by Al Culler
The bars weren’t without the odd babe sporting AIDS lesions... All of the go-go bars have to bear in mind that there are plenty of alternative meeting places absolutely packed out with young gals, the only thing the go-go bars really have going for them is the medical checks (and some comeback if the girl rips off the farang) so they had better get their act together or face a bleak future!
Dog Days
The nineteen year-old babe kept a death grip on my arm the whole time we were in Pattaya, even reluctant to let me do a solo run to the toilet. It probably wasn’t merely my overwhelming charisma, helped along by the Rasputin beard and almost full head of hippy hair; more likely the mere fact that for every foreign male there was something like fifty hot Thai gals on the prowl! Happy days. Oddly, those few punters doing the rounds were mostly young chaps in their prime - cheap holidays in the low season?
Yep, I’d finally hit on Pattaya with perfect timing - no army types, no US navy invasion and not even the mad hordes of Thai families... true, there were a couple of bus-loads of mainland Chinese tourists but they weren’t a problem - they’d paid up front for their hotel and meals; only spent money in the 7-11 and even then the beer would be shared by a dozen or so of them!
There were lots of mad Thai women parading along Beach Road - out of their heads on the usual mixture of cheap whisky, extra strong speed tablets and in all probability a wild old fusion of sexual diseases. Even with the babe in tow, they seemed reluctant to let me go on my way without some attempt at sexual harassment or at the very least throwing a few insults my way. Nah-hee being a popular refrain (pussy-face, Thais generally don’t like beards).
Like many of the locals, the nineteen year-old was covered from head to toe and sporting a rather fetching hat, absolutely paranoid that her deep brown skin would turn Ethiopian black after thirty seconds exposure to the supernova power of the Pattaya sun - one of the disadvantages of moving away from the protective layer of Bangkok smog! Or not!
Saw one Cambodian wench dragged away by the police, kicking and screaming, she was eventually tied to the substructure of the open back of a police pick-up and paraded down Beach Road; the Thais found her antics hilarious and she would probably end up being gang-raped by the cops before being released again.
The only other activity from the cops, stopping farang who were riding helmetless on hired motorcycles - a bloody stupid law in such a hot country, however many lives it saves. Suppose the fines pay their wages and it keeps them busy.
Some of the beggars were so young they could barely walk, others were physically deformed (some naturally, some done in by the gangsters to increase their take) but mostly male so they didn’t get any of my dosh (why help guys who are going to turn into rivals somewhere down the line?). I’m a sucker for the flower girls, even though I know they don’t keep the dosh - at least it stops them getting beaten up by the gangsters or their families if they don’t turn up with sufficient money.
One girl, an elder sister of some wench I used to know, screamed my name as if I was her long lost lover (not the first, gets embarrassing after a while). She spent most of her youth in Chinese brothels, emerging with a kind of breath-taking beauty and death-zone eyes. She’d had an on-off affair with an Australian guy for a couple of years and was now sporting some big purple skin lesions on her shoulder and a frightening haunted look as if she’d realized she was in the no-hope (AIDS) zone.
Of course, the fact that she’d had sex with thousands of Thai men a few years ago won’t register in what is left of her mind, the Oz guy getting the blame for giving her the virus; the only energy she’d have left that of mad retribution.
We didn’t linger long in her company and I managed to resist her pleas for some loose change; the whisky breath at eleven in the morning didn’t exactly inspire the notion that she would use the dosh to buy a square meal. The whole of Pattaya has a slightly edgy feel to it, never quite sure what madness was going to go down next. Some of the foreign families on holiday looked quite bemused by the whole parade of mad humanity... give ‘em something to talk about once safely back home.
The local newspaper probably didn’t help, with stories of a katoey being beaten with a toilet seat by her gay lover, mad drivers crashing their cars into innocent walls and the police seizing the local drug dealer carrying 100,000’s of speed tablets!
Although there was an endless parade of lovely young women, there was also an excess of elderly ladies who, for some reason, kept giving me the evil eye; most likely down to the nineteen year-old lacking bar-girl’s eyes and still having a proper smile, two traits that ninety-nine percent of b-girls can’t hide from people who’ve been in the scene a while. The corollary to that, of course, is that once a farang has been shaken down by a bar girl he can’t hide the hurt in his eyes!
Lots of really vile-looking Western old-age pensioners wandering around with Thai women in tow, the men insist on cuddling and kissing their whores in public even though the local council has failed utterly to provide a useful quantity of sick-buckets. Most of the women well past their prime, happy to get into farang money any which way but they looked like they wanted to die of embarrassment in their gaudy clothes. Worse yet, some of the old clowns insist on dancing in the discos! The Thai cure for such outlandish behavior is poison in the farang’s food (some of it quick acting, heart attack inducing), which can almost be defined as natural justice. Almost!
Jomtien had an air of being deserted, no-one wanting to brave the polluted waters and the vendors following us for ages with a kind of desperate greed. Big signs saying we were in a rabies-free zone, but the dogs evidently couldn’t read English and a couple needed a boot around the ear to keep them in check. Lots of abandoned buildings along the sea front, a good hour’s walk to get from one end of the bay to the other but a minor gale blowing in off the sea and palm trees filtering out the sun. Almost paradise.
Plenty of small hotels and guest houses, a lot of the restaurants couldn’t be bothered to open for business. Cheap condominiums, marvellous sea views but not a lot of nightlife! Most of the mad Thai women thankfully stayed over on Beach Road, though one old katoey managed to be big-boned and sport withered muscles at the same time. Thank God I wasn’t on my own, she kept giving me the eye!
Back in Pattaya of a night, just about every kind of entertainment available... the gal liked the boxing shows and live music; as neither required any energy on my part, other than lifting the odd bottle of beer, I could live with those. Midget boxing seemed the thing of the moment, one dwarf equipped with a hunchback and no neck. Pretty sick to what is left of my mind but I suppose it keeps them in loose change and off the street.
One beer tasted ancient, when I complained the old biddy behind the bar said she would improve matters by shoving the bottle up her pussy; wasn’t too amused when I shoved two fingers down my throat like I was about to throw up. I managed to drink it anyway and left her with the threat that if I was ill the next day I’d come back with a grenade by way of retribution. The silly old dear thought I was joking. To be fair, no-one tried to palm warm beer off on me. Both the food and water in Pattaya liable to cause serious food poisoning.
Pattaya famed as a halfway house, gals from the country turning up there to check out the scene, either in the go-go or beer bars, before moving on to the bright lights of Bangkok. Another exodus - of washed up old dears from Bangkok to the resort, who given half a chance try to mess up the new girls lives as well as their own. To be honest, I’ve never had much luck with Pattaya girls but purely in the interests of research I poked my head into a few go-go bars and there seemed to be plenty of youngish girls with a tinge of innocence on ‘em. Won’t last long, get down there fast!
There seems to be just as many gay bars, many of them sited next to the girlie bars - completely nasty given the penchant of couples to work each (a sign of true love, as the guy doesn’t live off the gal but plays gay instead!), the Thai guys’ love of living off the gals and even the b-girls armed with a bit
of money paying for sex with the guys of a night. There is nothing anyone can do about this kind of madness, the Thais are in their own country and they have to put themselves first, farang a long way down the pecking order, even compared to a gay lad taking it up the whatsit every night, practically bathing in the virus. And you can bet that the gals don’t bother with condoms.
On our last day, saw a big sign erected on the somewhat rickety pier on Beach Road - welcome to the US navy. Not a-f..king-gain. Not surprisingly, the place had a bit more of a buzz to it with the gals practising their smiles, if not their lines of bullshit, and the vendors rubbing their hands with glee; even the walking-wounded beggars looked like they might awaken from the death-zone…
copyright (c) Al Culler 2018
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