Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  It shouldn't be surprising that tree spirits are worshiped alongside the spirit of a tormented village girl of the nineteenth century. There are Chinese gods here, too, and a glass coffin bearing a figurative "golden child," or kuman thong, a spirit who is thought to be a reincarnation of fetuses aborted in previous lifetimes. These charms used to be made of actual dead infants preserved in glass bottles (other, manmade, figures of the kuman are shown sucking their own placenta). The kuman thong spirit can possess little girls and make them speak for it, and the charm itself can be carried around like a real infant; it whispers into your ear. In the papers you will find occasional stories of mentally disturbed people being arrested for stealing or procuring fetuses in hospitals in order to turn them into kuman thong. The dutiful are supposed to appease this spirit and send it back to its rightful mother, the river goddess. They do this by means of a ceremony called "bury with love." The effigy is buried with flowers, and told lovingly that there is no more use for him on earth. There is a charming variation known as "float with love," where it is sent off down a river like a boat. Animism swirls through the city's undergrowth, feeding it from below.

  •

  What is this mood that takes us as we cut through streets subtly infected with the spirit of Lady Takian? For one thing, the genders seem less divided here than elsewhere in the world. More artfully blended into each other, as if everyone is subconsciously aware that you can be reborn, reincarnated as either gender. Indeed, the very word "gender" seems like a mistake.

  I feel Si Ouey snapping at my heels, and I feel the forests of the last century hiding just behind the ubiquitous Dipterocarpus trees. These are forces felt only deep inside the body. It is like the force field of a woman who passes you in the dark, like magnetic disturbances that alter a few molecules deep inside your liver.

  My walks through On Nut late at night are like séances. In the house on Soi 51, I will hear the banana trees flapping slowly against the double glazing as the servants' table is being set up under the oil lamp slung from a pole where they eat gai massamam every night with tin bowls of kao suay. A terrible sadness comes over me as I hear those leaves and glimpse the twinkling spirit house through the trees, the crumbling marigolds laid there, and the incense sticks trailing wisps of smoke. The mood suddenly changes. As the spirits move, a supernatural breeze stirs a chime, a bough, or a piece of grit against my tongue—and there for a second I feel them, shrilling like pipes in the distance, flickering in the dark with the mosquitoes.

  Thais are never surprised when I admit these feelings to them, since they themselves accept them as perfectly normal. For them it would be abnormal not to feel the closeness of the dead, to search for another past vastly different from the physical one.

  SOI 33

  Weeks went by, and finally the rains came. I lay in my glass house, trying to learn the Thai script, watched by the staff as they pruned the frangipani trees. Learning the curves of that variant of Sanskrit, but never really learning it properly, was a healing exercise in a sort of futility, for deep down I suspect I wanted to remain in day-to-day incomprehension relative to the language, which I never learned to speak well. It was like a soft wall enclosing me at all times, and I preferred for many reasons not to penetrate it too adroitly. There was something Chaplinesque in the episodes of mutual incomprehension that delighted me no end.

  When a severe humidity arrived with the first rains and the glass house heated up, I found myself wanting to take cold baths. Unfortunately, the plug in my bath was broken and I couldn't fill the tub. I called Kitty. What is Thai for "plug"? She had no idea. Dictionaries, calls to friends, forays to libraries yielded no help. No one knew. I went to the Kinokuniya bookstore in the Emporium Mall, a few blocks away and spent a morning searching high and low for the Thai word for "plug." No result. Finally I took the plug itself and wandered down to a hardware store on Sukhumvit Road. I dangled the magic object in front of my face and asked them what it was in Thai. The entire staff came out and looked at me as if I were mad. The owner pointed at it and said, "Pluk." I repeated it after him. Pluk. They all shook their heads. Not "pluk." Pluk. Or was that Plukghk? Or Prukk? "Pluk," I said. They all shook their heads again. No, no, not like that. Pluk. Couldn't I hear it? Listen. Plukkk.

  I bought a dozens pluks and stored them from then on in the bathroom. But every other day I'd wander down to different stores and ask for a pluk. For two weeks no one understood the word. Then, one fine day, I asked for a pluk in the Villa Supermarket and the sales guy went and got it for me without a murmur. So my mouth and my ear had finally aligned. That is how long it takes to master Thai. It was the same for the words for noodle soup, guaytio naam. Since it can be eaten only on the street, there is no menu you can point to. You have to ask for it orally. On Soi 38, I asked for it every day for the better part of a fortnight before tongue and ear finally lined up the tones properly. Four weeks, two words: "plug" and "soup."

  Vital words, but how about "disoriented," or "alone"? Armed with a bare dozen words, I could forage, feed, and bathe myself. But I couldn't enter into the treacherous subtleties of human relations, and perhaps I didn't want to. No one ever truly appreciates how much Robinson Crusoe enjoyed his solitude. My glass house and gardens were an island of sorts—they looked like a tropical island—and the principal difference between Crusoe and a Bangkok transplant in the early twenty-first century was the staff hanging about with their pruning shears, peering in through the glass walls at Farang Exhibit A as he dabbled with calligraphy on a sofa bed. The children in particular were grimly fascinated. They hung in the trees, eating peaches and staring.

  •

  When suffocated, I simply walked down Sukhumvit to the Emporium Mall near Phrom Phom. As of then, it was the newest and most formidable of the city's malls, a snapshot of an Asian future dominated by the color white. I took the zigzag escalators up, through a central space filled with a soaring abstract Christmas tree made of multicolored metal leaves. For me, no tablecloths from Versace on the ground floor, or items from the Beverly Hills Polo Club and Sport Chic. On the fourth floor, however, was a toy store called Be Cute which I liked to browse through, and from which I often bought strange Japanese sweets which I never ate but which sat on my sideboard for weeks before being thrown out. I liked them, I suppose, purely for their names. Hello Kitty and Hi-Chow, then Cola tablet candies and jackfruit chips. The nauseating cuteness of Japanese capitalism. More fascinating, and nauseating, still was Born in Japan, filled with plastic toys called Flip Flops—a plant with two leaves that bobbed up and down to music. There were times when the whole display bobbed to bossa nova and the children there did the same, all bobbing in synchronicity with these mechanical toy plants. And so, sated with Japan, I would wander on, through curved thoroughfares of plate glass, through isles of artificial rain forest, through amenities worthy of a Biosphere or those hub airports with which Asia now leads the consumer world. Announcements in silky Japanese rose above the din. The brands are so spatially condensed that they soon form a verbal ribbon inside one's head. You begin to fiddle with your wallet. Anonimo, Blancpain, Bossini (the brightest store on earth), Adidas, Georges Rech, Rampage. Apex Profound Beauty. Kitahachi Udon. Baume & Mercier. It is a new language, the patois of brands. The Germans naturally have a brilliant word for it: Konsumterrorismus.

  There was one place inside Emporium where I could make my solitude. It was the corner where the Royal Davinci furniture showroom met the Ellezza Crystal and Symphony store. The windows of these two shops gave out onto a darker-than-usual stretch of corridor where there were benches for tired itinerants. The showrooms were dense, packed with the whole gamut of bad European taste from the incomparably vulgar 1860–1914 period. The period of effulgence, boasting, raw confidence, and venal exotica. I could only marvel at the Third Empire mirrors stacked here waiting for some Thai millionaire to drag them back to his satai roman mansion. Or the gold elephant clocks, the gilt hat stands, the naval paintings, and the cut-glass gon
doliers with crystal boatmen in top hats. There was even a 3-D rendering of Klimt's Kiss, which shimmered as if about to explode. It went quite well, one would have to concede, with the glass elevators nearby and the Arab pop music. But most eye-catching of all was a display placed right in the middle of this fourth-floor street. It consisted of a glass pavilion framed by tasseled sashes and lit from inside by a chandelier. Within was a single case of antique "1805" Johnnie Walker, the "Jewel of Whisky." It was surrounded by a Victorian writing case with period nib pens and a leather recipe book supposedly once belonging to Alexander Walker, Johnnie's grandson. On the cover of this curious book, plain to see, were three words which I imagine were the reason for my stopping here every time I came to the mall, and which were even more striking than the bearskin adorning the shrine's floor, namely: "Where is it?"

  •

  When I came back down, I walked alone to the Phrom Phom Skytrain station, climbing up to the station gallery, where a few outlets were still selling fresh beetroot juice and cassettes of Green Music. Unlike Asoke or Nana, this station is near empty at night. I walked up the left side of Sukhumvit, where I knew all the places: the golf equipment outlet with its Cobra clubs and Power Tornado drivers, the furniture store with the longest store name you have ever encountered (Pipithsampavararit), filled with gilded, looted apsaras. The Sukhumvit Toyota dealership, with its awkward English slogans probably translated literally from Japanese: Are You Groovy? Yes! My Life Party. And, next to an Innova model: Big Memories.

  By a tailor called Bitharo, there was a string of barbershops with names like Lek Barber and On Salon, rooms set back from the street with murals of idyllic villages in Issan and portraits of the king and queen colored like Hindu saints. I went into Lek. Any hair salon with the name "Small" is a provocation to a yak. So I sat in the beaten chair of greasy burgundy leather and, for the hell of it, got myself shaved as well. I came out smelling of rancid pomegranates, and, looking across the street, spied the tailor called Beethoven which McGinnis had mentioned all those summers ago. A Beethoven suit? I say, is that a Beethoven suit?

  The Rex Hotel was lit up like a dismal roadside motel in Oklahoma, bald farangs in the coffee shop windows. I would always stop for a while and wonder why I never ventured down the side street Soi 33, although since Livingstone's was situated here it was familiar to me. Late at night, the girls who work there flow down to Sukhumvit in search of cabs, and you see at once the difference between them and the denizens of Nana and Soi Cowboy. They have a different look: I could swear they were a little taller, a bit more sophisticated, a bit better dressed. But I did know that the bars of Soi 33 were themed preponderantly around classic French painters. Surely this fact alone suggested a better class of clientele, unless you assume that every Tom, Dick, and Harry knows who Degas was, though I wouldn't bet on it. Bangkok rumor had it that the Manet club had turned into the Monet club because of a sign painter's error, but either way, one had to admire the effort of bringing such a level of cultural consciousness to Asia's erotic tourists. They would go home enriched. Nevertheless, I stood there hesitating, because if the truth be known I dislike going to a bar by myself, even in the bar capital of the world. But as soon as McGinnis discovered that I lived in the vicinity of one of his favorite streets, invitations to join him there began to flow over the telephone.

  •

  "I have a friend," he said one night, "who you must meet. He's my only French friend, Lionel. Do you know Lionel? Lionel's a legend."

  "I don't know any legends, I'm glad to say. And I'm even happier to report that I don't know any Lionels."

  "But Lionel is different." He mispronounced the name, emphasizing the first vowel in the English way. Li-onel. "Lionel's one of the funny uncles."

  "Oh, the guys who sell you drugs? I don't—"

  "Come on, Lalant, don't be such a bore. I'm not suggesting a drugfest. I think we should go to Soi 33 and soak up some culture. With Lionel. Lionel's a wonderful pervert. He's French. He knows Soi 33 back to front, top to bottom. Especially bottom."

  We had a weary chuckle. "All right. Where are you now?"

  "End of the street, old man. We're having a cappuccino at the Cal Tex."

  For a moment my heart sank, but there it was, I had to invite them round. It was the first interruption of my months of solitude.

  "Are you alone?" he muttered.

  One could never underestimate McGinnis's paranoia. It was one of the most fragrant things about him, but from where did it originate?

  "I live in a household," I said. "My landlady is having a cocktail party right now."

  "Landlady? Cocktail party?"

  He conferred frantically with the mysterious Lionel.

  "Are you both stoned?" I asked.

  "Not at all, not at all. Lionel and I are not stoned. We are merely diplomatic."

  "Maybe I should come and get you."

  "No, we want to see where you live."

  "We?"

  "Yes. Lionel is as curious as I am."

  "I don't know Lionel."

  He hung up. Five minutes later they were at the door. I had not been lying, and there was indeed a cocktail party going on in the main house. Well-dressed Thais and farangs of obvious wealth swanned about in the brightly lit windows of the salon. The maid came to my door, looking a little concerned.

  "There are two men for you outside, sir. They look like tramps. Shall I let them in?"

  My heart sank even further. The disadvantage of my household arrangement was that everyone could see, and inspect, everyone. And I felt an absurd social concern, namely that the staff would think badly of me as I entertained these two aging drug addicts who had wandered down so nonchalantly from the gas station espresso bar. One is sometimes capable of astonishingly shameful acts of cowardice. I went down to meet them under the umbrous mango trees, where hopefully we would all be invisible. Lionel was tiny, barely five feet tall, and he wore an extravagantly wide collar like a twenties intellectual, paired disastrously with khaki shorts. He looked like an evil child, with sandy hair brushed all over to one side as if covering up a wound. He shook my hand limply. McGinnis was in baggy pants, a crinkled shirt which had seen better days, and—horror of horrors—espadrilles. With his mountain of hair, he looked vaguely like an English poet on sabbatical in Majorca circa 1960. He was deeply tanned and his skin glowed like the inside of a peach hastily bitten. From the house came a sound of exaggerated laughter and the tinkle of forks clashing with china. McGinnis took it all in in one second.

  "Thai aristocracy," he whispered. "Fascist bastards."

  "Her grandfather was a famous general—"

  "They're all like that. Ties to the dictatorship!"

  Lionel nodded—but which dictatorship?

  At that moment the maid thoughtlessly turned on the lawn lamps and we were suddenly exposed like three men escaping from Colditz. I hustled them in toward the pool, but we were spotted by the giggling socialites. I was grateful McGinnis didn't give them the finger.

  "A pool," he cried instead. "May we bathe?"

  "Bathe? There's a party going on. They'll be watching."

  "I want to bathe among the fascist bastards."

  "They're not fascist bastards, McGinnis. They're perfectly nice socialites."

  "But that is a contradiction in the terms," the pervert said in appalling English. "They are aristocrates."

  "So is your little English friend," I hissed at him. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

  But he simply grinned and drew a finger across his throat. McGinnis had slipped into the house and undressed down to his underpants, in which he reemerged into the frangipani gardens picked out by a dozen spotlights, a statue illustrating the sadness of mortal flesh. The guests watched him walk to the edge of the pool and then, with that gesture of imminent flight which I had observed in him before, take wing in a grotesque dive contrived expressly for their benefit. A loud crash interrupted the conversation and at the center of the floodlit pool an English
man in advanced decay appeared like Piss Christ. "Oh my god," someone said from the salon. "He's going to drown."

  "Not so," came the booming voice. "Good evening to you. I am Earl McGinnis, B. Phil. Cantab. Cantab being the rarest and most expensive melon known to English greengrocers. You doubt me? I am here to recite a poem for you, it being such a lovely evening and you all in ties. I have some aristocratic poems for you. Poems written by one of our foremost earls."

  They came to the windows, and everyone was apparently interested.

  " 'A Ramble in Saint James's Park,' " McGinnis began, and his voice was authoritative, musical, and cutting. There are defining moments in every friendship, and even in every acquaintanceship, moments when another's critical faculties are admirably exposed by a sudden flight of the tongue. I immediately understood that Saint James's Park in Rochester's poem was, for the reciter, Bangkok itself. No one understood a word of it except me.

  Much wine had passed, with grave discourse

  Of who fucks who, and who does worse

  (Such as you usually do hear

  From those that diet at the Bear),

  When I, who still take care to see

  Drunkenness relieved by lechery,

  Went out into St. James's Park

  To cool my head and fire my heart.

  But though St. James has th' honor on 't,

  'Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.