Aside from teaching, the three of us had to play showpiece as well. This usually meant meeting some representative or administrator from way up north, smiling, waiing, the whole shtick. Other times, we were driven to a remote location to attend a “celebration,” a ten-year anniversary or an awards ceremony. The parties were conducted Thai style, that is, teachers from different schools sat at different tables with interaction ranging from very little to none at all. It was more like sitting to demonstrate how well we could sit. Entertainment consisted of a bad singer in a bad suit, while twenty babes in bikinis did a bad line dance behind him. It was all pink and green and orange and purple, with spinning lights, strobe lights, and Christmas lights to make it seem even more pink, green, orange and purple.
“Do you like Thai music?” asked Miss Sangwan, sitting next to me.
“Umm,”
After dinner, a female singer sang a Cha Cha Cha number while men and women got up to dance. Everyone moved in a circle in front of the stage. The women seemed to be plucking imaginary flowers while the men followed along, palms up, making small circles in the air. They all swayed back and forth, left to right, careful not to touch.
“OK,” said Miss Sangwan. “Dancing.”
What she meant was that she wanted us to join in. I politely turned her down. Then Bob and Monty got up to dance and hell, it looked as if I were too. We got out there beneath the kaleidoscope of spinning hangover lights and did what the guy next to us was doing: dancing. It was obvious that we were doing something wrong, though, because the man often had to stop and correct us.
“Look at Monty!” said Bob. “Look at him go!”
Monty went. He went like a man under the spell of an epileptic fit. His body jerked and his hands went up and down, violent and puppet like.
“You know, I can't help feel sorry for the guy,” said Bob. “He's one of life's victims.”
“So what are we?” I asked.
“We've got a hold on things. We're not blown over by a change in the wind, if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe it's better to be knocked around than stand and let it blow through you.”
I was always ready to take an opposing side to anything Bob said.
He shook his head and made a tsk tsk tsk noise. “I've seen a lot more of the world than you have. I can adapt to my surroundings much better. Don't get me wrong, Chief, I'm not insulting you. I'm just saying that if you want to survive, it's best to get over your wonder and concentrate on living.”
Bob poured himself a soda and thought for a moment. I could tell when he was thinking because of the look on his face. It was neither a smile nor a frown. It was the expression of a man holding his pecker, not sure of whether to jerk off or put it back in his pants.
“I have to admit,” he said. “I've banged a lot of whores in my day, and the one I had on Friday was one of the best lays of my life. But I just didn't enjoy it as much as I normally do.”
“Maybe you should try farm animals,” I said.
Bob wasn't paying attention. He was hard at work on his dilemma. Meanwhile, the teachers had returned to the table, worn out from all that dancing.
“OK,” said Miss Sangwan. “We go now.”
§
Our next big social took place in the North, in the city of Chiang Mai. From what I read in the guidebooks, the North of Thailand was an untouched wonderland filled with Hill Tribes who still practiced their age-old traditions. Traditional dances, traditional dinners, traditional arts and crafts. I didn't know what there was to learn from any of this, but it beat another night spent falling in love with a massage girl.
We left in the evening. It was twelve hours by bus. Monty stayed home with diarrhea. Sangwan played tour guide. I was forced to sit next to Bob. I expected a long and torturous evening filled with Bob-stories of Cairo, Bob-stories of his ex-girlfriend, Bob-stories of Bob. Only Bob conked out about an hour into the journey and didn't wake up again until we arrived the next morning, which REALLY pissed me off since I couldn't sleep at all. Busses, you know.
The morning circus wasn't as terrible as we expected. Sangwan took us to a school and introduced us to the head of the board of something, as well as the mayor—mayor? Ex-mayor. Anyone who held a position of semi-importance wore a plastic strip of multicolored blocks like twenty-year veteran army generals earn. The Thai version appeared to come from an Our Army At War kit that included a plastic gun, plastic grenade, epaulets, and maybe a fake compass or secret decoder ring. Nevertheless, the officials wore them proudly, though what the hell they meant was anyone's guess. One highly decorated fellow shook our hands vigorously and said in a fairly good accent,
“Ayutthaya not same same Chiang Mai.”
“No,” I told him. “Chiang Mai has Hill Tribes.”
The colonel or major or grand Pooh-Bah's eyes lighted up. “Oh! You want to visit the Hill Tribes?”
“Very much.”
“Good, good. Do you like Thai food?”
“Mmm-mm. I can't get enough of it.”
“And do you like Thai women?”
That afternoon, we got into a truck and went up the side of a mountain. The roads were narrow like a dead end street or a dead man's alley. It helped not to look. If you looked, you saw the tops of trees stretching out for miles. You saw Chiang Mai in the distance and the surrounding mountains against a blue blue sky. You also saw the curves your driver was taking at highway speed, with the occasional truck coming at you from around the bend. Even Sangwan looked nervous.
“He's driving very fast,” I told her.
“Mai pen rai. He have Buddha.”
Yes he did. Sitting right there on the dashboard. All drivers had them. Statues of the B. Photographs of holy monks. Sometimes both. These items brought good luck to Thai drivers and saved them from following traffic laws. It also saved them from other drivers who might have bad karma that day and drove like accidents waiting to happen. It didn't matter that car crashes were the leading cause of death in the country, nor did all the permanently scarred arms, legs, eyes, and brains deter them. Just as long as Buddha was there on the dashboard.
We made it. Not to the top of the mountain but to a village high on a plateau. The name of the village was Doi Pui and the people who lived there the Hmong or Meo. There were some Hill Tribe villages where the inhabitants had never laid eyes upon a white man. This wasn't one of them. The first thing we saw was not a race of people untouched by civilization but a bunch of fat Europeans standing around smoking cigarettes and drinking Sprite. Past the Europeans was a row of souvenir shops, a couple of outdoor restaurants, and signs directing us to the Meo village. The signs were written in English, German, French, Japanese, and Thai. The only road to the village just happened to be packed with shops on both sides of the street. I could hear the Meo women calling from their gift shops.
“You! Come looking! I give special price!”
Meo children dressed in colorful clothes danced and played in the street. Bob squatted down and took a picture of a little girl. The girl stopped dancing and held out her hand. “Ten baht!” In the doorway of an old wooden shack, a white haired old man sat smoking from a long pipe.
“Aw, hell,” said Bob. “My folks will think it's real.”
He photographed the old man smoking the pipe. Twenty baht. We could each take a puff for another twenty.
Entrance to the village was thirty baht. Sangwan paid. I didn't want to go in. I wanted to go stand by the truck and drink a Sprite. Inside the village were more kids in their traditional outfits practicing the traditional art of scamming tourists. The grass was green though, and the wooden huts set back from the eye did indeed have real live poor people living in them. One curious traveler went right up to one of the huts and looked in the window. I heard a woman scream. The fellow snapped a picture and ran.
We left the village and went back down the mountain into town. That evening, Bob was restless. He wanted a hooker. I followed him to various bars to see whether they were brothels. One place off the main road had girls sitting outside calling to passer-bys. Bob crossed the street with his Bob walk and Bob hair and folded his arms Bob style while he talked to one of the girls. I stayed back, at least, I tried to stay back until a girl took me by the arm and pulled me in. The girl had dark orange hair and was obviously Meo.
“Hello, where you come from? You buy me Coke, OK?”
I told the Meo girl I'd be back in one minute. She took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke to the right of my head. The girl that Bob was talking to had short hair and golden cheeks that were spoiled by ugly makeup. There was a smile on his face, but I could tell he was irritated. Something was really turning his piss white.
“What's up, Bob?” I asked.
“She doesn't want to go with me.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn't say anything to her. I asked her how much, and she said she didn't know.”
“Did you offer to buy her a drink?”
“Drinks are expensive.”
I looked at the girl giving Bob a hard time. She was squirming too, in her own way. It was a ridiculous scene. Bob wasn't going to be satisfied until she let him prove that he was a man and she wasn't going to be happy until he left.
“I asked her if she was a whore,” said Bob. “What's the word for whore? Soypanee, right? That's whore, right?”
“Bob, you spooked her, Bob. She doesn't trust you any more than she can speak with you.”
“Look, this is a business transaction. She's a whore and I'm a client. If I accidentally spook the cashier at 7-11, she's still going to sell me a goddam Slurpee, isn't she?”
“Maybe this girl is new.” I was trying to get us out of there. “Maybe she's on her period.”
“Yeah,” said Bob. He wasn't convinced. The girl bit at her fingernails and Bob asked her if it were aroi. Aroi means “delicious.” It's one of the first words farangs learn, mostly because everyone wants to know if we're happy eating. The girl didn't think Bob's joke was funny. She gave him a nasty look and went inside.
“Let's stand here a little while longer,” said Bob.
“I'm going back to the hotel.”
“I'll tell you something. Those girls in there want us. You may not think so because they're whores but they hardly ever get to sleep with young, good looking guys like us.”
“All right, Bob.” I walked off in the direction of the hotel. At the street corner, I turned and glanced back. Bob was still standing in front of the bar, arms folded like some half pint bouncer, waiting for God Knows What. A tuk-tuk slowed down and I got in. I went back to the hotel, showered, shaved, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. I began to dream that all these crazy wars were breaking out across the world and the only safe place to be was Thailand. I awoke sometime after three when Bob came back.
“I fucked her,” he said. “Look.” He stuck his face close to mine and pulled down his bottom lip. There were bloated teeth marks and a little bit of blood. “I fucked her so hard I nearly bit through my lip.”
“How did you talk her into it?”
“I didn't. I paid the bar and told the mama-san that I wanted her. I admit, she didn't like me at first, but she changed her mind once I started banging her. I knew she would. Well, good night, Chief.”
Bob switched off the light and got into bed. Ten minutes later, he started to snore.
The next morning, we left Chiang Mai.
§
Our final excursion of the school year was to a national park called Khao Yai. Once again, Monty stayed home with a bellyache and I was forced into Bob and Sangwan's company much like prisoners are forced onto a chain gang. There were some advantages that Khao Yai had over Chiang Mai. For starters, there weren't any brothels in the jungle, at least, none that I was aware of. There weren't any hookers and there weren't any Hill Tribes and if you forgot about the roads and power lines for a minute, you could almost believe that you were in an unexplored part of the world. We stayed the night at the home of Sangwan's brother, Deek, who lived on the outskirts of the jungle. Deek had a large family. That's what it looked like at the outset. There were about a dozen children ranging from two to sixteen in age, with names like Moon, Bub, and little Mot. Later, I found out that they were mostly cousins, neighbor kids, forest ranger offspring, and orphans. They collected wood for a bonfire and brought us red and orange bugs to look at.
Deek spoke English. He had gone to school in New York for five years. Deek was 100% Thai, but Westernization had taught him to complain. He bitched about the government, the environment, the economy, the educational system, and the traffic in Bangkok. It was good to finally hear a Thai give up the dirt on Thailand. Up until then, the only response I had heard regarding the country's woes was “It's better than Burma.” Deek brought out a bottle of the Mekong's finest and the lot of us, kids, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and farangs sat around the fire while the stars shined above and the jungle watched with all kinds of unseen eyes.
“I miss America very much,” said Deek. “Maybe I would be there now but you know, I have some problems with my wife.”
“Where is your wife?”
“She's dead.”
“Sorry.”
“She was not a good woman, you know. She like to gamble. She lose all her money, then she lose all my money. She lose money we don't have. Very bad. Thailand very big with Mafia. You know Mafia? Not good to have to pay money to gangster men. But my wife, she crazy. One night she go to gambling house with her jewelry. She have gold necklace that her mother give to her. And wedding ring. You know, she don't want to pay money she owe, she only want to gamble more. So I go to gambling house with a gun. I sometimes stupid too. But that woman, you know, she make me crazy. I go in and shoot my gun. Ha, ha. I shoot it up in the air but everyone think I'm gonna kill these gambling men and run. I look at my wife. My wife, she lose all her jewelry. Now we have nothing and we must to pay our debts or maybe some men come, you know, and kill us. I tell this to her and she hit me with a piece of metal. You can see where she hit me. My wife, she run away and not come back. Then I find out she dead.”
“How did she die?” asked Bob.
“I don't know. Not good to talk about, you know? Police tell me she shoot herself but I don't believe them so much. What can I do, you know? It's a problem for Thailand very much.”
Deek gave us each a cigar and went to bed. Bob and I sat smoking them and thinking about the fate of Deek's wife. Soon the bonfire died out and the jungle began to creep in like some dark, living thing. Bob talked about how he missed his Filipino girlfriend in Cairo and resolved to write a letter once he got back to Ayutthaya. The moon went behind some clouds and Bob nodded off to sleep. I sat for another moment, then got up and gave his chair a kick.
“Let's go inside. There are wild animals out here.”
So we went into the guest room where there was a pair of beds and Bob took the one by the window and I took the one by the wall. Bob went right to sleep. He considered this a sign of mental health. Me, I was borderline insomniac. I lay there listening to the crickets, thinking about everything and nothing until my thoughts went their own course and proved to be dull enough to induce sleep. When I woke up again, it was much deeper into the night, though it seemed that only a few minutes had gone by. There was a cool, quiet wind blowing the curtains from the window. The crickets had stopped singing. The only noise was coming from Bob, who tossed and turned in his bed as if the mattress were administering electric shock therapy. He'd turn on his side, his stomach, and his back, then slap his knees and shoulders, all in his sleep. Then something really weird happened. I noticed a shadow move near the door. Only it wasn't a shadow that was moving, but a shape, the shape of a woman. She was dressed in the traditional garments worn by Isan folk. There was even a long pointed headpiece on her carefully sculpted hair, like I had seen in pictures of classical dancers. There wasn't any light entering the room, but there was clearly a Thai woman near the door. She danced across the room to a long lost song from out of the jungle and disappeared as she reached the bed where Bob lay writhing. He had one final spasm, then settled into a quiet slumber.
Everything was still. Then the wind blew and the crickets started to sing again and I too fell into a peaceful sleep, with dreams that took me back to high school, where I said hello to some of the punks I used to hang out with before I became old and wise, so to speak. Even the ones who were killed in drunk driving accidents came back to have a laugh. When I awoke the next morning, I felt as if my soul had been nursed and burped and dusted with powder. Outside, there were pancakes and butter and syrup all laid out for us, courtesy of Sangwan and Deek. Bob couldn't eat. He had the look of a man who'd been awake for three days. He couldn't figure out what the problem was.
“What are you so happy about?” he asked.
“Pancakes! I love pancakes! Say, Bob could you pass me the syrup? There's nothing on this wonderful world I love more than Sunday morning pancakes and syrup!”
That afternoon, we got into a van and drove back to Ayutthaya.
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