We made it to the city a little after six p.m. A taxicab took us to the hotel where Sucheeda and I used to meet. We showered, smoked, then went to a tiny restaurant across the street. Bruce brought out a guidebook to Thailand that he scanned while we ate.
“It looks like we’ve got three choices,” he said. “There’s Patpong, Soi Cowboy, and The Nana Entertainment Plaza.”
“What are the differences?”
“I don’t know. But it looks like if we go to Nana, we can walk to Soi Cowboy.”
“OK, let’s go to Nana.”
“I’m curious,” he said suddenly. “I just want to see what it’s all about.”
“Yeah, me too.”
The sun was down when the taxi let us out at Sukhumvit Soi 4. We walked the half block to another soi that branched off to the left. There was nothing visible in the line of trouble except for a virtual horde of farangs walking with their Thai “girlfriends.” Whether they were partners for the hour, the night, or longer was hard to tell. They walked side by side with their oversized boyfriends; silent, sexy, and without the least trace of emotion on their faces.
“It must be here,” said Bruce.
We rounded the corner. Before us was a three story U-shaped complex alive with music and neon and flesh. Farangs of all shapes and sizes were planted on stools at the outside bars built in the middle of it all. Girls in short skirts and sleeveless blouses roamed about. Some of the girls sat on the laps of the foreign men. Others hustled their bodies in the neon lit doorways. The air stank of beer and piss and cheap perfume.
“I guess this is where it begins,” I said.
“And ends,” said Bruce.
To the left of us was a stairway. A couple of kids, no older than my third graders, lay sleeping on the bottom step. We walked past them to the second level. A Thai man-boy dressed in a suit approached us.
“You want see sex show?” he said. “Third floor. Live sex show. Man cum on top of woman.”
We started at the tip of the U and made our way around. That is, we gave it the old college try. Girls appeared from out of nowhere, girls in bikinis, girls in bras and panties. They took hold of our arms and tried to pull us into bars. A rather young and pretty one latched onto Bruce and wouldn’t let go.
“You! Handsome man! Where you go?”
“I was just looking for the snack bar.”
“You come inside with me, OK?”
Bruce looked down at her. She gave him a big grin, then reached over and squeezed his privates.
“This place seems friendly,” he said.
The name of the bar was “Texas A-Go-Go.” There was a neon cowboy hat and spur that blinked on and off. There was also a small neon cowboy who held onto a rope. At the other end was a small naked girl who had been lassoed by the cowboy. She blinked too.
“Do you think the girls wear cowboy hats?” asked Bruce.
“We’ll soon find out.”
It turned out that the girls weren’t wearing any hats at all. The entire western theme seemed limited to the neon outside. Our hostess led us by the shirtsleeves to a pair of stools next to the stage. Then she disappeared. Four girls danced on stage to a rotten disco beat. That is, they bent their knees and swung their arms and kept fixing their breasts in the wall length mirrors. It was a form of dancing. Each of the girls had a number pinned to their bikini bottom. When the song-thing ended, the girls moved one pole to their left, losing one and making room for another. A waitress came by and took our orders. The waitress was an old woman with terribly pockmarked skin. She too wore a number. She brought us each a beer and went away.
“Uh oh,” I said.
“What?”
“I just made eye contact.”
“Which one?”
“The one against the wall. The one with a towel over her head.”
“How did you make eye contact when she has a towel over her head?”
“She lifted the damn thing up.”
Another girl, one without a towel over her head, suddenly appeared over Bruce’s shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him and said “Hello dah-ling” into his ear. Meanwhile, my girl was making her way over, pretending to be a ghost. Her tiny hands found the bar and she crept along, still with the damn towel covering her head and shoulders.
“I think we picked the wrong bar,” I said. Bruce didn’t answer. I looked over and saw him, girl in lap, face in bosom.
The one with the towel over her head snuggled up to me. Then she took the towel off. I hadn’t noticed it from across the bar, but up close, it was obvious. She had a severe wandering eye. It was her left eye. She kept it hidden by burying her face against my shirt.
“Listen,” I told Bruce. “We have to go to another place.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m in love.”
“Can’t you fall in love somewhere else?”
The girl’s fingers reached up and ran through my hair. I took hold of her head and lifted it off my chest. She opened her eyes, looked at Bruce, then hid her face again when I let go.
“You see,” I said, “if I stay, it’s because I feel sorry for her and if I leave, she’ll think I don’t like her. We have to go together.”
“You’re worried about hurting her feelings?”
“Look, I’ll buy the next round.”
Bruce gave in. We got out of there after his girl got up to do her time on stage.
“This is terrible,” he said, once we were free. “I never dreamed it would be like this.”
We moved past a gathering of equally wide-eyed sailors to a bar called Flashback. There weren’t any girls, just a pair of doors. Beyond them lay a fairly normal bar, with a set of pool tables, a dartboard, and the Rolling Stones playing over the speakers. We went in and took two seats at the bar. No one flashed us their breasts. No one called us dah-ling. It was quite a relief.
Bruce tapped out a cigarette and lit up. “I’m afraid to go back out there.”
Bruce was doomed. It was written across his face. The next girl on his lap could have punched a hole in his chest, reached in, and played him like a sock puppet. I was slightly more resilient to their charms. Though I still fell head over heels for the smiles of check out girls, bank tellers, secretaries, waitresses, and fish sellers, prostitutes were a different matter. It was the sadness behind their smiles and it was something else. All those other girls dreamed a little dream before ringing up your purchase or assisting with your transaction. In the a-go-go bars, the girls were the purchase and fucking was the transaction. There wasn’t any time for dreaming. Not with a stud farm of other men, other farangs waiting to get their hands on them. And the sex? What sex? Sex lies in many places but the a-go-go bar wasn’t one of them. I had my weak spots like any other, but a topless girl telling me she loved me wasn’t one of them.
Not on that first night, at least.
Our next stop was The Fantasy, Inc. Bar, where we sat watching a show no different from the one at the first bar we were in. The girl on Bruce’s lap kissed his ear and occasionally grabbed the crotch of his pants. Bruce was doomed, as I had mentioned, but I was surprised at how quickly his doom befell him.
“Remember how I said I wasn’t going to buy any girls out tonight?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I lied.”
So Bruce and his lass went into the back and didn’t reappear for another hour. I had kept the girls at bay by explaining that I was broke. I might as well have told them I had leprosy.
“How was it?” I asked.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
We paid the tab and stood to leave. Bruce’ girl was already back to work. She blew him a kiss from the lap of another farang.
“How do you like that?” he said. “Here I thought she really liked me.”
The doom was upon him. The doom had infected his soul. Like an airsick man stuck in a flight across the ocean, there would be no relief until he touched down again. We left the Fantasy, Inc. and walked out into the warm night air.
“Where to now?”
“The night is still young,” said Bruce.
That it was.
§
A few more weekends in Bangkok and going to the a-go-go’s became as normal as work, war, or Christmas day. Bruce usually bought out a girl within the first or second hour of the night. It always began with “Tonight, I’m not going to buy out a girl. I am in complete control of myself. You’re looking at the new Bruce.” And then he’d buy out a girl. I’ll admit, he did have style. Especially when I thought of Bob’s wrecking ball efforts to charm a woman. Bruce knew the secrets that so many other farangs seemed to overlook: a, the girls liked to laugh, b, the girls liked to laugh at farangs. I sat and thought about it while I waited for him to finish having The Most Fun He’d Ever Had In His Life.
Usually within eyesight was the other type. They type who honestly believed he had found someone who loved him in return. They were mostly older men of one extreme or another. Too tall, too short, too thin, too fat. The type that drove ice cream trucks, even though they hated kids. The sort that spent Sunday afternoons building bird feeders as they cursed God for creating things that flew. Not surprisingly, the bar was filled with this type. They wore button down shirts and brown shoes. They looked at each other in semi-disgust. Drunk, they were obnoxious. Sober, they were hardened syrup clots who tilted their heads back, drew their girls near, and tried to kiss them while displaying the dirty cobwebs that lay inside their potato noses.
“She soaped me,” Bruce said upon his return.
“What?”
“She soaped me down with her body. It was the most fun I’ve had in my entire life.”
Bruce’s doom lay like a tar road spread out before him. And I was right there alongside his ass, headed in the very same direction. Thailand had suddenly become something else; and Bangkok was our new Babylon. Bruce was the sex fiend; I, the voyeur. The aftershocks were apparent. The big ones occurred immediately, the next day, say, while sitting in a restaurant or movie theater. Reality would become lost in the crowd. The people around me, the people on the movie screen, would suddenly turn into topless dancing girls, shaking their tits and calling me dah-ling. Afterwards, when I told Bruce about it, he’d nod and say, “Yeah, I felt that too.”
Even back in Ayutthaya, standing in front of a classroom of children, the a-go-go bar scratched the surface of my brain like a nail file against a rotten apple. One Monday morning, I wrote the days of the week on the board while the children sang The Alphabet Song. It went like this:
“A B C D E F G, H I J K L M N O P, Q R S, T U V, W X Y and Z, now I know my A B C’s, tell me what you’ll pay for me!”
I spun around and hollered “WHAT?”
Behind me were the days of the week; Monday through Thursday, then Friday Night, Saturday Night, and Sunday Hangover.
I was imagining it all, of course, even the part at the end of class where the kids all stood up and said, “Thank you, Whoremonger.” As evil as it all was, I couldn’t wait. Bruce couldn’t wait. We spent the weekends counting the days until we could be back in an a-go-go bar. We savored the anticipation on that bus ride to Bangkok. We joyously smoked our last cigarette before sundown and left the hotel room wondering what sort of human being we would be upon our return some eight or nine hours into the night. When would it get old? When would it turn against us? Every aspect of the evening held an adventure of it’s own. When two a.m. rolled around and the bars began to close; the night opened a new floodgate of sin and more sin. There was one spot that refused to lock its doors: Thermae. Thermae was only a few blocks from either Nana or Soi Cowboy. Those few blocks, however, were populated by true blue creatures of the night. Doped up zombie hookers, fluorescent men in the process of becoming women, failed experiments, failed lives, all lurking in the shadows of a flyover or alleyway. With one hand on your balls and the other searching for your wallet, these creatures pressed themselves against passerby’s with the ever familiar “Hello, where you go?” which explained why there weren’t many passerby’s at two in the morning.
The Thermae Coffee Shop was for those who knew how to dress for Hell’s social scene. It was a large, underground bomb shelter of a place with tables along the edges and a standing bar that snaked through the middle. It was where the girls went after work, no longer dressed in their a-go-go outfits, but fashions straight from the Whore Department, located just past Bait and Tackle in most major department stores. Cut off mini’s showed all that there was. And if each girl decided to wash their faces in the Chao Phraya River on any given night, I believe the waters would glow and the fish suddenly sport a third eye. The farangs, still in their bad mustaches and worse hairpieces, watched and flirted as they did in the bars. I guess the idea in there was to allow foreign men and Thai women to interact on a more personal level than the bar allowed. What this technically meant was that farangs didn’t have to pay the bar fee since the girls were off the clock.
A nightcap at Thermae meant getting back to our hotel room just as the sun was coming up, passing out for five or six hours, and waking up to face that hangover along with the flashbacks, hallucinations, and overall feeling of despair the bars left in their wake. Neither of us knew how it would end.
Until Bruce found a girlfriend.
§
His new honey was named Usanee. She was a student, cute as a button and only nineteen years old. Despite the age difference, he believed it was something with a future, even though she couldn’t stay out past nine o’clock. For the first time in months, we went three weekends in a row without looking at naked women. The colors of the sky no longer ran together. The piss had drained from my eyes. True, Usanee wouldn’t go any farther with Bruce than some illicit hand holding, but at least she kept him - and me - out of the bars for a while.
On one of those Saturdays near the end of the hot season, Ted came knocking at my door.
“What’s up, big guy?” he said. “Haven’t seen you around lately.”
“Been sick,” I said.
“You and Bruce have been hitting those sex bars in Bangkok, haven’t you?”
I smiled, but didn’t answer his question.
“So what are you doing in October?” he asked.
October was our next big break. A fully paid month off.
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“Any chance you’ll be sticking around Ayutthaya?
“No.”
“Because Sue and I are going to Indonesia and we’ve got two teachers arriving in Bangkok on the fifteenth. We won’t be here to meet them.”
“And?”
“We’ll give you a thousand baht to pick them up and pal around with them for a couple of days.”
“No. Sorry Ted. I don’t want to get mixed up in these schemes of yours.”
“What schemes? It’s good money!”
“Ted, the last batch of teachers you brought over belonged in a nuthouse. I heard what happened to them all. Richie was caught buying drugs from his students, Dale was fired for smoking his pipe in class and hitting on nuns at the Catholic school, and the other one, the tall one—”
“Terrance.”
“He turned out to be a drunk. Where did you find these people?”
“Off the Internet. They’re decent fellows. They just have a few kinks to work out.
There was little point in talking to Ted. He only saw the good in people and forced those around him to suffer through his judgment calls. He poked around my room, opened the refrigerator, took out a jar of peanut butter, then pointed to a vase of red roses near the window.
“Who are those from?”
“Guess.”
“Miss Malika?” Ted grunted and cocked his head to one side. “You devil, you!”
There was another knock at my door. I figured it to be Sue, looking for her hubby. Ted answered, peanut butter in hand. It was Pratompong, one of the higher-ranking English teachers who pronounced “excuse me” like “kiss me.”
“Kiss me!” said Pratompong.
Ted moved in toward him with his lips puckered. All right. Ted had a few good moments in him.
“Mr. Ted,” said Pratompong. “Miss Sue have accident.”
The clowning ended.
“What kind of accident?”
“Accident on motorcycle. Not to worry. She go in hospital, now.”
“You take me to her.”
“Ted left with Pratompong leading the way.
The bastard still had my peanut butter in his hand.
§
Sue wasn’t dead. She was banged up and bruised, though nothing was broken. A pickup truck had pulled out in front of the motorcycle taxi taking her to a night class and pow! She remembered the truck. It was blue. She watched it drive away. A tuk-tuk stopped to take Sue and the motorcycle driver to the hospital. Sixty baht. Sue had to talk him down to fifty. The tuk-tuk driver gave her yesterday’s newspaper and told her not to bleed on his seat.
When I went to see her, she was lying in bed with the usual grim look on her face. Ted sat next to her eating fried chicken from a box. There was grease and bits of chicken around his lips.
“Hello, Sue, how are you feeling?”
“Did you see what the school gave us?” said Ted. “Go ahead and look. It’s sitting on the table.”
I looked. It was a basket of stuff covered in yellow cellophane. The stuff consisted of instant coffee, jam, cheese balls, dried milk, and shrimp chips.
“It’s crap,” said Ted. “I don’t eat any of that stuff. Do you? If there’s anything there you want, take it. I’ll be glad to sell it to you for half of what you’d pay at the store.”
“Thanks, Ted, I’ll keep that in mind. Sue?”
“Have you got a Bible?”
Ted laughed out loud again. “Sue wants to read The Bible! She has one accident and she thinks she’s born again!”
“Shut up, asshole!” said Sue. “I mean, I forgive you.”
“Um, no, I don’t have one. I think Monty does, though. You should ask him.”
It was another two weeks before Sue was up and walking again. As soon as she was able to teach, Ted somehow fell down the three steps that led to their bedroom. He wasn’t hurt, though he milked it for two days of bed rest.
“Apparently,” I explained to Bruce, “He had just come out of the shower and fell on his bare ass onto a swarm of fire ants.”
Bruce got a big kick out of that. “Suzy!” he called out in his mock Ted voice. “I fell down in the ants! Bring me a fried chicken!”
Bruce did a pretty good Monty, too. It was too bad he never met Bob.
§
August passed into September and the school term was winding down. We were all anxious for it to end. Bruce and I had planned a trip to the South. He wasn’t bringing his girlfriend. Back at the school, Miss Malika had stopped sending me flowers, which I missed in a way. If things had taken a different route, I might have considered a relationship with her. But ever since the a-go-go bars, I felt that the part of me that had been ripped out by my love affairs with Sucheeda and Pornpimone had been filled in by something warped and perverted. It was no joke that we referred to our upcoming journey as the “Last Blast.” Whatever nails we had set in place were to be hammered in or pulled out. We didn’t need Nostradamus to tell us.
On Monday, a foreign teacher’s meeting was called. Madam Gamonwan had our vacation time mapped out for us. For the first and last week of October, we were to show up every morning for one hour to see whether any teachers needed “assistance.” If we didn’t show up the first and last weeks, we wouldn’t receive our pay. She told us this smiling, of course.
“No, no,” said Ted. “Sue and I already buy tickets go Indonesia.”
“How about you, John?”
“I won’t be here either.”
“This is completely unacceptable!” said Ted, forgetting his incorrect English. “We want all of October off and we want to be paid for it.”
“Thai teaches must work.”
Ted was on his feet now. “That’s because Thai teachers don’t care. You could make them work ten, twelve-hour days and pay them peanuts. Mai pen rai, mai pen rai. You kon Thai. We kon farang. Not same same.”
“Monty?”
“I was considering the monkhood.”
“OK,” said Madam Gamonwan, avoiding the confrontation. “I’ll talk with my husband.”
Outside the office, Ted wanted to know why I didn’t stand up for my rights. “I’m in there busting my ass for us while you and Monty are reaping all the benefits.”
“Look, Ted, I never asked you to speak for me. You’ve got to stop using the pronoun ‘we.’ We think this, we feel that. Remember the time you complained about how the teachers weren’t nice to us? I didn’t agree with that at all. The teachers are plenty nice to me.”
“That’s because you suck up,” said Sue, who had found faith in the Lord. “You’re a kiss ass.”
“Are you happy?” said Ted. “You’ve upset Sue.”
Ted and his wife walked off. Nothing a box of chicken wouldn’t cure, I thought.
The strange thing is that the two of them went to Indonesia and never came back. Sue had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in Jakarta and had to be flown home. Monty had packed the things that Ted requested and sent them to an address in America.
They still demanded to be paid for the month of October.
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