjusted their attitude and got with the game – most likely already supported by rich farangs and only doing the bar gig to keep the boredom at bay. Strangely, given the absolutely crap food in the PI, a lot of the girls sport longer, thicker, shinier hair than their Thai sisters. Wild manes that can envelop ya in a secret little world of lust and desire back in the hotel room – and, again, I can say this with some authority.
Click, click, click; here we go again. Some absolutely divine teenager makes the connection: I’ve fended off the already damned and ain’t going anywhere other than deep into the Zone. Play the game – what does an eighteen year-old Oriental version of Kate Moss see in a fifty year old player who believes his best moment is yet to come? Well, if she actually turned out to be an honest babe (an oxymoron if ever there was one) a possible fast exit from the bar scene.
Not only beautiful but heated by her own personal nuclear reactor. If this was really my first time in the Orient then I would’ve been down on my knees in lustful supplication – merely after a f..king handshake. Girls with that kind of heat running through their body, a straight vibe from the depths of their pussy hardcore into your cock, they run at about one in five hundred of the bargirl population. The kind of heat that would revive you after twenty beers and send you all the way to heaven or hell. And, she’s so young she probably doesn’t quite understand her uniqueness; not just yet, anyway.
I give in, buy her an exorbitantly priced cola on the understanding that she will sip it like expensive wine. If she downs it in a second then she can f..k off, unique or not. But she passes the test despite the predatory waitresses and rather demented looking mamasan who’s trying to angle on in for some kind of commission. The babe’s with the game, our concentration on each other eventually dissipates the greedy, lazy, out-of-it bitches – I really can’t
stand these people, if they can’t do the go-go gig they are dead in the Zone and all their hollering won’t change a thing.
It happens like this, some nights it take twenty bars to find a decent women, other times it goes down fast, the first bar you walk on into, when it feels too easy to be true and you figure you have to work a lot harder than that; but you don’t, because however long you’ve been in the scene sometimes the luck runs your way… sometimes.
And then the little bitch threw back her head in laughter at something I said, that swirling mane of hair soaring in the neon and revealing on the left-hand forehead a very, very nasty clump of purple lesions that defines skin cancer that mostly affects ancients and only appears in very young girls if they have HIV on the cusp of turning into AIDS. Fast exit? I all but levitated outta there!
Elephant Man
Minding my own business, the receptionist at the low end Chiang Mai hotel demands that I accompany her on an outing on her day off. She’s a long way from the Zone, probably just about acceptable on a wet Wednesday night in Watford. Tell her some lies about business to attend to that day. Despite going out of my way to save her face I only receive a nasty scowl of disbelief for my effort. Time to change hotels?
I tried once before and sheepishly had to book back in an hour later. The plan was to move into a nearby apartment, I’d even given the manageress a 5000 baht deposit after a run-around about only wanting to stay in a top floor room to avoid the predatory mosquitoes – and they can be huge in Thailand’s northern capital. Despite repeatedly telling her that I would not countenance a lower floor when I turned up with my luggage she had decided that was where I was going to stay. Half an hour later I had my deposit back and a wonderful parting grimace. Welcome to Thai logic, an art particularly well formed by CM locals.