Bangkok Filth

by Ken Austin

  “Shira there are some men outside.”

  She was out the door without having acknowledged me and I scrambled to get dressed. I considered the window at the back of the hut. But really, I was acting asinine. What was there to be scared of? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I decided to casually amble out, make whatever gestures seemed appropriate and then be on my way. Before I exited the hut, I secured a heavy pestle that had been with some cooking utensils on a small table and placed it under the bed.

  Striding out as naturally as I could, I saw Shira with the three men who were now all grouped together sitting under a large tree. There was a hooded veiled glaze to her eyes and she didn’t look towards me.

  “Please, join us,” one of the men offered in a seemingly friendly voice. Having no real choice, I sat down on the ground.

  “You make love to my sister?” the same one speaking now, a slight clip to his voice. So here it was, I thought, at the same time impressed with his English.

  “Well, I uhh…I,” I stammered out a non-response taken aback by the sudden shift.

  The man who had spoken, ostensibly Shira’s brother, started laughing a good natured affected laugh, as he rocked back and forth and the others took this as a signal to join in. I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Of course, it’s only us western puritans who are so hung up about sex I thought. Maybe I’ll somehow try to leave a small bit of cash as a goodwill offering. I started to slip back into that relaxed mode, the vagaries and surprises of travelling filling me with a feeling of bonhomie as I was already considering how I would impress the rubes back home with this tale.

  As I was latching on to this feeling of relief, I noticed that Shira was not sharing their enjoyment and was in fact looking tentative and frightened. Her eyes seemed to plead with me and despite my earlier pang that she was in cahoots with these three, I now realized that our brief time together had meant something to her. Her “brother’ continued the laughter well beyond any normal length of time and now looked directly at me, eyes blazing and ratcheted his now obviously contrived cackle into a high-pitched shriek.

  Jaysus!! I was thinking to myself, what’s this freak trying to do? Just trying to put a scare in me? Despite my best attempt to appear unfazed, I knew I must be blanching like a son-of-a-bitch.

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Mister, mister white man…we need you to pay for the services of this young woman!” the laughing psycho said in a staccato voice while straining the cords in his neck and trying not to keep laughing.

  “That’s OK with me. I’ll just have to get my wallet from the room and we’ll settle up,” I said and got up and started moving towards the hut, not waiting for permission and trying to act as calm as possible. This seemed to be acceptable to them and one of psycho’s flunkies slowly ambled behind me. I already had my wallet secreted in a money belt under my shirt but I needed to put together some half-baked plan, no longer convinced a payoff would keep psycho satisfied.

  As I reached the door to the hut my sinewy escort came up directly beside me and I noticed his soiled dungarees, work shirt and sour smell of sweat. His slight build didn’t convince he would be easy to take. I nodded at him and he smiled a bemused almost disinterested grin that somehow seemed inappropriate for the situation.

  I entered the hut and moved towards the bed. Kneeling down I looked under the bed and wrapped my hand securely around the pestle I had placed there earlier. My shuffling escort loomed over me now and I came upright but still on my knees and drove the thick end of the pestle with all my might into his groin. He groaned and doubled over and now I straightened up on my feet and lifted the thick club-like utensil into the bridge of his nose with an uppercut motion, shattering the bone and splattering blood onto the hard-packed dirt floor. I laid the pestle across the back of his neck like a blackjack, careful not to use all my force for fear that I would kill the bastard and I’d be on the run from a local posse seeking vengeance.

  Hopeful that the others hadn’t been alerted and feeling better now that it was only two against one and having a slight surprise factor, I strode towards the door of the hut intent on carving a path to escape. As I came out into the light I looked towards the tree where we had sat and saw nothing.

  My puzzlement was quickly solved now as psycho and his remaining thug were on me coming from the side, surely having heard the bashing I had given their mate inside. I flailed wildly clipping something hard with the pestle that I still held in my hand….I was kicked solidly in the guts and saw stars…taking repeated shots from fists attached to sinewy black arms…it didn’t matter how incensed I was, there was no staving off the eventual kicking that I was going to take which surely could end in disaster…I was now on my knees and there was a brief lull as I saw the game was up, psycho and his sidekick looking down at me panting…I saw that I had inflicted some damage with the solid stone tool that probably mashed countless thousands of herbs and vegetables before I turned its use to human skulls.

  In that brief surreal respite I felt the strange realization that this day that had started out with such a light-hearted sense of adventure was almost drawing to a close. Dusk was settling and the new sounds that always came with the darkness were already starting. If only I’d been happy to go with one of the women from the brothels in town.

  There was a shriek from behind and the three of us turned to look, my aching neck making it a painful task. It was the woman, Shira, standing a good 15 meters behind us with a machete in her hand. Much too far to be of any use against my attackers, it was clear in the manner that she was holding the knife that she was threatening to harm herself.

  While they were distracted I drove the stone utensil into the guts of psycho, dropping him to the ground. I staggered up and pin-wheeled backward managing to slump down on the hard earth a few metres in front of the woman. I got up and she handed me the knife. I now saw the toothless flunky I had bludgeoned inside crawl slowly out into the open and lean back against the small hut. I took out some cash from my wallet and threw it on the ground, happy to give everyone an out from this absurd explosion.

  Grabbing Shira and moving through the line of trees towards the canoe I kept glancing back with a wary eye on the prostrate psycho and the other two, of whom only one was now capable of standing. I tucked the efficient little stone club that had helped me into the waistband of my trousers. I helped Shira into the canoe and we pushed off. It was difficult going as I ached all over from the pasting I had absorbed. It was dark when we eased back into the beach area where the hut I had rented was located.

  Though I would have loved to worship Shira’s glorious black arse all night long, I had to settle for her swollen jugs as a comfortable pillow as I rested my bruised carcass. In the morning I was eager to get out of Nkhata Bay as soon as possible for fear of reprisals. She assured me that the three involved, of whom psycho was actually a cousin and not her real brother, would have taken the money and been long since drunk on whatever alcohol they could find. Still, I packed up my things and trudged my way to the nearest road that led back to the other side of the bay. A dusty cab happened by, one of the only ones in the sleepy town. Shira followed along and I said goodbye to her at the small airport where a flight was leaving within the hour. I gave her some cash for her troubles and was off, cursing my luck at not having had more time with her.

  Strange rhythms course across that continent. Walk up to the invisible ghost outlines of foreign tourists who have gone before and watch those on the other side of the contrived interaction play another role. Step outside the normal, tacitly agreed upon boundaries, and the results are not so certain.

  Musings on the Final Days

  Something about the human condition makes us want to share our innermost feelings, often with complete strangers. This can become a compulsion for the expat when he feels that there is nowhere to turn and no one to listen. In the following confessional, an expat who lived in Bangkok writes about what motivated him to return home. Some names have been cha
nged and faces mutated to protect the damaged and discarded.

  The horrible thing about a nervous breakdown as brought on by some insane event is that there is no escape. Your life has been forever altered. There is no reprieve in sleep. Sleep is fitful and unrewarding. There is an insidious moment when you wake up every morning and for a cruel instant the horror is not there. Then the heavy wave of revulsion, sickening bile-filled guts, rubbery legs and hopelessness come rushing back with a vengeance.

  Now, for the first time I am considering seeking out some medication to alleviate what seems like a permanent state. What is there to lose? Perhaps I can regain some form of functioning normalcy, some escape from this never-ending nightmare.

  I am racked by violent fantasies in which I perform all manner of nasty and vile tricks on the evil piece of filth who has brought this on me. I can’t get out of my head the pure essence of joy that would flow from burying her alive. To see the horror in her eyes and the quivering of her taped mouth as she screamed an intense shrill wail of horror that could be heard by no one. Ricocheting inside her doomed insides as I heaped a shovelful of dirt on her face. Or simply barging into her home and putting bullets in the heads of all her family members as she watched. And then, ending her life as well.

  If I reach the end of all hope I just may do one of these things. That people don’t weigh these possibilities before they decide to cheat, dishonour and degrade another human is strange.

  Slow-motion suicide is another option. Try to burn away all remaining shreds of care, decency and moral codes. Walk into any insanity. Let them pile one on top of another until the misdeed is just a pedestrian, passing moment under the crush of everything that flowed after that time.

  Her face is hideous. At 30 years old she is still plagued by severe acne. It is such a nasty, rancid variety of the skin affliction that usually hits people half her age, that a rank odour rises from her face in the early hours of each morning. She has had a nose job. The effect is jarring. An inappropriately large beak pasted in the middle of this face of oozing pus and scars. Her receding chin and skinny neck and poor posture result in the image of this out of place beak leading her around.

  The violent fantasies seem to have a life of their own. Upon closing my eyes I keep seeing an open field with a clump of bushes at either end. She is wandering into the middle of the field. I am in the bushes and I take aim with a high-powered rifle and casually blow her skull apart. In another fantasy, it is the same scene but this time I shoot with a cross-bow. It doubles her over, impaled and gasping. I saunter up to her and slit her throat.

  The lack of control is what is so insidious. The dream of living an honourable life is gone. I’ve got to reshape things. Reconcile it and get on with living. Lifelong torment and eventual suicide is the only other choice.

  One thing you don’t anticipate when you face some kind of devastating crisis is the obliteration of your own self-image. Everything you saw in your own self-image, every positive aspect of yourself disappears in the mist of rage, despair and horror. You have to reorder your mind. Somehow rearrange things. Or death. There are no other options.

  How we cherish the image we have built of ourselves. Something comes in and slices it away. It’s hard to say accurately what qualifies for I can only assess those things which have befallen me. But I can speculate on events in the same vein, and here I’m talking major devastations. Someone purposely infects you with AIDS, you are raped or forced to watch someone you love being raped, you are forced at gunpoint to kill someone you love, you’re swindled out of your entire life’s savings.

  If you can ride out the collapse, a small amount of hope surfaces There comes a morning when that brief horrible moment of remembrance that comes with a wave of sickening despair is not there anymore. It’s a dull ache somewhere in the back of your mind. You have been fundamentally altered. But you still have life. You can still create, gain some small pleasure, marvel at the surreal nature of life and existence.

  In a strange kind of way, the whole train wreck takes away some inhibitions and restraints that may have guided your life before. If you seriously considered suicide for the first time, surely no act is unthinkable for there is always an easy escape if necessary. If the tripe of honour codes and other meaningless horseshit has rewarded you with this injustice, why should you continue to follow any rules?

  What brought me out of it? I was drawn to reading accounts of horrible things happening to other people. It wasn’t conscious. These stories are everywhere if you start paying attention. Newspapers are the obvious first source. I started to notice a soothing respite from the pain I was enduring when I was reading about other people’s lives being destroyed.

  What if inflicting this kind of punishment myself were to generate this kind of balm?

  After being involuntarily bombarded with violent images every time I closed my eyes or paused during the day, it was natural that the perfect crime came to me.

  I’ll lure her into picking me up in her car. My location ensures we will soon be on the expressway. As we approach a line of cars waiting at a toll booth I will turn slightly in my seat and drive the almightiest punch possible directly into her face, knocking her unconscious. Okay, it might not put her out directly but I’m confident repeated batterings with side-fisted hammer blows will.

  As she slumps against the side of the car door I will unclip her seat belt and coast into the line of cars at 80 or 90 km per hour, turning the wheel at the last moment to maximize the side impact collision against her prone body. The risks are quite high. I of course could and likely will be injured. I’ve done some research on side impacts and even being away from the side that takes the hit presents potential for severe injury or death. The possibility of whip-sawing against the side of the car door and suffering head injuries is real.

  Still, the whole scenario will muddy the waters and provide a good cover. How can anything be proven let alone hypothesized in a way that will convince most people?

  The main problem is whether I am willing to do this and live with the moral consequences for the rest of my life. Will it start to eat at me? Has the weight of a lifetime of B movies and pulp fiction filled me with a skewed sense of the potential freedom this could bring?

  To eliminate the most insidious piece of filth I have encountered, who has brought me more misery in a brief explosion of time and insanity than any other person anywhere or anytime in my life? Or is the counter weight, those feel good mantras offered up by society’s feel-good shysters and repeated ad nauseum on refrigerator magnets and by willing dupes, a stronger force?

  “Let it go. Move on, forgive,” etc. The dull abject pleasure of pure revenge seemed much more soothing. Many of the fantasies involved duct tape. Bashing the living fuck out of that wretched face and then binding her hands, feet and mouth and taking off a few of her digits with my teeth. Both of her thumbs. Render her completely fucking worthless for the rest of her life. Soaking her face in acid. Taking apart her cosmetically altered nose. That freakish, utterly out of place ridiculous nose. How fucking absurd and ugly she looked.

  Amidst all the violent fantasies I knew there was only one real final solution. I would have to leave. I felt nothing but contempt for these simplistic, dishonest, cheating bags of filth. How they have constructed this false image of themselves as benign, smiling, good-natured people is truly beyond comprehension.

  It’s the utter surreal nature of everything here combined with most people’s relatively short stays. The same greasy, waxen faced, nasty fucking cheats stand at the same well known, public places every day and openly cheat foreign tourists. The police know it. Any local with half a brain knows it. Yet it carries on. It is allowed to carry on. It makes up for the gnawing realization at the back of everyone’s mind that they are completely inferior. They make up for it by cheating and lying.

  The new airport stands as a testament to how totally fucked this backward shithole of a country is. Built on a swamp and 40 years in the making, it w
as a big, well-used tit to be sucked dry by any of the miserable, soulless, individuals who have helped to fuck this nation so thoroughly over the years.

  The runways started to crack a mere few months after the place was prematurely opened against the warnings of many. Cut-rate tiles broken, water leaking from the ill-planned parking garages into the elevator shafts, shoddy, worthless workmanship in the so-called “5 star” hotels that adjoined the farcical structure. Passengers stand baking in line-ups because of the overhead windows some fool made a fortune out of selling to the ignorant apes in charge of building the fiasco.

  It would be the last thing I would see as I departed for the final time.

  One Soul in Bangkok

  When he felt like this, the whole world was his punching bag. Every face turned into a smirking target. During the day when he walked the street he felt like a ghost, unable to deal with all the people and ideas he couldn’t understand. He felt that anger just as equally during the daylight hours but he couldn’t react as he could during the night. When darkness settled he played a starring role in his own personal movie, and the running theme was revenge.

  Walking through the dimly lit bar with music playing in the background, he breathed in the feeling of liberation. He sat at the bar and surveyed the scene around him with a rictus grin and a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

  The first time he had felt like this he had gone off the rails almost instantly. The feelings of rage had long been there but this simple new awareness that there was a way out had been new. That virginal eruption had been abrupt and violent and he had wakened with a broken nose, sore ribs and a number of missing teeth. He had ached for a week but he had also felt like a new man. When he had thought back over the events that had transpired that night he felt thrilled and for the first time in a long time had known that there was a reason to continue on. Those feelings had kept him going for some time and when the razor sharpness of that experience had slowly started to dull, he planned when and where he would embrace the night again.