Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  There, by a most incestuous birth,

  Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;

  For they relate how heretofore,

  When ancient Pict began to whore,

  Deluded of his assignation

  (Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),

  Poor pensive lover, in this place

  Would frig upon his mother's face;

  Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise

  Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies. . . .

  •

  "I know every bar," Lionel said as we walked down Sukhumvit toward Soi 33. "I think of this street as my private violin on which I can play anything I want."

  "A violin?"

  "Yes, a violin."

  "Xylophone, more like," McGinnis drawled. "The cheap metal kind you buy at the supermarket for a hundred baht."

  "You misunderstand my metaphor."

  McGinnis, one of the great Francophiles, put an orangutan arm around Lionel.

  "You wide-headed French twat, there is no metaphor I do not understand. There are, indeed, few I do not thrill to.

  You are a xylophone."

  "Ah," said Lionel, as if he understood.

  "You mean, I assume, that you are the virtuoso of Soi 33?"

  "Exacte."

  Soi 33 is a dense and complex street, otherwise called Soi Daeng Udom, or else Dead Artists Street. At its entrance stand a 7-Eleven and the UBC 2 Building, in which can be found the Londoner Brew pub, while a little farther in one passes a club called Christie's, and two restaurants, named Basilico and Pan Pan. Opposite them rises the Novotel hotel and Coco's Café, where I had once spent a Christmas alone when I was staying at the Livingstone. After the Novotel, the dead artist bars begin: Dalí on the left side of the street, Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, and Gauguin on the right. Farther up are Goya and Monet/Manet, and around them other establishments themed in other veins—Napoleon, Wall Street, Santana, and one called Demonia, a Thai-style S&M joint. Parrot Green, Lookie Lookie, and Big Shots line the small side street of Soi 33/3, and forgo any mention whatsoever of deceased titans of the canvas, though Lookie Lookie was apparently opened as the Mondrian. Big Shots has a brass plaque outside which reads Non Members Only. The You and Me Club is self-explanatory.

  What attracts one to nosing about in bars is the sudden change of atmosphere that promises the opening of a new door—a new window into life. It's nonsense, but we need nonsense. We went into the Monet, where a middle-aged Japanese man was doing a hula dance on a table. A girl stood by the door, holding an artist's palette, with a mustache painted on her face. A long brush was held parallel to her mouth. "Bo'jow," she whispered as people came in. The red-lit bar sported a lone Monet, one of the water-lily series, and behind it stood lines of half-empty bottles with Thai and Western names scribbled over them, and on several of these the word Lionel could be seen. The system on Soi 33 is that the repeat customer can buy a bottle fixed at the bar, have his name put on it and return with mixers and ice anytime he likes and not pay again until said bottle has been finished. If a bottle of Absolut costs about 2,000 baht, the client gets ten to twelve drinks out of this amount, an incredible bargain, which is sure to make him return night after night—the bar, naturally, does not make most of its profit on vodka cocktails. Lionel suddenly came into his own. His sweat, his diminutive stature, awkward hair, and venal grin all magically fell into place and he blossomed visibly into a barfly occupying his rightful niche in the sweeping ecosystem of Bangkok nightlife. "Afterward," Lionel said, "I am taking you to Christie's to see the six-foot wooden penis in the garden." It was, it appeared, typical of the kinds of announcements he liked to make in male company. I began to warm to his peculiar brand of repulsiveness. Lionel had been a quite well-known journalist in Paris, but he had been a journalist in a country which mostly despises journalists and pays them less than unionized garbage collectors.

  Lionel did documentaries about Islamic "problems," reportages on shelters for battered Maghrebian women, reports from the increasingly battered and sabotaged Mediterranean, a sea—as he put it—that was once gay, pagan, vibrant with innocent sex and beauty, but which was now increasingly a grimy, polluted, overpopulated arena of conflict between two mutually antagonistic civilizations. The world, he said, was full of refugees from the Mediterranean, which was once the most beautiful place on earth. The garden of civilization, the preferred abode of writers and artists. The cradle of enlightened hedonism.

  "It was only a short time ago," he said as we plucked down one of his bottles of curaçao and mixed our own drinks (and suddenly he was much more interesting, speaking in his native tongue), "that our parents and grandparents flocked to the Mediterranean as an escape from the ghastliness of the North. They went to take off their clothes, to eat properly, to drink properly, to become human again. It was a recognized ritual. Now we go to Luton or Orly and take a charter flight to Goa, the Seychelles, Bangkok, Phuket. Our innocent pleasure gardens are no longer in Europe or America. The sun kisses us at the equator, among images of Buddha and Shiva. Innocent, you say? Bangkok, innocent? Yes. It is far more innocent than Torremolinos, Mykonos, or Miami. Far more innocent than Atlantic City or Catalina or Las Vegas, or even than Malta. After all, what is the idea behind those places now? We feel choked in them. Whereas, I am sorry, but I simply don't feel that here. Perhaps it's merely that here we have sanuk and in those other places we don't. Perhaps the West is just a shithole now and there's nothing we can do."

  "Canterbury," McGinnis said quietly. "Canterbury is not a shithole."

  "I am sure it is, in fact, a shithole at this point. I cannot imagine Canterbury as crucial to the hedonistic imagination."

  "Maybe not hedonistic, but—"

  Lionel mixed our drinks himself, calmly and knowledgeably. It is quite something to know about drinks, to know about them the way a botanist knows trees and plants. He made them up smoothly, not missing a beat. He was about fifty, a young fifty, and there was nothing wasted or wrinkled about him. After years working the fringes of the Med doing stories about illegal immigration, he had gone to Indonesia and Malaysia to look at the rise of religious extremism in those tense nations.

  "Every culture needs a Garden of Eden. I am afraid with the loss of the Med we have lost ours. I think that place was a way of believing in our own innocence, and then finally we couldn't believe in it anymore. The place itself just became so overwhelmingly developed. I drive down to Antibes now, or Monaco, and I cannot believe my eyes. In two generations we have totally fucked it to death. It looks like New Jersey at best. The coastline of Italy or Spain in summer—we won't even mention France—looks like an industrial accident. So we look farther and farther afield for what we used to have. It's a journey into the past."

  "I am sure," McGinnis put in, "that the past was even more of a shithole than the present. Isn't that the Asian attitude?"

  "Forgive me, but you don't mean that. You of all people. You are the biggest romancer of the past."

  McGinnis turned to me. "Where would you go for a romantic weekend? Lionel here has given up serious journalism and is now writing about spas. He has passes to all of them. He's always trying to get me to go with him."

  "We'll drive in my car," the Frenchman said cryptically.

  We then stepped over to Christie's to experience the man-sized penis in the back garden, where there was also a tethered horse. The horse looked at the penis and the penis looked at us. Animism in action. We moved on to Dalí, which from the outside looks as if it is made of wet spaghetti, like a Frank Gehry nightclub, its line waving and undulating, which of course was meant to suggest the fluidity of Dalí's objects. Or it could have been the curaçao, of course. Inside, there were more Dalinian touches. The ceiling was covered with the master's motifs, and the hostesses wore excruciating hats which could well have been designed by him. Lionel had his own bottles here, too. Did he come to Soi 33 every night?

  "I have discovered," he explained, "that the girls on Soi 33
are unique. Many of them are attending marketing courses in city colleges. They are all related to each other, or have the same boyfriends. They are better educated, as you can sense. The strangest thing, though, is the popularity of those marketing courses—why would that be, I have often wondered? Is Soi 33 known among marketing undergraduates as a part-time earner? I have often taken one home only to find myself talking about marketing strategies the whole of the next day. Not that I mind. But I have not fathomed why."

  "Perhaps," I said, "they are pursuing their studies?"

  How many bars can one visit in a single night? On Soi 33, all of them. At Napoleon the girls at the front door stuffed one arm into their tunics as if they had lost them in battle. We went to Renoir. Around the pool table were Edwardian fixtures and lithos of Alfa Romeo racing cars from the thirties, and somehow I ended up revising my opinion of Renoir the more Black Russians I drank. I ended up thinking he was a genius, the greatest of all geniuses and every bar in Bangkok should be themed around his paintings, especially the ones with fields of poppies and girls in straw hats. I was soon positively in love with Renoir, especially as some of the girls wore painter's smocks, and I thought exactly what Lionel now said out loud: "Look, they're Impressionists too!" Lionel was whispering into my ear as if he wanted to know me better. "What part of New York do you live in? Do you like it?"

  At the end of Soi 33, past 33 Center and Demonia, stands a shabu place with the most succulent, tiny scallops on earth. It's where the drunkards go when they need to cool off. It's often filled with clients of the spanking show in Demonia, sometimes with spankers and spanked tagging along for a free meal. Suddenly, then, all the violent color and drama of the street's business falls away and once again we are all humble mammals eating shabu scallops together and peering at each other with a kind of evolutionary curiosity. The girls no longer in flowing togas looked like the slightly gaunt marketing undergraduates which they no doubt were. Most of their patrons that night were Asian, which according to Lionel was typical.

  "If I have to listen to one more NGO type droning on about fat, white, middle-aged perverts I think it will have to be violence. Besides, is it some sort of crime to be white, fat, and middle-aged in a country where you are 0.5 percent of the population? Or what about middle-aged but not fat, or vice versa? I always point out that farangs are less than 5 percent of the customers in Bangkok. Get furious about that 5 percent if you want—it says more about you than them."

  McGinnis: "Lionel, it is purely aesthetic, that's all. It's like the feelings between blacks and whites. It's irrational."

  The scallops restored our zest.

  "I think I'll come with you to Hua Hin," I said cheerfully. "Why not? It's free, isn't it?"

  "Still didn't get your check, Lalant? Don't worry, I'm broke, too. Lionel?"

  "I have passes for Chiva Som, the best spa in Thailand. I have to write a report for a Swiss magazine."

  "I used to go a lot with my wife," McGinnis put in unexpectedly. "She spent all my money there."

  I said, "Where is your wife?"

  He shrugged and twirled a marine beast on his fork. Did he pick up and lose wives in a serial way? Or did he invent them for his friends while spending all his life alone?

  "I've never seen you with a wife," Lionel snapped. "Good God."

  "I went there every other weekend. Lalant, I am surprised you haven't been to Hua Hin yet. It's practically a suburb of Bangkok."

  "A three-hour drive. I have a driver, too." Lionel looked quite happy at the prospect. "I will bring my wife, too."

  "Your what?"

  "Her name is Fon. We got married last month."

  A pang of envy seemed to cross McGinnis's face.

  "She's not a marketing undergraduate. She's in sales."

  "How nice for you."

  •

  Across the street from the shabu place stood a curious mall built around a courtyard over which the words peep inn stood with an ominous gravity all their own. The ground floor was lined with Japanese-only clubs outside of which red paper lanterns and a single hostess stood. As we passed they bowed and said something in Japanese, though we were clearly the wrong race to be so addressed. In the gloom and quiet of this recess, Lionel asked me about New York with more insistence, and I finally admitted that the only parts of New York I could stand now were the immigrant neighborhoods around Sunset Park and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, which I could reach on the R train and which were now fifty-fifty Hispanic and Chinese, though the Chinese were clearly getting the upper hand. Walking around the Chinese parts of Seventh Avenue near Fifty-ninth Street always reminded me of On Nut in some way. The streets which had changed hands many times, the Chinese grandmas on the stoops watching you go by with eyes that knew you—and the smell of sad trees in summer. But I could never live there.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm not an immigrant."

  "That's exactly what you are."

  "Yes, but immigration is a patterned affair. Segregated like nothing else."

  "Ah well. We are all immigrants here, too. And we live in a ghetto of sorts."

  Lionel gestured toward a pair of frosted-glass doors providing entrance to the aforementioned Peep Inn. The frosting formed the shape of a naked girl which any entrance would break into two halves.

  "This," he sighed, "is our ghetto."

  We didn't go in. Next door was a plush club with girls in flowing Santa hats. Wasn't it rather late in the year for those? It did indeed look like a cranny in a ghetto, and we the stigmatized ghetto denizens were marked out for an easy kill. The madame stepped out with smooth words, disconcerted, it was clear, by our non-Japaneseness.

  "Come inside," she said, "it's Christmas special."

  A WEEKEND IN THE COUNTRY

  The road to Hua Hin crosses a plain covered with watery paddies and scores of small windmills. The skies are spacious outside of Bangkok, the effect of a flat land, and the flyspeck towns with their Honda dealerships and shuttered banks look unnaturally bright even under low clouds. It's a straight road and always busy: the Bangkok middle class follow their king to take the sea air at Hua Hin, as they have since the twenties. And here I was, too, with Lionel, Fon, and McGinnis in a giant boat- like Camry limo commanded by a driver in the usual Thai getup of peaked white hat and gloves. He had been provided by the magazine, which regarded Lionel as a star of some kind, and during the three-hour ride he said nothing to us at all. Was he disgusted by the presence of a beautiful young Thai girl in the midst of this farang expedition? I couldn't say. Fon herself was a thirty-year-old operator, as far as I could see, but it was also clear that she and Lionel had come to some sort of troubled arrangement among themselves. Not money for companionship so much as companionship in exchange for promises of a new life, eventually, elsewhere. She spoke English and French well, and from time to time she said acidly to the driver, "You took the wrong road. Is he paying you by the hour?" She clearly regarded McGinnis and me with deep suspicion, and I thought that, all in all, that was fair enough.

  The weekend stampede to Hua Hin—a cavalcade of limos and Mercedes shuttered with sunscreens, their backseats loaded with snoozing fat faces and flapping fans. At times the traffic slows and an atmosphere of impending disaster brews all around. The names of the villages are obscure. The warehouses of textile and software companies shine with their sickly cheap look at the edges of dusty lots, hastily screened by pathetic little trees that don't grow. Billboards announce a Mystery of Siam that has shriveled up here under the force of prosperity.

  We shot past a fairground beginning to light up in the first glows of twilight, the elephants lined up along a rice field with silver masks on their heads, their toenails painted blue. The clouds dripped into slopes of dreary forest, signaling the end of the plains and the first rolling hills. I left the window open and slumped back on the caramel leather, as if trying to suck in air that wasn't refrigerated. It was now a fast, bumpy ride. Water buffalo stood in the dusk, their hides a color of rose
ash, enduring the rain. The gutters overflowed, the shops were closed down. People scattered through dusky lanes in waterproof hats. At Hua Hin, the sea was violent, a vast change from the tepid bathwater it usually was. Seaside towns always strike me as the epitome of failure—but at what do they fail?

  •

  Chiva Som is set on the ocean two miles out of Hua Hin's raffish center. It was an exclusive resort for wealthy health neurotics who can fork out the $500 a night for chalets designed to suggest a Buddhist monastery set around private gardens of flame-vines. It's a world apart, proof of the anxious theorem that money can buy you a suspension of the world's intrinsic tedium and fatigue, and indeed it presents you with the calm geometry of all planned, gated communities, which are utopian by default. It was to this enclosed paradise that Lionel had passes, and like refugees from urban poverty we all suddenly felt relieved, if not overjoyed.

  At the lobby, with its curved gables and teak pillars, a "personal guide" was waiting with a tray of orange tea and our keys. The mood was a kind of forced placidity which felt as if it could break into pieces at any moment. Most of the other guests had fled back to Bangkok because of the storm and as a result we would have an exceptional degree of solitude. A manageress came out to wai and wish us an agreeable stay. Only the Thai kickboxing classes had been canceled, she said, assuring us that water therapies were still functioning and that the beach was not yet closed.

  The resort is so spread out that it has to be navigated in a golf cart with a canopy and rain flaps. We were driven straight to our chalet set in a glade of bamboo, from where the turmoil of the ocean was less palpable. But the bamboo itself shook frenetically. Blown about like Charlie Chaplin, Lionel became imperious and demanded in a shrill voice to be introduced to the managers and the staff, but it was clear that they had never heard of either him or his Swiss magazine, which was called Loisirs et Mers, or something like that (or was it Loisirs de Merde?) They looked at him with a gentle bemusement, a look of which Thais are masters, and Lionel reacted to this dismissal with a touching pomposity, the pomposity of the man who has come down in the world and who cannot do anything about it.