Once I was off the island, I wasn't sure what to do next. There were still another two weeks before school started, plus another five days that the farangs weren't expected to teach. So I rented a hotel room in Surat Thani and thought about my next move. There were still plenty of Thai words to learn, but I had given up in my attempts to rope them all in at once. My brain could only take so much each day. Also, I found that sitting down with those books mostly just got me to thinking about other things; sex or extraterrestrial life or why ants were so smart, and after an hour, I'd realize I hadn't learned a thing at all. So, hell, I pulled out the guidebook and looked for something else to do.
Outside of the city was a school where monkeys learned to pick coconuts. It seemed a bit ridiculous, but the act of FINDING the place and SPEAKING with persons other than prostitutes could provide the opportunity to pick up a few more words. So I set out with my dictionary and notebook. Rong Rien Sawn Ling; that was the name of the place. There was a bright, clear sky above me. I walked slowly towards the bus station. No hurry. The sidewalks of Surat Thani were alive with Thai. Old women chewing beetlenut, tuk-tuk drivers sucking on the butts of their cigarettes, kids running around without pants on, and The Most Beautiful Woman In The World watching it all from behind a noodle stand. It was moments like these that made me forget about Dostoevsky and Beethoven and Lives of the Artists and take great pleasure walking among the masses. Thai crowds were unlike any other crowd I'd been in. No one pushed, no one tried to hurry. No one had a set of eyes trained on me in hatred for simply existing in the swamp. There were probably pickpockets, there were probably rapists and murderers. But even they were polite in the Thai crowd.
But I wasn't looking for trouble. I was looking for the monkey school.
When I showed my white face and big nose at the bus station, the drivers were eager to come to my aid. It would be easier swimming with sharks. “You! Where you go?” I explained where I wanted to go. The drivers looked at me as though I was insane. They found a vendor who spoke a little English and brought her over. She was in her twenties, wearing a blue T-shirt that said “In Case Of Rape: This End Up.” I told her where I wanted to go.
You want tour?” she asked.
“No. I don't want a tour. I want to see monkeys pick coconuts. At the Rong Rien Sawn Ling.”
“Oh!” she said. She picked out a bus and told me to get on.
“Are you sure?”
“Chua! Chua!”
I got on the bus. It was one of the “ordinary” busses. The seats were at a ninety-degree angle, with about as much legroom as you can fit into a cereal box. The bus didn't move until the seats were full and people were standing. Men and women smiled and rushed to get a seat ahead of their neighbor. I thought again about the Thai crowd and wondered. When it became impossible to fit another body into the aisles, the bus began to move. I was the only foreigner on board. The driver wore dark sunglasses and sucked on a cigarette. Five minutes into the journey, he put on a cassette tape. It was a group called Caribao, who was very popular with the Thai. Only the driver turned the volume all the way up and whether you wanted to listen to Caribao or not, you were going to listen to Caribao. Again, no one bitched or moaned. Everyone just suffered, Thai style.
We headed a long way out of town. I turned to the man sitting next to me and asked where he was going. He said something I didn't understand. I supposed it was a little too much to hope that he was going to the monkey school. I tried to look for signs out the window. I saw a buffalo grazing in a field. I didn't see any signs.
“Excuse me,” said a woman in a gray dress, sitting directly opposite me. “Where you go?”
I told her. “Rong Rien Sawn Ling.” If I had learned anything that day, it was “monkey school.”
The woman repeated the words to herself. I didn't hear any bells go off. Then the fellow behind her wanted to know. “Sawn Ling, Sawn Ling.” The information was passed around. Everyone got in on the act, but no one knew diddly. Even the bus driver, who was supposed to know, didn't know. It was then that I realized I was in trouble. The woman in the gray dress looked at me kind of funny.
“Ling,” she said. “Are you sure?”
“Ling,” I repeated. “Monkey.” Then, just to wipe the baffled look off her face, I said “Ook, ook, ook,” and pretended to peel a banana.
There was a commotion in the back of the bus. Someone knew of the school. It was an old woman who couldn't speak any English. She pointed out the window and gave directions to the woman in gray. When she finished, the woman looked at me and said: “You must change busses.” The bus driver pulled onto a stretch of gravel and I got out. There wasn't any shade around. I was without water. I watched the bus drive away and stood there in the heat. There were long stretches of field on both sides of the road, probably overflowing with snakes and malaria, malaria and snakes.
A minute went by. It was really hot. Maybe, I thought, this is where I'll cash in the chips. Some men die looking for new lands or questing for fair maidens. Other men die on their way to 7-11 to pick up a six-pack of beer. Me, I went searching for the monkey school. If I got out of this alive, I swore I'd stick to learning Thai through Thai prostitutes.
A car was coming. I stuck out my thumb. The fellow beeped and waved and kept going. I got a good look at his face. If I ever saw him again, I swore that I'd saw his knees off.
Another car. This one stopped. It was a woman. She had short hair and a thin face. She was headed back to town. I didn't have to die looking for the monkey school. I got into the car and we drove off. Her name was Nitaporn, Nit, and she dealt in shells. That is, she drove around the South of Thailand buying or diving for seashells, which she took back to her shop in Hua Hin to sell. She had some stashed in the backseat that she pulled out to show.
“They're beautiful,” I said, though I was of the opinion that seashells ought to stay in the sea. I didn't tell that to Nitaporn. There was something terribly sad in her face. Whatever it was, it didn't affect her driving. I was going to make it home alive.
At the end of the ride, Nit gave me the name of her shop and told me to stop by if ever I went to Hua Hin. Then she drove off.
I didn't try to find the monkey school again.
§
It wasn't the last time I saw Nitaporn. I stopped off in Hua Hin on my way back and found her seashell hut. Nit wasn't in. I spoke with a young man cradling a baby in his arms who told me that Nitaporn would return in the morning. I had nothing better to do. I told him I'd be back.
I had read that Hua Hin was mainly a tourist resort. That's exactly what it was. There were restaurants catering to foreign tastes next to souvenir shops next to men's suit shops. The suit shops were mostly run by Indians. They stood outside in one of their nice suits and called out to passerbys:
“Hello, sir! I have best quality suit for you! Please come inside!”
“Excuse me, sir! New suit! Not expensive! Have a look!”
Or simply: “Hello! Handsome man!”
The suits in the windows were always of a hideous yellow or red or strangely pieced together plaid. I don't know where they got those suits. I don't know who bought those suits. The signs advertised deals like, two coats, two pants, two vests, two shirts: six hundred and fifty-nine baht. The storeowners must have kept watch on his competitor's shops because the same bargain could be found in a dozen other windows.
I spent the afternoon drinking coffee in a German run guesthouse with a view of the sidewalk. Hua Hin was crawling with rich tourists. I saw old women in big straw hats walking arm in arm with old men in big pink shorts. I saw families. The families all seemed the same. Dad with his mustache neatly trimmed and combed, mom all worked up into a panic over Christ Knows What, kids crying, screaming. The happy family on their exotic vacation. It was easy to tell the rich tourists from the local farangs like myself. Rich tourists carried video cameras. Actually, the male of the species carried the video camera. He kept it strapped to his shoulder like a gun in a holster, ready to shoot anything that moved. The rich tourists were an odd bunch. I imagined they could be picked up and dropped just about anywhere in the world without the slightest change of expression or interest. Mom would continue to fret, pop would continue to film, little Sport and sister Heather would continue to bawl. And everone would go home with a T-shirt.
There was another group of tourists, not as rich as the rich tourists, and mostly not as old. These were the backpackers. They walked up and down the street, sometimes with their backpacks, sometimes without. The backpackers celebrated their freedom by growing their hair out, wearing old clothes, and cultivating a stink during some kind of spiritual abstinence from bathing. They too, would go home with a T-shirt.
Finally, there were the “locals,” the group in which I supposed I was a part of. These were the drifters, mostly loners, living in Thailand, getting by on whatever it took. You could always tell who was a local and who wasn't. Locals did their best to blend in, but it was embarrassingly obvious that they never would. If it weren't the whiteness of the skin, it was the receding hairline, the pot belly, the hairy legs. Locals usually weren't friendly with other locals. There was little camaraderie, and much suspicion. We were all on the lam from something back home. A broken marriage, a lack of work, a lack of life. No one stayed in Thailand with an umbilical cord stretching across the sea. It was all or nothing here, and in most of us, the nothingness was all too apparent.
When the sun began to set, I paid the bill and went into the nearest bar I could find. It was a place called The Bedrock. There was a pool table and a dartboard. Now this was more like it. I sat drinking and watching the Thai barmaids ham it up. Their English was good, but it was Bar English. English they had learned on the job. Customers had taught them things like “fuck you,” “on the rag,” and “choke your chicken” and the girls played a little game with what they knew to get a reaction from newcomers. “Excuse me, I have word but I don't know what mean. I can't to find in dictionary. Can you tell to me?” The word, of course, would be muff-dive, ass-sauce, jizz, any one of a number of obscenities. Then when the poor sucker would try to explain, the bargirl would throw a fit, pretending that she thought it was a “nice” word. I suppose it was a way for them to interact with customers when there wasn't much to talk about. One girl even tried it on me. The word was “furburger.”
“Furburger? It's what a frog's ear is called.”
“Cornhole.”
“Oh, cornhole. That's the aperture on a thirty-six millimeter camera, built before nineteen sixty-nine. They're obsolete now.”
“G-spot.”
Do you know where the endoplasmatic reticulum is? G-spot's right next door.”
“You are full to shit!”
The girls liked me. When they discovered I could read and write Thai, they liked me even more. I sat at the end of the bar while word caught on. The girls came down, one by one, with their names written in Thai on cocktail napkins.
“You're Mam.”
“Ooh, this one's very smart!”
“You're Boo.”
“Waah!”
There was one last girl who had yet to be exposed to my talents. She was decked out in a black mini and a low cut pink T-shirt with the word WOW spelled out across her breasts. There was a cigarette between the ends of her index and middle fingernails. She was talking to a guy who kept nodding his head, then shaking his head, then bursting into laughter. WOW stayed behind the bar, and each time the fellow would laugh, she'd burn his hand with her cigarette.
“OW!” he said. “That hurts! You can't DO that!”
The other girls didn't pay much attention to WOW. As for the other customers sitting on their barstools, nursing their beers, they couldn't keep their eyes off her.
“You're crazy!” said the man.
“Yes!”
WOW put out her cigarette (in the ashtray), and moved from her place. She slinked down to my end of the bar, picked up my lighter, and began to flick it.
“I can keep this, yes?” she said.
“You can give it back, yes.”
“How long you stay in Thailand?”
“Four months,” I said in Thai. Our conversation continued in this manner. I spoke her language, she spoke mine.
“You have Thai wife?”
“No.”
“Why you no have Thai wife?”
“Why don't you have a Thai husband?”
“Thai men not good.”
“The King is a Thai man. Your father is a Thai man.”
“Watch it!” said the guy down at the other end. “She'll burn you!”
“That's Cunt. Do you know Cunt?”
“Kent,” said the man. “Not Cunt. Kent.”
“Kent the Cunt.”
“You're not very polite,” I said.
WOW took hold of my nose and twisted it.
“OW! Hands off the nose!”
“Say,” said Kent the Cunt, “You want to shoot a game of pool?”
“Do you speaking with me or with him?” asked WOW.
“Him. I've had it with you. You're nuts.”
So Kent and I shot a game of pool. He told me his tale. He'd lived in Bangkok for four years, working as a supervisor for a well-known construction company. Then a doctor told him that he was developing respiratory problems due to the carbon monoxide in the air. Kent took the next available position in a village down south. He came to Hua Hin on the weekends, mostly because there wasn't any other farangs in his vicinity down south.
“So your Thai must be pretty good.”
“I can say delicious, beautiful, not delicious, not beautiful. Maybe something else when I'm drunk. I was never pressed to learn. In Bangkok, there were always places to go where the girls spoke passable English. I don't know whether you've noticed or not, but the bargirls I've met aren't too keen on a wide variety of interests. I've kept conversations going for hours with my “delicious” and my “beautiful.”
“Look, maybe this is a dumb question, but why are you here?”
Kent chalked his cue stick and shrugged his shoulders. “The line of work I'm doing now puts me in control of a major operation. Back home, I'd be lucky to make assistant foreman. I guess you could say it's a power thing. At the same time, I enjoy my time off. I'll be heading to Bangkok tomorrow to see some friends. We might head down to Pattaya or Ko Samet. So it's sort of a power-freedom thing.” Kent leaned against his pool cue and stared at the white ball. “Why am I here?” he repeated. “That's one of those questions I stopped asking after my first six months.”
After our game, Kent wrote down a list of bars I should “check out” in Bangkok. The bars had names like Candyroom, Big Ones, and Wet Fantasy. I thanked him and put the list back in my pocket.
“Just be sure to visit those bars,” he said. “They'll open up a whole new door for you.”
I wished him luck with his power-freedom thing and got out of there.
§
Nit was in her shop the next morning along with her brother, the boy-man I had seen the day before, his very pregnant wife, and their one-year old son. Except for the kid, everyone had his or her hands full. Nit had returned from her journey down south with at least a dozen boxes of shells. There were conch shells, star shaped shells, and long, spindly shells. Nit's brother, whose name was Bao, went from box to box in a pair of ripped shorts, occasionally handing me one to examine.
“Very nice,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Very beautiful.”
Bao ran into the back room and came out with a guitar. He tried giving it to me until I got it through to him that I couldn't play. So Bao pulled up a box and played for me.
“Down't tewll my hawt, my ay-chee-bray-chee hawt,”
“Bao!” It was Nit. She had her cellphone cradled on her shoulder and bags of shells in both hands. There was no time for Bao's ay-chee-bray-chee hawt. There was work to be done. He set down the guitar and jumped into the mess. I felt that I should be doing something, so I offered to help. Bao's wife gave me a box of shells. They seemed to be conch shells— only they had tails. She showed me how some tails were longer than others. My task was to separate the long tailed conch shells from the short tailed conch shells. As I sorted through them, I couldn't help wonder, as I did with the suits, who bought these things? What did they do with them? Put them in fish tanks? Make wind chimes? I wasn't about to look into the matter. I knew that if the clouds above had a price tag, people would be buying them too.
I finished my two piles of shells, then attempted more Thai. “My work is finished!” I said. “These shells have a long nose, these shells have a short nose. Do you have work for me again?” I must have sounded like an idiot. Nit looked over my two piles, then put all the shells back into the box I had just taken them from.
“OK,” she said. “We go now.”
I said good-bye to Bao's wife, Bao's son, and Bao, who had climbed to the highest shelf in the store to steal money from underneath a giant petrified tortoise. There was something Nit had to do upstairs first, so I waited outside. It was a warm Sunday afternoon and the hangover wasn't so bad. The wind from the sea was cleaner, more wholesome than the dust choked air of Ayutthaya. But I was going to have to return soon. Back to the school. Back to Montezuma. Back to Sucheeda. Nit came out of her shop and got into the car. She didn't smile much, that Nit, and later in the day, I learned why. Nit was divorced with a four-year old daughter who would rather lie in bed and watch TV than go outside and play. On top of that, there was the other kid—brother Bao. He wasn't a good father to his child. He was an even worse husband. Then there was the shop, the shells, all that driving around. She didn't have anyone to entrust the store to while she was gone. She couldn't trust Bao. He was just like all the other Thai men, according to Nit. He got drunk with his friends and avoided all responsibility. She liked her sister-in-law, but she didn't know her shells. Customers often swindled her out of valuable items. Another time, Bao's wife hid five thousand baht somewhere in the store and completely forgot where she had hidden it. Maybe Bao found it and didn't say anything. Who knew?
We took a long drive in her car and parked in a secluded spot. There was a cove where we could sit and watch fishermen cast their nets into the sea. Nit picked out tiny shells from the sand as she talked. I buried my feet. When the fisherman went away, I moved behind Nit and began massaging her shoulders. Then I kissed her neck.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I'm not conducting The Magic Flute.”
“How can you like me when you know I have daughter?”
I removed my hands from her shoulders. She was right. Not about the daughter part, but the other, unmentioned part. I remembered my promise not to screw around with Thai women's lives only to decide it couldn't possibly work out. Especially a woman like Nit, whose life was already teetering on old bamboo.
“Maybe we should go now.”
Nit stood. Then she took off her jeans. She was wearing shorts underneath. She sat back down and stretched her legs across the sand. She had incredible legs.
“You're not making this easy,” I said.
“Do you have girlfriend in Ayutthaya?”
“No.”
“Do you have friend?”
“Yes, I suppose I have a friend.”
Nit smiled. “I don't have friends.”
“Why?”
“I'm old.”
“You're thirty.”
“Yes. In Thailand, I'm old.”
“That's what they thought in Logan's Run, but it turned out to be a big government hoax.”
“Maybe in the future I can go to Ayutthaya and you can be a tour guide,” she said with a smile. I tried to think of Sucheeda, sitting at her desk, watching me leave her. Weak, I was. Weak. Nit moved close and placed her face close to mine. I kissed her on the mouth.
Bad, bad, I thought.
§
That evening we were all going out for dinner. Nit, Bao, and daughter Boo. Only Bao wasn't at the shop when we returned. His wife, still pregnant beyond belief, sat looking at a Japanese comic book. Nit asked where Bao went. She didn't know.
“You wait here,” said Nit. “I must go to find Bao.”
I sat down and waited.
Bao's wife asked me a question. I couldn't understand, but I hated to admit it. I asked her to repeat the question. I still couldn't understand.
“Four months,” I said, hoping it was the right answer. We didn't say anything to each other after that.
Then Nit came back. Bao wasn't with her. We were going anyway. She brought her daughter down and introduced me. I could now say that I had experience with kids. I knew how they worked. Nit didn't fawn over her like a typical mother. She treated her like a fragile adult. That was the trick. Kids had less chance to go wrong in life if they're made to carry their weight at an early age. We all got into Nit's car and waved good-bye to Bao's wife though the windshield. She didn't wave back.
“What's the matter with her?” I asked.
“She is very sad. My brother Bao is no good husband. I think he go to home of student.”
“That's bad?”
“She is seventeen years old.”
“That's bad.”
“It is the same everywhere in Thailand. Long ago, my father get drunk and like to hit my mother. My husband very lazy man before I tell him to go. He never stop to drinking whiskey. Now I see my brother do the same.”
“There are good men in Thailand.”
“Maybe,” said Nit. “I'm not to know.”
Nit drove us to a restaurant. It was a Thai restaurant located in a badly lit shopping mall. I didn't see any other foreigners. They were all over in the farang-oriented part of Hua Hin. The part that Nit rarely ventured into. The restaurant was small, with faded yellow walls and red vinyl seats with tears. Nit ordered Thai style, that is, half a dozen dishes that we all took a few spoonfuls from and left the rest to grow cold. Afterwards, Boo had strawberry ice cream. Nit and I smoked cigarettes. When the check arrived, Nit refused to take money from me. She paid for the whole thing herself.
“You are my friend,” she explained.
Outside, the night was cool and clear. Nit drove back to the shop and put Boo to bed. Her brother had still not returned. We got back into the car and drove to a remote spot overlooking the sea. With the windows down, we could hear the waves hitting the shore. Nit was waiting for me to take her in my arms and kiss her like I had done on the beach. It was much more difficult this time around. I went through the motions, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head; I am going to leave this woman like all those other Thai men have left her.
I held her, all right, I held her. I didn't kiss her.
“You want to go to your hotel with me?” she asked.
I didn't move. Nit didn't move. Then she said it.
“You don't want me?”
“I don't want to hurt your feelings.”
“OK,” said Nit. “You not hurt me.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe a night of tenderness would have done her a world of good. Cleared the dark circles from beneath her eyes and put a song in her step. It might have done all this and more. But it would have killed me. Nit's eyes and Nit's shells and Nit's TV dammed daughter. They all would have ganged up and killed me once I said those unmagical words. “I've got to go.” She must have sensed my hesitation. She smiled, painfully, and leaned back, out of my arms.
“We still friends,” said Nit.
No, I thought. A friend would have slept with you.
We rolled the windows up and Nit drove me back to my hotel. I was right about one thing. I never saw her again.
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