“OK, you have a gun, yes? You is hunter. What you want to kill?”
“I don’t want to kill anything.”
“You want to kill birds. You no good man. You see three birds on a tree. BANG! You shoot one bird. Now you tell Gai; how many birds are on tree?”
“Two?”
“You wrong, hunter man! There are zero birds because BANG of gun make them fly away. Ha ha ha! I win again!”
We were sitting in the Butterfly Cafe, Soi Cowboy, Bangkok. The Butterfly was part disco, part variety show, part a-go-go. When the line up of women left the stage, a male gatoey dressed in a silver wig and green dress came out to sing a song about “Rak, rak, rak.” But I wasn’t paying attention. Bruce was nearly on his side making out with a girl named Moo and little Gai was so pretty, what with that black dress and tattoo and all, that I might have forgotten myself there and then if not for her one major personality flaw: she couldn’t shut up.
“Now, look here,” she reached into her cleavage and brought out a folded piece of paper. There were five black dots drawn upon it. “Can you draw three lines to touch every dot? But, is important, cannot cross the lines. Wait here, I go for bring pencil.”
Little Gai bounced off for a pencil. I looked at the five dots. Most girls just came up and threw their sex in one’s face like a coconut cream pie. Gai had honed a different shtick. She wasn’t a girl to take into the back room for a short time lay. She was a girl you took to the zoo and shared a whirl of cotton candy with.
Bruce suddenly came up for air. It was his girl’s turn to dance. “You no go with another,” she said.
“OK,” said Bruce. “I wait here for you.”
The girl bent over and kissed him again. Then she swung her ass around and led it to the stage.
“Not that I’m complaining, but why is it that you always get that type and I always get this type?”
I showed Bruce the five dots. Gai returned with a pencil and a handful of toothpicks. She laid the toothpicks out on the table to spell the word HOTEL.
“OK,” she said to Bruce. “This boy and girl go to hotel and boy, he very horny, you know, he want to make love to girl but girl say oh no, I can’t make love to you boy. Now you must change three toothpicks to tell why she cannot to make love to boy.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Bruce.
“See what I mean?”
“You do this game and you,” Gai gave me a pencil. “You draw three lines.”
I looked at the dots again and drew a line through two of them. Wrong! Bruce adjusted his glasses and went to work on the toothpicks. “Let’s see,” he said. “Why can’t a girl make love to her boyfriend?” He was determined to outwit the hooker. After a series of unsuccessful guesses, Gai moved the H and L around to spell KOTEX.
“OK,” she said. “I have more games.”
She reached under her seat and brought out a game called “Four Stars.” It was a plastic board that players dropped red or yellow discs into. Four across, four down, four diagonally, you know.
“I’m sorry, Gai,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”
“You don’t want to play with Gai?”
“We’re leaving for the South tomorrow, but we’ll swing through on our way back.”
“Promise with Gai?”
“Promise.”
Bruce said good night to the girl on stage. Truth was, he would have gone with her if unknown treasures weren’t waiting for us in other parts. The girl scowled and pointed a long finger at him.
“I think you pissed her off,” I said.
“She’ll get over it.”
The next day, we were on a bus headed south.
§
It all looked so painfully familiar to me now. The neon cafes where beautiful girls in sexy outfits sang songs to a computer programmed accompaniment. The sad a-go-go girls with their suicide smiles and devil’s dream stage shows. The rotten discos, the lonely massage parlors, the Thai-style method of introducing its greatest asset to foreigners. Gentleness. Kindness. Affection. All at a ridiculously low price. Where were the judges? The protesters? The moral majority that came to say this is not right? Home watching TV, I supposed. There was no one to block our path.
And we indulged.
From Bangkok to Hua Hin to Surat Thani to Phuket, we indulged. Christmas tree lights, beaded curtains, “Hello sexy man”; there was no hole-in-the-wall, off-limits-to-boy-scout dens of iniquity that we didn’t stumble upon. In five days, Bruce had bedded seven girls in three cities. A flip of the coin decided which of us went back to the hotel room and which of us rented another. I usually won. During the night, dreams abandoned me. All those memories of innocence turned tail and fled. I was trapped in a concentration camp of fun. And I was growing weak.
Bruce returned each afternoon, hungover, with a new tale to tell. And I sat there, hungover, to listen. There was the hooker who had an apartment full of remote control cars. The hooker who had a wardrobe of outfits for whatever fantasy her customers desired. The hooker who ... On and on. He told each story without bothering to ask whether I was interested or not. He told his story, then laid down and passed out for a couple of hours. And when he awoke, he couldn’t remember how he got back to the hotel.
When we arrived in the city of Patong, I thought we had reached the end of the world. During the day, the bars lay dark and cheerless. Then, like ants upon a dying cockroach, it suddenly came to life when darkness descended.
And we indulged.
Sick of our indulging, tired of our decay, we went out no longer to see how close we could stand near the edge of the cliff, but to leap off and put an end to our rotten selves. It had to be done. It was the only solution, though we both refused to admit it. For Bruce, the end came with a bottle of whiskey and a girl in white boots. For me, it was Nok.
Nok was a dancer at the Honeybee with a lovely face and a wall-to-wall smile. My first thought upon seeing her was “My God, I could fall in love with this girl.” I won the toss. I paid the bar fee. I led her back to the hotel room.
Nok was awful sweet. First she showered, then I showered, then we got into bed together.
“You have girlfriend?” she asked.
“No.”
“I think you have girlfriend.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Two months ago, I fall in love with a farang man. He a doctor from Australia. He very nice, like you. He boyfriend me for short time, then go back to Australia. He say he love me but now I think he liarman. You ever say I love you to a girl?”
“Yes.”
“Why you no marry?”
“It’s not the same where I’m from. The girl I loved became a different person on the inside. I couldn’t love her anymore.”
“If you go back to your country, you think can love again?”
“Hard to say,” I said. “Now I’m a different person on the inside.”
“Why farang man love Thai girl?” she asked. “I think is very different.”
“Sometimes different is good. Sometimes, it’s bad.”
“Ever you love Thai girl?”
“Almost,” I said.
We held hands. A fly buzzed around the room and landed on the mirror. I really liked Nok. I liked her eyes, I liked her voice. I wanted to do something nice for her.
“Listen,” I said. “We don’t have to have sex.”
“You angry me?”
“I just needed to prove something to myself by buying you out. Turns out I was right. I’m too much of a martyr. You’re terrific but—I don’t think this for me.”
Nok kissed me on the cheek, then moved in close and said something in my ear. “Nok love John.” She smiled and fell asleep upon my arm. In a few more minutes, I too was out. And I dreamed. I dreamed I was back in Chicago, walking through a fabulous snowstorm. My face was cold and the snow crunched; it actually crunched beneath my feet. It must have been nighttime because the orange crime lights lit up the large white flakes and made them look like falling stars. A million falling stars! And there I was in the midst of it all with my cold-ass ass and my wonderful rotten job and my lovely two-timing girlfriend. There I was back in the land of the living.
The next morning, I awoke sober with a new outlook on life. No, not exactly new. It was the old one that I had swept under the rug to embark on a debauchery I wasn’t really cut out for anyway. Nok lie asleep next to me. Her long brown hair lay like an exotic fan upon the pillows.
“Hey!” I said. “Let’s go eat breakfast!”
Nok was confused. She thought I wanted her to go.
“No, no, no! I want to buy you breakfast! And then, and then,” Then what? BANG! “Then we play golf!” I remembered seeing a putt-putt course while we were hunting for a room.
“Golf?”
I kissed her on the cheek and jumped in the shower. Wait! I was being inconsiderate. I hadn’t even bought her roses. I finished quickly and snuck out when it was her turn. I couldn’t find a flower shop. I bought donuts instead.
“You look beautiful,” I said. And I meant it.
I kept my promise. We went out for breakfast. I spoke in Thai and told her all about my dream. Nok said that she wanted to see snow. After we ate, she wanted to return home for a change of shoes. I suspected that she needed to check in with mama-san but what did it matter? We’d have a laugh, shoot some balls, drink a soda pop, and call it a day. Nok lived above the bar where she worked. She told me to wait outside while she went up for her shoes. Outside the bar, a couple of farang men, German, I believe, smoked cigarettes and moved their hands as if they were mentally reconstructing the place. Girls walked in and out. The girls looked pale under the clouded sun. Many had skin problems. The German men paid no attention. They went right on smoking and planning their empire.
Nok came out wearing sandals.
“OK,” she said. “I ready.”
“Who are those men?” I asked.
“They own the bar.”
We walked away from them, hand in hand.
“When you go?” Nok asked.
“Today.”
“And your friend? He go too?”
“I don’t know. He may want to stay.”
“You think of me? You write me letter?”
“Of course.”
“I have a sister in Ayutthaya. Maybe I go to see you someday.”
We didn’t play golf. We had walked all the way to the golf course, when it all became a Big Nothing again. I tried to hold it off. I joked, I laughed, I even showed her a magic trick where I made a coin appear from nowhere. The Big Nothing knew more magic than I did. The Big Nothing could pull love out of a hat and make it disappear in a cloud of smoke. The Big Nothing never warned of its tricks, nor gave any indication of the sudden unveiling of the illusion. As sweet and beautiful as Nok was, I simply had to say good-bye and get the hell out of Dodge before I set myself up to be tricked again. I gave her a thousand baht tip. She was awfully happy, considering we hadn’t gotten past first base.
“You write your name for me, OK?” she said. “I not to spend this money. I take it to bank.”
I kissed Nok, my first and last hooker good-bye, and went back to the hotel room.
§
Bruce returned at four in the afternoon. He looked bad. The girl in the white boots had led him on a wild goose chase “looking for a friend.” They went to six different karaoke bars, stopping each time to pour whiskey down their throats. White boots could drink, but Bruce was no namby-pamby. He matched her glass for glass.
“I knew what she was doing,” he said. “She wanted to get me so drunk that I couldn’t have sex with her. But I did. I don’t know how or why, but I did. Then the sun came up and we both passed out. I just woke up about a half hour ago. What time is it, anyway?”
“Listen, I can’t do it anymore.”
“Say no more.”
Bruce gathered his clothes and stuffed them into his pack. That afternoon, we made it to the bus station. We made it onto a bus. My last sight of Patong was of a tall foreign man walking with two Thai girls. The man wore a bikini swimsuit and a T-shirt that said, “Liquor up front, Poker in the rear.” Pink sunglasses and a sunburn. The Thai girls in short skirts and big plastic heels were cute as bugs in rugs.
The bus pulled away, and we were gone.
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