My first Thai girlfriend was not a teacher or a massage parlor girl. She was a bank teller named Pornpimone. I met her the day I opened a savings account. She told me that she wanted to learn English. I told her I wanted to learn Thai. It seemed a better reason for getting together than, say, a fondness for action movies.
So Pornpimone and I started to meet. I bought her a notebook and a new pen for our first lesson. She was twenty-one years old and her braces were due to be removed that very week. Neither of us could communicate beyond a third graders' level of speech, but she was so darn cute with her chipmunk cheeks and braces that I really couldn't see any harm in a few English lessons. On our first Saturday together, we skipped the lessons and went to a mall just outside Ayutthaya. It was a very modern mall, complete with a fountain that shot a stream of water all the way to the top of the five-story structure. I couldn't stop to admire it, though. Pornpimone was in a walking frenzy. She didn't stop for anything. She didn't stop for the Disco City pants sale or the Firm Chicken jewelry display. She was moving so fast up those stairs, I had to break into a jog just to keep up with her. When we made it to the top, she ducked into a line and came out holding two tickets to a movie.
“What's playing?” I asked.
No time for questions. We went into the theater and sat down. The National Anthem played and everyone stood. Then the movie began. It was a pseudo-karate movie where a group of men and women gathered together to fight monsters and bad guys dressed in strange clothes; a typical Hollywood disaster that probably made millions back home. There was one bizarre scene that seemed oddly familiar. “Wait,” I said. “I know that.” Sure enough. It was the three-chedi temple of Ayutthaya, Wat Mongkhonbophit. Fake lightning flashed above and around it, and at the film's end, a big motherfuck of a monster broke out of a different temple, Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon. It figured. In France, you get love stories. In New York, comedies and mysteries. Once Hollywood travels to Southeast Asia, it sends home karate movies and monsters.
Pornpimone and I held hands, nevertheless. She was really making me hot. It was probably the fact that I had all those guidebook rules in my head and was growing more and more excited with each one we broke. That is, with each one SHE broke. Asking boys out and holding their hands in dark movie houses without the supervision of a chaperone was a big no-no in Thai society. Pornpimone seemed to have skipped that chapter in her social norms class. After the movie, there was some confusion as to where we were supposed to exit. Pornpimone rushed to a stairway where the doors at the bottom were clearly chained and locked. “Um,” I said. “I think we were supposed to —” There were the stairs going nowhere, there were flying karate kicks, and there were Porn's thin dark eyes, suddenly closer than I ever expected. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed me. Never before had I been kissed with such curiosity in the lips. It was the kiss I had been waiting all my life for, braces and all.
“Porn,” I said tenderly.
Porn ducked out of the stairwell before I could say “Let's make it, baby,” and led me on another race through the mall, this time to the exit, with Porn slinking through the crowd while I tried not to knock over any baby carriages. We made it to the bottom without losing each other. Another thirty feet and we'd be out of that shopper's Death Star. Then I heard it:
“Ajahn John!”
I should have kept going. My mistake was in turning around. There were two teachers waving to me in front of the Pizza Paradise Restaurant. Porn stopped and looked too. That move of hers made it obvious. We were together, no doubt about it.
“Oh shit,” I said. “I mean, sawadee krap!”
The teachers giggled and waiied.
“Okay, pumpkin,” I said to Porn. “The rumor mill has been set in motion. There's no turning back now.”
There wasn't anymore smooching for the rest of the afternoon.
§
A few days later I went to do some more banking. Porn wanted to meet again. Though our previous kiss hadn't blossomed into anything more than a Good Night, I found myself thinking more and more about her. It began with the question of whether a relationship was feasible or not. So long as I held on to my conviction that a perfect mate was someone I could talk to about literature, art, philosophy and life, it would never work. I wasn't into the idea of “educating” Pornpimone—what the hell did I have to teach her, anyway? No, I had to look at it from the angle that said relationships aren't about sharing interests at all. Relationships are about fighting and fucking and riding that big wave called Getting Along. There do exist couples that open businesses or attend poetry readings or night school together. But even these ventures are all a pretense for more fighting and fucking, sometimes referred to as love. So the question changed again. Could Porn and I fight and fuck and say Baby, I love you or Baby, I hate your guts and ride that wave together? Or would we just end up on two lonely roads heading in opposite directions?
Everything pointed to gravel and dust.
But there is a difference between convincing yourself of what's right and sticking to your convictions. Other factors play their part. The lure of the flesh or whatever you want to call it. Porn was making me giddy. She was sexy without knowing what it meant to be sexy. On our follow-up date, we traveled to Bangkok. Porn was scheduled to have her braces taken off. We sat in the waiting room looking at movie star magazines until it was her turn. She wasn't nervous. I tried to act the part of the boyfriend, holding her hand and reassuring her that everything would be all right. Porn pulled her hand away and told me that she knew everything would be all right. A nurse called her name. Porn disappeared through a pair of swinging doors. I wasn't going to let her take the fun out of this day. Her braces were coming off! It was a momentous occasion! I raced down the stairs to the hospital gift shop. There were plastic flowers, ceramic vases, and silk ties. This was no good, no good at all. When I was a kid, my dentist had a box full of old comic books to pick from when the session was over. Sure, the covers were ripped off, but that dentist knew, as all dentists ought to know, that every kid suffering under those hairy paws and steel picks and bad breath deserves a goddam comic book with the cover ripped off. Not Martha Stewart Madhouse crap. I raced out of the gift shop, onto the street. There were the usual vendors selling pig balls and lottery tickets and Buddhist amulets. I found a toy stand and made a purchase. Maybe I spent too much. I bought one of those hand held computer games like the massage parlor girls liked to play. The one where you have to line the shapes to fit into rows as they fall. I looked at it and thought; I did, I spent too much. And what the hell was she going to do? Play it? Most of the girls I've known hated these things. At least, the ones who weren't forced to spend their evenings behind glass.
Porn was already finished by the time I made it back to the waiting room.
“Here,” I said. “I bought you this goddam game.”
Porn looked at it, turned it over in her hands, and slid it into her bag. Then she was off, without even a smile. Beautiful, just beautiful. I caught up with her and made her stop and show me her straight white teeth.
“Now walk slowly,” I told her. “I feel like I'm dating the Road Runner.”
Porn gave me a pained look. What was it? On the way back the bus was full and we had to stand. There was a television blasting some rotten stage show over speakers placed directly over our heads. Those speakers made it impossible to talk, let alone think. But even with the sound turned off, I wondered what we would have to say to each other. When a seat opened, near the front, Porn sat down and didn't look up for the rest of the trip.
We arrived in Ayutthaya just before nightfall. The sky was red and orange, with yellow lightning drawing in the outline of a storm cloud. Vendors were packing their goods and throwing buckets of water onto the sidewalk. Oily rats ran from shadow to shadow like tricks of the light. I stopped on the corner and told Porn good night. She whispered something that I didn't understand. I bent down, closer to her lips.
“You come to apartment me, dah-ling.”
Down below, a kid no more than five or six tapped me on the leg and held out a tin cup.
“You! Ten baht!”
I dropped a coin into his cup and watched him run away. He took it to a one legged man sitting on the concrete.
“Okay,” I said. “Let's go.”
§
Pornpimone lived in a terribly small apartment at the end of a row of terribly small apartments. There was a bed, a fan, a TV, and a window. If it had been my room, there would have been a sick desperation to it, apparent to anyone who looked in. Porn, on the other hand, turned her little box into a real woman's room, with pantyhose drying in the bathroom, pictures of friends in colorful little frames, and postcards of Japan scotch-taped to the wall. Porn turned the television on, then locked herself in the bathroom for a good twenty minutes. She came out wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt that had the picture of two smiling kittens and “Happy Together” written above them. She sat down on the bed cross-legged and started to watch TV. I wasn't certain where my place was, so I assumed it was next to Pornpimone, who asked me to come home with her and called me dah-ling. Only when I sat down on the bed and put a hand on her shoulder, she reacted as if I had administered an electric shock. Then, devil be dammed, she brought out the idiotic drop block computer game I bought for her and started to play. I moved closer, until I could feel her hair against my cheek.
“You're pretty good,” I said. “I think you're going to get the high score.”
I began to lay light kisses on her ear. The game went beep beep beep as Pornpimone cleared stage one.
“Okay, Sunshine,” I said. “I've just hit my breaking point.”
I snatched the game from her. She grabbed at it, but my reach was longer. I used the opportunity to kiss her while she was off balance. That did it. She returned the smooch with great passion, or at least, a heartfelt attempt. She suddenly jerked away and for a moment, I thought she was about to go for more drop blocks. No, she was only putting some music on. Thailand Top Twenty, something like that. It was bubblegum pop without any life behind it but if it kept Porn still for a short length of time, kick out the jams.
So I slid my tongue in and out of her wonderful mouth and lifted her shirt to gaze upon her lovely breasts and undid the button on her jeans to feel her warm sex. It was that Thai beauty again, making me giddy. That Thai softness in the eyes, that Thai thickness of the lips. That Thai smile, smell, and touch. It worked on me like wine from a private reserve. With one kiss I burned down every shit apartment I ever lived in. One kiss and all those ex-bosses and ex-landlords choked on throat lozenges and fell over dead. One kiss and every girl I've loved and lost suddenly admitted that they were WRONG. One kiss and for the first time in my life I felt I was exactly where I ought to be, doing exactly what I ought to be doing, which is probably the most dangerous idea a man can have because he's always, always mistaken.
But I wasn't thinking about right and wrong, The Starship Enterprise, The Tree of Life, sidewalk sales, Christ, Buddha, or The Silver Surfer. Art and philosophy could go to hell. I had discovered the source of the river from which all things flowed, without questions, without answers and, as of that afternoon, without braces.
Sweet Porn was crying. Little tears ran down her temples and she bit her lip to keep from sobbing. “What is it?” She covered herself with the sheet and sat upright. I asked again.
“What, baby?”
Porn got out of bed and brought out her dictionary. She looked up a word, then pointed to it with a long, red nail. The word was “virgin.” Porn shook her head and started to cry all over again. I put my arm around her and caught a tear, a real tear that stubbornly held on to her cheek. I shook it from my finger and said,
“You're not a virgin? Hell, is that all? I thought you were going to tell me you already had a boyfriend.”
Porn stopped crying long enough to point to a few more words in the dictionary. Wag. That was the word she found, wag. I wholeheartedly denied any association with the word. Then came part two of the questioning. What about virgin?
“No,” I said. “I'm not a virgin either. I've had sex with a girl before.”
Porn wanted to know how many. I had never actually taken count. Not that there was enough to make up a chorus line, it was just something I didn't keep a running tally of. I thought about lying and telling her three but why take chances?
“One,” I said. “I had sex with one girl.”
Porn wanted to know why we didn't marry.
“She died,” I told her. “Right after we had sex.”
Porn looked at me, half baffled by it all. Thank Christ I didn't go with three.
“Well, not RIGHT after, but not too long after.” I was blowing it. I took Porn's hand and wondered what to do next. For some reason, the phrase “You can't change horses in the middle of a stream,” was going through my head. Porn asked me if I wanted to make love to her. I told her that I did. She lowered her face and didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I knew what the problem was.
“Look.” I explained, “I can't marry you. I like you and I want to see you naked, but I can't get married right now.”
The last song of the cassette tape came to an end and the play button clicked to the off position. Porn moved to flip it over. That was that. She had left our sacred touching ground and there was suddenly this THING between us: this sex-marriage, no-sex-no-marriage thing. Our intimacy was gone the moment contact had been broken. I couldn't blame Porn. She showed me another word in the dictionary and I filled in the blanks. People would think she was a SOYPANEE if they saw her with a FARANG. A Thai prostitute on the arm of a Western wag. I didn't need a dictionary to understand what was in her mind. It would have to be marriage. A relationship would never work.
I kissed Porn's sweet soft cheek and handed her the drop block video game at my side.
“Good night Pornpimone.”
Outside, the moon was firmly planted in the night just as I remembered it being on the other side of the earth. I walked along a row of apartments towards the street. There was a teacher's uniform hanging outside one of the apartments. I snuck past it and made it to the street where I flagged a tuk-tuk.
“Rong Rien Chullingsat, krap,” I said.
“Eighty baht!”
“Twenty baht!”
“Fifty baht!”
“Forty baht!”
“Okay.”
I got into the back of the vehicle and held on as the exhaust murdered the air around me. I looked at the road behind me and thought about Porn. I imagined her slipping out of her clothes and checking her neck for any marks I might have left. There might be one. I imagined her rubbing it and worrying over it and applying cream in the hope that it might disappear overnight. The “sniff kisses” that I received didn't leave any visible marks at all. So far, the suntan on my arms and face was the only indication I had visited Thailand at all. Those rare individuals who believe themselves to be possessed by angels or demons must experience a similar dilemma, explaining their moments of beauty and terror and rotten luck, after having tasted something otherworldly, only to wake up to themselves again.
Forty baht. I had been ripped off again.
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