by Ken Austin
I talked about Milt with some other teachers. Most of them were a bit suspect of Milt, and everyone had started hearing stories. But none of the other teachers were really worried about the presence of Milt. Sure, the possibility existed that irresponsible behaviour by a foreign teacher could a give a bad name to all the foreign teachers.
But the Thai teachers had seen it all from the human detritus who had washed up on the shores of their country to work as English teachers. The overall reputation of foreigners couldn’t get any worse. On the other hand, having an individual like Milt around could benefit us all. In comparison, we really didn’t have to do much to keep the Thai administration happy. When the bar is lower than a snake’s belly, you don’t have to jump too high to please your masters.
I was still holding out hope for Milt. I always liked the underdog. Besides, people like Milt who didn’t always toe the line and had a few demons always were more interesting than well-adjusted individuals. I wanted Milt to stick around if only for the interesting conversations that we might have.
One day I was in Clayton’s office and we started discussing Milt. Clayton was a fat yank who worked in the Romanian studies department, a project set up by the Department of Logic to take on students who weren’t able to gain acceptance to any of the other departments. Clayton had been involved in analyzing people in his previous life and liked to weigh in on various teachers and offer his “professional” advice about what neurotic tendencies they displayed. Clayton was well-versed in the language of alcoholism and recovery. He admitted that he had had problems with alcohol in the past, and together with his previous experience, he offered a grim outlook for Milt.
“He’s a hardcore drunk. No doubt about that,” said Clayton as he guffawed. “Many alcoholics are of the functional variety. But not Milt. He’s becoming dysfunctional. He’s probably already lost jobs, and from what I hear, he won’t last long here. After you start fucking your life up with booze, the next step is your health. The body can only take so much abuse. Then it starts shutting down. Then you die.”
I started to play devil’s advocate whenever the subject of Milt came up with other teachers, or with the head secretary at the university, a Thai woman who spoke good English and liked nothing better than to gossip about other teachers, both Thai and foreign.
It was at about that time that Milt started to change. It was when he interacted with other people. I would be sitting there having a conversation with him in the computer room and suddenly he wasn’t there. I don’t mean that he disappeared physically. But all at once it was if he forgot where he was and that he had been carrying on a conversation.
He would be looking off in the distance and then he would be mumbling to himself. It was surreal and a bit alarming. Even attempts to snap him out of his daze had little effect. He would keep rambling on to himself, as though interacting with another human was far too fraught with disappointments and pain.
One day when I was rushing to class late, the head secretary called out my name and motioned me over. She told me that there was a special announcement regarding an assignment for the class I was teaching. “And,” she added, “would you also look in on Milt’s class and give him the same announcement.” She handed me the memo and I headed off to class. Milt taught the same course to a different section just across the hall from where my class was.
I lightly knocked on the door of Milt’s classroom and poked my head in. He was standing in front of the class with the textbook open in his hands. “Important memo regarding one of the assignments for this class,” I said. I hoped that he caught my sarcasm. Milt looked at the memo and then read it out to the class. I tried to take my exit, but Milt started making some comments about the textbook to me. I looked around at the class, and then offered a perfunctory answer to Milt, hoping that he would take my cue and let me get to my class. Then, he was gone. In front of the class and me. The class of confused students and I looked at each other.
The embarrassment was palpable. Milt was mumbling and in some other dimension. I abruptly interrupted him and closed the door before he could object. It was a sad sight to witness. But I realized something then; he must want people to see him like this. It was a toxic mix of seeking pity together with a true breakdown of some sort; a slow, willful self-destruction for all to see.
A month later, the semester was finished. I was standing in the main office chatting with the head Thai secretary when the subject of student evaluations came up. At the end of every semester, students had the chance to rate their instructors. On a scale out of four in numerous categories, most instructors ranked in the three-point-five to three- point-eight range, with a few very effective ones coming very close to perfect scores.
According to the Thai secretary, Milt had bottomed out and been given scores in a number of classes that the Thai administration had never seen before. Twos. Some one-point-fives. It was unheard of. The outburst against the Thai teacher because of errors in the book she had written, together with the fact that Milt was usually marinating in booze, and now these horrid student evaluations meant that Milt was now essentially finished as an instructor at the university.
The last time I saw Milt he was striding out into the noonday heat in a garish sweater mumbling to himself. Maybe he would be OK. After all, there were still plenty of universities looking for foreign instructors. And not one of them would have a Thai in a decision-making role who would have a clue what the shattered capillaries were all about.
Bangkok Filth
Retroactive shame. It was a concept he had become familiar with in his little corner of the world. A corner on the other side of the planet. In the filth, seediness and anonymity of Bangkok.
He had landed there seven years ago. A failure from the west washed up on the shore like detritus. It wasn’t a planned destination. It was the closest and most convenient place to go after his money had almost run out. He quickly became comfortable for one simple reason. Thais seemed unable to clock people like him. They were unable to accurately sum up and judge him the way that someone back home could. The coarsened, red face, the tenderloin look, the speech patterns that were unusually slow and a bit off. Those were the things of which he was aware. While a social misfit, he still possessed a better ability to turn the cold hard light of inspection on himself than most other down-and- outers.
But there were those strange masks and mannerisms that everyone possesses and that can never be known. Except by those others in your orbit with whom you interact. They unknowingly conspire to draw out your hidden fears and involuntary reactions. The calm, placid face you view in the mirror is probably never seen by anyone except yourself.
His reactions in the face of any minor obstacle thrown up by ominous dealings with the other smooth-skinned apes brought out the reality. The crackling of fear in his brain betrayed his pathology, if only subconsciously, to others around him. The pleading look that started to appear on his face as soon as any conversation progressed beyond basic niceties. As any number of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of perceived judgements and challenges began to flow.
It always brought back fleeting images of squalor, filth, degrading insults. The image of his father reeling about the house drunk, suddenly raining down blows without any warning. If he could have built up a defense system based on some kind of pattern. But there was never any predictability to it. In its own way it had sharpened his ability to detect danger from others. But the absence of rational deduction about what represented something that could be accepted and dealt with and what was the kind of danger that could explode into the more sinister variety meant that danger lurked everywhere.
He consoled himself with the knowledge that he was at least aware of it to some degree. On this he was certain: he had one up on most of the other western degenerates he was likely to encounter in Bangkok.
They were more likely to construct bizarre persecution narratives. Somehow, coincidentally and consistently through years of failures, cock-ups and destroyed personal
relationships, it was all the fault of the big bad world.
Besides being exposed to a minimal number of other westerners and the seeming absence of any real scrutiny from Thais, there was one other bright spot in the existence he had built here. It came in the form of a five foot nothing, slender, brown-skinned spitfire. He had met here in the run down building where he lived. She had been a cleaner. He had seen her over the period of a few weeks, wearing the drab grey uniform the company provided her, scrubbing the stairs or mopping the floor in the lobby. She must have seen him too because then he started seeing her on his floor most days. She seemed to be absent-mindedly working away at something, putting in minimal effort, smiling at him as he approached the door to his flat.
He started to acknowledge her albeit in an awkward blundering way that would have creeped out most other women. Her face lit up every time they saw each other and she said hello in her own style that somehow seemed tailored just for him. Then the greetings became something he looked forward to. One day she offered him some fruit. He accepted and invited her inside to share its flesh. Shortly after she moved in permanently.
He looked at her as she sat in front of the television. Flaked out on a quilt on the floor with some pillows, watching TV. It had quickly become her favourite pastime. Almost her only pastime. He looked at her features bathed in the glow of the television. Big round eyes. They often looked coarse and sullen until she focused on him. Then they took on the caring look that made him feel like he wasn’t an outsider anymore.
She got up and padded across the room on her splayed brown feet. She stopped at the refrigerator and opened it. Her face lit up as she looked at the array of food and drinks. He looked at her profile. The caramel skin, slightly mashed nose, lithe neck. She giggled and wrapped one of her tiny mitts around a can of Pepsi. She slowly treaded back towards her nest on the floor, crinkling her nose and smiling at him on the way past.
“What are your plans for today?” he asked.
She looked at him blankly. As if the question were superfluous when this cozy set-up in front of the tube was the most a person could want. She looked back at the flashing screen without responding and started barking like a seal at some inanity. She got up again and strode to the toilet. He followed her and bent down to peer through the keyhole.
She had stripped off her trousers and carelessly thrown them in a heap. She was squatting on the toilet which was a ceramic fitting a few inches off the floor. Most apartments rented by westerners had the traditional throne. This was a testament to how far down the chain he had slipped, even here. He watched her. Her legs were covered in stretch marks which blazed all shiny when she was squatting. He was under no delusions about the relative lack of her beauty and social standing. At first it hadn’t bothered him…no, it still didn’t bother him. He loved her. Who was he to judge? In many ways she was a reject from her society and he from his.
He thought of the looks from the pinch-faced hag who ran the shop in the lobby when they came in together. As time had gone on, he had slowly become familiar with subtleties that had eluded him at first. To hell with it, he thought. I didn’t care what anyone thought back home and I sure as hell don’t care here.
He thought of the little domesticated world they had started to build as he peered at her disrobing completely and climbing into the shower. We’re starting to trust each other, he thought as he watched her breathlessly. Her peasant fingers had always intrigued him. Thick and solid yet still somehow retaining their femininity. He watched as she clutched the faucet and turned on the water. It streamed down over her brown skin, over the vertical scar that started at her pubic hair and ended a few inches below her breasts.
One of her breasts hung significantly lower than the other one. This had the strange effect of offsetting the shortness of her right leg, at least when she was nude. She had been injured in a car accident years earlier and the injury hadn’t healed correctly.
He had once questioned her about the accident and she had not answered. He let the matter drop. He didn’t want to create any issues in their relationship.
She was out of the shower and drying herself now. As she emerged from the toilet there was a knock at the door.
“That’s Nap’” she said matter-of-factly.
Nap was her fat, sullen friend.
Nudge opened the door and Nap walked in without saying a word. She exuded pure misery.
She slumped on the couch
They started nattering in that strange language that made his brain crackle.
“We have to go see Mr. Damruat,” said Nudge.
Damruat was the man who owned the cleaning company she had worked for. When she had abruptly quit a few weeks ago, he had been less than pleased. One less person desperate for money that he could grind into the concrete for profit. He had seen him a few days after when Damruat had dared to come to his door looking for Nudge.
He stood to the side seething as Damruat berated her from the corridor. He had fantasized about lifting the old fucker off the ground with a tight uppercut and then kicking that face that was covered in sickly, loose flesh. Taking a fistful of that greasy, dyed black hair and ramming his face repeatedly into the concrete floor. Instead he stood there and watched the humiliation of the woman he loved.
“What’s that all about?” he asked.
“He said he needs to settle everything with me,” Nudge replied.
“But he’s already paid you, I don’t think there’s any reason to go.”
“It’s OK, I should go or he will make problems.”
“I would prefer if you didn’t,” he said with his voice gaining a slightly perturbed edge.
“Don’t you think you could phone him?” he said as he started feeling ill at the thought of her having to deal with the unctuous old bastard.
She nattered a bit more with Nap. “Please, don’t worry, he’s not that bad.”
“I really don’t want you going there.” his face had a florid edge to it now.
“I am sorry, I will go.”
Nudge and Nap gathered their accoutrements in a slow motion flurry of activity and trundled out the door.
He stood there alone.
Christ in the Classroom
Proponents of the so-called “intelligent design” theory have been accused of being less than honest in their attempts to market their half-baked claims. But it’s hardly surprising that those who believe an invisible sky daddy controls everyone and everything in the universe resort to deceitful means to advance their ideas.
A lot of people start braying about demands for respect whenever their particular superstition comes up for discussion. This is a plea hardly worth responding to. When you run around claiming that anyone who doesn’t believe in your religion will burn in a pit of flames for all eternity and suffer indescribable, excruciating pain; well, expect to get mocked.
And, when you further try to insinuate yourselves into government and shove your beliefs down people’s throats with policies based on your twisted morals, anticipate further ridicule. Finally, when you hold yourselves up as holier than all yet seem to produce a significant portion of the most deviant, sick, child molesting bags of excrement on the planet, assume that you will have the harshest and most disrespectful verbal attacks thrown back in your faces.
Of course, those who follow their religion and worship in private without condemning people with different viewpoints should be given the respect and dignity that all humans who live without harming others deserve.
Leaving the western bastions of Christianity to live and work in Asia hardly insulates a person from direct contact with the self-righteous throngs of fundamentalists. In many ways, they become more visible and their methods more loathsome when you are in Thailand.
Just as there appears to be an increase in deception in the intelligent design industry, duplicity in the ranks of foreign missionaries is also on the rise.
Missionaries in Thailand
While not officially a state religio
n, Buddhism is the belief system of the majority of Thais and is part of most aspects of life in Thailand. Any disrespect shown to the images or ideas associated with it will result in swift and extreme public censure or worse.
But Thailand is quite welcoming to Christian missionaries. Perhaps it’s the all pervasive nature of Buddhism and the feeling that no matter how hard anyone tried, there could never be any significant inroads made in terms of conversions.
A more cynical view would be that enough money changes hands to make the influx possible. The exchange, of course, between those seeking to spread their dogma that maligns any other religion or belief system and those who could otherwise restrict access to the country.
And, there are many wealthy Thai families who are Christian and who hold influence and ensure that missionaries have a fairly easy time of it when they are plying their trade and earning credits for the vague, unspecified, other location where they assume that their rank will be guaranteed and the ghostly images of their worldly selves will rule for all eternity.
Regardless, missionaries are in Thailand in fairly significant numbers. They tend to pitch up in small, poor rural communities. It’s hard to argue with the time and effort they invest and the material benefits they bring. But there are strings attached to the good will and the guarantee that it will continue to flow. The conditions are in the form of pressure on locals to renounce their belief in Buddhism and accept Christianity.
There are other insidious means used to influence the young and impressionable. Cartoons are hugely popular in Thailand. Missionaries now distribute cartoon books in Thai that show pictures of people suffering in hell for daring not to believe in the Christian fairy tale (this is, of course, something that has also been done for years in countless different countries).