Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  The "church" was actually a seafood market whose entrance was lit up by a twenty-foot model of a crayfish. Inside lay a dining room with a hundred tables. The dome itself was decorated with pink neon piping, like an inverted cake, and painted with a fishbowl scene of a coral reef, through which a sand shark nosed with an inquisitive expression. A place to eat fish? We sat at the outdoor tables and marveled at tanks of lobsters which pranced about in slow motion, exploring with their feelers the hopeless possibility of escape. Farther inside the cul-de-sac stood temples and waterfalls, a whole miniature landscape of Thai spires, model swans, palanquins, glass cockerels, and carefully cut trees. This was sanuk instead of architecture, or sanuk as architecture, and it was like being inside a department store where all the departments have been thrown together. "I call it life-giving tack," McGinnis said. "Soul candy."

  With its Kloster signs and gimcrack awnings, the market was a working-class place, big tables of bawling eaters hot with endless plates of hor mor and tom yum, each table accompanied by a metal tray with an ice bucket. The waitresses wore black ties and short skirts. At the end of the strip stood a replica of a temple with a line of stone elephants. The lamps were held up by gold garudas, their sex appeal heightened by a few sacrilegious curves, and among them sparkled the glass cockerels, gratuitous things that caused the groups of ice-cream-eating adolescents in white socks to pause. I thought, "Middle-aged men also love this sort of tack," and before I knew it I was happy again, with the happiness of belonging to a crowd of families, with their small children racing about and the air filled with balloons. This outdoor terrace was framed by corroded eaves and trellises of leaves, and next to it boomed a nightclub with the usual toga-wearing hostesses. But there was no separation between this adult sphere and the family one. The two belonged to each other, paid no attention to each other, and merged with mutual confidence.

  When I thought about the men I knew here, I considered their world to be one-dimensional because women were not a part of it, not on the deepest level. It was a world of men alone. And if the claim that a man unmarried is only half a man is true (Dr. Johnson), then they were half-men, semi-men without fullness in their emotional life. Rag dolls on the loose.

  But at the same time, I didn't factor in this side of their experience, this other happiness which came only in passing moments. It arose as the result of a free coming and going, a sweet immersion in the life of a large city. They moved around as they liked, and in that respect they were surprisingly lordly. They didn't obey the laws of economic gravity.

  McGinnis talked about his wife, but after a while I began to feel that he didn't really have one, that it was just another invention and that the next time I saw him she would have disappeared. I looked down at his peeling sandals and the frayed hems, and it could have been that he was not really working either, that he was moonlighting and part-timing, and that he was writing (as he often claimed) in his spare time. He had brought me to the White House, he said, because he was going dancing with some friends of his at a club nearby called Pump Up.

  "I know what you're thinking," he said slyly. "No, it's not a gay club."

  I said I didn't care if it was a gay club. I rather liked gay clubs.

  "I have been thinking," he said, "how odd it is to see you here again. You seem to be going back and forth. You're in the back-and-forth phase. I went back and forth for years before I settled down here. By the time I settled down, I had been back and forth so much that the place seemed completely familiar to me. It was like losing one skin and acquiring another, or crossing from one side of a river to the other. You go back and forth between East and West and pretty soon you have no idea who the fuck you are anymore. You could say that it's a problem typical of the contemporary condition, and it's all because of airplanes. Without airplanes we wouldn't be in this predicament. The age of spending all one's life in one shitty country or one shitty city is over."

  "But what about your wife?"

  "Have you ever observed how a married man, when he lives in a large city with plenty of social opportunities, almost never spends his nights at home? He wanders about, he's even more nomadic that the single guy. He's even more single than the single guy. All it takes is fifteen years of conjugal bliss. Life is the hearth, and life is movement. The two can't be reconciled."

  "But look around you. Families everywhere having a good time."

  "No, you look around you. What's that you see across the street there? Oh, a five-storey massage parlor! That's what Asian family life is predicated on. No divorce, and massage parlors everywhere."

  It was an easy walk to Pump Up. It stood at the edge of an open space which must have been cleared by bulldozers, for the tenements all around pressed in. At the entrance to the complex stood a multistorey spirit house painted dark red, inside which sat a model couple primly listening to the hip-hop pounding from the Hip Zone Happiness Club. We walked across the parking lot shadowed by cranes and went first into the Super Performance Club.

  We sat near a window under buildings draped with green netting. "Isn't this great?" McGinnis kept saying, but I wasn't sure that either of us thought it was great. I wasn't sure either of us wouldn't have been happier at that moment sitting under an oak tree in Tuscany with a glass of chianti. But we weren't in Tuscany and never would be because we were broke bastards, and broke bastards don't get a look-in when it comes to the hills of Siena.

  "We are rather lucky in a way," he said with curious feeling, and half getting up, so that he looked like a tall, near-extinct bird about to launch into flight. His arms even opened out like two atrophied wings and made their first flap. "And you are a fool to be leaving. Waiter, two Cambodian brandies!"

  The waiters explained that Cambodian brandy didn't exist, at least not in Bangkok discos, and his reply to them was, "But I had it last time!" So they brought us schnapps on a tray instead, and McGinnis was happy to turn them into a toast, and then another. They were playing Tommy James and the Shondells—a nostalgia night—and was it "Crimson and Clover"? Before long a Thai aquaintance of McGinnis came up, a beautiful boy with the famed family name of Bunnag, and we took some coke lined on the back of a lacquer box. I hadn't done coke in years, and its effect was enhanced by this long period of estrangement. I went to dance with the boy and his girlfriends, and before I had realized it McGinnis had slipped away: I wouldn't see him again for two years, and I understood that this was his way of operating, that he came and went according to moods of sadness, embarrassment, and regret. He was a strange man, and a fugitive one, like one of those lost uncles which every family has, a man who shows up for three days at Christmas to pull crackers and play the piano and never at any other time, whose life no one knows anything about and whose activities are always suspect and distant, unconnected to family values. But on the spur of the moment it was easy to forget how appalling this was. One of the girls was called On, and she took me for a ride along Rama IV on her motorbike, high on her expensive coke, and I was sure that at one point we were alone in a small park of wet trees and I could hear barges tooting down the river and we were dancing barefoot to music that didn't exist—or was it a room with orange curtains, and was the dance another numberless act of love?

  THE SUPRAGLOTTAL STRUCTURES

  Two years went by. And then one night, as if those years had suddenly flattened into a few minutes, I arrived back in Bangkok as if I had never left. I took a car from the airport to Sukhumvit Soi 51 near Thong Lor, where I had rented a small cottage for the year, and I realized that yet again it was Christmas, and I always seemed to be here at Christmas. The house lay within a larger property owned by a member of the Thai aristocracy connected to the royal family, and by the metal gates a groundsman stood with a flashlight, waiting for me, in the light-cappuccino uniform of a South American traffic cop. The staff came out to see me, maids, gardeners, children. He opened the door for me, and at once a dozen dogs behind the gates began barking. Kitty, the mistress of the house, he explained in a hushed v
oice, collected them off the streets as a charitable hobby.

  We stepped into a garden with jungle trees, and up to a wire fence where the diseased hounds came limping and snarling. We went past them down a lawn from which tiny frogs burst out around our feet like heated popcorn. The cottage at the garden's end was made almost entirely of glass, its main room sitting like a three-sided showroom among the trees. The family estate contained old warehouses which screened the cottage's back garden, where an imposing mango tree grew. Even at night, one of the gardeners was pruning it. He came over with a machete, doffing his straw hat, and helped with the bags.

  "Is Miss Kitty still up?"

  "Yes, sir. She is making drinks."

  The main windows of the house were lit, and through them appeared rooms of antique furniture, ceramic lamps, and beveled mirrors. At the other end of the garden, a spirit house came to life, the candles lit by the staff. The rain stopped.

  I noticed now that the entire household staff were standing around the pool, their hands crossed before them. Priscilla, the head maid, turned on the toadstool lamps behind the ponds and an Angkorian statue emerged out of the dark. The house had sweeping traditional eaves, bringers of shade by day and shadow by night. Candles were lit along the paths, and the gardener said to me, "Sawasdee krap," taking off his hat again. Cicadas rasped in the mango trees, competing with the Phyloglossus frogs, and frangipani petals rained down onto the pool.

  Soon I saw Kitty dancing with a man in the main windows. To my surprise, she was young and chic and her laughter carried through plate glass. But as I slept that night, something happened to shatter the comfortable mood that had immediately taken hold of me. I was woken by a sore throat, and soon there was a fever, the throat gradually worsening and saliva pouring out of my mouth. Lying on my side, I watched the stars above the walls and found myself counting for no reason, like a child who counts to a hundred to see if his toothache will end. But within an hour my windpipe began to close and I could no longer breathe. I ran down Soi 51 to the main road in shorts, unable to breathe, flagging down a cab with a terrible finger. The last word I spoke for a week was roong-pa-yaa-baan—hospital.

  •

  Most foreigners go to Bumrungrad, the largest private hospital in Asia, on Sukhumvit Soi 1. Half resort, half luxury hospital, Bumrungrad has earned fame in a number of medical areas, notably plastic surgery and heart operations. It is the largest sex-change facility in the world. Westerners flock there, not only to change their sex but also to have babies, to undergo dermal procedures and hair transplants. Soon they'll be going there to die as well, because it's far cheaper.

  It was a Saturday morning and the emergency rooms were empty. I was taken to Ear, Nose, and Throat, where a young Thai doctor took my blood pressure and examined the inflamed throat. Looking at the thermometer, his brow contracted with that expression of controlled consternation of which doctors are the masters.

  "It's not a sore throat," he said gently. "It's worse. It may have something to do with the supraglottal structures."

  It was an infection possibly carried by particles of dust, Dr. Somnath theorized, particles coated with pathogens to which my immune system had no resistance. To get a clear picture, a fiber-optic camera would have to be passed via the nose and into the throat itself. The nurse prepared a gurney. As this was done, a calmant was administered to me, and, feeling happier than I usually do, I recalled the words that Krishna addresses to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kuru in the Bhaghavad Gita (I keep it always by my side, though not during this particular ordeal): Pleasure and pain, he says, are transient. They come and go. "A particle of dust inhaled on the street," the doctor went on, "something eaten at a market, a gulp of swimming pool water, a mango even—all these are possible culprits in the inflaming of the epiglottis.

  "I am afraid that you will not be able to leave the hospital for at least ten days. We will have to get you on to an antihistamine drip within an hour: if the inflammation doesn't subside, we shall have to puncture your throat to get the air in and out, and perhaps even your lungs. Did you know that the father of your nation, George Washington, died of it?"

  •

  Old age and death are constantly on our minds. What will they be like? Will Arjuna's advice be of any use? There is nothing about drooling in the Bhavagad Gita. I arrived at the Reservations Desk, which was like that of a hotel, and was given a menu of rooms. The medical consumer is presented with a menu of room options in a bound folder, with the prices and amenities laid out with the utmost simplicity. The De Luxe Suites seemed the best option for 4,000 baht a night, since one gets a desk, a private lounge area, sofas, and entertainment options, along with sunnier views from high up in the "residential" tower. Unfortunately, they were all booked. Next down the ladder, however, were the smaller two-room De Luxe Suites. At 3,000 baht there were also the Luxury Single Rooms. And then there were the Double Units, shared with another patient, with a shared bathroom.

  We moved through corridors filled with invalids, many Arabs in keffiyeh, Iranian women with canes, Chinese millionaires with families in tow, all of them with the look of people who are simultaneously stricken and pampered. An international city of the wounded. Strapped to the gurney, there were only moments to count before I was on the seventh floor, being undressed by the nurses. The seventh floor was populated by Thais and by the occasional wealthy farang, expats who obviously came here on a regular basis. The hospital as cheap diversion, a vacation within a vacation. There was a large lounge area with children's toys, international business magazines, and televisions. Potted plants made it look more like an upscale clinic.

  After I had been dressed in minuscule pajamas with an elephant motif, three intravenous drips were connected to my wrist, the little plastic gauges and taps tightened, the drips adjusted. The nurses washed my hands, and they are nurses unlike any others: slender and in stiff bonnets decorated with a single navy line. They alone are able to puncture a vein flirtatiously; and they do so flawlessly, drawing off a little blood in the buffer and then adjusting the three separate tubes inside an adhesive bandage.

  Through the window on the far side of the curtain came a truncated snapshot of a neighborhood such as one could see anywhere in this metropolis: wilted palms pecked by birds, roof gardens laid out at surprising angles, AC units stacked along back walls, a maid arranging a room of French furniture. A city like many others near the equator, neither more nor less peeling or blistered or shamed.

  FRITZY

  Sometime in the depth of that night the light of the corridor fell into the room and a girl in stiletto heels and a black cocktail dress slipped into the room with a careful stealth, making herself as quiet as possible, and with a bouquet of white roses and a boxed cake of some kind she darted into the far side of the partition with rustles and scent and threw herself into the other man's arms, tussling, unwrapping, encouraging. I heard the distinct pop of buttons being undone in practiced haste. A tryst, an encounter—which was surely illegal according to hospital rules?

  I was going to press the emergency bell, but I was then stirred by a calm curiosity, because the patient was sighing, "Mimi, Mimi," with a pitiful intensity and I decided to listen and say nothing. An ancient sound, you could say. They laughed and rolled around. The flowers fell on the floor, and under the curtain appeared a single dyed-blue rose in aluminum wrapping, which lay there all night. So I began to construct a mental picture of this improvident satyr. They whispered through a thunderstorm, and as I lay wide awake, alert to the smallest sexual sound, I looked over and noticed the impressively serious books on his night table. A volume of Heine; Bizot's classic account of Cambodia under Pol Pot, The Gate; and some contemporary German novels whose authors I had never heard of. Confined with a stranger in a hospital ward and afflicted by an illness I had never heard of, I rushed to hate this man, whose name was Fritzy. His girl murmured it over and over. Looking behind the curtain, I saw her placing slices of banana between his lips. It was at this moment that
the nurses came in to take our blood pressure, and now, surely, I'd have my revenge. But not at all. They merely apologized to the happy couple for interrupting their pleasures. With me they were more severe, and they assumed I could not understand Thai.

  "He looks half dead."

  "Does he have any relatives in Bangkok?"

  "I think he's a tourist. They always die alone."

  I was able to pull the curtain aside and see Fritzy's identification label dangling from his drip tree, which read Herr Friedrich Furnau, Blood Type A. Mimi left at first light, without a sound, and I came out of a nightmare to glimpse Fritzy making his way to the bathroom.

  •

  Without turning on a light, he shuffled in his regulation slippers to the bathroom, where for a moment he shot me a look, and then a wink. I remembered an entry that Samuel Pepys made in his diary in which he describes being caught by his wife in the act of "touzing" her companion Deb Willet, about which he remarks, "I was certainly deep in her cunny and at a wondrous loss for words to explain it." So, Fritzy, I thought as if speaking to him directly, are you at a wondrous loss for words to explain it?

  He came out of the bathroom and I saw now that there was something Neanderthal about him, with his extended arms, his hairy back, and his squat face, which all contributed to a look of prehistory, of virile primitivity which was quite startling. His swollen blue eyes sought me out and there was a distant, sad look in them that was arresting in its way. Mimi and Fritzy. What kind of life was it?

  •

  "I should tell you something about epiglottitis," Somnath said later as he sat by my bed, with that conciliatory spirit that Thai doctors so often manage to project in the midst of life's horrors, acting as if horrors themselves were necessary entertainments which could be enjoyed at a distance. He showed me a colored illustration of the human throat in which the leaf-shaped epiglottis coated with mucous membrane was clearly marked. The nasopharyngoscopy they had done had also yielded some alarming images. The risk of death was high, Somnath went on, because of the difficulty in intubating patients with extensive swelling of the supraglottal structures. The airways become obstructed quickly, and basically—well, he smiled, you strangle to death in about an hour. In extremis, they could puncture the trachea, but it didn't always work. One more day alone in my house, he said, and I would have been dead. Onset and progression of symptoms were remarkably rapid, and to make things absolutely clear, he then went through those symptoms one by one, as if I needed to understand them properly. Sore throat, odynophagia or dysphagia (muffled voice), drooling (inability to handle secretions), cervical adenopathy, tripod position (sitting up on the hands, with the tongue out and head forward), hypoxia, fever, stridor (advanced airway obstruction), respiratory distress, tachycardia, irritability, and, best of all, "toxic appearance of patient."