Bangkok Days

by Lawrence Osborne

  But this was not at all true. It was a very big city and most farangs did not know each other, and never would.

  "If you ever go to Lombok—" he began.

  There is always that moment when a man in an elevator stares at another man whom he will never see again with a superhuman coldness. Their gazes cross like sabers, not in anger but in exasperation; there is a mental clink, the sound of fine steel clashing. I felt it with Felix. He now took a half step forward. He held up one hand as if to stop the departure of the elevator for a moment and leaned toward me, whispering. His face went suddenly red and his eyes took on a more piercing clarity.

  "Wait a minute," he said, balancing on one foot as he held the door open and looked quickly over his shoulder. "Before you go, can you lend me forty dollars?"

  THE EDEN CLUB

  During the first months of summer, I began traveling again, to Laos, Malaysia, and Cambodia mostly, profiting from that tiresome monthly duty known to all expats as the "visa run." Thailand obliges all its temporary residents to renew their visas at the end of every month. Sometimes I went to Macau for the weekend and holed up at the Hotel Lisboa to play the all-night baccarat tables. Since numerals in Thai and Cantonese are virtually the same I could place my bets without the assistance of a translator, and thus lose as much money as I felt I could.

  There was something comfortingly integrated about an establishment where you could sleep, eat at a Robuchon restaurant with a wine list furnished by its billionaire owner Stanley Ho (if you could afford it), and gamble till dawn among Mongolian prostitutes as stately and cold as galleons bristling with heavy guns. Looking out my window, I was struck by how much like Bangkok Macau was becoming. The whole place was being taken over by Vegas moguls. A Sands Casino had just opened by the ferry terminal, and the night sky was already a jigsaw of neons devoted to the selling of baccarat and sex.

  "The American," Hemingway once said, "is a lonely killer." But what he really meant was that the American of his age was more of a lonely killer. In truth, we all have a lonely killer inside us, however smothered by pious social conditioning. As soon as he is alone, a man reverts to a different modality without even knowing it. He drifts away from respectable relations with women, the marriage, the monogamous arrangement, and however much he protests to the contrary, deep down he is excited.

  When I came back to Bangkok after these excursions I always felt that I was returning to the region's heart. The hugeness of the city, its advanced system of hospitality, its affluent middle class, its perfect hotels, its chaotic ease, all struck me as momentous. But what I noticed even more was something that is not obvious walking the streets but which becomes more so with time: the visibility of homosexuality.

  Walk down Silom Soi 4 and you see the ease of the homosexual man in the street, the natural flamboyance of the kathoey. In Bangkok, male beauty is heightened to the greatest degree, and then unleashed. Neither in China nor in Malaysia, nor in Cambodia nor Laos, did I feel that same comfortableness. Here, in the playground of the street, men are restless, ruthless, atomized, but they are nevertheless comfortable; they have reverted back to themselves.

  •

  "It's all a question of not lying to oneself," McGinnis would say when we had dinner on Soi 4, admiring the military cops who sometimes swanned by in elongated helmets looking like hermaphroditic Egyptian priests. "I've always found it interesting to compare the behavior of gay men and lesbians, and as far as I can see, there is no resemblance whatsoever. They are poles apart. This proves that gay men are more purely male. And that the heterosexual male is a hybrid, a compromise. Partially castrated, in fact. It can scarcely be denied, can it? I am not saying we should act on it, but it's an observation."

  We lay outside on a pile of cushions, eating thord mun plaa, fried spicy fish cakes with cucumber dip, and pomelo and pork salads laden with river shrimp. Boys traipsed by in Lakota Sioux outfits revealing their buttocks, in skirts and cutaway jeans and mink coats. There is just one hour in the twenty-four-hour cycle when a given street suddenly explodes into life. McGinnis was a highly sensitive instrument for measuring such things and his face lit up with glee.

  "There, there. Feel it? Wild, eh? Shit, if you can't feel that at least once a day you're a dead man, a total dead man.

  All those dimwits who think this is sordid are on the wrong side of life, my friend, they don't understand a thing—"

  Did you know," he went on, leaning back with a long, thin cigar, his old Carnaby Street antique shirt blotched with moisture, "that the word kathoey is actually Khmer in origin? They call them the third sex."

  "It's funny. I don't think about them at all. And yet they set the whole tone of the place, don't they?"

  "They do. I am sure more knowledgeable people would say that we two know bugger-all about Thailand, and I would be the first to agree. I know even less than bugger-all. But one thing I'm sure of is that you can't understand this city without understanding kathoeys. There's a whole Buddhist explanation for them which is connected to the Thais' profound tolerance within this one sphere—the sphere of love."

  "So what's the explanation?"

  "No idea. I'm always too stoned to read the books. Something about sinners being reincarnated as kathoeys, then being born again as heterosexuals. As in, we have all been kathoeys in previous lives."

  "It's highly likely," I murmured.

  "It's a mind-blowing idea that every man has been a woman in a previous life and every woman has been a man. And every man and every woman has been a transsexual. If that doesn't make you tolerant by nature, what will?"

  We watched the ladyboys for a while, acknowledging even that there was sometimes something irritating about them. A showiness and hardness in the eye, and in the tilt of the pseudo-female bottoms. An ass should be female or male, somehow, but not in between.

  •

  The British scholar Richard Totman has explored the world of kathoey, and he claims that Buddhism's early Tipitaka canon identifies not two sexes but four. Male, female, and what it calls in Sanskrit ubhatobyanjanaka (biological hermaphrodite) and pandaka (literally eunuch, weakling; translated by the word bando in Thai). Thai Buddhist commentators add their own gloss, identifying ubhatobyanjanaka, for example, as what they call in Thai kathoey thea, or "true hermaphrodites," and interpreting pandaka to mean kathoey, as in "a castrated man." The Buddhist scholar Suchip Punyanuphap adds that this is "a person who takes pleasure in having relations with a man while feeling they are like a woman."

  In the Theravada tradition dominant in the Lanna region of the north, there are creation myths which describe not two mythic founders of the human race—like Adam and Eve—but three. A primordial man, a primordial woman, and a primordial hermaphrodite. There is conflict between the man and the woman and the hermaphrodite, but the latter is still there in this Buddhist Genesis, even if he functions a bit like the snake in the biblical version. Napumsaka (as he is called) actually kills the heterosexual male when he sees that the woman loves him.

  In his prominent 1983 dictionary, Manit Manicharoen explains that homosexuals and kathoeys are not the same thing, though there is an obvious overlapping. "Homosexuals," he writes, "or the sexually perverted, wiparit thang phet, are not kathoey. The characteristic of a kathoey is someone who cross-dresses (lakka-phet), a male who likes to act and dress as a woman, or a female who likes to dress and act as a man." Biological hermaphrodites are actually extremely rare, and the vast majority of kathoey are biologically male but psychologically female. A hundred years ago they were described as phet thi sam—the third sex.

  "The concept of more than two genders," he writes, "would appear to have been inherent in Thai culture right through from ancient to modern times." The term kathoey may even be pre-Buddhist. And the cross-dresser, transgender subculture is recognized at the highest level of the Buddhist state. In the Vinaya, for example, that part of the Buddhist canon that deals with the behavior of monks, cases of monks changing sex, turning themselves in
to women, are not remarkable. McGinnis was right: Buddhists do indeed believe that one can be reborn as any of the three sexes, and that in fact one almost certainly already has been.

  More darkly, Thai Buddhism appears to believe that people become kathoey because they have sinned in a previous life. They may have sexually abused their children or deserted a woman whom they had made pregnant. However, because his state is predestined, no blame falls upon the kathoey himself. No karmic ill accrues to either him or the homosexual whom he sometimes resembles: neither state is seen as sinful. "Changing one's sex," writes the Buddhist author Bunmi, "is not sinful. But sexual misconduct is sinful." He is referring to heterosexuals.

  •

  "Have you noticed," McGinnis said as we walked up Silom, making our way through the night markets, through gangs of tourists whose faces looked as if they were exploding in slow motion, "that there is a supernatural atmosphere in the city right now, an atmosphere of cheap magic and uncanny happenings? Nothing seems quite normal. I was reading in the paper today about these mysterious tubes of silvery gelatin that keep appearing in different neighborhoods as if they were falling from the sky. Have you seen this in the papers? The Bangkok Post has entries on it almost every day, sometimes on the front page. No one knows what they are, though among schoolkids there is a wild Internet rumor that they are extraterrestrial in origin. Other people say that they are as yet unknown species of fish sucked by atmospheric conditions out of the South China Sea and deposited onto Bangkok. They find them quite frequently in working-class neighborhoods. I'm not saying that means anything, but one could suppose that those neighborhoods have a higher level of superstition. Still, many of my middle-class Thai friends are convinced there is something fishy, as it were, going on."

  "I didn't know you had middle-class friends."

  "What other kind are you allowed to have as a farang? I except bar girls. Anyway, I have also heard that these mysterious silver objects are most likely components in the cooling systems of hospital refrigerators. It is, you see, an elaborate hoax, like corn circles, designed to elicit a chain reaction among the 70 percent of the population who have no functioning brain. It's a work of art in a way. Imagine all the trouble you'd have to go to, to plant tubes of fridge gelatin all over Bangkok and then have it written up by some idiot reporter at the Bangkok Post who, if he didn't half believe it, wouldn't bother to write it up at all."

  •

  We took the Skytrain to Thong Lor and then walked all the way back down Sukhumvit. McGinnis said that it was high time we finally visited the Eden Club, which is located on Soi 7/1, and though I had no special desire to go I knew that I would be dragged there all the same—and there was a side of me, I admit, that was curious to see what this inner chamber of his imagination actually looked like. But there was time, he said, these things had to be done slowly. It was fun to walk around lasciviously relishing what one was going to do over the next twelve hours.

  "Some of us," he said as we clambered down into the heat of the street at Thong Lor, "are condemned to a life of relentless satisfaction. It's tough."

  The streets around Thong Lor seem like a series of drawers inside which different utensils are stored for specific uses. On the quieter stretches, we counted our way up or down, soi by soi. The mood became a little more introspective as we passed shuttered stores with votive jars outside them ringed with ash, bowls of water upon which lotus floated with figurines of the Girl with the Long Hair, a popular Buddhist legend. We passed Sukhumvit Shark Fins, where we often ate, with its blood -red external fans and stencils of mako sharks on the windows. And then Tulip Massage, and dusty tailors where I sometimes bought ties and cuff links, but which later struck me as being like funeral parlors with clothes suitable for the Final Day. We returned to Shark Fins and made them set up a table outside. I had a very trashy question which I had wanted to ask McGinnis all along. I wanted to know how many of these night ladies he had slept with during his interminable, irresolvable sojourn in the City of Angels. It's a vulgar question, but I was just curious. If Bangkok was a place where men could behave without strictures, how high would their promiscuity soar?

  Over swimming pieces of shark fin, he came slothfully clean.

  "Well, I don't keep a little black book with the tally. I am sure it is somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand three hundred, something like that. Please, if you can, desist from the mechanical lecture on AIDS. It seems, incidentally, that the AIDS vector is slowest among the prostitutes precisely because they are the only people who use condoms at all times, at least in Bangkok. Of course, nobody can give them credit for that. We need to demonize them as disease carriers. But it's true all the same. Ask any doctor in the city."

  There were moments when he looked very young, flexible and reedy, the dandy on the lam. The refugee whom you could never lecture about getting a job, leading a productive life. Those things are predicated on a belief in one's future, or even the future of the race or of society. But if one doesn't have any such belief, it all falls apart.

  I said, "Where are you going to die, then? Where are you going to be buried? Here?"

  "I think about it a lot. I could have myself shipped back to the village of Lower Slaughter and rot there peacefully with my ancestors. It's a thick soil, very wet, perfect for rapid decomposition. I'd have a family headstone. The vicar would stop and have a look at me from time to time. Or I could be cremated here and leave nothing behind. I'd be forgotten in about a day. Actually, a day would be a long time."

  Billions and billions of years to come, he added. Buddhism had it about right. There are more fearsome things to worry about than copulation.

  •

  At Soi 7/1, otherwise known as Soi Eden, we had a drink at a place called the Star Inn, where there was now a "Bar 24 Hours Cigar Club." The street itself was small and claustrophobic, its sooty black walls muddled with tarpaulins, sundry ladders, cracked AC units stacked up like egg boxes, rusted grilles, and ropes. In the thick heat of a hundred-degree night it was like the Black Hole of Calcutta, with girls swooning under orange parasols as they fanned themselves ineffectually, and the menu at Mike's Corner Bar offering seventy-five-baht "quiet beers" which were being gratefully guzzled by the usual ragbag collection of beady-eyed farangs. My skin crawled every time I moved, the glands gushing in overdrive, and I had trouble focusing on distant objects. Music flowed from every filthy crevice. In short, Soi Eden was my kind of place.

  We went into the Star Cigar Club and got some Cuesta-Reyes. The place was a bit dingy, but the cool air revived.

  "When we go next door," McGinnis said tipsily, and he rolled gently from side to side, "I am going to take charge, to show you the ropes. You are going to go to one of the rooms upstairs and you are going to wait there by yourself while I fix up your entertainment. It's a two-girl place, and one has to dress them with the in-house wardrobe. It's obligatory, and one is expected—if I may phrase it thus—to play all six pockets of the pool table. You can't do otherwise. You'll wait there and I'll send you a surprise."

  "Really," I said, "it's not my thing, to be honest."

  "Yes, but you are doing it for me, no? So I can show you how bloody repressed you are."

  He turned and said to a waiter, "Two Cambodian brandies, please."

  The boy flinched and stopped in mid-flight with a dainty "Arai na krap?" I noticed at once that he was kathoey, though dressed in normal monochrome waiter garb. McGinnis repeated his request. The manager came over.

  "There is no Cambodian brandy, sir."

  "Oh don't be ridiculous. I had it last time."

  "Impossible, sir."

  "All right, scorpion vodka."

  "No have, sir."

  We got some Johnnie Walker instead and began to drink in that steady, cool way that determined barflies have when they are embarked upon a plan of action. We agreed that we would leave Bangkok the next weekend to visit Farlo; and tonight we would stay on Soi Eden until we could stand it no longer. At about nine
we moved on to the Eden Club, whose narrow and rather shabby façade rose behind a black sign with gold letters. Outside sat a cohort of pretty scary-looking molls of the hardened and uncomplicated variety. No matter. McGinnis whisked us into a dark, faintly depressed bar area with a partially mirrored wall and a smattering of green stools.

  "Is Marc here?" he said to the mama-san.

  The French owner wasn't in, she replied, nor was Bruce, the manager. She handed us two plasticated menus with all the services and prices listed in a matter-of-fact way. At the very bottom it was noted that "You are here for pleasure, not to drink." The set time was ninety minutes. All "accessories" were included.

  "Accessories?" I whispered into McGinnis's ear.

  "Every girl comes with her black box."

  "A black box?"

  The mama-san smiled with treacled scarlet lips and two dozen girls formed lines for our inspection. We were the only clients, apart from a wiry, potato-white German guy in a tattersail jacket and blue canvas shoes who sat on one of the stools like a predatory insect and glared at the vertical yellow line that divided the brick bar into two halves. A corset dangled from it. All those standing to the left of the line, mama-san explained, were amenable to anal sex. The German nodded sadly. McGinnis flashed his VIP membership card and then asked her to let me take the top room, number 69. When the matter was settled, they told me to go up by myself. "Your uniforms," she said to him, "have arrived." McGinnis settled in for a drink with the German, whom he seemed to know vaguely, and I went up to room 69, past doors behind which bacchanalia of various sorts were in progress. The truth is that I have always felt ambiguous about bars, clubs, and resorts, because their contrivances seem overdone and stifling. Instead of roaming the savannah, one is inside a cage. I climbed up to number 69 with both dread and arousal, perhaps a mixture that punters here relish. Inside, the room contained the largest bed I had ever seen, two king-size affairs slammed together to form a kind of sexual football pitch. The enormous shower contained four heads, like the bathroom of a gym.