Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  Fritzy drank beer after beer and I tried to slow him down.

  "What I like," he said, "is the way these places make you feel like the planet is spinning round and round and nothing matters. It's all a sham and it will all disappear quickly, much quicker than we think. It's just a bit of amusement before we nod off forever. It's not a place for the young. And what do they know, anyway? It's a place for the dying. Only the dying—in flesh or in spirit—can grasp how pretty it really is. These places are all about death. It's like bodybuilding or health crazes, only it's more living. We come here, we get a hard-on, and we feel the dying speeding up. But it makes us smile at least. No? It makes us see around life's corners. So drink up, Miss Lalant, and death to all those who think they are superior to us!"

  In the large Erawan shrine on the hospital grounds, meanwhile, stood dozens of elephant statues, pachyderms which are thought to bring good luck to the sick. And in homage to this idea relatives of patients knelt in prayer before them, buried in a mushroom of incense smoke. The shrine seemed odd so close to the hospital, odd in its seriousness, but the onlooker is suddenly touched by that crowd of model elephants, some tiny, some quite large. Long ago, the intangible qualities of elephants had touched people and induced them to transfer to the elephants the idea of a god who could dispense compassion. It was a subtle observation about elephants, and it was an Asian feeling, but not ours, alas. Here, the streets teem with animals. Elephants wander down them, with rear-end lights attached to their tails; monkeys scatter through trees.

  •

  My last night at Bumrungrad was not the fête I had hoped for, since Fritzy had not reappeared. My tubes were disconnected and I read the horoscopes in a pile of women's magazines I had bought in the lobby. I noticed then that Fritzy had left his card for me on my night table. It bore the name of his hotel and car dealership in Pattaya, and he had scrawled on the back, "Visit me when you're well."

  I arrived downstairs the next day in my clothes, which had been freshly laundered and pressed: the recently released patient often appears as a prisoner collecting his valuables from a prison safe-box after a moderate incarceration. It was ninety-one in the shade, and the sunlight had an antiseptic, stinging edge. A smell of mint and cooking oil heated with chilies wafted down the street, rotting guava, the joys of the gutters which are always overflowing, and a whiff of camphor from a passing inmate. The hospital flags flew proudly above Bumrungrad's monumental gates. "International Man," they seemed to cry, "come here for your epiglottitis!"

  I stepped into the sun, basked for a moment by the elephant shrine, where I lit a joss stick for Fritzy, then one of the boys in white naval uniforms saluted and flagged me a cab. He asked me where I was going.

  "Sukhumvit Road," I said. "Soi 51."

  The boy leaned down to the window. Sukhumvit haa sip ek.

  After the words for throat, blood, pee, blood test, pineapple, and boredom, this was almost the first complete Thai phrase I ever repeated in my sleep. Even later, when I had forgotten why I came here at all and how I ever managed to leave, the words had a mystic comfort, the sonority of something like "home." Barely half an hour later I was at the corner of Soi 51, and, surprisingly, it looked unfamiliar, though I couldn't say why, and equally enigmatically I had the certain feeling that Fritzy was dead.

  THONG LOR

  After an illness the body takes its time. It is usually a period of great peace and clarity, sleep alternating with reading and swimming, the sun working its cure day by day. I spent Christmas alone, and then on Boxing Day went up to the house for one of Kitty's High Society parties, where I cut a thin and wasted figure among the tuxedos and tans. I was lost in every sense, but Kitty sought me out, and she surprised me with her plum British accent, fruit of a Somerset boarding school, and her free and easy attitude toward men. It is constantly remarked that the Thais are rather formal and proper in their day-to-day lives, a conservatism summed up in the phrase rab rioy. But it could be said that it is this very surface reticence which frees the deeper, more private self to be sexually anarchic. In this respect, one might venture to add, they are the inverse of Americans and Britishers, who are so often flaunting their supposed freedom in your face but who are invariably easy to offend. It is the tension between the calm, reticent surface and the adventurous core which arouses me more than the reverse.

  "Sick?" Kitty said at once. "The maid said you had cancer. Or you had found a girl. Every foreign man finds a girl in three seconds."

  I liked her more and more, though there was a bold, pushy side to her, and she didn't hesitate to be tactile. The Thai upper class are a strange world unto themselves, but they do not suffer from the nervous fragility of an elite living in a run-down country where revolution is a constant possibility. Quite the reverse. The elite here is Westernized, Anglophone, confident in itself and in Asia. It actively revels in flashy cars, designer rags, and Banyan Tree weekends. Kitty's own garage was stocked with BMW convertibles, Jeeps, and sundry town cars, and she went every day to a California gym in one of the shopping malls on nearby Thong Lor. Her friends were of the same class, with foreigners added like spice to a routine meal, and they danced around the pool to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony before heading out to a bar on Silom.

  I wasn't sure of my step with them. There was a feeling that we belonged to the same class. But if anyone had asked what that class was I couldn't have said. I never yearned to mingle with them, since belonging to a class is always accidental except for the industrious social climber.

  •

  At the corner of Soi 51, across from the twenty-four-hour Cal Tex station and the Chavala Turkish Bath, stands a green sign with an arrow: The Wells International School. A mass of dangling cables hangs over the intersection, and above them looms a neon sign which spells Yuasa Battery. Across from this sign, in turn, red and blue neons delineate the word Chavala in Thai and English over leafy shadows on Soi 34. It's a massage parlor built in 1959 where the bathwater is reputedly brown and the corridors haunted by the souls of clients past. From now on, it will be my most familiar street corner, the place I pass every day, a hundred times a day.

  The Yuasa sign on the corner stands above a store called Spa and Pool, in the window of which can be seen the surprising internal organs of Jacuzzis. Thus the corner is dominated by the signs of Cal Tex, Yuasa, Chavala, and Spa and Pool: a compendium of human needs. Fuel, electricity, sex. A half-naked man sometimes stands gibbering by the Jacuzzi machines, his matted hair falling to his chest like that of a deranged holy man. A policeman has descended from his motorcycle in his shiny boots and is walking across to him. The scene is turning ominous.

  •

  Just behind this junction with Sukhumvit stands a cluster of Japanese entertainment venues destined exclusively for the thousands of Tokyo salarymen who populate this neighborhood. To the left there is a sushi bar with outdoor table and slanted crates of ice holding chilled sprats, sea cucumbers, snails. Next to it is a karaoke bar with tinted windows. And across the road is a more grandiose hostess bar on the ground floor of a satai roman mansion, with a sign that reads Japanese, in English, as if to warn off all others, and a pair of glass doors that reveal five or six beauties in red evening gowns filling out a rococo boudoir.

  The soi runs past all this. Behind the walls lie the mansions of the Thai rich, gardens shrilling with cicadas, scrolled iron gates with gilding, spirit houses raised on pedestals so high they can be seen from the street, twinkling with fairylights and cheap candles. There is the Wells School: a British teacher doing gymnastics with a crowd of Thai girls shouting in British accents.

  When I had recovered my balance, I went with a walking stick and a thick hat along this path next to the Wells School and came out at the Thong Lor Skytrain station. This section of Sukhumvit is suddenly enclosed in claustrophobic shadow, the sun blotted out as tenements crowd around the Skytrain structures, offering defunct signs for language schools and dentists. There is a model-car store at the corner called Tifosi fille
d with little Ferraris, and across the road the employees of Cal Tex stand with red flags, waving down motorists. They erupt into chants, and dance.

  At the corner of Thong Lor the pineapple sellers are always massed under the Skytrain columns, where the shade is darkest. The cry goes up: Sapporot! There is the old man playing the khaen bamboo pipes, making his weird atonal noises. I stopped by the lines of lottery tickets and tabloids laid out along the sidewalks, breathed in the bowls of yen ta foh and the boxes of sweet tamarinds looking like small blood sausages. I looked into the lobby of the Gunn's "apartment block for ladies" by the Thong Lor station—for what?—then sifted through the beggars cuddling their infants as they lay in the street, cradling their bodies with obscene tenderness: I saw them as if for the first time in all their particularity. Even the laundry, open to the street and with a gold sign, Suripong, appeared something other than a laundry.

  •

  They say Bangkok is not a city but a collection of ten thousand villages. But each one is as dense, as impossible to decipher as your average city. I walked up to Thong Lor every day and read all its signs: for Thonglor Massage, with two images of feet with eyes painted on the toes; for the Suttirjn furniture store, where a whole gold-laquered pavilion like a tomb stood in the window. Not far away were the wedding parlors for which Thong Lor is famous, in particular the Wedding Castle, which posts an amorous gold statue outside, and a place called the Marriage Studio on Soi 9, fancied up with mannequins in hideous white tuxedos. I began to like it, this Avenue of Matrimony. The wedding parlor consists of a lavish reception area where the young couple are sat down under a chandelier and presented with a wedding catalogue which they can use to plan the whole thing out. Other establishments have names like The Lovers, In Love, and Classic, and in them you can watch the rising middle class planning their weddings by night. They stand there with their gelled hair, surrounded by heart-shaped red balloons, and you wonder what considerations of the future are running through their minds as they fill out their marriage questionnaires. They are Buddhists investing themselves in the symbolism of Christian unions.

  •

  Thong Lor is so long that it quickly seems a village unto itself, and as part of my recuperation from epiglottitis I forced myself to walk a little farther along it every day. Eventually, I was recognizing as familiar a pharmacy called Fascino which had a whole range of collapsible wheelchairs in its front window, secretive malls and construction sites cloaked in cement powder, cranes and rotting canals, and the Baskin-Robbins outlet done up in Barbarella pink. Soon I came to be distracted by the same things. By an apartment tower called the Panjit, for example, which broadcasted—halfway up its side—the simple word noah on one of its windows. It always stopped me in my tracks, this word noah, and as I stood between all the wedding parlors coughing in the cement dust, I stared at that word noah and wondered what it was doing there. Similarly, I was always taken by a bar somewhere near Soi 10 which was devoted to jilted lovers, and inside which patrons could pin up photographs of their faithless ones and hurl glasses at them while songs of despair were played.

  I soon found the open-plan mall where Kitty did her grocery shopping, and I used it for the Iberry ice cream parlor on the ground floor where an invalid could rest up with a garcenia or a guava-salted plum sorbet. It was now past Christmas but hymns still hummed in the air. In the parking lot, a Father Christmas still lumbered around in ninety degree heat, the nylon beard on his unemployed farang face coming away like a skin disease. The palms withered around a Crabtree & Evelyn outlet. I would sometimes wait here exhausted, unable to move myself, until night fell. Then, with the heat falling, I could move again.

  I have since understood that Thong Lor is the most mysterious of Bangkok streets. Even its green traffic signs, which you see all over the city written in English, are here more cryptic. One reads "Tumble Tots," and a few feet away another reads "Embassy of Khazakstan, 100 meters." The signs are formed like arrows pointing up tiny side streets. In the 55th Plaza, I sometimes ate alone in an always-empty restaurant called Zen. I am an easy believer in the latent meanings of urban signs.

  And when night came, the yellow stick neons in the dead trees came on, and the sellers of fake watches came out along with the mobile maeng-da buffets (I no longer partook), and the key-makers and dry cleaners and pharmacies with tanks of lemonade-colored water came alive. Even the blue plastic telephone booths of the TRUE company, with that English word emblazoned on their sides, could not be more playful.

  •

  I believe that Thong Lor was part of my cure. The closer it approaches the Saen Saeb canal the more eccentric it becomes. At the halfway point stands the Thong Lor police station, where, at night, the paddy wagons and a few hookers stand peacefully under large trees which seem to have survived from an earlier age. Here you can easily recall that in 1960 two canals ran side by side the length of the avenue. Designer malls like Playground have also sprung up here, offering new civic spaces for the upwardly mobile classes and their young. Playground is a sharp, rectangular object made of black stone, inside which the stores are arranged around an open space. In front of it students always seem to be erecting goofy artworks out of colored Play-Doh. I found a wooden mosque as large as a doll's house; a complex of Munchkin houses with a restaurant scaled to the height of imaginary midgets. Tudor beams, neoclassic ruins, gold garudas, minarets, Bauhaus lines, marble banks. I like not knowing what these things are or what they mean. I like struggling along streets which are broken and torn, which are hostile to pedestrian instincts.

  •

  A month went by visiting Thong Lor and soon I was calling it my street. I went later and later at night and ate yakiniku in the open-grill Japanese places near the junction, or guaytio naam soup with sen lek noodles at the Soi 38 street market around the corner, with a cold naam sapporot paan—pineapple juice with crushed ice—sucked through a clogged straw. I still had to wear shades at night, because for some reason—perhaps a sensitivity induced by the medications—I couldn't endure the night lights of Thong Lor or the sting of construction dust in the air. It was January, the best time in Bangkok, clear and bearable at sundown, and the city was wracked with demonstrations against Prime Minister Thaksin, "the Thai Berlusconi" as the scornful middle classes loved to dub him.

  Sometimes as I sat near the entrance to Soi 38 with my noodle soup doused with sugar and vinegar, sweating in a gentle and constant way, I would see columns of protesters making their way down Sukhumvit Road in tall orange Dr. Seuss hats, with English placards that read "Thaksin = Evil of Thailand," and "Theft Doesn't Pay." It struck me that these slogans were designed for a foreign press corps and an outside world that couldn't care less about Thailand's remarkable convulsions that year, and which later on ignored the military coup that eventually resulted. Moreover, to proclaim to Thai politicians that theft didn't pay, when theft was their natural modus operandi and always had been, seemed bravely doomed. It was an explosion of public decency that was unlike any demonstration I had ever seen: drums, face paint, and flags concentrated in crowds of tens of thousands who perpetrated no violence.

  The protests went up and down the world's longest road, and I sat there, learning the art of assembling guaytio naam with limes, chilies, and cheap sugar—Thailand's national dish, which you'll never find in a Thai restaurant. I liked to sit there alone because I could watch the foreign models on their way to Face Bar, and enjoy the nightly demonstrations without being noticed by either group.

  One night I watched the demonstration from the Thong Lor Skytrain, then walked hesitantly down the avenue itself with a pineapple cut in half with a penknife. There was an atmosphere of dangerous electricity, such as D. H. Lawrence once described during a visit to Germany in the twenties, as if the whole city had been plunged underwater for a few hours and subjected to a prolonged electric shock. The faces passing me looked intensified, the eyes maddened and bright, and I supposed that on a million TV sets the demonstrations were being discuss
ed as something unprecedented in so apolitical a country. In a cosmology dominated by Vishnu and a divine king, politics doesn't come easily. And when it does come, the shock is immense. I therefore proceeded carefully, picking my way through excitable throngs, until on a darker stretch of Thong Lor I recognized a white man lumbering along by himself, a can of beer in one hand and a walking stick like my own in the other.

  •

  Farlo's head was unique, and it could be seen from hundreds of yards away, a hard-boiled head with no frills, no beauty, and no nonsense, a head like an artillery shell, a comparison toward which its owner had no doubt impelled it. It bobbed and weaved, as some heads do. It shone with its military baldness, because the old mercenary could not bring himself to break with austere tradition when it came to hair. Buzzcut baldness was the style of his youth and he kept to it.