"I once saw British girls in Bangkok, wearing matching tank tops
pissed as farts in an expat bar where they drank lots" - Gramski

We (this time, we being the two of us, not the many of me) were walking down the road. We passed by a hair-salon. I looked inside, I walked back, I stopped, I said:

"I need a haircut."

Inside, sat down with the sprawling languidity of a subject of a Degas study on pleather sofas, or pouting, propped up on swinging chairs before great mirrors touching their geisha-paints, standing up at corners having gossip sessions, in tiny orange shorts and tops that would have been corsets had they only the laces, a multitude of Saigon's finest-looking girls waited for a customer.

The manager came up to me, a long Modigliani figure, so tall I felt like I was at the same level with her hips, her hair up like the mane on a general's helmet.

"I need a haircut," I said.

She showed me inside, and I'm falling in love left, right and center, my eyes can't even focus on anybody, but the crowd parts before me (to use a much-used, somewhat abused image) like the seas before old Moses. The girl with the impossible green eyes steps back, and the short girl who reminds us of somebody else, and the angel from an Opium dream, they all move back and we are pressed on to where an empty chair awaits us and it starts to feel like the walk to the gallows.

I am pushed down onto the seat. I swing it around from side to side looking for somebody, anybody to step forward.

A huge mammoth of a man, looking like a mutineering cook in a Pirate ship or a great gladiator,  walks out, putting on a belt with scissors and blades that do nothing to make him look less threatening. He walks up to me through the parted crowd.

"I need a haircut," I try to say, but the words get all caught up in the parched bits of my throat.

Let us just say that the consequences of that mistake, probably well-deserved, may require an eletric clipper.

Outside the Jomtien Hostel

We were sitting around the table, on the quasi-Apocalyptic alley of Soi Saritas, the Gay and Catholic ghetto of dirty, lusty Jomtien. The road was a long, thin cracked cement carpet. The tall, four-storied buildings on both sides, with their monumental arcades for fronts, were impossibly long and continued for a good 800 metres down to the absolute darkness of the sea. Zebra stripes of damp and dirt streaked these once-white walls. Creeping plants crawled up the pillars, while others drooped from balconies or, sprouting from the ground, had claimed and consumed the last vestige of a sidewalk.

It was seven or eight, but the night had settled already. The place was lit by huge floodlights, like a prison yard, throwing fantastical shadows all about this scene. The atmosphere was still and sultry: a storm had been announced and it was not far off.

Up the road, and half sunk in shadows, a dog was tearing at a carcass. Yellow skin flapped from the arced bones of a large rib-cage.

In our group, around the bottle of Thai whiskey, there was the little, drunken, heavily tatooed Cambodjan; an old, skinny man, completely naked but for his tight yellow briefs and pink rubber shoes; the fat little baby and his orcish keeper; the ladyboy, her face as flat as a frying pan, her fake hair hanging dead and long almost down to her feet; and the hostel's receptionist, Joe, with a thin scar running from his eye to his lips and his hair ends dyed yellow. He is our most reliable source of alcohol, followed closely by the flirtatious sexagenarian down the road.

In the baby's large black eyes, there was as much intelligence as you may hope to find in a shell-shocked sheep. The ladyboy hangs around my hostel when I'm in and won't leave until I do, and she follows at my heels, catcalling in her ugly, husky voice: "I like you, Spaaaain. I miss you, Spaaaain." She has done this since my very first visit into town and whenever I come back, she knows exactly where I was and how long I was there for.

A lady walks by and picks up the plump baby. He stares at his mother with as much recognition as a goldfish would look up at its feeder. She sizes me up in an obvious once-over and asks Joe something. He waves her away with distaste, sees my questioning glance and explains:

"She is a bitch!" He flourishes his long hand as he speaks, twirling and flapping it around. "Her husband is working far away in Saudi Arabia, for long long time and he send money every month. But now she has this baby - after he left, and she not tell him." As he gets excited, his voice started rising to a high, thin pitch. "Husband been away very very long time. So what you think? Husband can send sperm by SMS or what?" His laughter here went so high it scraped his throat and turned, mid-act, into a gasp for air. "So what she do? She come to this town of course, because in this town everybody's looking for a Farang. She cannot stay in village. They know what she did. But she needs to find new man, quickly, before other one finds out."

You wouldn't believe me, but I've heard this story a number of times before, give or take a detail or two. It seems to be the story of every single girl in town - and even of most girls who aren't particularly single anymore. 

Zero is a local bamboo tattoo artist. He has a dog, a hammock, a chopper and a cowboy hat. His shop is across the street from where I live. We took our seats at his bar. A few days back he'd explained to me the reason he'd opened the bar in his shop. 

"My friends come to island, to my shop, and say, Zero, come for beer. And then I'd have to close for the day. Bad for business. So I open bar. My friends come to island, to the shop, I sell them beer, I drink with them, and I can always keep on working while I'm drinking and after I'm drunk."

He poured me my drink as I sketched out a design to him.

"So like a ship's eye in the middle, see, circled by two Naga snakes - like this, their tails cross at the top, their bodies cross at the bottom, their heads hold up the eye's corners. See? What do you think?" He looked at it and squinted, and looked at me - he tried to understand whether I was tasteless, stupid or drunk. Finally, he shook his head vigorously and said:

"Mai dee. No good. This is not good tattoo. Do not do this. Please!" 

I should probably have bought him a couple of beers first - but then, the trail's always easy to see when you're looking back.

I was given a short tour of the bar.
"That's the fridge, these are the glasses. This is the paper and that is the pen."
"And that?" I pointed under the bar - it was a barrel, but not the kind you'd keep your drinks in. The mouth faced me, in that freezing black.
"Just in case," Mr. Lee said.
It had written on its side

DESERT EAGLE

ISRAELI MILITARY INDUSTRIES (LTD)

I'd never worked a bar with its own gun before.
When Mr. Lee left me alone, I checked to see if nobody was looking and pushed the barrel to the side.
Just in case.

--//--

Later, one of the Germans called me. With an oxidised moustache and a long, greasy pony tail he looked like the construction worker in a cheap movie (let's keep it PG, guys).
"Can I have a Cuba Libre?"  He asked. "But a little more Cuba, and a little less Libre."
Is it too hard to imagine a Cuba less Libre? Still, it's a beautiful country.

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

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.

"You no have girlfriend?" The fifty year old, self-concious Mary Magdalen said. She had all the appeal (and more than half the size) of a Sumo wrestler and above her shoulders orbited a full moon face - dark crater's shadows marring the bloated disc. She was a lovely girl and popular among the Scandinavian expats who found themselves short on cash. The last week of every month she doesn't have a moment to herself.

"No."

"Not in Thailand?"

"No."

"Not in Portuget?"

"No."

She didn't believe me and demanded to see my hands. It would have been great if she was a palm-reader to boot, but she was looking for a wedding ring. She seemed puzzled that I didn't have one and thought about it for a second.

"Maybe you are buttefly," she said at last, and I thought she meant something else. "You know butterfly? Fly from plant to plant, and kiss every flower."

I have you guys as my witness that I am no such thing - but isn't it a delightful description?

 "The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave. (...) This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise. And these were the men."

Joseph Conrad in Youth

I went to  Bangkok's LIDO theatre, a 1960s relic I believe, to watch On The Road. It's a Franco-Brazilian production, strangely enough, which meant it was mostly naked people, great music, and some more or less awkward dialog in between.

This isn't a film review, though, it's contextualization.

It brought back to mind something I hadn't thought about in half a decade, that had really flaked to the dusty bottom of the mind. I think it was New York Maria who told me this story, and though it might have been in a letter, I can hear her soft voice perfectly, shaping the words.

A Professor in a writing class was criticizing (probably oblivious to the irony) this new generation of "classroom" or "textbook" writers compared to the older Authors saying something like:

"I mean, think about it. All these writers, they really lived, they did things, they had seen a part of the world most other people hadn't and wanted to share it." I assume Kerouac was the example with which she was illustrating this, but Conrad sailed the Congo river and Melville actually whaled; Theroux took up a cabin by the lake and Dostoyevski was exiled in Siberia; Shelley and Byron waved their little flags ever so romantically. "But people nowadays sit at home on their computers and think they will write a masterpiece." 

Whaling's a little out of fashion nowadays, and most people think hitch-hiking across the States will end up with you dead or worst, but there you have it: an incentive to do something a little crazy this weekend. If not for the novel you're not going to write, do it for your biographer.

Bukowski, by R. Crumb

I was accosted on the streets just now by a man. He was slender, tall, young enough, but there were white stubs to his day-old beard. Green eyes, Indian, very well dressed: no brands but a far shout away from what  passes as smart around here.

"Do you know," he said, "you have a very lucky face?" Now I haven't slept in three nights, haven't had a breath without a sneeze in two days, am too sick to eat anything since last night and woke up today with a killer pain that shoots from my right ear all the way past my shoulder and doesn't let me turn. I was walking stiffly down the street and I wasn't feeling particularly lucky - nor could I imagine how he could have seen anything remotely lucky in my scowl, and this sparked off a little curiosity. "Have you ever been said this before?"

"No, can't say I have."

"You have a very lucky face. I look in your face you know, and I see good things coming. A big change, and three definite things will get a lot better."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. See, I see that you have two bad problems in your life. Did you know? And that's why you've never been successful in your life, because it's true, isn't it? You've never been successful in you life."

"That's a little harsh."

"It's truth. I'll tell you what they are, why because of this you are always only twenty or thirty percent, never a hundred. One, you think too much, friend. You always worry about little things, it gets in the way. Two, you don't know how to separate the good people from the bad people in your life. Sometimes you'll sit at night and tell all your secrets to somebody you think is a friend and then they are not. Do you know this feeling?"

I said that I didn't.

"Well, you have. I can help you friend. I can make life better for you. Do you want to know more? I can give you proof, friend."

"That's more truth than I can handle in one go, friend, but thank you very much."

"I can give you proof," he said, but I thanked him and turned to go. He waved at me courteously and as I walked away I wondered whether I had proved him wrong or right about knowing who to trust.

"It's been a very bad year," the old man told me, in a conversation that was mostly mimed. He pointed to the pair of Havaianas some other farang gave him which were now tied by a string. He pointed to his old, worn shirt and then to his trousers. "Look, look at the state of my clothes. They are not good like yours. Your shoes, your shirt-" then he pointed at my trousers and stopped there, scratching his head.

He was a little bit more impressed when I snatched a cricket out of the air for him.

"When I was a young man, they used to call me a gentleman traveller. That's what you are now. A gentleman traveller."

And suddenly I feel like I should have a moustache to twirl, or at least a hat to tip.

(- Kurt, the Delicatessen man)