Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  As we sat at Balls, McGinnis appeared through the density of the crowd, drenched with wet flour and holding a wet cigarette that was still lit in one hand. He was dressed in a linen outfit that now clung to his body like cellophane, and the hairs of his chest showed through a soaked blue shirt.

  "Did you know," I said to Farlo quickly, "that he got fired?"

  "I didn't know he was employed."

  "Cyclex Refrigeration Systems?"

  "I looked them up, lad. They don't exist. He has a small stipend from his family, I think. He also sells birds."

  "Sells birds?"

  "Ay. Import-export to China."

  "There can't be any money in selling birds."

  "Why don't you ask him?"

  McGinnis came up puffing, his hair dripping with flour. Along Suriwong large farangs, probably British or Dutch, swaggered with plastic water cannons. They could shoot pedestrians on the far side of the boulevard with ease, and they had got McGinnis with ease.

  "There must be a case," he drawled, "for the withdrawal of passports."

  The cigarette glowed in his drenched hand.

  "Hello, boys," he said loudly, casting an eye at the sign. "So it's cocktails at Balls, eh?"

  "We thought it looked a nice place," Farlo said.

  "Look at my wet suit. I got this made for me at an Indian tailor called Beethoven. So it's a Beethoven suit. I am at Balls in a Beethoven suit."

  In the taxi, he sat between us and said to the driver, "Roong muu, Klong Tuey," an address we had never heard of. Klong Tuey is the city's port, behind which lies a massive ghetto. We passed through the gray streets near Chong Nonsi, heading for Rama IV, and I was now getting used to the ragged avenues with their metal shutters, their hungry-looking mango trees, and their glints of fire. They made me think of New York fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, the Bowery in 1983, when I first walked down it high on psilocybin. McGinnis took out a flask from an inner pocket and uncorked it. I took a quick swig: it tasted like a medicinal syrup. We passed along the brightest part of Sukhumvit, and there are times when you remember that it's the longest street in the world, that it reaches all the way from downtown Bangkok to the Cambodian border.

  There were new gyms there that were just opening, L.A.-style fitness palaces with techno music projected onto the street. Through high windows, the joggers, the ponytails bobbing on treadmills. The statues of gods and goddesses stood lit up with a creamy kitschiness, piled high with marigolds, while cranes and scaffolding soared up on either side. A long street bordered by a canal led down to Rama IV and into the area around Bangkok University.

  •

  Along one side of the Bangkok University campus lies a waterway known locally as Guai nam thai, after the Thai word for banana, guai. No one seems sure of the exact translation. "Banana forest"? Perhaps once upon a time banana boats unloaded their cargo there; or else it had once been a banana grove. On the other side there is a bridge not far from the campus gates, and beyond it lies the port and the walled slums. The railway for the container port runs along its perimeter wall, and the tracks themselves have with time turned into a ghetto, with shacks nailed together on either side.

  For months I had been only dimly aware of this sprawling zone, noting its presence in passing when I skimmed through crime stories in the Bangkok Post. There was nothing in it to see, no restaurants to slum in, no bars, no oddities to linger over. Late at night, I sometimes glimpsed it from a taxi as I shot along the expressway, and suddenly there was a twinkling of open fires down there, signs of life coming from a different city which was now half submerged by progress. Streets, markets, kitchens, none possessing a name I knew. So it appeared like a black hole, but in reality it was just the far side of the class divide. By the port, where the slums were separated from the city by a real wall, you could see that much of it was more or less jungle, with people living in shacks and tree houses, or sleeping in trees. It had been there for decades, neglected and feared, but over the shabby gates to this underworld there were sometimes signs in English which read "Welcome!" as if people here, too, had their internationalist pride to consider.

  These walled-off neighborhoods surrounded the container port which employed their inhabitants as day laborers. Some were warrens of streets with self-built houses, squatter camps where the slaughterhouse workers lived, or crazy piles made of random materials where dozens of families endured—the men living off homemade yaa baa, which they sold in the city.

  •

  Roong muu is the city slaughterhouse, buried inside a mixed Thai-Viet slum: only these impoverished Catholics could kill animals, an act forbidden to the Buddhists who happily ate their flesh. It lay next to the roong gung, the place where they slaughter millions of shrimp all night long.

  The killing of animals is secretive in Bangkok, and I wondered how McGinnis had found this place, which most Bangkokians had never visited. I noticed now the slaughterhouse workers idled around the low, metal-roofed buildings with the look of men who are stoned and who will be killing pigs with hammers all night long. To get them through it they are said to take drugs which are made inside the slum itself. Mostly, you will hear, it is yaa baa, a methamphetamine mixed with caffeine, but sometimes also the underground drug 505. The most terrifying of these is a substance called sii qun roi, which in Thai means "four by one hundred."

  Pig blood running through the gutters appears a dark blue, like the tattoos that cover the skins of the killers themselves: Five Buddhas, spirit tigers, and blue yantas. Such tattoos are called roi sak, and protect the wearers. Sometimes they form the letters of vedic spells written in the ancient Khmer script called khom, using an ink made from lampblack and Indian sepia mixed with sap and lizard skin. Some tattooists even add the chin fat of human corpses, of people who have died violent deaths.

  Pigs are highly intelligent, and they know what's in store for them, but nevertheless they are fatalistic. What good would a breakout do? And then Farlo got up and started dancing, turning slowly on his heels, his arms akimbo. The killers found it hilarious. But what was going on inside that haunted head? Like me, had he started to remember the killing in other places, other times, the pleasure of it so deftly hidden afterward by excuses? What about the spirit of the gecko?

  Afterward, we went for a walk around the giant shrimp warehouses, where McGinnis put a hand to his ear and said, "Can you hear them? The shrimp are screaming. Boiled alive, and no one cares. So much for Buddhism!"

  •

  Sii qun roi is made from the active ingredient in mosquito coils, an insecticide called parathin which is manufactured by the Heibei Long Age Pesticide Company in Hengshui City, China. According to the company, parathin efficiently kills all kinds of plant parasites on rice, cotton, and corn, including cotton aphids, fruit moths, and mites. It is phytotoxic on melons, however, and is forbidden for use on tea trees.

  Parathin is mixed with a marijuana-like smokeable leaf indigenous to Thailand called bai krathom, which is then added to soda, the muscle relaxant alprazolam (Xanax), and cough syrup. The result is a drug which is now classified by the Thai military as a "mind control substance." It is used by Muslim guerrillas in the south to brainwash potential suicide bombers.

  I later found out that McGinnis got his yaa baa from Klong Tuey as well. He would serve them up at teatime, reddish-orange, green, or purple tablets flavored with grape, orange, and vanilla, like children's sweets and marked with either the letters R or WY. He would say, "I call it my Fliegeschokolade." "Flying chocolate" was the term Luftwaffe pilots gave to the methamphetamine-spiked chocolate they sucked down during long bombing missions.

  •

  There are color-coded maps created by the UN that show which drugs are most popular in the world's nations. In Asia, cannabis dominates both Australia and Indonesia. Heroin is the drug of choice in China and Vietnam, while ATs (amphetamines) prevail in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Japan. In Thailand, ATs are the drug of the young, marketed as candy-like tablets, but also smok
ed by heating the tablet on a square of foil in a rite known as "chasing the dragon."

  The whole country is awash with it. People eat it in the clubs, in the massage parlors, on the street, in university libraries, in exam halls. It was banned in Thailand in 1970, but there is a curious story behind its name. It used to be called yaa maa, or "horse medicine," because that was the name of the company which manufactured it. In 1996, the then–minister of health, Sanoh Thienthong, renamed it yaa baa, or "madness drug," to scare off young users. He couldn't have made a more naïve blunder. As soon as it was dubbed "madness drug," demand exploded. In deference to its distant origin, it was also called "Nazi speed."

  I stopped sleeping when taking yaa baa, and went down to the pier, unable to close my eyes. In the rainy season it is often ninety at midnight, but the rain is soothing. Through the windows of the Spaniard's ground-floor apartment, meanwhile, I noticed large canvases propped against a wall, a few candles burning with a bohemian aspiration, and from time to time a naked form pacing back and forth holding a book, reading upright and rocking himself like a Torah scholar. He seemed as jittery as I did, another European naked in the heat. But the privacy of strangers was the premise of being farang in Bangkok, the guarantee of being left alone.

  •

  There was something fantastical in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood: people sleeping like lemurs in trees, paths cutting through a forest made of compacted trash. McGinnis knew them all. He took me down some that passed through deeper jungle, with spirit houses built by the addicts in honor of their own demons. Some of these shrines had plastic dolls inside them, toy cars, syringes, or photographs from magazines. We passed shacks where old couples lay together smoking, their hands raised in greeting. And it began to dawn on me that I could possibly live here at some point in the future, because I could always live in any city that has a neighborhood like the Slaughterhouse.

  On my last night, however, I went with McGinnis to somewhere very different—the Trimurthi shrine near Central World Plaza, to see the crowds looking for luck in love. The shrine is devoted to the color red, as if red were the color of love, and its godhead is the Hindu trimurthi triad of Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva. With its lush red decorations, the shrine itself has a Valentine's aura, and the crowd bristling with red roses seems to believe in the karma of love with an intensity and naïveté which can take you by surprise in a city which is so casual about the body. Women plead to the trinity to increase their libido and fertility; couples wanting babies gather round to make their votive offerings.

  I was struck by the face of Brahma, because it's a face you rarely see. In India there are only three temples to Brahma, and he is the least visibly worshiped of all Hindu gods. Bangkok, however, seems to receive him and relish him. We walked down to the more famous Erawan shrine, and there it is Brahma alone who commands the neighborhood. With his four faces, he gazes out at the new century embodied in shopping malls with an elegant indifference. None of Brahma's four arms ever carries a weapon, an unusual thing for an Indian god. Instead, he carries scepters and spoons brimming with holy ghee and coconuts filled with holy water. But Brahma is a god cursed by love—it was desire, the pursuit of a woman, that undid him and which explains why he is so unpopular in India. At least I heard this from McGinnis, who added: "It's the same reason he is so popular with Thais."

  Brahma is the creator of the universe. While engaged in this monumental task, he also created a female god called Shatarupa, "one with a hundred beautiful forms." He immediately became infatuated with her, and, alarmed by his attentions, she moved about restlessly, to avoid his gaze. To keep this alluring goddess within his sight, however, Brahma developed five heads, four on the sides and one on top, so that he became a divine periscope of lust, an all-seeing cosmic voyeur.

  Shiva cut off Brahma's top head to control him. He felt that Brahma's infatuation was distinctly incestuous, that Shatarupa was, in a manner of speaking, Brahma's daughter. Shiva restricted the worship of Brahma as a sign of his disgrace, and ever since, the repentant god has been reciting the four Vedas.

  Brahma's own life cycle defines the life and death of whole universes. A single day or night of Brahma's life lasts 4,320,000,000 years, and a whole twenty-four hours for this amazing, baffling god is the same as 8,640,000,000 years for us, which begs the question: How many days, how many billions of years, did his love for Shatarupa last? Could one more day of love be equivalent to so many countless centuries?

  LADIES OF KUCHING

  I traveled to Asia for work, covering psychiatry and science for American magazines, and I passed through Bangkok sporadically, in pursuit of research for medical articles which I could write in hotel rooms. Each time I went, the city had changed. I took in the opening of the Skytrain or the rising height of the billboards upon which iPods and sneaker brands and Italian swimwear appeared like fresh fruit, proving the city's desperate desire to be more contemporary than anywhere.

  Here capitalism had been imposed upon new ground and was itself novel. A capitalism that was not merely "Asian" but Indochinese, Hindu-Buddhist, Sino-Malay. All along Sukhumvit Road the Skytrain stations had appeared, lifted above the street on cement columns, their arcades bright with organic fruit juice vendors, opticians, and travel agents. They were new urban spaces, cleaner and wider than those of the city below them. It was as if after centuries of chaos the city was yearning for geometry and order, and she was getting her wish.

  There were times when I took a room for a week at one of the cheaper places on Soi 4 and tried to trace the men who had all left the Primrose and settled elsewhere. I rarely found them. I went to the dental clinic on Soi 49, had my crowns and fillings done, and then spent evenings alone playing pool with Arab punters at the Grace Hotel, a place that satisfies their every need.

  I spent many nights wandering around Little Arabia on Soi 3/1, going to Al Ferdoss in the Schiller Inn to smoke a water pipe and watch the men in lamb's wool hats and djellabas filing with tarts through the lobby next to the dining room. Eating a fatoosh salad with an orange shish and watching such maneuvers, or simply taking in the restaurants with displays of plastic veal chops where men in tattersail jackets cry "Lam', Lam' " all night long.

  The small elephants of Southeast Asia plod by with boys seated on their heads, ice picks dug into the animals' ears, because it is the elephants who do the begging and charming here. And I daresay one can be happy watching a Russian pilot stuffing his face with slices of watermelon, or scanning the crinkled posters of Crusader castles in Lebanon or the Thai ketchup bottles and plastic orchids that rise from the tables.

  At four in the morning in the midst of Little Arabia, in all its steam and filth, the face of a painted kathoey, a transgender boy-girl thick with rosebud paint, appears through the neons with a scornful little smile. It is the Thai cult of beauty, mannered, like the art of puppetry.

  A photographer based in Bangkok once said to me, "It is difficult here because of their obsession with beauty. They are the most beauty-obsessed people on earth. But it can't be photographed."

  I began to change rooms from night to night, just to spread myself as widely as possible over the city. I remember rooms on Petchaburi Road, in hotels like the Livingstone and the Amari Watergate; hovels near Silom sprayed every night with insecticide. For a while I favored the Livingstone, on a small street off Sukhumvit 33. Its entrance was flanked by two enormous elephant tusks, and inside the decor was African Thatch. There was a sinister pool and a bar staffed with nymphs.

  •

  There were times, too, when my medical trips to and from Bangkok threw that city into a strange relief. One of these was an expedition to Borneo to investigate an obscure mental illness known in Malay as latah. Latah is a "culturebound syndrome," a mental illness which is specific to a single culture. In the American Diagnostic Manual it is listed as a "hyper-startle syndrome": when a human being is surprised by a loud noise, he or she will go into a momentary trance. Typically they will flap their arms in a cha
racteristic way, noticeable only in a slow-motion film, and utter a sexual obscenity of some kind. Technically, they go into a split- second state of hypnosis.

  In Malaysia this momentary trance is experienced differently by old women, and by old women alone. For them the experience extends to half an hour, an hour, and sometimes even longer. No one knows why.

  Kuching, in Sarawak, is even hotter than Bangkok—a sluggish town built around a dark green river. There's a strong Chinese presence in coastal Sarawak, but the Dayak presence is equally evident. The British were here, as evidenced by their squat cream arcades, but they didn't have the energy to build seriously. From there I drove to Lundu, on the border of Indonesia. It's even hotter than Kuching, a place of torpor and bewilderment dominated by Chinese merchants. I had spent some wonderful afternoons in Kuching with the anthropologist Peter Kedik as we met women in the suburbs who claimed they had been made latah by being poked too much. "Repressed sex," Kedik would say as we drank hot chocolate with them in their sitting rooms. We watched them jump up and down on one leg like pogo sticks, shocked into a latah fit by a simple clap of hands. I think both of us felt a surprising calm before this scene, but Kedik had studied it many times. "The old men, you see, have an outlet for their sexual drives. They can always go to some discreet brothel somewhere. But the women, after a certain age—"

  Outside Lundu, my Iban driver found us a place called Kampung Seberang, a small village straddling the road. He knew of a family named Suut whose grandmother was latah. When the woman's son brought in a black cat and slipped it behind her, she went into a seizure. Imitating the sumo on the screen, she put her own foot into a wrestling lock and rolled on the floor in a ball. I asked the driver what she was shouting and, mortified, he leaned down to my ear. "She is saying 'cock,' sir. 'Cock.' It is what she is saying. 'You fuck me big fat cock,' sir. I am sorry to say."