by Ken Austin
About a month later I was sitting in a downtown internet cafe when Levi strolled up to me.
“Hey! We got a new software shop set up down the block if you want to drop by for a visit...”
The Transit Strike
It’s easy for an expat to get in the habit of criticizing everything about Thailand. It sometimes takes a temporary return to his country of birth to realize how good he has it in his second home. A litany of annoyances can intrude on your daily life in Thailand, but a public sector transit strike that partially shuts down an entire city is not one of them.
Andy sat on the bus and stared straight ahead. It was strange to be back on the bus after six months of a brutal transit strike. He considered how unreal it was as people silently shuffled onto the bus without any harsh words to the smug, sneering individual behind the wheel. The drivers had gotten what they wanted and wreaked devastation on thousands of lives. Many of them were high school drop-outs and were simply allowed to hold people hostage for months on end. Yet here they were, the people damaged and beaten down and without the guts to even say anything.
The driver looked to be about 45 years old with long straggly hair and a few faded tattoos visible on his arms. Andy thought he smelled the reek of alcohol on the driver’s breath as he stepped on the bus.
The driver stared ahead and marveled at what a gutless and easily manipulated city he lived in. The drivers had held out and got what they wanted, and then some. Sure they had lost money during the months they were out but they had made up for it in other ways. The driver had known many friends who had sold drugs during the strike, making a tidy profit while taking a sick satisfaction in the misery that people were suffering through.
He barely acknowledged the sad fools getting on the bus though he had to admit they were useful idiots in providing him with the potential to rake in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year. It was so simple to play the system that he could hardly believe it. He briefly noticed a man wearing a ski mask in the handful of people still getting on. Strange he thought, hardly cold enough for that.
Now he was being manhandled and ripped out into the cold air and vaguely noticed that it was the man with the ski mask. It was one fluid brutal motion and he was face down in the cold slush of the street, inches from the tire of the bus, an oppressive and overwhelming pressure being applied to his neck. He was blacking out quickly.
The man with the mask drove his foot down on the driver’s neck with all his might while pushing up on an immovable rod that supported the side-view mirror of the bus. The spindly tattooed arms of the driver thrashed in the snow, the sneering look long gone and replaced with a pop-eyed horror at the realization that his life was ending. No sounds escaped through his bent, yellowed teeth as the thousands of pounds of pressure mashed his windpipe to the concrete.
The odd thing about this spectacle was the group of people on the bus. There was a silent collective sense of pure fascination as people sat forward on their seats. No one breathed a word nor stepped forward to intervene.
A few metres away, a fat bus driver was walking slowly down the sidewalk, shoving donuts into his cake-hole, thinking about how his mother always told him he should get a good education. What a laugh! He was making more than many of these complete fools who spent years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars struggling through university. It had given him extra pleasure to know how much those jerks had suffered during the strike. He had always felt they looked down on him before. Not now!
He noticed a commotion at the bus that was stopped a few metres away. There was another driver lying on the street and a man wearing a ski mask standing over him. He was confused, unsure what to do without the comfort of dozens of his fat, uneducated colleagues to back him up. Still, he had to do something. He moved to within a few feet of the situation.
“Hey, wh…whh…what is happening here?”
The man with the mask stepped off the lifeless corpse and took a short metal pipe out of his jacket pocket and brought it down in a vicious windmill arc onto the head of the fat bus driver, sending him to the concrete. A few blobs of chewed donut oozed out of his mouth as he somehow managed to get to his knees. The man with the ski mask hammered the fat driver’s head into a soft pulp.
At that moment, a hefty female bus driver with a short haircut was ambling down the same sidewalk where the fat driver had walked his last steps. She had come out of the same donut shop and was sipping on an extra large coffee. “What’s this?” she thought, as she saw two bus drivers in lifeless heaps. The man in the ski mask stood between them staring at her.
She dropped her coffee and rumbled towards the man with the ski mask. He smiled to himself. Fitting that the only one with any guts amongst them is this buffalo who’s ready for action, he thought. He stepped forward and lifted a tight, brutal uppercut into her windpipe, sending her to the ground. It all took on a surreal quality in his mind as he leapt into the air, lifting his knees up to his chest and achieving an impressive vertical height. It felt as if he were suspended for minutes, the whole scene before him as he came down on the female driver’s head, stomping her skull with a solid, satisfying finality.
He stood and surveyed the wreckage. Yet it was only a mere fraction of the suffering the drivers had brought on the thousands of innocents. Minutes passed and the steam from the blood, innards, and brains of the bus drivers’ carcasses rose into the air. The man with the mask breathed in heavily, turned and walked into the bus, settling behind the wheel and driving into the street as if he were accustomed to such brief interludes.
Andy was rigid in his seat, still unsure if he was dreaming. He shook himself out of his dream-like state and considered what he had witnessed. “Why does society condone the brutality that the drivers were allowed to perpetrate but this kind of response is so shocking to us?” he thought. And there had been real violence and devastation because of the strike.
The 75 year-old woman who couldn’t take the bus to visit her doctor and then withered and died in her small apartment, no one aware that an abdominal infection had set in and taken hold.
The 24 year-old woman who was putting herself through university and refused to give up, walking the four miles to her part time job every evening at the local grocery store. She never would have been walking on the side of that road that had no sidewalk. She never would have been hit by that car and left to die.
The newly arrived immigrant who had no support system and no way to get around. She lost her job and took her own life one evening in her tiny, run-down rented room. And all the law abiding fools went along with these tragedies and never responded, never took any action.
The man with the ski mask seemed to know where he was going. He was driving down the street at a good speed, stopping at every red light and obeying all the traffic laws. In the distance Andy saw The White Hog, a well known stand alone drinking saloon. It stood well back from the street and had no other businesses around it. It was a location where many local bikers and other undesirables drank. Something twigged in Andy’s mind as he remembered reading that the bus drivers were holding a celebration rally in the parking lot of The White Hog. Appropriate, he thought. Just like the bikers, the bus drivers were a form of white trash royalty, thrilled that they could intimidate and cause harm to those who played by the rules.
They were almost in front of The White Hog now and Andy saw that there was a large crowd of bus drivers there, at least 2000 to 2500, he thought. The man in the ski mask roared the engine of the bus and sliced the wheel hard to the right, going up over the curb and slamming into the crowd of bus drivers, bashing through them like so many empty beer bottles. The forward movement of the bus was hampered by the corpses being dragged under the bus but the man in the ski mask kept gunning the engine. The bus finally came to a stop. It was surprisingly silent except for the moans of some of the drivers scattered in the parking lot. The man in the ski mask had done a remarkable job of taking down every last one of the drivers.
/> The man with the ski mask opened the door of the bus and started walking amongst the corpses and writhing bodies. The others on the bus got off as well and started mingling amongst the injured drivers who were begging for mercy. Strangely, the passengers were in no mood for mercy. An old woman knelt and choked the life out of a bloody mass of flesh struggling to crawl away. A ring of passengers formed around a driver who only had minor injuries. They silently kicked him to death.
The man with the mask was looking for someone. He finally zoned in on a particular individual. Andy came up behind the man with the ski mask and looked at the driver on the ground. He recognized him. He was the fat, arrogant individual Andy had seen on the news throughout the strike. He was the one goading on and leading the other drivers. The other passengers now came towards Andy and the man with the ski mask. They too recognized the man on the ground. An older, well-dressed woman wearing stilettos raised her foot and drove a heel through the palm of his hand. He shrieked like a little girl. Suddenly, he was swarmed. Someone took his eyes out while others repeatedly stomped his ankles, knees and shoulders. There seemed to be a general understanding that he wasn’t to be wiped out as quickly as the others.
The crowd of passengers suddenly stopped the beating and allowed the man with the ski mask to reach down and drag the battered lump back towards the bus. A few of the passengers followed him. He stopped and with the help of the others, lifted the still breathing sack of flesh into the bike rack on the front of the bus. The man with the ski mask looked around him and nodded at the passengers before getting back on the bus alone and driving off. The passengers in the parking lot of The White Hog slowly wandered away from the final resting spot of the scum who had tried to destroy their lives.
The man with the ski mask turned into the bus corridor and slashed through the night air. He surveyed the empty road in front of him and thought of the millions of tax dollars that had gone into constructing this special route reserved for the city’s buses. He peered out through the windshield of the bus and saw the twitching, bloodied oaf jammed into the bike rack.
He saw the section of the road ahead, the stretch that cut through solid rock. There was an imposing wall of concrete located to the right of where that section began. He veered straight toward the wall, opened the door and launched himself out onto the road. He landed hard, rolling for 30 metres before coming to his feet. He stood up straight and watched intently as the bus rammed head on and exploded against the wall.
The man with the ski mask disappeared into the night.
Mazoonga
After the novelty of being an expat has long since worn off, there is still a desire to experience strange and mysterious lands. So where do expats go when they want to get away from it all? Somewhere more exotic and foreign than the country where they currently reside.
For a man seeking illicit sex with women in foreign countries, one of the potential dangers that adds to the thrill is trying to gauge the reaction of local men and how they view interlopers. Being unfamiliar with mannerisms, facial expressions and warning signs of those from a different culture can lead to tense situations.
Arriving in the southern African nation of Malawi after a recommendation from a good friend, I immediately took another flight from the capital Blantyre to a small but burgeoning location for tourists named Nkhata Bay. It was a small twin engine plane that transported me there and landed on a short runway outside of town, the airport a small corrugated iron building smaller than some commercial garages.
The dirt roads, street stalls and locals who still saw white-skinned foreigners as a novelty were all the things that appealed to me as I made my initial observations and breathed in the sleepy atmosphere.
On the shores of the massive lake Malawi, locals earned a living from fishing and the growing influx of western tourists. It was far from any well-developed standard with only a few rudimentary guest-houses, the main clientele being bleary-eyed backpackers. The usual grimy pseudo-sages were present: the ones convinced they had discovered nirvana in the seedy chic outpost where ganja could be smoked cheaply and western currency stretched many stays into weeks and months.
The beautiful local women with their naturally curious smiles and their voluptuous figures were another major attraction. I was tentative about how to engage in a possible short-term relationship with one of the nubile, dark-skinned beauties and was also apprehensive about offending the sensibilities of the local community. There were obvious brothels on the edge of town but I felt I was above that option.
The first few days I wandered around briefly and spent most of the time lounging at the guest house which was perched on a hill that provided a good view of the expansive lake. Actually, “lake” is almost a misnomer in this case because of the idyllic image it creates in most people’s minds. Lake Malawi is one of the biggest lakes in the world and stretches as far as the eye can squint. On the second day, I was sitting at the guest-house bar staring out at the vast body of water when I saw a black blur far off in the distance slowly moving across the surface, like an impossible-to escape spectre. I was informed that it was a swarm of locusts.
Though enjoying the relaxed, nearly catatonic pace of life and the sweltering heat, I grew restless after a few days. I trekked to the opposite side of the bay and found a relatively nice hotel operated by the only long-term expat I had met there so far. With some basic rooms in the main house and some huts along the beach I rented a beach house hopeful for a change. I made my way slowly back to the first guest-house and transferred my bags.
The next day I woke late and as usual lounged around drinking coffee and fruit juice. Feeling like I needed to see something different, I rented a canoe on the beach and decided to explore for a short distance along the coastline of the bay.
It was easy going; I stayed close to the shore and had no problem with the small vessel—a standard western style canoe with a strong wooden paddle. Shortly I was out of sight of the hotel and any sign of human activity. I could see an inlet opening up in the distance and staying as close to the edge as I was, a new stretch of shoreline kept coming into view as I rounded the gradual curve. The scenery on the banks was of fairly thick tropical trees, the occasional small rock outcropping and short stretches of beach.
As a new slice of shoreline came into view, I was greeted with the pleasant site of a nude, shapely African woman bathing on a raised ledge of rock next to the water’s edge. Low enough so she could jump into the shallow water to wet herself, that is exactly what she did as I approached in the canoe. Far from being embarrassed, she beamed at me and waved as I came abreast of her, using the paddle as a rudder to slow my movement.
She rinsed off the soap that she had been lathered with and then started to climb back onto the low rock ledge, affording a glimpse of her beautiful black arse. I had drifted by slowly at this point and was a good 10 metres out from the side. She had now turned back to face me and continued smiling. I didn’t want to misinterpret simple friendliness combined with an unashamed openness with nudity as anything beyond that, but still I was excited and intrigued at the same time. I looked at her with an expression of expectation and raised one hand in a gesture of appeal. She laughed and happily waved me towards her.
I pulled up the canoe on the small spot of beach to the side and scrambled up towards where she was standing. She said a few words in English but almost unspoken it seemed like such a simple, almost fated opportunity for two people to engage in the pleasure of bathing together in the cool water, heavy air and hot sun. I disrobed and she giggled and then we both laughed and we jumped in the water together and shared the bar of soap she had. We took turns soaping each other and there was some obvious excitement from both of us but it was so simple and playful and lacked any of the sinister overtures with which so many western women seem to see potential first-time sexual encounters.
She was incredibly beautiful, a natural ample figure with a glorious smooth swell at her ass and hips and full heavy dark breasts. She wasn�
��t especially young but her flesh possessed the perfect amount of responsiveness.
After rinsing our bodies intermingled with a few kisses and squeezes we lay naked on the slab of rock ledge drying ourselves before she led me back under the relative shade that the palm tress provided where there was a small neat thatch-roofed hut. Not her home, I gathered, but seemingly kept by her as a rest-house near the water, with a few of her belongings inside including a small bed with cool, clean sheets turned back. We made love there, something incredible and fell asleep in the sullen afternoon heat though a gentle breeze passed through the window nicely and provided a perfect combination for deep slumber.
I awoke sometime later feeling refreshed and gently got up, intending to have a relaxed walkabout and return to lounge with the still sleeping Shira, as she had told me her name was. I was congratulating myself on what an operator I was, a libertine for the new century, a true lover of women, when, as I exited the small hut, my guts dropped as I saw three men sitting in various locations in the small worn clearing surrounding the hut. They vaguely glanced in my direction with indifferent looks on their faces, apparently uninterested by the sight of a naked foreigner.
I turned around and went back inside the hut, scanning the small shelter for anything I could use as a weapon if the need arose. Like being pulled over by the police when you have done nothing wrong, I still had a sickening sense of guilt and fear. I mentally prepared for any trouble as I accepted the rationale for their potential displeasure with me. Maybe if I went back out there and paraded around starkers, my average-sized Caucasian dick would alleviate any sense of fear they may harbour about foreigners. Though they outnumbered me and were on home turf, psychological offerings like that could often have more of an effect than most people imagined.
I heard Shira stirring and she raised herself up in bed and started rubbing her eyes. She seemed to have a qualitatively different look on her face now. She must have sensed my fear and she started out of bed and covered herself with a colourful wrap that had been draped over the back of a chair. Despite the potential situation that was developing I still took a last admiring look at her impressive ass before she was under the sarong.