Bangkok Filth

by Ken Austin

  I opened up a backpack that was on one of the beds. A few t-shirts, some shorts, and a couple pair of rancid socks were inside. I grabbed a union jack t-shirt and wrapped it around the smashed face of the Brit, gagging his shattered mouth. I used a sleeveless undershirt to bind his hands behind his back. I looked up at Rack from my position on the floor where I was kneeling next to the Brit. Rack was silhouetted against the window of the bungalow, thin strands of moonlight slicing through the spaces between the wooden shutters. He hadn’t spoken since we were in the restaurant.

  “We’ve got to get rid of both this freak and Heroin Addict,” I said. “We have to find a spot somewhere near the retreat. But we can’t risk leaving them here unattended for very long.”

  Rack moved forward, bent down and lifted up the Brit, throwing him on his back in a fireman’s carry. The sound of the Brit’s destroyed face slamming against the solid bulk of Rack’s back in a wet splat was sickening.

  “Right. We’ll take him with us as we look for a good spot,” I said.

  We went outside the bungalow and closed the door behind us. We stopped and surveyed the still night. Not a sound. No trace of anyone. Strange.

  I went down the stairs of the bungalow and collected the shovel and the pick-axe where we had stashed them. That sick sense that things were about to break out into the open hit me. I moved toward the perimeter of the retreat where the smooth, well-trampled ground surrounding the bungalows gave way to tall elephant grass and trees. We moved through the grass and trees for about 30 metres until we came to a small clearing. Rack leaned over and dropped the Brit onto the ground. I threw the pick-axe to the side and used the spade to try the ground. The spade went in easily.

  “I want you to get to work digging a hole here Rack. Make it as deep as possible in the time it takes me to bring the other one back here.”

  It occurred to me that we had no idea what their names were. It was probably better that way. I also realized that although I was initially thankful that Shaved Head was still alive, there probably was no choice now but to take things to their sick conclusion.

  I strode back toward the retreat compound. I cast a glance back and saw the large figure of Rack driving the shovel down into the ground with intense purpose. I moved through the bungalows as quickly as I could without attracting attention to myself. The doughy Brit had to be somewhere. If he was back at the bungalow, he had to have figured out that something was up. I slowed as I approached the bungalow where we had disabled Shaved Head. Only silence.

  I kept going toward the central enclosure where we had left Heroin Addict in the kitchen. I stood still near the entrance to the enclosure and listened. No sounds. And no light coming from the kitchen. I walked around the back of the kitchen and opened the door. Some rustling sounds came from within. Heroin Addict was stirring. I turned on one of the lights and scanned the room. No one here but me and the Brit.

  I flicked off the light and waited, letting my eyes become used to the dark. I crouched down and lifted up Heroin Addict, who was alternately limp and tensing on occasion. The shattered ankle had to be smarting. I hoisted him onto my shoulder in the same way that Rack had lifted up the much larger Shaved Head.

  The realization struck me of how things were playing out in a much different way than I had anticipated when I decided to spend some time here. Would I ever get a chance to meditate? In a way, the single-minded focus that was necessary to take care of this nasty little business was a kind of meditation. I cleared my mind and pushed out any thoughts of how this might not be the best way to insert myself into a situation with a group of complete strangers.

  I moved out into the common area of the central enclosure and again stood still for some time to get a sense of whether anyone was about. Still nothing. Heroin Addict was completely limp now and was so light that carrying him did not require much effort.

  I moved at a fast clip, wanting to clear out of the area with bungalows as fast as possible. What time was it? Had an hour passed since our confrontation with Heroin Addict in the kitchen? Perhaps two? It was hard to tell exactly, but I thought that we still had four or five hours of darkness.

  I approached Rack in the clearing. He was submerged up to his hips in the hole that he had been digging. Good progress. I laid Heroin Addict on the ground a few feet away from Shaved Head, ensuring that he could not see or communicate in any way with his incapacitated mate. Rack looked up at me with a blank look on his face and then went back to digging.

  Shaved Head was moving on the ground with a renewed energy. Perhaps he had sensed what was going on. I walked around the other side of him so that I could look at his face. The sneering arrogance was gone, perhaps forever. His eyes were screaming for some kind of reprieve. He had nothing to lose. I had seen it before. A skilled piece of filth plies his self-serving machinations with no regard for those who get damaged. But when necessary they will turn on the desperate appeal to humanity in order to save themselves. Buried under all the pleading is a relentless desire to get back to a place where they can once again destroy others.

  A voyeuristic curiosity was getting the better of me. What would Shaved Head have to say as he was watching this strange spectacle play out before his eyes?

  “If you so much as raise your voice above a whisper, I will kick the life out of you before you can blink,” I said as I bent down to pull the makeshift gag out of the way to see what Shaved Head had to say. A person in a desperate situation has both the ability to say anything to save himself, or the potential to utter a rare kind of truth.

  My fear that Shaved Head might start shrieking for help was unwarranted. He could barely muster the energy and muscle coordination to speak above the barest whisper.

  “Give...give...,” said Shaved Head in a weak, barely audible croak.

  “Give you what?” I asked.

  “Give him...,” he said.

  “Give who?” I pointed to Rack in the hole. “Him?”

  Shaved Head nodded slowly.

  “Give him what?”

  “Your...your phone...” Shaved Head said as his eyes closed and he went silent again.

  I put the gag back in place.

  I turned to look at Rack. His shoulders were almost even with the top of the hole and the pile of dirt was growing bigger. Rack had stopped and was looking at me.

  I ran back over in my mind what had happened over the last seven to eight hours, including the narrative that Rack had relayed to me. My phone? Why should I give him my phone? His phone had been stolen by the Brits, so why should I...

  I stopped for a moment and thought about Rack’s girlfriend storming out of the retreat, crushed by the cruel things that the Brits had said to her. I had even fashioned an image in my mind about what she looked like. And then Rack discovering that his phone had been stolen and that he couldn’t contact her to see if she was OK.

  I unholstered my phone from the case I kept clipped to my belt and I motioned to Rack.

  “You should phone your girlfriend to see if she’s OK,” I said. I held out the phone to Rack who was standing still in the hole.

  Rack slowly stuck out his hand and accepted the phone.

  “I had her number programmed into my phone. I don’t think I’ve punched in the number since I saved it to my phone,” Rack said. He looked up at me with a plaintiff look. It seemed reasonable. I had numerous numbers saved in my phone of people I contacted on a regular basis. I wouldn’t be able to recite a single one of them if I had to.

  Rack handed back my phone from the pit that he had already dug. He turned back to his task. Dull thunking sounds as he repeatedly drove the spade into the ground and launched the shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder onto the growing pile a few feet from the hole. I sat down on the ground between the two shattered Brits and contemplated this strange night as the rhythm of the digging lulled me into a reverie.

  When you read all the literature about meditation, you could be forgiven for assuming that only normal, well-adjusted people do it
. You get drawn into the meditation-speak and forget that this is you, with all your decades of strangeness piled on top of one another. The shifts, the constant evolving, the realization one day that you are no longer the person you were a few years ago.

  You read the cautions about the fact that meditation can bring many good things but that it also may release fears into the open that you didn’t know you had. In my case, it was a cold hard dread about my own mortality. It also sharpened my ability to detect damaged, deviant individuals (or at least, convinced me that it had sharpened my ability in this regard) so that at the first inkling that I was in the presence of this type, my guts would fill with bile and I would do anything possible to get away from them.

  With ease I could cover up my true feelings when forced to interact with such lowlifes. But gnawing away was always the knowledge that even being aware of the existence of their kind in a personal, face-to-face way made every bad thing in life seem all the more intolerable. While the meditation had been beneficial, it also made me aware in a visceral and painful way how much I loathed so many people in the world.

  As I had become more and more involved in my daily practice, I also confronted the rankism that infected the world of meditation as it did every other subculture. Some went to lengths and took on affectations to prove that the long hours had taken them to a place which others could only imagine.

  No doubt, there were some enlightened, serene fuckers who had done well to take those minutes and hours out of the day to rest the mind. When the effects of your daily meditation started to seep into the rest of your life, you knew that it was having the desired effect. But was it possible to burn away all regulating forces that helped to keep us human?

  Something that had not previously been in the space surrounding the surreal, late-night frieze of which I was part, was now there. The collective aura that Rack and the Brits had unwittingly created together was different now than what it had been a few hours previous. And also different than anything I had experienced before.

  I looked up and saw a form at the tree line at the edge of the clearing where we were. Rack must have sensed it too for the digging stopped. I breathed in slowly and noted the point at which my inhalation turned into an exhalation. It was a peaceful, almost awesome moment, the converging of energies.

  I heard Rack grunt and saw him pawing his way up and out of the hole that must have been six-and-a-half feet deep by now. Strong, sure movements and he was suddenly out of the hole, panting and looking at the figure at the tree line. I lay down between the two Brits and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. I turned to look at Shaved Head, who was facing me. He had managed to turn himself around in the minutes during which I had been lost in thought. But he wasn’t moving now. In the black, I looked into his face and saw nothing. Behind me on the ground, and closest to Rack, was Heroin Addict. I slowly turned around so that I could see Heroin Addict, Rack, and the figure near the tree line.

  The figure near the tree line started moving toward Rack. It was the doughy Brit, that was obvious. He was moving with intent, walking directly toward Rack. Rack stood still, silently sucking in large lungs full of air. He was holding the spade in his right hand. The doughy Brit came within three feet of Rack and started to raise his hand. In the black night with the moonlight casting Rack and the oaf into strange shadows, my first instinct was that the oaf was raising his arm in a Sieg Heil gesture. But he had something in his hand.

  Rack lifted the spade and brought it down with both hands in a vicious pinwheeling arc towards the oaf’s head. As the spade crushed the oaf’s head, an explosion erupted from his outstretched hand. In that instant, as the two figures were illuminated in the light of the explosion, I saw a fine red mist spreading out in two directions. And then it was black again, and Rack stumbled back a few feet and plummeted into the grave that he had dug, unknowingly, for himself. The doughy Brit listed sideways and then fell with a horrible finality onto Heroin Addict. He must have landed on Heroin Addict’s head in just the right way, for there was a spasm from the addict and then he too was lifeless under the weight of his dead mate.

  I got to my feet and stood surveying the wreckage. I dragged the doughy Brit by his feet toward the hole and with a last pull, launched him onto Rack and his final resting place. Heroin Addict went in next, and then, fittingly I thought, Shaved Head on top. Though Rack had done an admirable job of digging a reasonably deep hole in a short amount of time, with four corpses, it didn’t leave very much space to fill it in. I picked up the spade and started shoveling the dirt in from the pile. In less than twenty minutes, a mound was over the pit of death. This left a fair pile of dirt and so I proceeded to spread it out in the area as best I could.

  The sun was just starting to peer over the horizon as I packed my things back at my bungalow and slipped out of the meditation retreat, and started the slow trek back to town.

  The Drunk

  One of the great appeals for the westerner living in Thailand, is that he can count on Thais not being able to size him up the way that other foreigners can. The presence of foreigners in Thailand for decades, the large expat community and the 10 million plus tourists to the country every year make this fact quite remarkable. But it is a testament to the certainty that many Thais want little to do with outsiders. To those Thais, foreigners are a curiosity, a necessary annoyance to help the country in a number of ways, and nothing more. After all these years, Thailand is still very much a closed society.

  Many expats are just fine with the current state of Thai/foreign relations. This interaction level that ends at mild curiosity for the vast majority of Thais, allows expats in Thailand to glide happily under the radar, free from the instant judgments they can count on back home.

  Walk into a roomful of unknown people in your home country and you start making instant judgments.

  Mannerisms, clothes, body language, manner of speaking, even someone’s teeth. You size people up in a rapid-fire way without even knowing it. With a glance you can tell with some accuracy someone’s education level and station in life. For many, that constant, probing gaze of strangers can be wearing. So the relatively anonymous life for foreigners in Thailand can be liberating in many ways. Telltale indications that would mark many as deviants, addicts or otherwise dysfunctional in western countries are meaningless to most Thais.

  This sense of escape has a name: anomie. However, while Thais may not be able to clock the most obvious of shortcomings in foreigners, they do not have a limitless tolerance for misbehaviour.

  Many foreigners ostensibly move to Thailand to escape the rankism and intimate knowledge that others have of them. But the rankism within the expat community is perhaps nastier and more intense that anything they have faced at home.

  I walked into the appointed room for the first day orientation and immediately saw a new face. My first reaction was that he looked like he would be at home in a skid row hotel. The big red nose of a hardcore, if barely functional, alcoholic. The bursted blood vessels that announce to the world that he soaks himself in the hard stuff whenever he gets the chance. A ratty looking pilled sweater added to the look of a down-and-outer on his last legs. This was even stranger for the fact that it is usually about 35 degrees Celsius or higher with humidity in Chiang Mai—sure it was cool inside with the air conditioning ramped up, but a sweater?

  But this was Thailand. And so, those tell-tale signs that let anyone with a modicum of observation skills know that they were in the presence of a drunk, were instead likely chalked up to the fact that farangs are just different.

  Milt Bender seemed affable and happy to have a job at the university. We were both from Australia and we discussed the different parts of the country from which we hailed. He had spent years in Thailand and it sounded as if he had seen a fair number of different schools in his time. He was also proud to let anyone know that he was married to a woman who had a good job for one of the big international NGOs based in Chiang Mai.

  As quickl
y as I had told myself that he was a hard-core boozer, I started to ease up on my judgment of Milt. Who was I to come to hasty conclusions based on a large, inflamed snout? After someone becomes your colleague, you can only really accept him as competent until such time that he does something to convince you otherwise.

  Within days of the start of the new semester, I started detecting in the elevator that nasty, boozy/fermented odour that drunks give off after a hard night of drinking. I didn’t always see Milt on those mornings, but I couldn’t help but assume that he was the culprit.

  A few weeks into the semester and I started hearing stories about Milt. We all used less than perfect textbooks that Thai teachers had written. And we all noticed mistakes in them. But only Milt took it upon himself one evening to phone the teacher in question and berate her about the mistakes. No doubt he had imbibed a few cocktails before phoning and letting her know that her textbook was rammed full of mistakes.

  I had the chance to talk to Milt on numerous occasions. Once, when we were assigned to put together a mid-term exam, he came into my office with a look of determination on his face. He sat down at my desk, and proceeded to outline a number of errors in my work. He bristled with a barely concealed contempt as he started to set me right.

  “First, when you are writing numbers, you write them out when under 10, and use numerals above 10,” he said.

  “Fair enough,” I responded. “However, when you have in a paragraph numbers above 10 for which you have used numerals, you use numerals for the numbers under 10 in that same paragraph. For parallelism, you understand,” I said with a bit of lecturing tone in my voice.

  Milt jolted to a stop and considered what I had said. “Yes, you are right on that.” He continued with a bit more respect. And, he made some good points. I agreed to make the changes. Milt talked at length about various theories related to writing tests. Everything he said he backed up with references to the latest research, and he sounded convincing. Perhaps he was able to keep his boozing in check and was a very good teacher. Maybe the drinking was only a way to deal with the myriad frustrations that a teacher is faced with in Thailand.