Please Please Please don't start here if you wanna read the Thailand stuff from '07 and '08. Anywhere but here. The way, way bottom is best but it doesn't matter as long as you read this last. Is that dicky? agh do whatever you want and thank you, and thanks for reading.
I have a new neighbor friend in my building, a Thai dude named Jam. I ran into him in the foyer one night a month ago at 2AM as I was coming back with the last food and money I was gonna have for 3 weeks. I had literally spent my last 40 baht on some kao pat gai and was heading upstairs with it. Jam was going up to his apartment and said, "Come on, come have beers with me." This is what Thailand is like, you spend your last money and someone comes along with beers.
The thing with Jam, besides a true generosity, is that Thai people can't bear to be alone and his wife was not due back from her province up north for a few days. He'd been alone all month and when he saw me he was like "Holy shit, let's be friends!" Jam is a driver for some rich farang and he speaks almost fluent english, if with a strong accent. We made fast friends over Leo beers and a trip to the all-night restaurant for more. He told me about an American friend he had made 10 years ago and traveled Thailand with but that the friend had lost trust in him over a woman Jam had introduced him to and he had subsequently married. It's a common story actually. The guy, Chris, had asked Jam to find him a woman to marry. Jam chose a girl he thought would be suitable, Chris married her and then promptly moved back to the US alone and charged Jam with keeping tabs on her. Of course the first time Jam went up to Isan to check on her she had gone back to sleeping with her ex-husband, a Thai. Honestly what else was she gonna do? Jam was not able to tell Chris about it, out of the Thai "conflict-avoidance" thing. The details get fuzzy here but what ended up happening was Chris told Jam to go eff himself and either brought the girl over to the US, came here to live, or divorced her. Jam suspects she told Chris something to drive a wedge between them because he (Jam) knew she'd been unfaithful and had to be eliminated from the equation. 10 years later the dude is still haunted by the whole thing. He brought it up every time he'd had a couple drinks.
For the next 3 weeks Jam called me whenever he got home from work, whether it was 2AM or 7AM and asked me to come downstairs. I'd go down there, he'd open a bottle of Sato, a rice wine from the Northeast of Thailand, and we would trade shot glasses of it while his wife prepared these massive Laotian meals. Then we all (Jam, his wife Porn, her brother Charlie and me) would sit on the floor and eat it all. He started having me teach the brother english, which I tried my best to do.
One night Jam got off work early and he and Charlie came to my room with all kinds of beer and Sato and we all got plastered listening to Jam's choice of Eric Clapton and CCR. I said "I am getting paid any day now, and when I do we will all go out somewhere for dinner and to shoot pool and I will pay for everything" like 50 times. He'd say "Don't worry about that."
After they left that night I got an email telling me I had been paid. Beginning sometime last year my monthly reaction to the news that my bank account was now fat with cash has been a moment of jumping adulation followed by sudden, uncontrollable and totally dry wretching. Tonight, after I was done gagging over my sink, I didn't change my clothes, brush my teeth, turn off the lights or lock my door. I went straight to the outdoor street bars that border Soi Cowboy. There are 5. I rang the bell at each (this means I bought drinks for every girl at the bar). At the last one I rang the bell 3 times and barfined this girl named Biw after handing her my ATM card, telling her my PIN # and saying "Go get us 5000 baht." This is a thing I've been doing alot these last few months, with different girls, none of whom took the dare and ripped me off. The sun was coming up so I took Biw to Texas Lone Star and we proceeded to ring the bell there. I sent her for another 5000 baht. I went to the bathroom and when I came back she had lined up 3 tequila shots each for both of us.
The last thing I remember is us both downing the first one and Biw clapping her hands and saying "I ring the bell 3 times!" I said "Good girl."
I have no memory of this but Biw later told me that I did the shot, immediately fell backward off my stool and began projectile vomiting.
I woke up with my clothes on in my bed. Both my knees so sore I fell down a few times when I tried to move between the bed and the bathroom. My right foot felt like all my toes were broken. I checked my back pocket and my wallet was gone. There was a foul-smelling towel that was not mine and was covered in dirt in the bathroom. I went back to sleep.
This was Friday night and I had work due but instead of doing it I lay in bed and prayed for sleep which came in intervals, and death which did not come at all. The next afternoon I got out of bed and saw that I had trashed my room -- the TV had been knocked over, my fan was in two pieces and I had broken a chair. The wallet and ATM were gone but when I checked my balance online I saw no more than the money Biw and I had spent together had been withdrawn so I knew she hadn't stolen it. She had the PIN # after all and I don't have a phone or her number to track her down. It would have been easy. I didn't know how I had gotten home.
When I could walk I went and found Biw to ask her if maybe I had given her my wallet. I hadn't. She'd taken it out of my pants and placed it on my computer when she left but hadn't locked the door (since it wasn't locked when we came there in the first place, or the 2 other times she'd spent the night with me). I decided someone had come in my room and seen it on the computer and taken it. Whatever had happened I no longer had an ATM card or access to the money in my account (for like the fifth time in 3 years).
Monday morning I managed to get my hands on some of my money thru a friend and Western Union. I put all my laundry in to be washed and went to get a haircut. After the haircut I decided to have one beer. I had $500, enough to cover my rent, food and smokes for the next few weeks while I waited for the replacement card. I got my sneakers shined while I had a second beer. It was 1PM or so.
I shot some pool and ended up sitting outside a bar called Country Road smoking cigarettes with my friend On who works there. She tells me, "I have had three customers not pay me this week." I can't believe this. I ask her "You had sex with them and they didn't pay you after?" And she says "No, they didn't." This is a girl who, despite being perfectly cute, regularly pays her own barfine so she can go home early, and ex-pat Bangkok lifers who try to get free sex from girls who are working are a particularly low form of life. I ask her why she doesn't have some Thai male friends to call when this happens, to muscle dough from the dudes. She explains she doesn't want to get involved with mafia types. I say, "Okay. Well, bad luck comes in threes so maybe now you will have good luck." She says, "But the two customers before that -- one guy was ... this word ... sadist? And he tie me up. Then he is chok-wow." ("Chok-wow" is a Thai term for jerking off) "I say to him, Please, mister, can I go? and second customer -- he is small, more than me, we go together to his hotel room, we are crossing the street," she points to Asok, a major road 100 feet away, "In the middle he stops me and says he wants boom-boom in the street. In the middle. I say no thank you. I go away fast." Then she points to her waitress uniform (which I hadn't noticed before) and says, "I don't work the bar anymore, now I am waitress. I am scared of farang."
At the same bar around 5PM I ended up in a conversation with this fat dude with a handle bar moustache. He'd been living in Thailand for 8 years, was a pretty funny guy and a good talker. Talking about baseball is a luxury even bargirls can't compete with when you've been away from other Americans long enough and I was only too happy to talk about the Cleveland Indians with this guy as On stared off into the distance, refilled my beer and prolly thought about the short dude who wanted to fuck in the street, and how totally insane Western men are sometimes. The dude with the awesome moustache said, "Come on, let's hit a go go bar" so I went with him to Tilac where the girls dance at poles with mini skirts on and no panties. The idea is to look up their skirts as their knees are at eye level. I used to love places like this but at some point (actually the second time I was in one) they became impossible for me to handle. Either I was too into it or the whole idea was too fucked up -- I don't know why my reaction turned but it did. In the space of one 24-hour period in Pattaya last year these types of bars went from the best thing I ever saw to one of those Thai sex industry things that make me want to walk into the ocean with rocks in my pockets. Don't get me wrong, there really aren't a great many things about the Thai sex industry that make me feel this way, there are only a few to be entirely honest. Like anything involving ping pong balls for instance.
Anyway on top of all this, me and my new fake friend hadn't been sitting there 5 minutes before the guy was putting his hand way up girls' skirts and shoving his pointer finger in and out of a girl behind the bar's mouth. I couldn't deal with it. I mean the guy lives in Thailand for 8 years and he still treats the bargirls like this? Like he got off a plane an hour ago and has been reading sex tourist websites for 2 years? I hightailed it out of there, staggered across the way to Toy Bar and ate some fried chicken. Well, the truth is the chicken was fed to me by two girls who work there.
The next stop was a bar my third-to-last Thai girlfriend had worked at before getting married to some Australian dude with one hand. As I approached, the mama-san knew I was there to see Bong, told me she wasn't in Bangkok, showed me to a stool and motioned a girl over. The girl dialed Bong's #, talked a second and handed me the phone. I apologized to Bong for inadvertantly criticizing her English the last time I saw her (this may have been the only time I ever saw a Thai person actually get really pissed off, she had wanted to kill me). Bong said something I didn't understand and we hung up.
At 2AM, after a thousand more beers and back at the late night Cowboy street
First I came to the realization that my two front teeth were now broken, then I realized they had gone through my lower lip and there was blood spurting from my face. I crawled to a sewer grate a few feet away and went to sleep. I was barely there 5 seconds before a Thai person saw me and came running over and put me in his truck, washed the blood from my face.
I ended up crashing onto a drunk ladyboy’s lap after falling down again and practically crawling to the embankment she was sitting on. A non-drunk friend of hers came up and was like “wtf, bro?” and I pointed to a street bar a few feet away and said "Beers?" They agreed and we had a beer. Checking my pockets I discovered the remainder of the $500 had been lifted from me (most likely from ladyboy#1 when I sat on her lap, or maybe the kid somehow through some Bangkok sleight of hand sorcery. Or maybe I just threw it in the air, who knows. I only knew I had still had the wad of thousand baht bills while sitting on the good samaritan's tailgate). After I discovered the money was gone I was genuinely relieved. My thought was "Ahh. This is over now." That money had been gone since the second I ordered the first beer of the day 14 hours before. Me and the two ladyboys hung out awhile and I explained I now only had enough money left in my breast pocket for the beers we were drinking and a cab. Every time one of the ladyboys asked me a question -- "Where you from?" "You live Thailand?" -- I asked them both to kill me. They just looked at me a second when I said this and after awhile hailed a taxi for us all.
