Mistakes Were Made

A few weeks ago I had a girlfriend of sorts. I met this girl named Bee who spoke excellent english, was patient with my awful Thai and was very sweet and was also way out of my league looks-wise. She liked me for a little while and we had a couple dates. On the best one of the dates we ate fancy Thai food at a restaurant called MK (one of the dishes was this plate piled high with indescribably roasted duck) and bought stuff at a big department store attached to it. Good date. In the store I handed Bee 5000 baht and said, "Make my room nice. Like yours." So she bought really nice sheets, fat pillows, a new fan, a rice cooker, Q-Tips, a new toothbrush, two small rugs, expensive soap and fluffy towels. I bought her a pair of shoes, a bathing suit and a blow dryer that she spent 25 minutes deciding on ("It must have power, but I want it is small"). Then we went back to my apartment and I assembled the fan while she put the sheets on the bed and took care of the pillow cases and made a small kitchen area on one of my tables for the ricer, set up the toiletry stuff. It was awesome! Awesome. Then she had to leave and go work as a prostitute. That was not as awesome.

She was 26, smart, beautiful -- everything. But I screwed it up, in a big, ugly way. The last time I saw her I was in her bar. She was sitting with a customer but kept coming over to talk to me. This is a bar right on the edge of a busy Nana Plaza corner and I like to sit there and smoke cigarettes and watch the other sick bastards walk by. I hadn't realized she had a customer while I was sitting there and when I did make the connection I was like, "Don't worry, you don't need to keep coming over here. I am not gonna get weird." Really I should have called first. I wasn't jealous and she wasn't hiding anything from me, it just would have been better if I had called and given her the option to say "Yes, come here" or "Not a good night to come here," or if I had not gone in at all. Either way, not the best decision. I didn't want to complicate her night and she didn't want me to feel shitty. It wasn't tense in any way and she wasn't upset and neither was I but when I got up to leave she came running over and said, "Gimme a hundred baht." This is where my chance at a nice sweet girlfriend went up in smoke.

I had only a single 1000 baht bill til I got paid (anywhere from two to five days) and had already worked out in my mind how much of it I was gonna drink (900 baht's worth of it). So there was that. Also I had just bought her three drinks (which puts 120 baht in her pocket from the bar). And lastly I felt weird handing her the 1000 baht bill and waiting for her to go make change. This seems crass doesn't it? I should either give her a hundred baht bill or the whole thousand, right? Right? Agh. And a hundred baht is such a tiny amount of money, I figured it could not be that big a deal. So horror of horrors, dick of dicks I said, "I don't got it. Get it from the customer." Bee smiled and said, "Sure, okay" but that was it. Game over.

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I was shooting pool in a bar the other night and the first Terminator was on the TV and the girls working were astonished when I explained to them the guy in the movie was governor of California. Schwarzeneggar was firing a machine gun into a crowd of people in a disco, training the red light laser scope right onto the middle of Linda Hamilton's forehead and the girls were like, "Him?" I said, "Yes. Some day he will be president."