True Hardcore

Not a lot going on lately. It's the rain season so I am sleeping more than usual -- this makes for good sleep but it also makes for entire days shot to hell by the steady pound of rain on my patio. I blew my last paycheck in something like 5 days so now is the waiting period in which I eat less, smoke cigarettes to the goddamn filter and slow my heartbeat. I wake up, check email and ESPN.com then I listen to 4 hours of podcasts of the Adam Carolla Show, have a couple cigarettes, play Spider Solitaire. After this I force myself to take a shower and shave, go outside and buy something to eat -- usually either pat krapow moo which is spicy pork and greens over rice or kao pat gai which is fried rice with chicken, egg and vegetables. I buy two cans of coke and some potato chips and some oreos and a pack of smokes. Then I go back to my room and eat while watching Jimmy Kimmel Live which this guy posts in 10 minute clips on youtube everyday. Then it's nap time.

A couple weeks ago I realized I haven't had this much freedom to do what I want with my time, or had my life set up in such a way where so little was expected of me, since I was 5 years old. I have this distinct memory of the week before I started kindergarten, my last day before school started. I'd watched my brother and sister get yelled at to turn off Gilligan's Island and go catch the goddamn bus enough times to know what was in store for me. I was 5 and I would wake up every morning while it was still dark out, like 6AM and go across the street from my house and catch frogs in this tiny pond all day. This is all I did. This one day, the one I remember, was the last day before school started and I was walking through the wet grass to the frog pond with nothing to do for anybody else all day, just gonna go catch frogs for as long as I wanted. I was passing this huge oak tree and I had the thought: my life will never be this good again.

This is kinda funny: I was coming back from the market last week and there was this huge elephant tromping down the sidewalk with a guy riding it. As me and a small group of dental assistants (they were all wearing the pink dress uniforms, every one of them) were passing the elephant, it decided it wanted some water from a fountain that bordered the sidewalk. The rider made a move as if to steer the elephant away from the fountain but immediately saw it was no use and just shrugged his shoulders and stared ahead as the big guy sucked a bunch of water into his trunk and started slapping the trunk on his side and spraying the water. The women all screamed and we tried to avoid the spray but we all got wet. Hot, elephant-snot Bangkok water. I thought my skin was gonna come off.

Elephants are everywhere here and it's scary sometimes because you know they can do whatever they want and the only reason they aren't stomping the life out of everybody and tossing people around is that they just haven't thought of it yet.

Typical Idiocy

Yesterday I went out to eat at 12noon, with no plan but to eat and do the crossword in the International Herald Tribune. I got home after 2am, piteously drunk. As I approached my door the security guard jumped up to open it. In Thai, I said "It's okay, I am okay, I am okay." He said "You are not okay." It's been awhile since I had a night like this. At noon I ate panang gai at New Wave Pool Bar, a big place with six tables. I like to call it New Wave Hookers Pool Bar but no one ever gets it.** Panang gai is chicken in red curry over rice. Very spicy. After breakfast I shot a few games of pool. I was playing well but I kept having to play dudes so I went to another bar. Also they were playing this awful Michael Bolton cover album. His version of "Whiter Shade of Pale" was the last straw. So I went to Hillary II, which is a smaller bar and is usually empty in the afternoon. There I shot pool versus a cute waitress named Dia and a silent black dude from London. It was one of those leisurely Bangkok afternoons; too hot to be outside, a wide open agenda and an excellent vibe in the bar so I hung out. Around 4pm the girls started showing up. Then it started pouring rain, with tons of thunder ("faa-long" I learned). I was buzzed and shooting like a champ. Because it was raining no other customers came in. A girl watching me play got my attention and asked "Why are you so handsome?" I told her it was because it was raining and there were no other farang men in the bar. She laughed really hard at this and got embarrassed. Her name turned out to be "Meow" which is the Thai word for cat. Around 7pm I decided to go see this girl I met the other night when a visitor was here and I was waiting for him to finish bar fining (having sex with)** a girl. The girl I went to see works in Nana Entertainment Plaza, which is a cul de sac of pulsing Bangkok nightlife -- a hive of interconnected open air bars on the ground floor surrounded by three stories of neon blaring go go bars. There are probably 800 girls total in the various places. I was a little drunk but okay. I just wanted to get a read on this girl, to see if maybe she likes me or not. She's very, very cute and sweet so I am thinking of taking her to a movie or something. I have stopped nailing random girls and am actively looking for some kind of "girlfriend." May (her name) was really skittish when she saw me so I wasn't sure what to think. Plus all the other girls in the bar were laughing so I felt weird. I also realized she's a pretty young 21, like she might not even go with customers. So I split. She made me promise to take her out sometime before I left so I did figure that out at least. But she's really a kid so I don't know. From there I went to Voodoo, a go go bar, and had a coffee at the bar outside it and played video games for awhile. When I went inside to pee I saw this girl who was given to me as a birthday present two birthdays ago. I know, sick, sorry. It's different here. Anyway, this girl is stunning. Whenever dudes are here Voodoo is the first place I take them because not only are most of the girls beautiful, my girl really impresses the shit out of them. I want them to get a good impression of go go bars right away. Also I can never believe I actually had sex with this girl once and visitors are a good excuse to go in and buy her a drink and talk to her again. I bought her a drink and another girl made eyes at me as I was sitting down. Then there was this threesome possibility in the air. This doesn't happen so much anymore so I got kind of psyched. I was suddenly really happy to live in a place where just this idea could be hanging in the air regardless of the fact that I had pretty much no intention of going through with it. But maybe ....you know? Fa (birthday girl) recounted pretty much everything that happened with us two years ago, remembered my driver's license picture as being particularly good and asked why I never bar fined her again. I told her she was too beautiful and that whenever I come to her bar she already has a customer. She said "that's not true." Then she had to go dance for awhile. After she finished dancing this old guy -- bald, frowning, easily weighing three bills -- called her over and she never came back. I left as she was hoisting herself up onto his disgusting lap. Besides the overwhelming urge to kill myself on the spot I also felt relief as I now had an excuse to go somewhere else. I crossed over to this place where the girls are not so cute but I like them, I like the bar. They're all funny. I had a beer, ordered a drink for one of the girls and told them I just got dissed by birthday girl. This wasn't really true, but a good way to take the pressure off of them trying to get me to bar fine somebody. The head bartender is older, kinda tough and plain-beautiful. Is that a word? Whatever, I love her. They were all drinking tequila. Apparently the mama-san had found a bottle of tequila on the way into work so they were drinking some of it. They made me have a shot which I did not want or need but they were laughing and screaming and having fun so I acquiesced. The bartender marked the bottle, showing where they would stop drinking and start selling it. Then I was dragged into the adjoining go go bar by this girl I like who makes a beeline for me every time I have ever gone in this bar. She's like a short, chubby Mira Sorvino. No lie. But we've never gone together as I am always with a friend or something. Who knows, there are a million reasons I can't bar fine girls anymore. While talking to her I realized the tequila shot had kind of leveled me and this girl (I can never remember her name, it sucks) doesn't even drink so I was like "I am too drunk to be here," apologized and left. I went back outside and asked the not so cute girls why they had to give me that shot. They all laughed and showed me the tequila bottle which was now empty. The mama-san was wasted, head down on the bar and everything. The bar was chaos. Then I went up to the third floor, to Carnival where I, um, rode a mechanical bull. One side of this bar is girls dancing on a rotating stage and the other side is a padded ring with a mechanical bull and a girl I love in hot-pant shorts basically getting fucked by it. I always ride the bull. I talked to the girl once but she was all business at 19. Like a con. Kinda scared and depressed me. As far as the bull goes, my high score is 46 seconds. Make it a full minute and you get a drink or something I don't know. From there I crossed over to Hollywood bar, which has insanely white decor, like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This short, fully-packed girl who looks like an asian Bjork and is named Yao (I always always say it "YOW!") and I rolled around in a booth making out for while but I decided to move on when she had to go dance. I gave her 500 baht. Things get hazy from here. I made plans with a girl to score and do ecstasy at one place. Then I went to meet the dealer but realized I was too drunk to do it so I bailed on it. What tipped me off to being too drunk was the fact that as I was leaving the bathroom at this bar called Big Dogs, I slipped and took out some tables. I didn't knock over any drinks though, luckily, but it did cause something of a scene. I got in a cab. It was 11pm. I went to this part of town called Soi Cowboy (me and the cabbie talked about the fact that, too drunk to fuck, I was going to Cowboy to find a girl to cuddle with. He thought this was hilarious). After coffee I depressedly visited the bar an old girlfriend I am still hung up on named Bong used to work before some Australian dude married her. Boring. The night ended in some place I found called Toy Bar where I bought like 50 tequila shots for the girls. I went outside, ate some watermelon and came home. I woke up this morning in a state of panic because of how much money I blew and the fall-down. Then the security guard came up to my room with a book someone sent me and I got an email from my boss that I thought was gonna say "you're fired" but was not that at all. He just wanted to talk baseball. Then writing this I realized I had a really fucking good time yesterday.

Christmas Part II

My first Christmas in Thailand was spent in Pattaya, a legendarily sleazy beach town 2 hours southeast of Bangkok. Pattaya is the kind of place where you become so giddily happy in the first few hours of getting there you never ever want to leave. You run around in a sea of seeming lawlessness and pervasive vice, stay up all night, sit on the beach, swim in your hotel pool and eat fresh fruit, while away the hours in the most pointless of pursuits. Drink, drink, drink. You think, “This is a fucking Disneyland, man! This is incredible!” Then you have one 2PM beer too many, you see one 58 year old shirtless British stevedore too many, you realize the girls calling you “handsome man” are also saying it to the guy stumbling around with a black eye (I know because I’ve been that guy there) and next thing you know you’re crouched in the corner of your hotel room with the lights off and a gun in your mouth. There is no place on earth like this town.

Naturally I wanted to spend Christmas there, and did. Christmas night at maybe 11 o’clock I was sitting on a curb, on the phone with someone back in the states, when I saw a fight involving 5 bar girls and a man carrying a life-size stuffed Santa. The curb was on Walking Street, a mile long stretch of go go bars stacked three stories high, and the double wide street was clogged with tourist families, sex tourists, working girls, ex-pats and food delivery motorcycles moving in both directions when this guy walked past with the giant Santa under one arm and two bar girls on either side of him and then all hell broke loose. Three other bar girls came running up behind them screaming. No posturing, no threats – an all out brawl involving six people and a 5 foot tall stuffed Santa Claus erupted instantaneously. Somehow the guy never lost hold of the Santa, he had a girl’s hair in one hand and the Santa in the other and was fighting off a second girl with hip checks. I couldn’t tell if the attackers were after the Santa or someone owed money or a boyfriend had been discovered cheating or what. They were all outrageously drunk. One of the girls running up actually dropkicked one of the other girls – genuine martial arts executed perfectly – it was incredible. They also continued moving past the whole time and within forty seconds or so were out of my line of sight. It was like they got swallowed up by the throng. The guy never let go of the Santa.

This most recent Christmas was marked by the near total collapse of my fragile life here (see very first post down below). After jazzing my way out of my friend’s apartment feeling electric and stupid I decided I wanted to sing “White Christmas” at a karaoke bar. The only karaoke bar I have found in Bangkok that caters to farang and actually has a selection of western songs (besides “Happy Birthday”) is this place called Cozy Club in Patpong. I knew for a fact that they had “White Christmas” as I had sung it sometime last spring.

I have been to Cozy Club probably six times in 2 years. The night I discovered it, the room was crammed with old gay Australian dudes singing "What A Wonderful World" and "You Were Always On My Mind." I checked the book, sang “Everything I Own” and split. Then the next four times I went I had the place to myself basically. So on Christmas 2007, I decided this would be my destination. I’d sing my songs and be depressed, miles from home, lost, alone – depressed as all hell but in that awesome Christmas way.

I don’t know what the deal was on this particular night but there was a party going on. A major party, all Thai people going hog wild (as in dancing on the bar, standing on tables, screaming), Before I could turn around and go I was immediately pulled in, pushed onto a stool, handed a cigarette and a beer.

Over the course of the next 30 minutes basically everyone in the bar eventually came up to me and shook my hand and if I didn't have one lit, offered me one of their cigarettes. I didn't see the bartender charge a single person for an endless stream of cocktail refills so I asked this lady if this was a work party and she said, "Nobody work here. We have party for Christmas." Then she stood up on the seat of her booth and started dancing. The DJ recognized me and gave me the microphone and I sang about two verses of "White Christmas" before a Thai pop ballad came on and this girl started singing about her broken heart. It was chaos.

At some point I left. I had to step over people laying on the ground in the doorway.

Thai Girlfriend

There is a girl here named Pin. She has decided she wants me to be her boyfriend. I have no idea why. She won’t take any money from me. She has one boyfriend in Australia paying for her apartment and one boyfriend in England paying for her school. She makes 100,000 baht a month off them, by doing nothing. I think they're both pretty old guys and that she talks dirty to them on the phone or something. I think this because once one of the guys called while we were sleeping and she spent like 20 minutes saying "You're so bad, I can't say that. Yes I'm alone I have a cold. I can't talk. I need sleep. Yes I love you and I miss you and yes ... uhhhh ... I'm wearing my pants and a shirt. Why? Huh? No, I am not naked. You're so baaaaaad" and all this stuff trying to deflect the guy it seemed like. Creepy. I felt bad for her and wanted to get on the phone and yell "Dude it's fucking 8AM. She's sleeping. Get a life!" But y'know, 50,000 baht a month you gotta take the call. Another thing is she's always calling me at like 6AM and trying to talk dirty even though I'm half asleep and she's wasted.

She still works in a bar (a beer bar, not a go go bar) but doesn't go with customers so much, according to her. She says she works the bar as a favor to her friend who is the manager and only goes with guys if they are so drunk it's likely they will pass out before anything happens, which might or might not be how we met.

When I go to her house we play fighting games on the Playstation. She has a fridge stocked with big bottles of Chang. When she wins the fighting game I have to drink an entire beer. When I win, she puts on her school uniform and ... ahh ... forget it. Anyway, these are her rules. When I wake up in the afternoon, she has bought spicy pork over rice with this like fried egg omelet on top of it for me to eat, new t-shirts for me to wear when we go out, potato chips and candy bars for when we get back. She says she likes me because she wants a "simple man" and since I don't dress flashy or have mousse in my hair and also am living in a utility closet with no AC then I am "simple and not like other farang." I tried to explain that maybe she was getting the terms "simple man" and "late stage alcoholic" confused but she didn't really get it.

I ran out of money last week but she's been feeding me so I am okay and not freaking out. She shows up at my house every night at midnight or 2 AM or 3 AM, after working the bar, with food and beer and we sit on my floor and wolf it down. The other night she came over with a big bottle of brandy. She says "Here take these pills, they're fun" and gives me 2 because she's drunkish and I am sober, to catch up. An hour later she's putting two more in my mouth as we are finishing the bottle of brandy on my roofdeck. She tells me about killing rats to feed her family when she was a kid and even describes the method which, not surprisingly, involves a pointy stick.

Then the next thing I know I'm in a restaurant with her, it's 5AM and I am sobbing. I can't stop crying. I haven't cried in 5 years. I sleep for like 19 hours and have a fucking David Cronenburg movie of a dream. When I wake up I ask her WTF dude? She's like, "My ladyboy friend gave me those pills. He puts them in men's drinks and takes their money when they pass out."

For a few weeks she'd been talking about this drug she wanted me to try, called "gao." I told her sure I wanna try it. Finally one night she shows up at my house with "gao," which turns out to be a can of rubber cement and some plastic bags. I had never sniffed glue and she had to show me the correct way to do it. It took me awhile to get the hang of it but eventually I did. It’s similar to whip-its, only slower. It’s like that part of the whip-it where your body relaxes to a jelly-like state and everything floats, but for a longer time, not 3 seconds like with nitrous.

We were on the roof of my building. At 4 AM the terrorists at the mosque a mile away start singing and, as the city is silent, the prayer is all you can hear, just this mournful chant-song. It's really beautiful. On this particular night, the sound was bouncing off the buildings around us as if there were people on either side of us singing. I was hearing this extremely far out and beautiful sound and the glue trip unexpectedly peaked and Pin turned to me and asked, "Is that sound real?" I giddily nodded yes and she started walking towards me smiling and she transformed into a glittering skeleton, not a skeleton really but a being entirely made up of sparks that were in fact tiny spinning bones, little white bones -- she was walking towards me smiling and there were showers of sparks all around her. But she was all bones, and the sparks themselves were bones, spinning and twinkling bones in perfectly symmetrical patterns. All I could think of was the Grateful Dead and how she had turned into a Dead album cover. I actually had this thought: "This is the most psychedelic moment of my life." It was religious. It really was, but we both woke up with unbelievable headaches.

***
I wrote the above about 2 years ago, when it all was happening, but at some point I was like "Well one of us is gonna die here" and broke it off. Since then I haven't seen much of Pin. Her boyfriends both stopped sending dough and she became very despondent, really dreading the possibility of working in a go go bar and she started spending most of her time back in her hometown Pisanulok. She called me once and asked if I could lend her money, which I did and was glad for the opportunity. Since I was not going to be able to give her the money for 2 days, I asked if she had at least food to eat while she waited, and if not I'd bring her some 5 baht noodles (I literally had 20 baht til I got paid). She said "Well, I have a mackerel." I don't know why I thought this was funny. I ended up giving her twice the amount she asked for, partly because I screwed up and partly because I'd happily give this girl 8000 baht any time she needed it for as long as I lived and still owe her. I mean she gave me that picture up top for one thing.

Throw a Kit

I visited the states and while I was there I bought gifts for a bunch of people here, some people that I like and some that make me feel paranoid -- I like my landlady, the security guard in my building is a major question mark, the gang of perpetually buzzed motorcycle taxi dudes at the end of my street who scream at me every time I walk by make me REALLY paranoid, and I bought stuff for various bar girls who asked me to bring them gifts, or just because I like them.

I did this to grease the wheels maybe, or assuage guilt, or to show I am not a "cheap charlie," who knows -- I definitely wanted to quell the almost constant paranoia I feel for being able to do whatever I want here, at all times. I really wanted to come back with gifts for everyone, and did somehow. But almost all of them went over really bad. I think they were too cheap or something. Also I inadvertently insulted the motorcycle taxi dudes.

I bought them a six pack of Bud tall boys. There is no Budweiser here to speak of, it's an import and expensive so you never see it. I brought the six pack out to them in a brown paper bag I had taken on the plane with me, for maximum effect when I presented it. Budweiser is the king of beers after all. The idea was for it to be like the beer came directly from a liquor store stateside. It was early evening and they were sitting in their customary row across the street from the 7-Eleven, on some steps. Standing before them I said "I brought you beer from America!" then I pulled out the six pack, like you would do in the states, letting the bag fall to the ground and pulling cans off the plastic thing and tossing one to each guy, the way you would do at a cookout after procuring the next case of beers. The first guy missed his, then the rest were terrified except one dude who looked like he wanted to put his machete through my face. I also gave some Latino "Homies" (I couldn't find any gangbanger ones) to the children running around, which had seemed like a good idea when I bought them, but then handing them out they were so small it felt like I was handing the kids lint from my pocket. Then with the dude glaring at me, this one woman driver who I never can tell if she hates me or not, asked me for a second beer after I had just handed her the last one. This really unnerved me so I put my beer down on the ground, said "this is for the guy not here" (one usual guy was not there) and saluted them and pretty much ran in the opposite direction. The whole thing took about a minute and a half to unfold. I don't know why it all went so wrong. I can't decide if it was the throwing beers at them, which is very likely seen as an aggressive act here, or not sitting down and drinking one with them. Or just leaving the brown paper bag on the ground (litter, tree-waste). It definitely wasn't my clothes. I was wearing my best white linen suit and cleanest pith helmet.

I gave this girl Thip a little tiny stuffed rooster I figured was cute and funny and she reacted like I had thrown a black cat covered in chicken blood at her. She kept saying, "I am not a chicken." Then she just split. It was awful. I later learned there is a very ugly term for bar girls in Thailand -- "chicken." Basically I gave this girl a worthless gift that said "you are a whore."

I gave this other girl, Nok, a white hat I had bought her my first week in the US because this was a big one I needed to get as she had specifically requested a white baseball cap. So I bought it right away thinking I'd already have it when I ran out of money. I'm no good with things that are white and it didn't stay so clean. By the time I gave it to her it had like entire fucking fingerprints on it, like a crime scene. She asked me what happened and I said "well I had to wear it on the plane" and she eyed my dirty hair for a split second.

Even my landlady said "what? chocolate covered macadamia nuts? Eh...maybe my son will like them." And I think the security guard is Muslim. He reacted to the Miller High Life 22 Oz. can I gave him with a sort of polite confusion. I later realized I've never even seen him smoke.

photo by na' chim

Things NOT to do in Thailand

I live in Bangkok, the emerald isle of the Far East, land of a gajillion smiles. The actual full Thai name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udom Ratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanu Kamprasit which translates as "The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukam." More commonly it is called Bangkok, which translated means "The Big Smelly."

A lot of people ask me what it's like to live in such a faraway, exotic place and I'll tell you, it's a real trip! It's totally different. First of all, everyone is Chinese. But they don't ride bikes like in all those pictures you see. They just walk everywhere, or take taxis or the subway. Secondly, it's impolite to blow your nose in public. But picking your nose? Fair game! Pick away! How's that for a paradigm? There's a million of these, and at first I had some difficulties adjusting to life here.

Apparently they're not as into doing your laundry as you might think, given the historical accounts of Chinese people and their behavior. I asked this one lady to do my laundry and she acted like she had no idea what I meant until I put the bag in her hands and said "washy washy" like 50 times. She didn't even do a very good job and on top of that they got mixed in with some angry punker's clothes or something because somehow the words "GO HOME FUCK YOU" bled onto all my shirts.

Halloween. What a disaster. It was like NOBODY had any idea what Halloween even is. Every house I went to reacted like I really was a rapist (I was wearing pantyhose over my head and carrying a bat). No candy. Lots of screaming and door slamming. One person gave me some dried fish that smelled like cat period. That sucked.

Thankfully I have slowly but surely started to adjust to the way of life here. It's a process. I no longer slap Thai people across the face when they address me without being spoken to first. Or don't smile. It just became too much of a chore, also my hand started hurting a lot. I have finally stopped falling for the old come-to-this-motel-room-with -me-and-my-scowling-brother -and-take-these-pills-for-fun -then-wake-up-five-hours-later -in-a-bathtub-full-of-ice -missing-some-organs routine. Mostly. And I can finally pronounce the word for "banana" correctly -- say it wrong and you are asking to see someone's cock so you wanna be real careful there, especially around monks. I used to get chased with a lot of machetes.

Koh Samui

This is pretty long. Sorry.

When I first moved here people kept telling me about how cheap and awesome the islands are. "You can rent a bungalow on the beach for 80 baht! That's $2.00!" "They give you psychedelic mushroom shakes and you just snorkel all day, TRIPPING!" I figured, wow I gotta try this. So I went to Koh Samui, an island on the Gulf of Thailand side, about halfway down the strip of land that connects Thailand's north to the southernmost tip of the country. I am not such a good traveller but who doesn't love tropical islands, y'know?

I got maybe 20 minutes sleep the night before my 6AM flight, a fact that perhaps made the airport a little more complicated than it needed to be. Like I said, bad traveller. At the counter getting my ticket, the paper must have sliced my finger but I didn’t notice it until I was walking toward the gate and felt something sticky and looked down to see that my right hand was gushing blood all over my passport and ticket. There was a shining trail of blood leading pretty much the entire way back to the counter. I went into the men’s room and ran water over my finger but it kept bleeding and bleeding, dark blood. I used some toilet paper to stop it up while I went to learn whether or not they sell band aids at the airport at five in the morning. They had them at a kiosk but I needed to paint an ATM machine with my blood before buying them. I finally got a band aid on the cut, with help from the very uncomfortable lady at the kiosk. All this time, in the bathroom with blood flowing into the sink and a cleaning lady looking at me strangely from the corner of the room, in line at the kiosk with a ragged piece of toilet paper on my hand, bleeding on the ATM machine, I wondered if I was making a scene. Like a suspicious character in the airport type of scene. I was vaguely drunk from the night before. Not drunk, just hazy. The ubiquitous AK-47 toting soldiers did not arrest me though, they didn't even seem to notice me. Relieved, I approached the gate and a woman at a desk who needed to see my bloodsoaked ticket. For a split second she drew back from me before accepting it but then had no choice but to take it. Awful. Then beyond the desk was a set of stairs, like 5 steps. I fell on the second one and went sprawling, my backpack swinging off my shoulder. I looked back at the lady at the desk to say wasn't that funny with my mind but she was in the process of intentionally looking away.

For some reason my walking was bad all the time on Koh Samui. I stumbled on uneven pavement everywhere, fell in holes in the dirt roads, knocked over tables at the restaurants, spilled my drinks. This contributed to a feeling of unease most of the time I was there. I felt sharply conspicuous and was trying really hard to get comfortable. I even bought one of those short sleeve, printed linen farang shirts, so I would fit in with the rest of the tourists. My first night there I went to an area called Soi Reggae, which is a little street clogged with pool bars and bar girl bars, with a giant reggae club at the end of the road. I was convinced by some girls to sit and have a drink at one of them, I forget the name of it. It was probably “Sexy Night” since there were approximately five bars called “Sexy Night” within 50 feet of each other. One of the girls sat with me. She said “You want lady tonight?” and I said “No, just here for a drink.” I was feeling tense. She said, “Do you like my friends?” and pointed to the group of girls at the bar’s entrance. I said “Your friends are very beautiful” and as I said this I looked directly into the face of a girl with one eye. I got very drunk that night but went home alone.

The next night I was lying in my hotel room sweating and decided fuck it and went out to the bars again. This time I was in an area called Chaweng. I approached an open air bar I picked at random. As I walked up to a stool, the girls yelled “Welcome!” and just then I stumbled on the uneven ground and had to grab the stool to keep from falling on my face. There was an extended moment of actual careening and regaining balance using the stool as leverage. Thai people often react to situations like this with a sort of grinning terror. I climbed up on the stool feeling like an idiot and ordered a Heineken. I was angry at myself for falling and thinking “Why can’t I just relax for 5 minutes?” As I took a sip of beer and turned, I noticed I was sitting next to a bald midget. I almost jumped out of my skin. The thought, “Holy lord, a midget! Now there’s a midget within speaking distance” flashed in my mind quickly, like, what could be next, you know? Are the dogs gonna start talking to me? I realized we were sitting close enough to each other for some kind of inevitable conversation to occur that I was not really prepared to engage in. I have never spoken one word to a little person in my life. It’s just never happened. And the thought that it was about to happen, with me totally unprepared, was terrifying. That thought was followed by “I think he just saw the disbelief register on my face.”

I don’t have a problem with midgets per se it’s just that I was in a mild paranoid state to begin with and then it seemed like everything that happened to me was only making it worse. It was comic. Not cosmic, comic.

One of the girls invited me to shoot pool with her. We had one of those painfully long games where no one sinks any balls. With the warped tables on those islands, it’s like shooting pool on the Poseidon sometimes. The bar girl’s name was Noi, she was a beautiful but decidedly plump girl. She was really funny though and had an easy laugh. I got semi-drunk. At one point I heard myself agreeing to her request to take her to the Full Moon Party on a nearby island. It's a major tourist attraction on Samui and she said she'd never been to it. The party started in approximately 3 hours.

First we went to the river and celebrated Loy Kratong, a Thai holiday where you light a candle that is stuck in a little boat made from banana leaves and set it off floating in the water after praying over it. There were Thai people all over the riverbanks setting their boats off. The river was filled with little floating candles. I bought her a huge stuffed monkey she wanted. I said to her, “You really want this? Are you sure you’re 23?” Then we went to the Full Moon Party. The plan fell through, as we were boarding the ferry and I decoded her suddenly terrified body language. She felt her outfit was not suitable for the party. Too bar girl-y. I took her home. She slept over but there was no boom-boom. We even slept in separate beds.

Islands are no fun alone. Everything is set up for couples. I swear people think there’s something wrong with you.

I woke up one morning, put my shirt on (later on I realized I had put it on inside out) and stumbled out to the street in search of a nice cup of coffee at an outdoor café. I found a place called Black Canyon and went inside. A girl immediately approached me with a menu in her hand. I said hello and realized I wanted to sit outside, so in mid hello I lurched back towards the door and we kind of bumped. This, along with my longish bed hair and unshaven face, a jumbling, failed attempt to hold the door for her -- where my body is pressed against the glass, trembling, losing the door with each passing second and the person you are supposedly helping has to squeeze by and hurry through before it shuts on their face -- and with my inside out shirt (which in Thailand is like walking around with your dick out, they would just never ever do it) all made the waitress visibly uncomfortable. I tried to explain with my hands that I wanted to sit outside but she just looked at me like I was crazy. Then I knocked the table over as I sat down, spilled my coffee two seconds after she brought it and dropped her tip on the ground. This basically made me a dead person to her and she scowled at me every time I passed this café the rest of the time I was on Samui.

My last night on the island I decided that I had to at least attempt to meet a girl who was not a prostitute. After four months in Bangkok I wasn’t even sure if I knew how to flirt with white girls anymore. So I found a bar on the beach (the bars inland are all bar girl bars) that had 3 white girls sitting together at it. Fellow travelers. Lonely maybe. Certainly three girls on an island are there to meet dudes. I picked a stool at the bar without incident and struck up a conversation with the girls. I made a couple jokes that went over well, they were students on vacation, were interested to know that I was a rock writer living in Thailand. I’m not the best looking guy but I have a good angle. The bartender, a rastafied Thai dude, came over several times and offered me drugs -- "We have everything," he said. I said no thanks each time. Things were pleasant enough, I wasn't totally unable to hold a conversation with non bar girls which was good. Who knew what would happen here. Then this 6 foot 4 shirtless guy with wet hair and an admittedly amazing chest (the dude had muscle tits and everything) sauntered up and said hello in this stupid New Zealand accent. I was pretty much erased by the guy. The girls all turned and started giggling. At this point the bartender again said to me “Do you want to buy some drugs? We have everything.” I was like “Yes. Heroin please.” He said “Oh no we don’t have that." "Okay, well you got opium?" He said, "Oh no no no." Before I could ask if he had a syringe of liquid acid I could shoot into my eyeball he said, "We have coke, weed and E.” He did say he had everything. Whatever. So I bought four pills of ecstasy figuring I’d take them back to Bangkok as my flight out was at 6AM. Ten minutes later, for no good reason, I had taken one.

I went straight to the hooker bars figuring I’d have a beer and I don’t know, see what happened. The way I saw it, there was a fifty-fifty chance I'd wake up missing my kidneys, but also maybe I'd end up with a really amazing massage. I'd taken ecstasy maybe 5 times in my life.

I went to the first place I came across. An open air bar on a ridiculously rutted dirt road. It started raining, which hastened my decision. A woman was playing cards and I somehow ended up teaching her how to play Blackjack. Pretty soon I was dealing hands to all the girls in the bar (not for any money) and we were all laughing. Not long after this, the drugs hit in and well...midway through announcing I was high on ecstasy to the now-crowded bar, one of the girls almost choked me, saying I should never ever ever under any circumstances tell a bar girl I was high on ecstasy, and then said “You have more?” So I gave her a pill which she took immediately.

Even though doing E with a Thai prostitute in a motel room on a tropical island is a story that kind of demands to be written down, not to mention shouted from the rooftops, I am gonna refrain from doing so. So no details. Except for this one thing: part of a bar girl’s job is to stand outside the bar and scream “Welcome!” at every farang that walks by, trying to get them to come in. Joy, who was 19 and not stupid, had a tattoo on her back that said “Not Welcome.” I skipped my flight. Also there was a real, honest to goodness typhoon.

The Quiet American (Bar)

I found this bar, maybe the best bar in all of Bangkok. It opens at 5 AM, a real novelty here as any other bar in the city open at that hour is strictly for Thais. But Texas Lone Star is all-American, from the décor to the clientele (old American dudes) to the menu which is pretty legitimate tex-mex (for Southeast Asia) even if the burritos are actually a tortilla with chicken pot pie in the middle and cheese on top. Finding cheese here is such glorious discovery sometimes you look past things, like the lack of beans say, or the fact that the burrito you’re eating is actually chicken pot pie.

A square bar ringed with booths -- soft light, no mirrors and heavy dark brown wood. It’s also silent. It’s like a cave. The perfect place to go have coffee and breakfast when you don’t want to go home. See, going home between 5AM and 7AM is tricky because there are all these monks walking around accepting gifts of food from businesses and people who live in whatever neighborhood you happen to be in. Who knows why but I am terrified of monks. So Lone Star is a sort of sanctuary and also an excellent excuse to stay out. Unfortunately this is how you wake up confused in a short-time hotel on Christmas Eve day sometimes but that’s okay for today. Plus they like me in there, I know it.

More about the bar: every time I’ve been there, the owner, who is 83 years old and has to -- has to -- weigh 400lbs, is either starting or ending his day in the first booth, gasping for breath and getting a vigorous back massage from one of the three girls working. The patrons start to trickle in around 7:00. These are old men. In fact I'm pretty sure a big reason the girls working there like having me around is that I don’t talk to them about stool samples.

The last time I was there (my third time in 4 months or so) I finally spoke to the owner guy. I had to, basically because it’s just me, the girls serving drinks and him sitting around, and if the girls all remember my name he must at least remember that I have been in before. It’s not like I’ve seen anyone else in there before 6. So to be polite I said, “How ya doin’? I love your bar. It may be my favorite bar in the whole city.” And he says, “Ahhh….I’m a sick bastard.” This is while this girl Yun is giving him the back rub, she’s actually standing in the booth as he sits on the edge of the seat because he can’t fit into it. He’s enormous. I say, “Yeah, well … that‘s okay. It’s Bangkok. So how long have you owned this place?”
“Forty three years”
“Wow. And what part of the states are you from?”
“Cleveland but it’s been years since I been there.” He lets out a long sigh, “I’m a sick, sick bastard.”
Now really awful images are crowding my mind, I mean he keeps saying what a sick bastard he is. And he obviously feels some need to confess to me. I say, “Hey we’re all sick man, don’t be so hard on yourself.” But in my mind, really, the worst images.

We fall silent again. I order some chili. As I’m eating it, a customer comes in, a guy with white hair and a newspaper in his hand. He says hello to George (the owner as I learn his name) – “How are ya today, George?” and George hisses for a minute and finally says, “My stomach … pain … I’m a sick bastard.” The customer goes, “Oh Jesus, are you all right? Do you need to go to the hospital?” and George says, “Yeah, get me a driver.”

The last thing that happened, after George went off to the hospital, was this brawny old Russian guy came in. He looked normal but after saying about three things to me he decided he wanted me to fight him over the lack of napkins at the bar or something. I was like, “Huh? Um …it’s like 7AM, isn’t it? You’re 70 and I haven’t been in a fight since the first grade.” Then the driver-getter came out of the bathroom, saw the Russian guy and screamed, “Jesus Christ! Derek! You know you’re not allowed in here! If George saw you he’d kill us all now get the hell out!” and the guy practically vanished into thin air he was gone so fast. Then somebody asked me a question about politics so I got the hell out of there myself.

Christmas

I am in a black period. My glasses broke, I left my atm card in a machine (this makes for a 5 week ordeal) and I let my computer get stolen by a girl I've known for a year and allowed to sleep in while I went to show some visitors around. Very probably gonna get fired. Plus I lost almost everything I wrote since leaving the US (that didn't get printed somewhere). yeesh.

Christmas Eve day I woke up in a short-time hotel and after a good 20 minutes of pure post-blackout terror, listening to female voices through the wall, I stumbled down the stairs, past a giggling cleaning lady and into the bar my room had been two floors above. I opened the door onto a glinting and bustling party, the room decked out in Christmas decorations, with "Marshmallow World" blaring and seemingly a hundred girls wearing mini-skirt sex-elf outfits sitting on old men's laps and leaning against the bar and eyeing me like "where the hell did he come from?" as I'd just come in through the employee entrance. Very disorienting. I went up to the bar and put down the room keys and asked for my bill. They told me I'd paid already and asked me if I wanted a drink. I was about to order a code-red-gimme-a-coffee coffee but suddenly remembered something that hadn't registered before. Minutes earlier, when I had left the room I had first found a bathroom in the hall and gone straight for it. On the way in I noticed out of the corner of my eye a sort of dorm room with bunkbeds. When I left the toilet, the door had been closed. Later downstairs in the bar I realized this is where all the girls live, in bunkbeds above the bar. I found this unspeakably sad and felt like I had intruded on their world by having seen it. So I split, in a hurry.

I continued this four day bender on Soi Cowboy and later doing cocaine on the 33rd floor of a building called State Tower in Bangrak with this hot Canadian girl who is living out a cross between Leaving Las Vegas and Bad Lieutenant because she's losing her job in January. We were on her patio, 33 floors above Bangkok, with the river in front of us babbling at each other about God and His guidance through tough times when there was this really loud "pppppffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft" sound and a fireworks display went off directly in front of us, over the river. I swear to God it was at eye level and close enough so you could smell the gunpowder. I almost fucking cried.

Pretty sure this whole thing is coming to a major wipeout/moving in with my father end