Blanca Gomez

I ordered my coffee, twice black (no milk, no sugar) and some banana roti (they didn't have pie) and took a seat. A girl from the other end of the room, Thai, young and pretty, beamed a great big smile when she saw me.

"Happy birthday!" She said. I frowned and she blushed, apologised but studied my face. She was so sure. She pointed across the street. "Yesterday you come to that bar." I remembered that. "You and your friend, you guys told everybody it was your birthday." I didn't remember that.

I finished my coffee and crepe in a long and awkward silence.

"I heard about how you nearly died," Nick, instructor and landlord, said.

"Oh yeah?" I tried one of those nonchalant faces like they did in old movies. I hadn't the faintest clue what he was talking about.

"Stepping on a snake, it was a miracle it didn't bite." I remembered that as well. "There's 27 snakes in Thailand, only two are not poisonous."

"I didn't step on it. It more like crawled up my leg."

"The Norwegians say you disappeared with a group of Russians and they didn't see you again."

That? No, not so much.

(-We Live and Burn in Nights like Beatnik Poetry)

The Landlord, shouted out to me from the kitchen.

" 'cisco! Phone!"

I came down from the bar and picked it up. On the other side, there were tears and heavy breathing carried over the distance of a thousand copper highways.

"There was a motorcycle accident."

I closed my eyes and tried not to swear. The whole world stopped, like it's cogs had jammed, or it was running on Windows.

Seconds later, I told myself I would never let my kids ride. Hours later, I realised how disappointed I'd be if they actually obeyed. Only today, in the morning, did the thought occur: why on Earth did my parents let me? Me of all people. I've crashed the thing more times than I can count. I crashed it into an ambulance once (and I was even sober that time).

 God, I miss that bike.

"So, when are you going back?" The Swede asked. His resemblance to Daniel Craig was uncanny. Everybody tried not to hum the Bond tune. Well, I know I was trying, anyway.

"I have to go back for Christmas so I'm not struck from the inheritance list," I said. He sat up, eyes bulging, a little pale.

"They can do that in Portugal?" He meant it - I checked.

"Oh yeah; we take Christmas very seriously." He shook his head a little horrified. I promised the other day I wouldn't lie anymore but it was a little late now to explain myself.

"We're not like that in Scandinavia. So you have to go to a government office and sign ourself in or what?"

"And take two witnesses of course. For the signatures." 

He looked out at the milky waters of the afternoon sea, his eyes scanning the dusty horizon for Pirate ships and Portuguese bureaucrats. But it was three o'clock, almost four and neither of them are very active after lunchtime.

 Later I was telling his Asian wife:

"Well, I've more or less worked six months, not worked six months the past three years." It's almost true, too, given the flexibility of the term "more or less" (and the flexibility of the word "almost"). "But I'm hoping maybe I can keep my job a little longer this time."

"So next time we see you, you will still be in Thailand? Married a Thai wife and ten childen like this one?" She pointed to little Gustav who'd collapsed next to us after our long session of hide and seek.
"No hairs on his arms, but all hair all curly on the head from your white man genes?" Ten? The mind reels but accomodates.

"Well, I can always start my own tribe I suppose."

"And your own dive school?"

"Oh, no. I hope not."

Magical ambition we accept - but let us check it's material sister. It could make a serious person, (the so-called mature adult), and we'd find ourselves writing about VAT and cholestrol levels and investing in stocks and bonds. Or, God forbid, taking politics seriously.

Shoot us if we ever.


Please.

(Robert Zimmerman above, Corey Cogdell by Lucas Jackson below)

 "You don't know me, but I tell you. I'm not a jealous man. I've always - how do you say (entertained, no?) entertained romantic notions, part Shelley, part Sartre," says the Spaniard, his Trilby down low, the slick brim pushed over his eyes. We haven't met an intellectual hermano since we last saw Alejandro in Hull. We're at the bar, of course, sitting on spinning stools - it's all black lights and shadows. "But she sat by my side and asked for my help writing messages to half a dozen other men: how old are you, do you have a girlfriend, &c. Her English isn't very good you see. But that's when I first felt it. Thailand - it is so real as to be surreal. It gets a bit much, no? I don't think I can handle it. Maybe I'll go somewhere else."

(Epileptic Valentines #4)

"And about this Parsi woman I know, Bapsy, that's her name, she lived in Germany for a while and fell in love with a Turk. - Trouble was, the only language they had in common was German; now Bapsy has forgotten almost all  she knew, while his gets better and better; he writes her increasingly poetic letters and she can hardly reply in nursery rhyme.- Love dying, because of an inequality of language, what do you think of that? - Love dying. There's a subject for us, eh? Saladin? What do you say?"

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Matt Stephens

"I hope you understand that ours is a rather strange family. The people that make it are a little odd and the ties that bind them are very complicated."

(-in Correspondence and Old Letters)

I'm sat at the only bar still open - I was the last of a number of other strays to have stumbled in on my way home.The Frenchman complains that his girl is only with him for the money and the Finn replies with great, theatrical waving arms, and raising his voice so that everybody hears him:

"My dear! Nobody told him the first rule! In here, you are on top of the world. This is Paradise! This is land of a thousand smiles! In here, everything is Paradise. Everything is good. You either get broken hearted - and that is most likely - or you find the girl of your life. I can offer you one answer: if she doesn't want your money, she wants you. You go to her, you say you are my darling, my love, my everything. Quite litterally because i have nothing back home and if she stays, well, she is the one."

(Epileptic Valentines #3)

In Thailand's alleged best jazz bar, old Saxophone, I met an old Austaralian who was a good, friendly guy despite being a racist and a bigott. Ignoring his various, rather colorful ways of describing "this piece o'shit country" or his references to Australia as a " real one", he was really rather agreeable company.

He had a dozen good ideas for what I could do with my life, which he was good enough to give as answers to questions I never made.

"If you really want to make a move, I'd think about mining in Mongolia. That's a really good place to look for a job now. The boom there is unbelievable." (Remember to read these in your best Aussie accent.) "If you have the money for it, buy yourself a shack in one of Singapore's slums and live there for three years. Then you get the best passport in the world. That's what I'd do if I were you and if you had the money."

He kept referring to his girlfrend as "my little brown girl" and "the concubine".

A retirement plan helps too but there are only three things, I realised that night, one needs to have to be a true expat over here. A moustache, of course, a faded tatoo, and a local girl to call concubine and say horrible things about her country to.

If I don't manage all three of these before the end of the month, I can always try Mongolia I suppose.

(Epileptic Valentine #2)

 

And this is how we'll think of ourselves in the future.

Same setting as before. Rooftop, moon and thunder, bangkok skyline. Exit Lyonn, enter the Walloon in tight golf trousers. He is her boyfriend and they're on their break-up date, cheerfully. He waves away the third man who has proposed a threesome in the last half an hour and goes on saying:

"The guy on stage, Andy. He's got this great song called 'Can't go anywhere' which is about having a Thai girlfriend. It's really funny. It explains stuff like you can't introduce her to your parents because she may even be twenty something, she'll still look sixteen and all your friends think you're a paedofile. Or that you can't take her home, or travel with her, because she doesn't have a passport. It's a really great song."

"Definitely sounds like it," I said.

(-Epileptic Valentines #1)

She is really tall and a little dark. A pair of very long legs and a pair of very short shorts. She is so beautiful - hell, she is so perfect - when I saw her I thought she was a man.

Asia does that to a guy, I suppose.

She's sitting next to me, one thin leg dangling over the other, a slender-fingered hand on her knee waving a cigarette. The passing skytrain lights up beautiful little curls of smoke. The full harvest moon hangs exactly above us and lightning forks in the distant night behind her.

"He tried talking to me earlier," she said, about the big angry American with an inferiority complex. "I think he was drunk. But you know, so many times, so many times, men try to talk to me at bars. I don't know. I just learned to be snobby or something. It gets so boring."


She sighs out a long petal of smoke that washes across the Bangkok skyline. My heart goes out to her. People never think about what it must be like to be an ex-model.