Days back, in Surat Thani, we had witnessed an odd spectacle. It began with a procession of men and women dressed in white. They were headed in the direction of the Chinese temple. Bruce and I were too busy hunting for trouble to take notice of them. We went to a cafe that advertised its female entertainment on a wall of photographs outside. Oddly enough, none of the girls inside were girls featured in the photographs.
I don’t remember the names of the girls that sat with us or offered their services to us, but the walk back to the hotel was a different story. The men and women and boys and girls all dressed in white had converged upon the temple. They were lined up in an orderly fashion, waiting their turn to cross a makeshift bridge. There was music and lights and a crowd of people gathered to watch.
And there was something else.
“Say,” said Bruce, “That wouldn’t be a chair of nails by any chance?”
It sure was. The chair of nails looked like any other chair, except for the rows of two-inch spikes jutting out of the seat, back, and arms. The congregation gave no hint of who would sit in it.
We searched the crowd for the toughest looking fellow. For some reason, I expected him to be bald with a handlebar mustache, dressed in leopard skins. I figured them to be the type that enjoyed chairs of nails. But there wasn’t a Goliath like that in sight. Instead, a heavyset old woman walked to the apparatus and stood before it as the crowd bobbed their heads in an unnatural motion.
“She’s not going to sit down is she?” said Bruce.
The old woman raised her flapping arms, gave a yell, and sat down on all those nails. She not only sat, she adjusted her fat ass!
We discovered later what it all meant. It was the annual Vegetarian Festival held during the first nine days of the ninth lunar moon, usually in late September or early October. The devout believe that the nine Chinese Gods come to Earth and “enter” the bodies of young initiates, who go on to perform acts of self-mutilation and torture to emphasize their sudden holiness. The chair of nails, we were soon to discover, was just the beginning.
After the stars came crashing down on our a-go-go binge, we made it out of Phuket and arrived in Krabi in the late afternoon. We checked into a hotel, and set out to find a laundromat. Our clothes stank of bars. We each had a bagful. As we walked beneath the setting sun, we noticed that storefronts had set up small altars along the sidewalks. The altars contained nine cups of tea, fruit, incense, and flowers.
“Now who do you suppose all that is for?” I asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care. All I want is a clean shirt. Clothes make the man and right now, my clothes smell like they crawled out of Satan’s ass.”
We found a laundry service on a street not far from our hotel. They too, had a small altar set up in front of their business. We stood outside looking at it when the noise of a procession could be heard from around the corner. Not just a procession, a war. Shouts, explosions, and the brap-a-brap-a-brap of firecrackers. The air was tinged with smoke. Just then, a young man in a yellow loincloth appeared, running on bare feet and acting like a monkey. That is, he was making the movements and gestures of a monkey. Three other men chased after him. The man in the loincloth looked panicked. He shot from one side of the street to the other, pausing only to, well, only to scratch himself the way a monkey would. As he came closer, I noticed that he wore a long silver spike from his nose. Closer still and I saw that it wasn’t dangling from his nose at all. It was pierced through his tongue. I’d seen men do strange things before, but they were usually drunk or driven half-mad by some woman. I’d never seen anything like this. The sight of it all threw me into a daze, quickly broken by a young boy at my side lobbing firecrackers at the man on the street.
The fellow in the loincloth ran on. Then the rest of the parade rounded the corner. It moved at a fast pace. The lead boy sported a red Chinese sarong and a long steel pole through his cheeks. Pineapples, watermelon, and other fruits were stuck through both ends of the pole, supported by men jogging at his sides. This time, it was the grown ups with the firecrackers and bombs. Some ran alongside the lead while others remained on the sidelines. This group held onto strips of fireworks that they lit with a flaming torch and raised on a wooden pole over the boy’s head as he made his way forward. As more initiates appeared, the scene grew in volume and weirdness. We saw colorfully garbed boys with all manner of objects pierced through their faces. Spears, sticks, swordfish, a motorcycle exhaust pipe, trombones, pitchforks, even a chandelier. One man who hadn’t been pierced held a long machete in his hand. The fellow licked the blade until his tongue split and his white garment turned red with blood. Many initiates stopped at the laundromat altar to drink a cup of tea, take a bite of fruit, pick up the candles or the incense or the flowers, and give it right back to the friendly laundromat lady, all the while nodding frantically and enduring the firecrackers exploding by the hundreds and thousands just above their heads.
The parade didn’t seem to have a beginning or an end. We decided that the best thing to do was move in the general direction of all the face-pierced, tongue- stabbed, knife-licking, god-residing initiates to see where they were going. The rest of the townspeople were already in motion. We soon knew to avoid anyone who even remotely looked as if they might be possessed by a god, a monkey, whatever. They tended to attract the most fireworks. The parade passed by a Chinese temple and continued on, far on down the road.
It ended at a stadium.
“What now?” asked Bruce.
Lord, I didn’t know. We had seen so many strange sights during the night, during the weeks traveling, that nothing could have shocked us further. Flying sheep, women with three breasts, an attack from Mars. Pick a card. This time it was fire walking. Fire walking! A twenty-foot runway was set up and filled with hot coals for the initiates to run across. People in the stands began to brave the mud and climb the fence that separated them from the field. We followed their cue, and were soon out in the wet grass. Fireworks exploded low in the night sky and made everyone run from the falling embers of light. Bruce and I stood on the sidelines of the coal filled raceway. Some of the men running still had instruments pierced through their cheeks. Others had white gauze imbedded in the holes. We watched until the last initiate made his run. By then, the crowd had already begun to disperse.
It was a long, loud, walk home. Our ears were ringing; our lungs filled with smoke. A layer of ash and sweat covered our faces and the clothes we wore might have been better off in the garbage can.
Some night.
There was something both exhilarating and sad about having witnessed the wackiest night on Earth; about renouncing a-go-go bars and all that went with them. We had reached our peak, as well as our depth, and to go any further in either direction would be walking a fine line between life and desperation. It wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be anything. We, ourselves, wouldn’t be anything, except a couple of hollowed out ex-pats crawling from rock to rock.
We stopped once for a cigarette during the trek back to our hotel.
“You know,” said Bruce, “When I get back to Ayutthaya, I’m going to give up smoking.”
“That’s the spirit! Heaven and hell, yin and yang.”
“No more hell. No more yang. I’m through with yang. I just want some yin in my life.”
I suddenly noticed something strange. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Nothing! It’s stopped! The vegetarian festival is over.”
Bruce smiled. “Maybe now there’ll be some peace and quiet in this town.”
§
By mid-October, the money had nearly run out and thoughts of home, bed, and other luxuries were tapping on our brains like a blind man’s cane. We had been lying low in a place called Takua Pa. There was a guesthouse, a beach, and nothing to do but sit and watch the clouds drift by.
“Our days are numbered,” said Bruce. “Pretty soon, we’ll be back in Ayutthaya. Just think of all those students waiting to see us.”
“All those teachers.”
“All those tuk-tuk drivers.”
“And a whole new batch of farangs.”
“Well,” he said. “You could always quit while you’re ahead.”
“And go back to America? I think I’ve passed my expiration date.”
“I’ve got to go back someday. I can’t stay in Thailand forever. It’s too goofy here. Dirt and dogs and a-go-go’s and guys sticking trees through their cheeks. I don’t know how much longer I can live without reality.”
“Bosses? Girlfriends? Landlords?”
“Reality.”
On our last day in Takua Pa, we ate a great meal of fresh shrimp smothered in sweet and sour sauce. The sun was just getting ready to go down, and waves came rolling in to lick the shore. Palm trees ripe with coconuts swayed in the wind. A pair of Thai girls in long white T-shirts passed by. Bruce finished a bottle of water and held it in his hands.
“You know,” he said. “If we gathered up a few more of these,”
We had no trouble finding another batch of empty plastic bottles. I laid two long strips of bamboo in the sand while Bruce set the bottles in a triangular fashion at the end of our makeshift alley. He found a good-sized coconut with a hole in its side and assumed the position of one convinced of what he was doing.
“Ten frames?” he asked.
“I’ve got nowhere to go.”
Bruce threw the first coconut. He got a strike.
Then it was my turn.
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