THAILAND
Well, now that the subject of prostitution has come up, it would be silly to ignore Thailand. I promise, that with the exception of the S2S story about the hooker in Trinidad, in which I was purely a journalist, and the piece about the bordello in Germany, where I was merely a member of the orchestra, this will be the last such adventure. This piece also ran in SCREW. I’ve lost the clip, but I came across my copy of the manuscript. This is pretty much how it ran. I titled it just as it appears below, and Manny and the SCREW Crew, bless them, ran it under that name.
As much as I’d like to, I haven’t changed a word…
The Only Girl in Thailand that Didn’t Like Me
Thailand is quite a place. It had been corrupted by the Vietnam War in a far more tenderhearted way than, say, Cambodia or American democracy. Instead of sending in tanks and automatic weapons and napalm cluster-bombing, the U.S. military had used the soft shores and balmy beaches for rest & recuperation for its soldiers. American soldiers on leave had the tastes and urges of soldiers on leave from combat zones everywhere, and Buddha has never been much of a behavioral tyrant, so every corner had dope, whores and alcohol practically going begging. When I got there, the war had been over for years and the hedonism industry was slowing down. But it was just a change of focus, from Yankee soldiers to just anyone else in the world. Still, the supply of horny young men had dwindled, so the delights were everywhere, and extremely affordable.
I left Singapore, took a train north to the end of that city-state, and walked across a rickety bridge into Thailand. Exactly one minute after checking into a village hotel, right after the border, a beautiful young woman knocked on my door. She smiled politely and apologized for having no English and held up a piece of paper with her price–in Thai currency–written on it. When I went to what they termed the dining room, the waitress, the cook and the maintenance lady–each one gorgeous–winked at me and named their price. Taking a taxi to the train station the next morning, the driver took me instead to a whorehouse, and promised to wait outside for a dash of 15 bhat. “Many trains, much time, my friend,” he said.
Many girls, I thought. Nowhere near enough time.
Once I got to in Bangkok, I foolishly went to Phatphong Street, the heart of the red light/cheap dope district. The area was once described as “a street of a thousand young girls, each one only working there to save enough money to buy their family a water buffalo.” Although all I wanted was a Thai Stick, at least 15 gorgeous young girls hit on me. They even said “Hey, Johnny.”
Back at my hotel, the night maid wandered into my room, saying, cleverly, “Hey Johnny?” and named a price. When I went down to breakfast, the day maid named a price, substantially lower than the night maid’s. Apparently word was getting out about this Yankee cheapskate.
At one point I had a bit of trouble on the street—there was a definite wild west atmosphere in that place, what with big-time dope dealers and attendant thugs hanging about—and I remember hesitating about calling the cops, because I thought that one of the policeman might be a policewoman, and if she hit on me, what could I do?
I ended up spending a lot of time in my hotel room, with my head ringing. For the first–and, so far, the last–time in my life, I said, “Will these sweet, beautiful women please leave me alone???”
Otherwise, with the exception of the floating markets, you can have Bangkok. It’s huge and lives under a cloud of horrendous, excruciating noise, riddled with the snarls of probably a million three-wheeled taxis, powered by detestable little two-stroke motors that sound like an hyperventilating lawn mower. The occasional graceful temple or religious structure only heightens the hellishness of the rest of the place. I have exactly the same feeling about other Developing World megalopolises: cars have ruined them, skyscrapers have ruined them, overpopulation has ruined them…and finally, being ruined has ruined them. If it weren’t for the bars with live bands, I wouldn’t go near them. And yet, I still do. I like cities, even oversized, dysfunctional ones. I can’t say exactly why.
I liked the Thai people, of course. They’re lovely, the guys and the girls behave pretty much as one would expect decent Buddhists to behave. It’s hard to dislike a 20-year old beauty giving you a big and, actually, sincere smile. So I went to a small resort town in the North and spent my time there. But every time I’d see a beautiful young woman coming my way, my reaction was the kind I’d have for a wino or even a mugger. Only in Thailand–and this isn’t really a complaint–can you reach a point where a gorgeous, willing young lady is just another irritant, something you brush aside like a panhandler.
So, in the Gulf of Siam, I discovered a fabulous cafe. It was a jungle hut, really, made of bamboo, and didn’t bother with doors or windows, leaving instead an entire wall open, letting the breeze in and the smoke out. For background music, or actually, instead of background music, the patron had some tropical birds perched against a wall, fed them, and they sang their gratitude. Or maybe they were bitching about the food and conditions and planning a break, I dunno. What I liked about this cafe was that no one spoke English, people left me completely alone, meaning that nobody, for two entire days, asked me if I knew John Wayne or Carlos Santana. Believe me, in Asia, this makes a rare spot indeed.
Then she walked in.
I’m not denying that she was pretty. She had the kind of face you’d see on an airline poster, advertising their gorgeous flight attendants. She wasn’t, however, alone. She came in with her little brother, a smartass guttersnipe whose idea of upward mobility is to kick an old lady to death for her grocery bag. He was evidently trying to better himself and break into pimping, because he came straight to my table and announced that it was time for me to “Johnny Boom-boom pretty sister one thousand bhat.” The bhat is the national currency. I can’t quite remember what they were worth at the time, but I seem to recall that one hundred of them constituted a rupee.
I wasn’t interested. I really wasn’t. I had been pretty busy, in that department, since my arrival in their country. I just smiled and said no.
That didn’t do me any good. To begin with, “Johnny Boom-Boom pretty sister etc” was the only English either of them spoke. So I leafed through my Thai-English phrase book, which, for some reason, did not contain the words, “No, I don’t want to fuck your sister,” which is practically the only phrase you need to know in the damn place. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t need a phrase book. He could leer and slurp and pantomime depravity with the best of ’em. In fact, despite his tender years, he was as close to the human embodiment of Living Sleaze as we’re ever likely to see. He could take somebody’s filthiest fantasies and parade them in front of you and the entire community. And he proceeded to do just that.
I tried complaining to the cafe’s owner, the patron. Although “Tell this shitball that I don’t want to fuck his alleged sister” wasn’t in the phrase book either, I did some pantomime myself and got my point across. The patron, however, merely smiled and affectionately patted the boy on the head. I never found out why, but it meant that the little fuckwad was as honored a guest as I was.
Finally, little brother wore me down. Like a divorce lawyer, he won by being more obnoxious than his opponent. I simply decided that sleeping with his beautiful sister was more agreeable than watching his disgusting gestures any more. This is a logical decision and most of us would have done the same. But, as it turned out, it was going to be a close contest.
Some guys like a woman who does most of the talking. Vibrant, sparkling and vivacious are words that come to mind. Others among us prefer quiet, reserved women, who give us room to brag and strut without contradiction. My new friend fell into this category. And with a rare vengeance.
I mean, she spoke no English, so I wasn’t expecting any witty repartee. But once the financial pact was concluded she lost all interest in the proceedings and lapsed into a wave of indifference more suited to a manic depressive than a working hooker. As we walked toward my hotel, she just stared straight ahead, not even grunting, and trundled alongside like a prisoner of war. We walked through the village like mortal enemies heading for the OK Corral.
I began to get the feeling that she was only after my money.
Reaching my hotel, the mood didn’t improve. One of the maids, who I swear I’d never even leered at–suddenly decided that she’d seen me first and burst in to a frenzy of territorial rights. She hissed and snarled and barked out insults and rattled screens and fussed with her broom and disconnected the overhead fans and in general went around acting like a wife of twenty years catching me in leather bondage with her baby sister.
None of this affected Judy. I had christened her that after those vinyl “Judy Dolls” that they sell in the Amsterdam sex shops. She stood and stared blankly at my door while I fumbled for my key and the maid rained a string of epithets and Asiatic curses down upon us.
Well. Moments like this are when the sleaze bubbles over and starts running up your leg. And when you go a-whoring, it’s bound to happen now and then.
A sexual transaction, in Thailand, is a perfectly respectable business proposition, scarcely different from buying a bowl of noodles. People perform it cheerfully, with mutual respect and goodwill. There is a certain framework, and both trick and whore operate within it. It’s just that some people are not well suited for their roles. Jack the Ripper, for instance, displayed as poor an understanding of the boundaries as we’re every likely to see. As for the ladies, you wouldn’t expect any good street whoring from Margaret Thatcher or Mother Theresa. Certain ingrained behavioral patterns would prevent them from living up to their end of the bargain.
And so it was with Judy. She had no appetite for her work. She would have probably been very happy as a spinster schoolteacher somewhere, twisting the boy’s ears if they stuck their tongues out. But no, instead she was turning tricks in a jerkwater town, hating her job, her life, every one of those nasty objects that people shoved into her, and getting her revenge by making me feel like Ted Bundy.
I pointed to the bed, and from the way she looked at it you’d have thought that it was crawling with white maggots. She curled her lip and sneered something that sounded like “You no good, Johnny,” her first, and only, words of the evening.
We got into bed, and she started screaming. Not in terror, but in simulated ecstasy. This, I guess, is an old whore’s trick to build up the male ego, but it was patently transparent and wouldn’t have fooled George Bernard Shaw. It made me think of an untalented starlet auditioning for a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And every time she screamed the maid would pound on the wall with a broom handle and shriek that we were making a disgusting, perverted racket and making all the other guest’s sick. It was getting to be like an X-rated Three Stooges flick. Finally it ended.
“Are you satisfied?” I asked, which I thought was a pretty good line, under the circs.
Judy didn’t answer. She was already settling back into her sullen autism. It struck me that, if school teaching didn’t work out, she could have made a great sales clerk in one of the Soviet department stores.
I opened the door and pointed toward it. She got up and hopped through it, with a parting “You no good, Johnny,” which I suppose had been pent up during all that screaming.
It was, by then, evening. Twilight was coming on, and for some perverse, inexplicable reason, I started getting horny. Perhaps seeing her leave had had some salutary effect or other. But since I didn’t want to go through any more of that, I grabbed my trusty “Portable Nietzsche” and tried to escape down that trail. But the forest and Zarathustra and the rope-dancer and all those other wild and crazy guys couldn’t do it just then. Even the bit about going to woman and not forgetting thy whip seemed anti-climactic. So I put Bad Fred aside and stood up. I knew what I had to do. When you’ve got a problem in a hotel, what do you do? I did it.
I rang for the maid.
This piece appeared in 1991 or 1992. Interestingly, to me anyway, is that by now, I had forgotten almost everything about this encounter. It’s one of the vaguest memories I have, no clearer than the face of my second grade math teacher. The only reason I know the details is from a few sheets of paper from decades past.
A moralist would find Bangkok a hell-hole because of the endless supply of loose women and cheap dope. I found it a hell-hole because of two-stroke engines. And it’s not often that I find myself in any kind of agreement with Jerry Falwell.
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