Bangkok Filth

by Ken Austin

  The greatest commercial fraud ever perpetrated on a group of unsuspecting fools.

  A multi-billion dollar industry built on the nearly unquestioned belief that the best way to clean yourself after defecating is to take a coarse piece of paper and smear the remnants of shit all over your arse. Gouge, tear and mash away at that tender and sensitive tissue.

  The most prosperous and advanced nation in the world and the majority of its populace are walking around with chunks of shit clinging to the hairs around their arseholes.

  Overseas proctologists cringe when they see bloated expat yanks blundering towards the entrance to their clinics, knowing that awkward and sickening moment when they have to summon their assistant with the jackhammer.

  Take a drunken yank slut home for a mattress-pounding session and there is always that tentative hesitation as to whether you should manhandle her into doggy style position for fear that as she spreads her cheeks your lust will be castrated by the sight of her soiled hole.

  Why has the whole world figured out the simplest, most effective and hygienic way to clean your arsehole is with water, while yanks, Brits and perhaps a few others insist on luxuriating in their own filth and excrement?

  Many Europeans have the somewhat cumbersome bidets while most of Asia uses a simple hose and nozzle that can be adjusted with different levels of water pressure. The result is quick, thorough and painless.

  Doctors have done studies that have shown that those who use water as opposed to paper are less likely to suffer from hemorrhoids, piles and other conditions.

  During my years in Asia, it never ceased to amaze me that no one had taken the idea back to the UK or the US and made a concerted effort to market the hose and nozzle method. If you could convince people to try it, it almost couldn’t fail simply because any damn fool would have to see the superior cleaning that resulted.

  On reflection, there were certain obstacles that would have to be overcome. Those habits surrounding personal hygiene are learned early and become personalized and ritualized in decades of layered and hardened shit. It’s hard to crack that petrified wall of excrement even with undeniable logic and reason.

  That and the fact that there was no actual invention or innovation that could be patented. I determined that the hose and nozzle method was the best option. While already available in any hardware or DIY store and often used for other purposes, such as hooked up next to the kitchen sink and used for washing up, if it was packaged specifically as an arse-hose and marketed in conjunction with an advertising campaign, it just might work.

  In fact, this is exactly what I did. I took on the UK market while some of my associates handled the US. I managed to co-opt a few high-profile proctologists who quickly agreed to shill for our product in exchange for some time with the entourage of Asian tarts I had brought with me. There was a lighthearted advertising campaign that degraded anyone who was filthy enough to not see the benefits of water over paper.

  It somehow seemed to be the right time; the public was receptive and the media lavished so much free publicity on us that we were able to scale back the advertising as sales quickly racked up. One concern that could have prevented quick acceptance was the fact that most homes and public restrooms would have to be renovated with special fittings so that the hoses could be installed. An inconvenience and additional cost that could throw a shit caked toilet brush into the works.

  We insinuated some of our thugs and operatives into various plumbers unions on both continents. People were leaned on and the clogged pipes of understanding were cleared up in remarkably short order. Favourable deals were struck that meant any customer who wanted to have our product installed would receive a fair deal and others who saw how easily they could siphon off some of our business with their own set-up were quickly dissuaded by abrasive and uncooperative plumbers.

  It was about that time that the big corporate, toilet paper giants started to make shrill public comments about the supposed “dangers” of our products. The absurdity of their claims were commensurate with the continuing demand of our product and skyrocketing sales. They ratcheted up their own advertising campaigns but they were no longer touting the benefits of paper, they were manufacturing bogus claims to try and smear us. Testimonials were trotted out with bloated illiterates claiming to have suffered permanent internal damage from our arse-hoses. We beat off a few high profile lawsuits and we just kept on hammering those shit smearers closer to a day when they would be obsolete.

  They did seem to have some loyalists and almost to a person they were uneducated bible-beaters. As their empty skulls were clogged with the absurd self-righteous and judgmental shit that refused to be cleansed with logic, so too they hung onto their shit-caked lard asses as a defiant sign that their ignorance was invincible.

  We carried on unimpeded and headed towards an empire built on pristine and well-maintained arseholes. At the same time, threatening phone calls and strangers following us were becoming the norm. We laughed it off, the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it adding to the cachet that surrounded us.

  One night as I headed home with a young tart at my side from a night of celebrations, I had the sense that I was being followed. The tart had become part of the group who moved with us and hoped for some crumbs of attention. Occasionally when one of us was particularly soused and had no other prospects, such as tonight, she would stagger home with us and hope for the best. At least I could be relatively certain that no unpleasant surprises awaited if she offered her ass up to me.

  I fumbled with the key to the door of my walkup flat that led into the street and just as I managed to get it open we were barreled into from behind and driven into the foyer of my home. There was mass confusion and screaming and with my inebriated state and the pain from the lambasting I had just received I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on until I came to. I was rigid and unable to move, tied up in a chair. A fuming thug was in front of me with his arrogant accomplice leaning against the wall in my kitchen.

  “You cunts just had to keep coming, dincha? Things were OK when you carved out a slice of the shit-filled pie but you had to have the whole thing hey? You know that I put two kids through college with this,” he held up a handful of toilet paper from a pile on the floor in front of me. He was quaking, red-faced and nearly apoplectic and barely able to hold in his rage.

  “Yeah, two punks with ‘shit-caked arseholes’ as you and your fucking asshole associates like to say so often!”

  He rammed a fistful of the paper into my gob, the slight perfumed aroma and the dryness that soaked up all my saliva making me gag. Then they went to work on me and did a pretty good job. I looked up with a false sense of bravado, knowing that I didn’t have much hope left, wondering what happened to the girl and scanning my memory for every bit of cinematic pop psychology of someone who had used a last ditch attempt to sway his tormentors.

  The thug was sweating and panting now, taking a breather from the energy he had spent laying a pasting on me. His accomplice had casually wandered out of the kitchen. The sneer on his face perhaps an indication of what he had in mind for the girl.

  I managed to spit out the wad of toilet paper that he had shoved into my mouth.

  “You smell like shit you son-of-a-bitch! Can’t you see how brazenly fucking logical our product is! Yer so fuckin’ brainwashed yourself that you’re still using the god-damn paper! You sick filthy cunt! You work up a sweat and all the shit caked to your filthy hole starts emanating that putrid odour. When was the last time…”

  He was still enraged but I had hit a nerve.

  “How much they paying you you daft cunt!” I blared at him, my new-found sense of bravado urging me on. But his guffaws in response to my verbal attack told me that I was in for another round of abuse.

  “You must love picking out the bits of paper clinging to the shit-caked hairs around your whore of a wife’s asshole as you’re fucking her!”

  He came at me screaming and though my hands were bound behind me to the
slats at the back of the chair I was able to stand up. I lurched to one side as he crashed into the cupboards behind me. I lunged into the other room with the chair laced to me. My forward movement carried me towards the front door that the fools seemingly hadn’t closed and I burst through into the night air launching myself off the stairs and onto the concrete of the street below where the chair shattered.

  My hands now freed, I bounded back up into the house, no ache from the impact, flying on adrenaline, I charged back into the kitchen where I unloaded in a frenzy on the oaf who was still prostrate. Kicking until I was exhausted I remembered the other thug and pulled a knife out of a kitchen drawer and turned to sink it into his chest as he came back into the room in a flurry, the remarkable fluidity of the entire movement amazing me as much as the surprising lack of resistance of his flesh to the knife as he slumped to the floor.

  I stood panting, the rage waning but still not gone. In workmanlike fashion, I hauled the oaf into the toilet across the hall from the kitchen along with some loose excess rope that had been used to tie my hands. Without pausing to consider any potentially unpleasant aspects of what I was doing I tore his clothing off, took the gold plated nozzle that was hanging on the wall next to the toilet and using my foot, drove it as far into the screaming oaf’s arse as I could.

  Then un-attaching the hose from the wall I started lifting kicks into the squealing fucker’s midsection, driving him towards the hallway. I was directing him towards the stairwell that led towards the basement and then with a tremendous punt I lifted the bag of flesh into the air. Clattering down the stairs screaming and begging for mercy as the hose dangled from his arse, he landed with an expulsion of air and then he emitted a low moan.

  I rifled through the small collection of implements and tools I kept in the basement and located what I was looking for. Grabbing the oaf by his blood-matted hair, I dragged him towards the collection of pipes that came out of the floor near the rear wall of the basement. Taking the end of the hose hanging from his arse I added a fitting and then screwed it into the main water pipe, wrapping it securely in electrical tape and cinching it tight with a spanner.

  For good measure I emptied a few tubes of caulking onto his arse and then took a long pincer like utensil that was normally used for plucking small items from places that were impossible to reach by hand. I pinched the end of the hose where it protruded from his arse and drove the implement and hose further into his rectum causing him to emit a wretched scream.

  I jacked up the pressure of the water far beyond anything that was possible in the toilet connection and then put my hand on the lever that would release the explosive torrent.

  “I’ll show you the benefits of water you worthless son-of-a-bitch!”

  Bangkok Noir

  “Your thumbs ache after you strangle someone.” A convicted murderer told this to Sal Veneer in the visitors room at a federal prison in Kingston, Ontario.

  Veneer started writing to prisoners when he was 16. He wasn’t really surprised when they answered. What else did they have to do with their lives? He craved the insight they could provide into the crimes they committed.

  Veneer decided early that he wanted to spend his life writing about criminals and crime after he got his hands on a stack of crime noir novels. Jim Thompson, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler. He couldn’t get enough. Something bleak and unrelenting about the books drew him in.

  He didn’t make much headway in his criminology classes when he got to university, though he learned plenty of valuable things and continued his habit of reading whatever he could devour on the subject. He started visiting prisoners in his second year of university to help with research one of his professors— named Gletgen—was doing. That’s when a convicted murderer told him about strangling someone. And when the idea of writing a book about crime really started to take hold with him.

  He still attended his classes, but they had started to become little more than a opportunity to daydream about the book he was going to write. And a chance to talk to his classmates and pick their brains about various theories he had about criminals.

  He sat next to a female student named Sherry in a class with professor Gletgen.

  “Those men excite me. The ones who pull off the biggest heists and deal in the most relentless violence.”

  “They don’t repulse you?”

  “Yes, that too. But something vile about the whole world in which they live. The satisfaction that I am still alive in a dangerous world. To be on the very edges of that; when a writer gets inside that world and pulls you in, it can be incredibly moving.”

  Veneer leaned back in his chair and smiled. Something he felt for a long time. People get a thrill out of knowing that nothing horrible has happened to them…yet. It’s one of the things that makes crime novels and movies so appealing to people.

  I can do that, thought Veneer. A way to keep immersed in something that I enjoy, and avoid the anonymous, boring lives of most people. I want to do something meaningful. To know that I have affected people the way Thompson and Chandler did. OK, he thought, I might not reach the heights of legendary crime noir status. In fact, I’ve got a much better chance of writing a true crime book. But I’ve got to try.

  He liked some of the classes and he enjoyed the other students. But in the end he couldn’t see how it would help him accomplish his goal of writing a true crime masterpiece. The visits to the prison were more valuable. The fear and loathing radiated off the human filth that he interacted with during his visits.

  The insights they longed to share with him crackled with realism. He assumed that the convicts wouldn’t attempt to impress their fellow inmates in quite the same way. He wanted to be the closest thing to a confidante that they had.

  As the research visits continued, Veneer started engaging the prisoners in wide-ranging conversations with the hope that he would glean the kind of compelling information that he could write about. He did many of the visits alone now, and this gave him the opportunity to search for that narrative that he could spin into a true crime book.

  But as interesting as his interactions with prisoners were, they weren’t providing the kind of material that could be spun into entertaining reportage. Sure, it was nasty, sociopathic stuff. Like the tale a convicted murder told him of slicing open his victim’s belly and then eating the undigested spaghetti out of her stomach with a fork. Vile pieces of filth like that were simplistic animals and their stories were brutal vignettes with no rhyme or reason. He needed a narrative, a story that stretched over years and a central player who could at least elicit some sympathy from readers. An anti-hero. The kind of criminal who people secretly envy.

  But Veneer kept looking for that one individual who would provide the kind of twisted tale that would motivate him to put it all together.

  Then, one day he found it. He got the heads up on an interesting character at the prison that he visited. A prisoner named Vic Streeter. Life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years and he was on year 12. More than a decade stretched out in front of him, and the prospects of any semblance of a life when he got out dimmed by the day.

  Veneer heard about him from a convict named Calvert Slopski. Another murderer. The murderers in the same prison all seemed to know one another. Maybe it gave them something to talk about when they met each other in the prison yard.

  Slopski told Veneer that Streeter was a hard case who had spent years traveling and living in south east Asia. Apparently he was involved in heroin smuggling, spent time inside one of the toughest prisons in Thailand, the infamous Bang Kwang prison in Bangkok. Also known as the Bangkok Hilton.

  Veneer knew about Bang Kwang. He had read a number of books about westerners who tried smuggling drugs in and out of Thailand, had been caught and sentenced to time inside. There was a sub-genre of books in the true crime field that specialized in their exploits. Universally horrid books though they contained the kind of details that Veneer loved to read about.

 
; Yes, something there. I have always dreamt about traveling to Asia. And the potential for writing about someone with experience in that part of the world could be what I am looking for. I have got to research this Streeter character, thought Veneer. Got to find out whatever I can about him. Impress him with my knowledge of what he has done.

  Veneer looked online and found nothing. Perhaps his crimes predated the internet. He did a scan of the microfiche database at the local library. Also nothing. What was he thinking? Just because some murderer dropped this name to Veneer did not mean a thing. In fact, if he found something on Streeter, it would have surprised him.

  Veneer applied for the visit with Streeter before he left the prison the same day he had talked to Slopski. Veneer let on to the prison officials that the interview would be related to the research his professor was conducting.

  The word came a few days later that Streeter agreed to the visit and the prison granted the pass. Veneer realized he had nothing to go to the interview with. No clue about who this Streeter was other than what Slopski had told him.

  But Veneer remembered something that his professor in one of his criminology courses told him about interviewing people:

  “People always answer in a superficial way at first. You have to probe beneath the surface to get at the things that are really interesting. The superficial response isn’t necessarily a result of a conscious attempt at deception. It’s the default response, and an indication that so many of us think in clichés and have few good listeners and askers who motivate us to do otherwise.”

  The professor had interviewed hundreds of inmates during his career and Veneer had stayed after class many times to get more tips from the professor.

  When Veneer arrived at the prison check-in area on the day of the visit, he provided the information that the prison authorities required of visitors. Proof of identity, his signature on various forms, one of which indicated that the information that he intended to take away was for research purposes only.