Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  Mohammad saved his parting shot for when Martin was in the bathroom. “Be very careful, my friends, and watch your backs. I hear there are now four or five other gangs like ours operating around Khaosan Road. Business is going to get cutthroat.”

  Mick, for once, did not argue. “That’s us in trouble with the customs and immigration blokes, ‘cause everyone will snitch on everyone else. That’s how the big drug traffickers do it. They’ll send seven or eight mules through on one night, grass up one of the sad bastards so customs is distracted, and the rest get through no worries. Those lazy sods in customs and immigrations couldn’t catch a cold unless someone sneezed on ‘em. You know what it says in the papers, lads, ‘Police, acting on a tip-off, arrested such a body…’”

  I was incredulous. “You mean, the drug gangs turn in their own people?”

  “Absolutely.” Mick pointed his thumb at Mohammad and sneered. “This dodgy cunt will dob us in first chance he gets.”

  Mohammad, smiling that Teflon smile, looked at Mick, as a Thai vendor riding a bicycle with a rack of dried squid on the back pedalled past. “What if Yves snitches on both of us?”

  They clinked glasses. Mick said, “Fair comment. We dunno nothin’ about this arsehole, not even his real name.”

  It was stupid to think that I could hide behind an alias for very long in this little underworld where you could buy or rent almost anything except trust. Neither of these guys could be trusted and they didn’t trust me either. Worst of all, I wasn’t sure if I could even trust my own judgements anymore.

  THERE WERE ONLY so many action movies we could watch and only so many American hits from the sixties and seventies we could listen to—“Hotel California” by The Eagles had become my most hated song—before we reached the end of Khaosan Road’s limited night-life options and headed for our late night hangout, the Thermae coffee shop and bar on Sukhuvmit Road, a last chance saloon for the dregs of foreign drunks and a meeting point for whoremongers, go-go dancers soliciting business after the other bars closed, free-lance hookers and ladyboys (some of the older ones looked like Dr. Frankenstein had been their surgeon). The entrance was in the back, down a concrete tunnel that led past a bathroom where the ladyboys would try to grab the dicks, or pick the pockets, of the men using the urinals. Even that was not the ugliest part of entering the place.

  The ugliest part was a big splintered mirror on the wall, half clouded with cigarette smoke, that threw back the most warped and distorted images of everyone who walked in there. Literally and metaphorically, your worst half walked into this pickup joint and, after you left, this image of yourself—cracked, crooked, fogged and faded— followed you out into the daybreak, where the last embarrassment of the night came on the taxi ride home, watching the barefooted, bald-headed monks in their orange robes out collecting alms on the streets, leaving me to wonder if this was my karmic punishment for daring James Strate to spit on that church door back in Grade 5.

  If there’s a bar-cum-bordello in hell, it must be a dead-ringer for the old Thermae: always packed after the other bars closed, always noisy, smoky, and full of drunken whores cackling like witches and men giving them cockeyed leers and spitting out jibes the sex workers could not understand. “She’s gagging for some good English sausage.”

  On that night, we had just lined up at the bar and I was remembering what Mohammad had said about the other human trafficking gangs moving in on our turf, when I saw Mick wheel around, grab another guy by the hair and smash his forehead into his nose, which snapped with a twig-like crack. Blood spouted from his nostrils like rain from a gargoyle’s mouth and his face was twisted in the same grotesque grimace.

  Immediately, five of his other friends converged on Mick, who smeared the blood on his hands all over his face like it was tribal war paint. “Any of youse other cunts want some. I’ll have all of you lot.” Mick hunkered down in a boxer’s pose, feinting this way and that, jabbing the air, throwing rights and uppercuts.

  For the first time I considered the possibility that Mick was not only psychotic, he was certifiably insane. I think the other guy’s friends came to the same conclusion, because they backed off and carried their mate to the bathroom.

  Like all the hooligans and rednecks fond of fisticuffs, Mick wanted to hang out and bask in his victory. He wanted all the other blokes and birds in there to have a good look at the victor as he sipped his beer, still wearing the other man’s blood on his face and hands. Except that half the guys shooting glances in our direction looked like they were trying to remember our faces so they could administer a future beating.

  Finally leaving the bar two beers later, I saw Mick pass by that funhouse mirror which did not reveal your exterior, but functioned in the same way as those hideous portraits by Frances Bacon that turn people inside out so their neuroses and insecurities warp their features. In that psychological mirror, Mick, with his long blond ring-lets of hair and face smudged with blood that could have been makeup, was Cinderella when she turned back into a scullery maid after midnight. I’d never seen him in that light before: girlish in his vanity and deluded in his pursuit of fairytale riches as a petty criminal.

  In the back of a tuk-tuk rigged with turn signals and flashing disco lights just above our heads, Mick and the driver worked out that they were both Manchester United supporters. So he began teaching the elfin, constantly grinning driver football chants.

  How did he do it? Inflict such savage violence, and then, not twenty minutes later, while weaving in and out of traffic on Sukhumvit Road in what was little more than a glorified golf cart, began shouting in unison with the driver, “TITS, FANNY AND UNITED! TITS, FANNY AND UNITED!”

  I THOUGHT IT WAS finally time to tell Mohammad that if Mick continued playing the psychotic Cinderella, throwing temper tantrums and drawing attention to himself, he was going to get us all killed or arrested. But the ringleader had either gotten busted or gone underground, because he’d disappeared.

  Left to our own vices, Mick and I slept through the sweltering days of the hot season, when the streets were like skillets and the mercury nudged the 40 degree Celsius mark. Up all night, we smoked weed, drank beer and chatted on the roof of the Ploy Guest-house, which had the best panoramas of Bangkok’s most historic district. Both the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, with its fanciful pagodas, and the Golden Mount, with its gilded tower supposedly enshrining a hair of the Buddha, were illuminated until 10 p.m. On a clear night you could see all the way across the river to a neon sign for a massage parlour. It was too far away to make out the flashing pattern on the sign, but Mick said, “It’s an enormous fanny opening and closing to lure in punters like insects to a Venus flytrap.”

  The extravagance of Mick’s similes suggested an education that contradicted his own claims. “I’ve been a guttersnipe and a wide boy, sleeping rough on the streets of Mani since I were a lad.” Whereas Martin spoke slowly and wrestled with his words, Mick was quick-witted. Whenever he saw me dressed up in a shirt and tie, ready to do another airport run, he’d remark in that dry way only the English can pull off with such deadpan panache. “Court appearance today, Yves?” If he saw me sitting in the guesthouse restaurant looking at the classified section of the Bangkok Post, he’d always make a quip about our lack of employability; he loved cutting me down to his size in that class-conscious way the British have of not letting you get too big for your boots. “Why don’t you put this on your CV, mate? From ’93 to ’95 I worked as junior Paki smuggler at Dodgy Mohammad’s Emporium of Illegal Migrant Laborers.”

  I had to laugh. Dodgy Mohammad’s Emporium of Illegal Migrant Laborers? Mick was smarter than he let on, which also made him more dangerous. He would not have been the first expat to embroider his past with all sorts of colorful and fictional yarns. Either that or Manchester produces some of the wittiest and most eloquent football hooligans in the world.

  Because of the view and the open-air roof, the guesthouse had become a favorite vantage point for potheads who congregated ther
e every night after dark. Many of them were regulars, who would go up north and do some trekking before coming back to the Ploy, head off to Angkor Wat and Vietnam for a few weeks, then come back to the Ploy for a couple of nights, before catching buses from Khaosan Road to hop ferries bound for the tropical islands in the Gulf of Thailand. The rooftop soirees attracted an odd bunch of travellers, from real adventurers to crooks, conmen and the backpackers who only go to places recommended by Lonely Planet. The most memorable included Kenji, who had just returned from Peru, where he had built his own dugout canoe and sailed it down the Amazon, staying overnight in villages with tribesmen who still hunted with blowpipes and poison darts. Rather than going back to Japan and working twelve-hour days as a “salary man” he had decided to become a travel photographer. Valerie, a widowed, childless bank clerk from Toronto had spent six months meditating in an Indian ashram before deciding that her real vocation was teaching Thai children at Saint Gabriel’s Christian School on the nearby Samsen Road. Dave, a chainsaw logger from rural Oregon, had brought his sixteen-year-old son with him to Bangkok. Together they would go out drinking and whoring almost every night, until it became apparent that the father had to pay for sex, but the cute blond son was getting freebies. They stayed in the room beside mine for a few months. Because the walls were made of thin plywood with a screen at the top, it was like having roommates. Every night the father would lock the son in their room and the son would call out, “Hey dad, can I come to Patpong too?” “Nope, ‘cause ya don’t know how to spot a ladyboy and ya don’t know how to wear a dick wrapper.”

  On the roof, Mick always sat on the edge of the conservational circles as potheads passed joints around and spent long minutes staring slack-jawed at the magical spires of gold and orange. This was Mick’s preferred position. In taxis and tuk-tuks he would sit on the opposite side, as far away as possible, and never make eye contact when we spoke. Contrary to his “hard man” image, here was a guy so fearful of friendships and relationships that he had banished himself to the margins of criminal society and the outskirts of every social circle. Why? That was what I had to find out.

  When it was just the two of us up there sharing a smoke and sitting on opposite ends of a mat, and he was more stoned than drunk and thus in a more reflective mood than normal, with a little prompting Mick would talk more about his past.

  I kept passing him fresh spliffs and a lighter. Polite to a fault (I also found that strange), he’d always say, “Cheers, nice one,” before sparking it up. After he’d had a good lungful and was staring up at the black velvet sky studded with stars, as if seeing them for the first time, through eyes polished from the inside with potent Thai weed, I would start shooting questions at him. “So why did you choose crime for a career anyway? It’s not the easiest way to make a living.”

  “You’re a right nosy git, you are.” He exhaled a vapour trail of pungent smoke. “Dunno really. Bit of a lark, innit? See what you can get away with.” He must have had the same proudly sneaky look on his face when he was seven and stealing a few pennies from his mother’s purse, or putting a tack on another student’s seat for him to sit on, or whatever it is that British kids do to assert their individuality by first rebelling against their parents and teachers.

  “But Mick, haven’t you heard? Virtue is its own reward.”

  “Bollocks. Virtue is for folks who don’t have the balls to do crimes.”

  I laughed and laughed and Mick joined in too. It was one of the best things about smoking weed: those spontaneous fits of laughter that burned away the residue of adult bitterness and brought us back to a state of childlike glee and wonderment once again.

  “So why did you head-butt that guy in the Thermae?”

  He looked back at me with the moon still glinting in his eyes. “I get claustrophobia in bars that are chock-a-block, and I don’t like people getting too close to me, d’ya know what I mean? That bloke, I reckon he was queer, rubbed against me a few times and touched me ‘air. I don’t like blokes touchin’ me. So I nutted him, didn’t I? Gave him a ‘Glasgow kiss’. That’ll learn ‘im.” Mick was too much of a miserable prick to possess a real laugh or a smile. His “laugh” (if you could call it that) sounded like a donkey’s bray and his attempts at a grin were always sideswiped by a sad sneer.

  In between binges and waiting for Mohammad to reappear, Mick and Martin had started a sideline career, running Thai women to Japan by pretending to be their boyfriends and claiming they were going on holiday together. Most of the women had been promised lucrative jobs in restaurants and hotels only to find out later, after their passports had been taken from them, that they’d been sold into sex slavery by some shady Thais in cahoots with the Yakuza. They would be forced to sleep with eight or ten men a day for months and months until their huge debt was paid off. The word on Khaosan Road from a couple of the Japanese drug traffickers we knew was that one of these women would turn up dead almost every day, her body left on the doorstep of the Thai embassy in Tokyo.

  Mick asked me if I wanted to do some runs. Though I certainly needed the money, I already had enough black marks on my conscience. What we were doing, my conscience had decided, was not crime; it was a kind of philanthropy. We were helping all these men, many of whom were dentists, engineers and professors in their homelands, making a few hundred dollars a month, to sneak into Japan where they could earn thousands of bucks per months as factory workers and send much of it home to their families in Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

  “Criminal philanthropy” is what I called it.

  Mick didn’t buy it. “Fucking hell, what are you on about? With your gift for spinning lines of shite, you should be writing adverts or speeches for politicians.”

  He was too hyperactive to hang around the roof of the guest-house getting high and laying low every night. Just as he had educated me in the periodic table of criminal elements operating in and around Khaosan Road, he wanted to show me the city’s underbelly. It was all part of his bid to get me on his side so he could take over Mohammad’s role. “Between you and me and the gatepost, as it were, it’d be a good job if I was the ringleader. I could do what that Paki does.”

  I did not point out the obvious—that Mick had no contact network set up to get customers—because my loyalties did not lay with either of them.

  Mick preferred the darker and sleazier bars. So Kangaroo, an upstairs club near the Surawongse side of Patpong 1, was his favorite den of promiscuity. The main bar was lit only by red light as dark as menstrual blood. Within thirty seconds of sitting down we were surrounded by a gaggle of four bargirls, offering us beer, sex, marijuana and blowjobs. It was such a hard and fast sell that I was tongue-tied, but Mick was pretty much fluent in Thai by then, so he took the lead, ordering us a couple of beers and a pack of pre-rolled joints that came in a Marlboro package. The one with the weed said her name was Noi. She offered to shake my hand but when I proffered mine she pulled hers away, ran it through her hair and laughed. This was a joke that James Strate and I used to play on each other when we were eight or nine. Another woman, all smiles and wind-chime giggles, sat on Mick’s lap. She also shook my hand, asked for my name and said, “Nice to meet you.” This was not the neon Babylon and the so-called “sex capital of the world” I had been expecting from a thousand tabloid tales. Thanks to the women’s cheerful, typically Thai demeanor it all seemed, for a while anyway, deceptively innocent.

  Mick wanted to smoke a spliff, so we had to sit near the front window overlooking the night bazaar. Through the open window drifted the sound of touts outside the bars chatting up the passing tourists, “Take a look, sir, no cover charge,” while holding up signs for X-rated shows involving ping-pong balls, razorblades, darts and cigarettes. In front of the go-go bars, the girls kept up their patter, “Hello, welcome. Come inside,” while the vendors clustered around the stalls running down the middle of the street kept pimping their fake Levis, fake Polo shirts, fake Rolex watches.

  On Patpong, al
most everything is fake and almost all the women for rent, most obviously the go-go dancers wearing plastic numbers like price tags, who come off looking like a cross between mannequins in a department store window and factory workers in bikinis as excited by the prospect of sex as by stitching another seam in a garment.

  Patpong, and its twisted sister Nana Plaza, is a department store, a sweatshop and a freak show of sex, so crass, kitsch, phoney and obscenely compelling that when Mick said he preferred the bar where the girls swam around in a tank wearing mermaid fins, or dressed up in Supergirl costumes to descend from the ceiling of a club on the back of a motorcycle while screwing each other with a strap-on dildo to the triumphant strains of “We Are the Champions” by Queen, I thought he had to be joking—“taking the piss” as it were, in British fashion—but no, this was Patpong, where the ludicrous is a nightly reality show. “It’s brilliant, Yves. This bird comes round with a bottle of tequila in a cowboy holster and you can lick the salt off her tit before taking a shot.”

  Patpong might have been an uproarious, X-rated sideshow if it wasn’t for the presence of all these lonely, desperate men like us out hunting for some love, affection and understanding that we would never find there. As it stood then, and still stands today, all the desperation in the air, both financial and psychosexual, combined with all the pheromones and cheap perfume floating around, have formed an invisible cloud that settles on everything like radiation from a nuclear fallout, making beer taste more bitter and cigarette smoke smell more acrid than usual. It’s a hypnotic, toxic cloud that fogs your eyes, dulls your senses, contaminates your memories and turns them into lies: You know, I think number 47 from Super Pussy actually likes me.

  In the dark back corner of Kangaroo, Mick sparked up the spliff and took a hit. What was he doing? This reeked of a setup, the girls in cahoots with the cops. I kept asking him, “Are you sure this is okay?” and he kept answering, “Safe as houses, mate.” In spite of his reassurances, I kept checking the shadows by the dark red bar in case they morphed into policemen.