Earn was a real trooper with the house. She did all the things I wouldn’t have bothered to do like water the flowers and hang wet clothes out to dry. In the evenings, we sat around and told stories. Her stories were better than mine. Like the one about how she went to work in Bangkok as a teenager, leaving her father all alone. When she came back one day to visit, her father asked where she had been. “Bangkok,” she said, “When do you have to be back?” he asked. “Monday.” That Sunday evening when Earn was asleep in her room, her father brought in bags of fruit and nuts and a supply of drinking water. Then he nailed her door shut and bolted the windows from the outside and wouldn’t let her out until all the busses to Bangkok had stopped running the following day.
“Jesus,” I said. “How did you go to the bathroom?”
She had to go in little plastic bags and throw them away when he finally let her out.
“If my old man did that to me, I don’t know what I’d do. First, I’d punch him in the stomach, then in the mouth. Then, I don’t know, I guess I’d punch him in the stomach again.”
“Yes,” said Earn. “But he did it because he loved me and didn’t want me to go.”
“I think I’d still hit him.”
“In Thailand, children never hit their parents. They gave us life.”
“And what a wonderful life it is. War and pollution and everything made out of shit. But don’t get me wrong, angel. You’re the exception.”
On Friday evenings, Bruce and Fa came over to drink with us. Fa’s ex-boyfriend knew that she was dating a farang and told her over the phone to give him a word of warning. Fa wasn’t worried. Bruce was slightly worried. He had been to the weekend market and picked up a few personal items for protection; a small spray can of mace, a switchblade knife, and a stun gun. The stun gun produced a thick line of electricity between two steel prongs about six inches apart. As we got drunk, we started testing our manhood by shocking the tips of our fingers. Each time a jolt would register, the shocked would scream “Mama!” and jerk the offended digit backwards.
Try as we might, however, we couldn’t get away from The Question. That is, how much longer could we keep it up.
“I love Fa,” said Bruce, “but everything else has bottomed out.”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve hit a mesa.”
Simon was part of it too. The Question had been on him since day one. He had a different take on it all. “Just don’t forget when you’re in bed with your girlfriend, living on a salary three times that of a regular Thai teacher, that once you go home, you’ll be back in the ratrace along with everyone else. Stepping outside the system hasn’t made me any wiser. It’s made me more stubborn. I’m not saying I’m better than everyone else, but after Thailand, I just can’t go back to working temp jobs for peanuts.”
“Life is what you make it.”
“Put that on a job application and see what kind of response you get.”
“As bad as America is,” said Bruce, “At least it’s real.”
“What’s real? Working for The Man is real?”
“Communication is real. Knowing what’s expected of you is real. I’m not just talking about work; I’m talking about sitting in a bar on a Monday night. I’m talking about waiting for the little white stick figure to shine so I know when to cross the street. I’m talking about watching a rerun of “Star Trek” at midnight with a bowl of cereal and a beer for company. I’m talking about — I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s a feeling that’s not a feeling at all. It’s a peace of mind in a certain region of the brain.”
“You sound like you’re on your way out,” said Simon.
“Sure. I’m on my way out. I just don’t know how I can leave this place.”
I can’t say I agreed with everything the two of them went on about. The boredom and homesickness in me were not as severe as they were with Bruce. The Question did not burn as hot. The others were looking for happiness. I was not a big fan of happiness. I did not trust happiness. Too much of it got you into hot water. Not enough put you on the road of sorrows. This is not to say that passion and fever are not without their merits, but the simple process of living without dying, without the soul dying, seemed to me a bigger challenge than finding happiness.
§
Bruce’s time came just before Christmas. He’d gone to Malaysia on his latest visa run, and come back with a sixty-day tourist visa. Normally, working foreigners received the customary ninety-day non-immigrant stamp. Only the Malaysian government had recently acquired new computers that somehow kept track of us all. The computers allowed two non-immigrant stamps. After that, the best one could do was a tourist visa, which meant a trip out of the country every other month.
“Why don’t you ask your school to give you a work permit?”
“No,” said Bruce. His mind was made up. “This is a sign.”
“This isn’t a sign. A burning bush is a sign. This is technology screwing you over.”
“It’s a sign,” said Bruce.
Before either of us knew where the days had gone, we were all gathered at the airport to say goodbye. I shook Bruce’s hand. He asked again how long I thought I’d be staying. I thought of Earn and I thought of leaving her the way he was leaving Fa and I told him I didn’t know.
He got on the plane. That was that.
§
Back at the school, things were proceeding along their usual lines. The only difference was that I was no longer in the thick of things. What news I caught usually came three days after the event, and only after it had been thoroughly passed around.
Fifty-two year old Kevin had gone and married the woman who made som tam at the end of the street. They had a traditional Buddhist wedding and moved into a house not too far from the school. None of the teachers approved.
Tammy had taken a trip down south. She came back and told everyone that she had brain poisoning and needed an emergency medical operation that could only be performed in America. Brain poisoning? She left the following week. I later found out from Jennifer that she had met a Filipino lad on Ko Samui who had asked her to marry him.
The only news that made any sense was that Jennifer had hooked up with Simon. She even overcame her hatred of Monty and adopted him as a whipping boy. She could go on abusing him for hours. It was the only time I ever saw Monty shut up and listen.
Then one morning, we all got fired.
“Phased out” was the technical term, though any fool could see that Madam Gamonwan and company were just plain sick of our antics. She told us very politely that the new school budget didn’t allow another year of foreign teachers. She gave us her big smile and rushed off to that eternal meeting in Bangkok.
It was a strange time that followed. Not just for us, but for all of Thailand. Government corruption had reached an all time high, and the only truth that existed was that something big, something bad was on its way. A new constitution had made it through the storm but for the moment it was fresh paint on rotten wood. Then the baht crashed. Almost overnight, rich stockbrokers found themselves selling sandwiches on Bangkok street corners. Finance executives were forced to drive taxis to pay their bills. People by the thousands were being laid off, canned, or made to take a reduction in pay. The majority would not show their frustration and defeat, but it was there. When the jobs ran out, no one seemed to know what to do. There was a sudden drive to return to the old ways, the simple, Thai lifestyle that existed for centuries. The drive didn’t last. Too many had lost placing blind faith in their leaders.
The only way to go was forward.
§
For the next few weeks, I sat around and did nothing. The old energy wasn’t there anymore. I was becoming antsy, antsy and bored. Earn had begun another hotel job and the overtime was getting to her. Each day, she’d rise at four thirty a.m. and head off to work before it was even light out. Me, I’d sleep in past the alarm, think about those morning classes, then decide that the kids could do without me. I was needed around the house. Things were broken and needed to be fixed. Take the fan, for example. It was a plastic blue thing that had once belonged to Sangwan. Earn and I even started calling it “Sangwan.”
“John, turn Sangwan to the left. She’s not reaching me.”
“John, put Sangwan on the stool and turn her on low.”
One day, Sangwan refused to oscillate. Each time I pressed down on the oscillate button, a loud clicking could be heard. Then the little knob that held the fan blades in place broke off. Sangwan the fan was looking like a piece of spent plastic.
So I went at her. There was nothing I could do to actually fix her, what’s broke is broke, but I did manage to tie her to a chair so that she’d blow on us without clicking all night. When Earn came home and saw her roped to the chair like some kidnapped hostage, she said: “What did you do to Sangwan?”
“I fixed her.”
“Didn’t you go to school today?”
“No. Come and see what else I fixed.”
There was a spare room upstairs that neither of us knew what to do with. Most of the time, we kept the door closed and pretended it wasn’t there. Then I got the idea to turn it into a classroom. I’d heard of some foreigners raking in five and six hundred baht an hour teaching rich kids at home. I wouldn’t charge that much, not in the beginning. I’d start slow, say, classes of seven or eight at fifty baht a head, then expand later. The first things I bought were tables and chairs. That was the surprise I had for Earn.
“Can we afford this?” she asked.
I wasn’t worried about our present finances. I could see the money waiting to come pouring down. I bought a whiteboard and hammered it into the wall. All the tiles in the bathroom fell down from the shaking. No matter, we still had the downstairs toilet. Earn bought a poster of the alphabet and a poster of dinosaurs to hang on the wall.
“Baby,” I said. “I love you.’
And at that moment, I believed I really did.
§
Luck was on my side, sort of. The same week I finished my classroom, I received a message from a foreign teacher who was returning home and needed to find an instructor for his students. The farang tracked me down at the school and left his phone number with Sangwan, the person, not the fan. The name on the message read: ANANDA DEEJAI. He was very loud on the other end of the phone.
“YES! HELLO!” he hollered. “LET’S MEET FOR LUNCH!”
I didn’t want to meet Mr. Deejai for lunch, but I had to if I wanted his students. We were to meet at a western style coffee shop, the one whose ambiance was ruined by a large screen television that was never switched off. I arrived first and ordered a coffee. How I dreaded meeting him! It was as if I had a premonition of some hell Ananda Deejai was about to put me through. I drank my coffee and began to feel sick.
Then he showed. Ananda Deejai. He was a lumbering, warehouse of a man, late forties, dressed like some kind of wealthy sailor. His face held that “likable” quality, which was akin to blood soaked hands in my opinion. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t trust any of the motivational psychology he was soon to spread across the table.
He carried a briefcase. I didn’t trust that either.
“Thailand’s a great place. The people are wonderful, just wonderful. After five years here, I’ve begun to feel that half of me really is Thai.”
A waiter came to take his order. He asked for the pizza toast, which I knew to be two pieces of semi--browned bread covered in melted cheese, tomato, and ham. When it arrived, Ananda Deejai took a jar of green olives from his briefcase and spooned half of the contents onto his plate.
“I just love green olives,” he said.
He talked while he ate. “I’ve got a philosophy on life. It’s something my college football coach used to say. If life hands you lemons — make lemonade. Well, I’m here to tell you, I’ve made some pretty good lemonade in Thailand. When I first arrived here I was just like you, working as a teacher, bringing in fifteen, maybe twenty thousand baht a month. After a year, it dawned on me: my language is a commodity. If I targeted the right people, I figured I could double, even triple my monthly income. Do you know how much I’m making now? Fifty thousand a month. And here’s the bonus. I don’t work more than ten or twelve hours per week.”
I knew he was coming to the part about the students he would recommend to me. That’s what he had told me over the phone. So I sat and nodded and smiled and tried to figure out what in the devil’s red hell he was talking about.
He spoke more about his money. About things he could buy. Places he could visit. Women he could procure.
“You see these olives? A few months ago, I was sitting at home thinking; here I am with everything, what more could I want? Then it dawned on me. Green olives! So you know what I did? I hopped on a plane to Singapore and came back with twenty jars of green olives!”
“And lemons?”
“No, I didn’t buy any lemons.”
“I thought you said something about lemons.”
“I said, “If life hands you lemons — make lemonade.”
“Look, I can take some of your students.”
“That’s what I’m leading up to. I’m willing to hand over my entire EFL database to you.”
“What’s EFL?”
“English as a Foreign Language.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve spent three years devising a teaching methodology that has proven so effective; I’m thinking about marketing it here in Thailand. You see, I sat down one day and thought; how can a Thai be able to look at an English word and pronounce it correctly? The secret, I decided, was in taking the word and transforming it into its Thai equivalent. Gaw Gai, the first letter of the Thai alphabet, makes the sound of G in goat. Kaw Kai makes the sound of K in king.”
Ananda Deejai went on talking. He went through about twenty letters, then started on the vowels. A pair of Thai girls came into the restaurant and sat near the wall. One of the girls had long hair. One of the girls had short. I started having a fantasy about the two of them unbuttoning their blouses and walking over to stick their bellybuttons in my face. But then Ananda Deejai asked a question that I thought I was supposed to answer, until I remembered that men like Ananda Deejai answer all their own questions. The question was “How can I increase my salary to fifty thousand baht per month, just like Ananda Deejai?” The answer: “Buy everything that Ananda Deejai has to sell.” Everything included a computer, a motorcycle, a table, four chairs, a bookshelf, a fan, a hotpot, and a television.
“You’re trying to sell me your stuff?” I asked.
Ananda put the lid back on his olives. “I’m offering to hand over five years of accumulated experience that has allowed me to live like a high class citizen.”
“A high class citizen!” The line made me laugh out loud. “I’m sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
Ananda Deejai shook his head. “You’re making a big mistake.”
Something in me sparked. Two wires that had been flailing round loose inside suddenly embraced. The man across from me was Ananda Deejai, maybe, but at that moment, he was Bob and Ted and Vaughn and Evan and even Uncle Joe who told jokes that began “A nigger, a chinaman, and a pollack, are sitting in a rowboat.” He was a multi-headed monstrosity of regional managers, landlords, and old girlfriends. Jesus Christ, I thought, it all makes sense. Life wasn’t handing out the lemons. Men like Ananda Deejai were handing out the lemons. Life was separate and distinct. It was the laughter of the two girls near the wall. It was the man in the straw hat pushing a giant metal restaurant on wheels outside the window. It was my sweet girlfriend sitting at home, waiting for me.
I said goodbye to Ananda Deejai and his olives but didn’t get into a tuk-tuk just yet. A left turn took me to a row of fruit sellers sitting beneath their umbrellas. I bought a bag of oranges, a bag of rose apples, a couple of mangoes, half a watermelon, and a pineapple. At another stand, I picked up two-dozen red roses and a bunch of balloons with things like “I love you” and “Happy day” written upon them. I had bought so much; I didn’t even see that I had run out of money. All the money. I walked home and gave Earn the flowers.
I didn’t get the students. We were broke. We lost the house.
The white board came down. I sold the tables and chairs to Chullingsat. Earn and I moved back into our old apartment building. The freckle-faced landlady who had taken our security deposit six months ago was happy to have us back. She had an air-conditioned room on the second floor.
Well, all right.
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