Simon wasn't the only foreigner Ted and his wife had sent from their new headquarters. Madam Gamonwan had agreed to sign on three more. There were two girls from Seattle, and a gray haired man named Kevin, who turned out to be Ted's uncle. The girls, Tammy and Jennifer, seemed fairly normal. Each had another year of college and neither knew exactly what they wanted to do, though Tammy was certain it involved “children or animals.” At the first meeting of the new semester, we sat around a table and laid out our personality disorders for all to see. Monty's hadn't changed much, although out his loneliness or boredom, he had acquired a number of animals. He had a pair of Chihuahuas named Romulus and Remus, a pair of kittens named Sodom and Gomorrah, a bird named Socrates, and half a dozen goldfish, all named after Roman emperors. Only the dogs were waking up the neighbors with their barking and, as usual, no one sympathized with their owner.
Madam Gamonwan greeted us all and sat at the head of the table. She went over the usual things, then apologized for having to cut the meeting short. She had to go to Bangkok for something or other.
“Just a few things,” said Kevin. He had a white mustache and stank of cigarettes. “I signed a contract that was written in Thai. If I could have that translated, that would be helpful.”
“Yes, yes,” said Madam Gamonwan. “OK.”
She waiied and left us sitting around the table.
“Has anyone seen the contract?” asked Kevin.
“I didn't even know that there was one,” said Jennifer.
“Before I came out, I was told that the school would provide a plane ticket home. I was also told that Id only be teaching fifteen to twenty hours a week. So far, no one knows anything about a plane ticket and I'm scheduled for twenty-six hours per week.”
“I thought it was understood that we’d have to provide our own return ticket,” said Tammy.
“The way I understand it,” began Monty. I quickly interrupted.
“How much did you give to Ted?”
“I gave him eight hundred dollars.”
“Well, there you have it. Ted bought you a one-way ticket and kept the rest. I assume he's also the one who told you that you'd be teaching fifteen to twenty hours?”
“Yes.”
“He told us the same thing,” said Jennifer. “He also said wed be making twenty-five thousand baht a month, but were only making twelve.”
“He lied.”
“I'm not so certain I'm one hundred percent satisfied with this set up,” said Kevin. “I've got child support to pay on the first of every month.”
We all sat there for a moment in silence. Then Monty let out a loud laugh, jerking us all a few inches back.
“Would anyone like to hear a funny story about my dogs?”
I got up from the table and went to my first class.
§
Meanwhile, Bruce had begun his new school term at the city high school in agony and dread. His was a government run school. There was no kind-hearted mother figure to watch over her wayward children. Government schools employed people who would enforce government policy regarding education. For example: all female students skirts must be at least, but not more than six inches past the knees. Also, male students hair must be off the collar and cropped around the ears. One of the main enforcers of this higher learning was a man named Colonel Noy. Bruce hated Colonel Noy. He told of how the Colonel would line the students up each morning and inspect them with a pair of shears in his hand. Any student found violating the Thai educational system got what the Colonel felt they deserved. Girls had their dresses cut. Boys got their hair sheared off. No exceptions. And crying got you nowhere.
“And then,” said Bruce, over a beer at the Full Moon, “There are the meetings. I went to one yesterday. The school bought fifteen overhead projectors and held a four-hour seminar explaining how to use them. I swear I'm not making this up. They had a guy on stage showing us how to plug it in, how to turn it on, and how to turn it off. He spent an hour and a half explaining which pens could be used with transparency sheets. Pens!”
I suggested that he come and work for Chullingsat, but the idea of kids that small was too terrifying for him.
I couldn't blame him.
Take Dangmo. Dangmo was one of my first grade girls. She was a plump little thing, who sat like a stone in class while the other kids hollered and stood on their chairs during a game of Hangman or Simon Sez. At lunchtime, she loitered outside my office. One day, she was bold enough to invite herself in.
“Hello,” I said. “What are you doing?”
Dangmo didn't reply. She just stood staring at me with a crooked right eye. When I got up to leave, she wrapped her arms around my waist and held me tightly. Jesus! Up until then I considered my employment with the school to be little more than a con. A badly directed stage play in which I was a supporting player, acting out my bit part so that the other actors, writers, and directors could feel that they were really accomplishing something grand. Once my scene was over, I never thought about who received the applause or raked in the dough. I never imagined that my time on the clock could affect anything other than helping some else's show to run smoothly. Could it be that this little girl looked up to me as a father figure? Maybe her real father was dead. Maybe he played rotten tricks on her like dressing her backwards or frightening her with loud noises when she was making pee pee. Anything was possible. I patted the girls head and said, “There, there, honey.” The clock was ticking, though. I had to teach. I showed her my watch, thinking shed somehow understand. She didn't understand. I wrenched her arms from my waist and waved bye-bye. All she did was smile. Maybe I was making a difference.
The next day, she reappeared at lunchtime. This time, she came up from behind and put me in a headlock. I wrestled her off and kindly told her to go play with the other children.
“Arf!” she said. “Arf! Arf!”
She stuck her tongue out and placed her hands to her cheeks. I pretended to ignore her. I suddenly didn't care if her father gave her an extra spanking or not. Then I felt something at my feet. There was Dangmo, down on all fours, licking my shoes and panting like some idiot dog.
I jumped from my seat.
“What are you doing? Are you mentally ill? Get out of my office!”
Dangmo crawled under my desk and barked at me. “Arf! Arf!” A gang of third graders had gathered outside to watch. I wasn't going to fight it. I went to get a Thai teacher. When I came back with one, Dangmo was sitting at my desk, looking through one of my Thai books. The teacher, a sweet-faced girl probably younger than I, yanked her from my chair and pulled her out of my office. She borrowed a ruler from one of the passing students and whacked little Dangmo five times across the palms of her hands. Dangmo ran away in tears. The teacher smiled sweetly and waiied before going back to whatever it was she was doing.
Dangmo didn't bother me again.
§
We had been spending our nights in the Full Moon, Bruce, Simon, and I, often thinking about when our time would be up. Bruce was more set to jump ship than Simon and I put together. He had recently begun sleeping with a girl named Fa. Only Fa had a boyfriend and her boyfriend had other girlfriends and what was the use of figuring any of it out?
“Still,” he said, “She's just about the most fun I've ever had in my life.”
“What about your chick?” Simon wanted to know.
“Were still in the early stages.”
Were we ever. With Bee lounging around like a sex kitten and Jas living out her days in front of the television, I rarely had a moment alone with Earn. She didn't seem to be leading me on the way Bee was with Simon. In fact, of all the Thai girls I had met, Earn seemed radically un-Thai. For starters, there was the smoking. She didn't wear a Buddhist amulet around her neck and when I asked one day where she would go when she died, she answered by pointing up in the sky.
“Heaven?”
“No. They'll burn my body and the ashes will go into the air.”
Her cynicism was appealing. So was her temper. When the waiter at the restaurant brought the main dishes before the rice and still forgot the silverware, Earn asked him point black if he brought his brain to work with him that day. This kind of behavior was generally uncommon in a Thai woman. I welcomed it with open arms.
In the afternoons, I went to see her at the hotel restaurant. On her days off, we wandered around the city, looking for a quiet place to be alone. This usually meant a temple, where a Thai girl on the arm of a farang still managed to draw stares and catcalls. I could have rented a hotel room, but I feared that would steer things in the wrong direction. I couldn't take her to the school—that was out of the question. Thus I saw only one option. I had to find an apartment.
Earn helped me look. She borrowed Jass motorcycle and drove to several different apartment buildings in the city. The buildings all looked the same. White cement walls, white tile floors. I stayed out of sight while Earn spoke with the landlords. Then shed relay the information. We both knew that if I spoke with the landlords, the prices would suddenly triple.
Earn didn't like any of the buildings we visited. “This ones dirty,” she said of the Happy town Apartments. “This one is clean, but the rooms are small and hot,” of Choksadee Apartments. At a place called Bua Lua, a string of long-haired lasses in outrageous neon clothes and six-inch gold shoes kept walking in and out of the building.
“This place is no good,” said Earn. “Nak longs live here.”
Nak longs were those girls Id seen on stage at many of the rainbow lit restaurants. They wore revealing outfits and sang look thung, or Thai country songs. Men bought them flowers and were sometimes allowed to feel their breasts.
Another nak long appeared before I got on the back of the motorcycle. She had long hair and eyes that reminded me of Nok, the prostitute I had fallen for in Phuket. All at once, the memory of her came rushing back and I had to turn my face away when Earn looked at me.
At the next place, it took a while for the landlord to appear. She was a thin, short-haired woman with a smile that covered an entire third of her face. A small circle of dark freckles had surfaced on both of her cheeks. Earn approved of the room that was available, but not the woman. Nevertheless, they both invited me in to have a look.
Well, it was a room. Four walls and a bed. It would serve its purpose and not much else.
I asked when I could move in.
The short-haired woman with freckles was very happy. She smiled and explained everything to me in Thai. I didn't know what she was talking about. I gave her a security deposit. She gave me a receipt. When I asked Earn what she thought, she said, “Its better than a building full of nak longs.”
To this, I heartily agreed. I think.
§
I moved out of Chullingsat on the following Saturday. Sangwan was less than understanding. She told me it was against the rules for foreign teachers to live off campus and why would I want to move anyway when the outside world was full of criminals and drug addicts? Sangwan still had a slight crush on me. Tammy and Jennifer, however, were thrilled about the matter. My leaving meant that one of them could take my apartment, allowing both of them to live alone.
“Wont Montezuma have first dibs on it?” said Tammy. “He has been here longer than us.”
“If he tries to move in, Ill scratch his eyes out and throw him off the roof,” said Jennifer. “I hate that guy!”
Monty didn't try to move in. He had his animals to think of. Also, he had painted his entire house black. No one was quite sure why.
I managed to nick a bookshelf and writing table from the school. Sangwan saw them being hauled out on a truck and shook her finger at me. I had to promise to return them in six months. Yeah, and my old Daddy Hogsweep is the finger-pickenest banjo player this side of Alabama.
So there I was, back to four walls, just like Chicago. Earn and I christened the place on the very first night. As we were going to sleep, the next-door neighbors began to argue. They slammed the door and I could hear a woman crying. Yes, just like Chicago, just like always. But I had a space that was mine, at least, and when the nasty hangovers struck, I would no longer wake up to the sounds of the alphabet song and three thousand children playing outside my window. I had my space.
Then Earn quit her job. The manager had been piling extra work on her, work that the other employees were mysteriously exempt from. The last straw came at Christmas, when she had to work on her day off. Not just work, but dress up as “Sandy” and help a Thai Santa pass out candy to hundreds of guests. The Sandy outfit looked something like a North Pole hooker might wear. It consisted of a short red skirt, a tight fitting coat, boots, and a hat with a fluffy white ball at its peak. At the end of the shift, she handed in her outfit, and quit. I really couldn't blame her, but I still wished she would have stolen the outfit and let me play out one dirty old elf fantasy.
With no job and no monthly income, I began to wonder what she would do. Then I noticed her belongings were slowly beginning to accumulate in my space. I noticed that she started sleeping over more and more. She washed my clothes when I was away and paid no attention when I told her it wasn't necessary. I knew what was happening; I just didn't know what to do about it. I liked her. Maybe I even loved her. But living together? In a one room apartment? That Thai sun might have been bigger than anywhere else in the world but I saw only black clouds on the horizon.
Oddly enough, the same thing was happening to Bruce. His girlfriend had slowly moved into his cubicle, and the two of them eventually found a room much like mine in the Smile Apartment Building. The four of us, Bruce, Fa, Earn, and I, began going to restaurants, seeing movies, and playing cards together. One day, we found ourselves shopping for curtains. The girls went through stacks and stacks of material in one of the outlet stores while Bruce and I looked on.
“Remember that time we were sitting in a bar watching naked girls swim around a giant fish tank?” he asked.
We each went home with a pair of curtains that day.
§
One morning, I awoke from a sweat filled sleep and saw a hundred million ants swarming over my coffee maker. There were so many ants, the thing looked alive from merely a slight distance. I got out the can of bug spray and gave it a quick shot. Earn turned over, still asleep.
Then the phone rang. It was the landlord. She was having a problem and wanted me to come down right away. I gave the coffee maker another shot and went downstairs to see what was the matter. The woman was in her little office looking out at me from a small square window. She had locked herself in, Christ knows how, and called upon me—before a Thai-speaking citizen or the fire department, or her sweet Granny Grace—to come and rescue her. Getting her out involved a screwdriver and a hammer and much too much noise.
“Kohp koon ka, khun John.”
Back upstairs, Earn was sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette. Neither of us had been able to sleep the night before. It was just too damn hot. Now it was morning, and the fruit trucks were parked outside, just as they were every morning at seven a.m. The fruit trucks were another Thai phenomenon that defied explanation. Basically, men in covered pick up trucks drove at five miles an hour, selling fruit from the back of their trucks. Watermelons, pineapples, oranges, mangoes, rambutans, and apples, all fresh and lovely. This would be so bad if it weren't for the giant electronic megaphone nailed to the roof of the truck. The driver spoke into a microphone as he drove, and the sound of his voice ripped through the morning like a cannonball through a papier-mâché wall. And it wasn't just any voice; it was a hawkers voice, calling out what he had to sell and the price that it went for.
“Everybody's crazy!” I said to my girlfriend.
“So why don't you go home?” was her reply.
It was the question that had been nagging at me during those long hot days and longer, hotter nights. I had never been able to give her an answer. I had never been able to think of one. I just kept on figuring that whenever my time was up, Id know. Id know for certain and Id have no regrets about getting on that plane and leaving. It had become the moment Earn was waiting for. The one where Id sit her down and say, “Sorry, honey, but I don't belong here any more than a chicken bone in meatloaf. I've got to go.” We both knew that I would never become Thai, nor did I particularly wish to. All I could do was put the whole business out of my mind and stay with the race I was running. Or quit.
“What we need,” I told her, “Is a room with air conditioning. One where we can close the windows and not have to listen to all the NOISE.”
We moved out the following Sunday. The landlady couldn't understand. Had she done something to offend us? No, no, nothing at all. There were smiles all around. Here are the keys. Now, how about that security deposit?
“Oh!” she said in the language of landladies, “I cant give you that!”
She explained to Earn why she couldn't give back our security deposit. Then Earn explained to me. We had failed to give one weeks notice that we were leaving. Anyone who did not give one weeks notice would forfeit his security deposit.
“All right,” I said as well as I was able. “We told you that we were moving last Friday, right? That was two days ago. So all we have to do is hang onto the keys until next Friday.”
The landlady shook her head. She didn't understand.
“But you already gave her the keys,” said Earn.
“So shell give them back to us.”
The landlady put the keys in her pocket. She wasn't going to do anything of the kind.
“Fine,” I said. “Well move back in for five days.”
“Oh, Ajahn!” said the landlady. “My sister is cleaning the room. Another person will move in tomorrow!”
“So you can give me back my security deposit!”
“Oh, Ajahn!” The landlady turned, tripped down the stairs, and locked herself in her office.
I never saw that security deposit again.
§
The next place was it. The room was slightly smaller, but it had air-conditioning and lay far enough from the road that we weren't waking up to the fruit sellers voice every morning. Earn seemed to like it too. I let her do all the decorating and arranging of furniture. That is, she instructed, I arranged. Once finished, we were both exhausted.
“Well,” I said. “That's it. Here we are and here well stay.”
One month and fourteen days later, we packed our things and moved again. It wasn't the heat, it wasn't the fruit trucks, it wasn't the ants. It was the neighbors. Like I said, the apartment building was set back from the main road, in a small community of old style Thai houses and unpaved streets. And like any small community, everyone knew everyone. There was the local drunk who sat outside the mini-mart, there was the bloated mother with her pack of screaming kids, and there was the circle of old men who played chess on the corner, throwing money around in the shade of a vegetable stall. There were all these people and more. And somehow, my arrival was like the landing of an alien spacecraft, complete with flashing lights going whee whee whee.
The first to take an interest in me was the local drunk.
“You!” he began each conversation. “Come here!”
I had learned after my first attempt at being a good neighbor that the drunk was neither capable nor coherent enough to speak. All he could say was “I, California! Hotel California!” before throwing his arms around me and refusing to budge. After that, I decided to ignore him altogether. Walking down the street each day quickly became something of a gauntlet. The drunk had set a precedent. People stopped talking when they saw me coming. Mothers hid their children's faces. “You!” seemed to ring out from behind every dark window, every half closed door. The old men on the corner added a “fuck” to their “yous” and let one rip after I passed by.
I unloaded my troubles to Bruce.
“I cant take it anymore! Do you want to know about my morning? Let me tell you about my morning. First, I'm in bed, dreaming away. I dreamt I was in a car, an old green Chevy in the middle of a parking lot and a voice kept saying “Put the car in park! Put the car in park!” Only there's no gearshift. How can I put the damn thing in park if there's no gearshift? So then I got the idea that maybe its another car saying “Put the car in park!” So I started searching, searching for a car with a gearshift. Only none of the cars in the lot have gearshifts. I thought I was going nuts. Finally, I woke up. But the voice is still there. “Put the car in park! Put the car in park!” O Sweet Jesus, I thought, this is it! I've finally cracked. Ill be doomed to hear this voice for the rest of my years. I woke Earn. I didn't know how to tell her. Then, in this split second, it hit me. This wasn't a voice saying “Put the car in park!” It wasn't that at all. It was a chicken outside my window. A goddamn chicken going “Ur Uh Ur Uh Urrrrh!” I swear to you, I swear, it sounded just like “Put the car in park!”
“But I'm not finished. After the chicken episode, I stepped out onto my balcony to get a look at the damn thing. I didn't see a chicken, but I saw a Thai man walking by who happened to look up and see me. Do you know what he did? He stopped dead in his tracks, pointed up at me, and yelled out “Farang! Farang!” Then he began looking around for someone else to tell! I mean, its six o'clock in the goddam morning!”
“So what you're saying is,”
“I've got to get out of there. The “Hey yous!” and “Fuck yous!” and wide-eyed stares of every man, woman, and child in the area are one thing, but I don't want to put Earn through any of it. Being a farang isn't easy, I know, but being the Thai girlfriend of one is something else altogether.”
That Monday, a Chullingsat teacher told me of a townhouse for rent near the Jao Prom Market. Earn and I went to look at it. The place was huge. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, dining room, and living room. One of the bedrooms was air-conditioned. There was a large balcony with flowers and shade.
It wasn't for us. It was bad. It had misfortune written on every wall. But I was greedy. My cerebellum had been waxed over by fruit trucks and chickens and a thousand eyes peeking out the window to see whether I had grown any whiter since the day before.
“Well take it,” I said.
Earn looked at me in surprise. I had taken leave of my senses, maybe. All I saw was that big bedroom and that nice balcony and my unnoticed ass sitting out there during each new sunrise.
“When can we move in?”
After one month and fourteen days in our second apartment, we packed and moved across town.
Home » Press » The Hot Season