by Jim Algie
This might have been proof of Mohammad’s suspicions that there were five or six other human trafficking gangs working out of Khaosan Road and everyone was now informing on everyone else. But Mohammad said he would never snitch on any of the other gangs. Grinning that inscrutable grin of his, he said, “We can all make a nice business.”
Nice business? Through all the bullshit, the hassles, the crack-downs and Mick’s antics, Mohammad never lost his temper. He never swore, never drank alcohol, never smoked. Even when him and Mick got arrested at the airport and taken to a police station, when he called me at the guesthouse to see if another Bangladeshi friend of his was there, he was so calm that I had no clue as to the severity of the situation.
Mohammad felt no twitches of guilt because he never thought of himself as a criminal, nor as a “criminal philanthropist” either. He was a businessman providing a service. To him, evading the law did not entail any moral considerations at all. He approached it in the same spirit, with the same common sense, as a businessman looking for tax breaks and loopholes in business law that he could exploit.
As Mohammad told it, “I brokered a deal with the police. An associate brought down five thousand dollars American in Thai baht and they allowed us to leave.”
That was it? Yes, that was all he had to say on the subject. It was a financial transaction, nothing more, nothing less.
But Mick was more like me—he played it up for all the macho melodrama he could muster. Running his hands through his long curly blond ringlets of hair, gesturing with his beer and cigarette, Mick said, “Bloody hell, the coppers had us bang to rights. I thought, ‘That’s me done… done and dusted. They’ll lock us up and throw away the key, d’ya know what I mean?’ This female copper was writing up our names on those pieces of papers they’d stick in front of us for the press conference with all the photographers taking our fucking photos. Next thing we’re on the front page of the Thai tabloids and the Bangkok Post. No such thing as innocent until proven guilty in this Third World shit-hole. It’s a good job that Paki came round with the dosh or we might’ve been locked away for the next twenty years.”
Mick sparked a spliff and held it up as an offering to the portraits of the cowboy outlaws Jesse James and Billy the Kid on the hospital-green walls of his guesthouse room, like the Indian insurance scammer we knew used to do to an icon of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and hashish, who once smoked a whole mountain of it, Rajesh said. The rest of Mick’s room was tidy and barren, devoid of any clues to his personal interests and any photographic attachments to his past. It was a criminal’s room; everything he needed could be packed, flung into the backpack by the bathroom, and he could be on the run again in a few minutes.
Mick used a lighter to open another big bottle of Singha, once the world’s sourest beers and one of the only choices in Thailand back then. Before they changed the formula a few years later, it tasted like heartache, the perfect aperitif for all the desperate whore-chasers.
I sat on the other bed across from him, emboldened by the weed and beer. “Hey Mick, have you heard the rumors that Singha contains formaldehyde as a preservative? What if it contains estrogen too? Which may help to explain why you’ve been acting like such a Nancy boy and drama queen after your arrest.”
Mick brayed that donkey’s laugh of his, as I knew he would. He didn’t respond to compliments or praise. I had tried to strike up a more sentimental rapport with him on a few drunken nights and all he ever said was, “Steady on, son.” When he was too drunk he’d get angry and shout, “Don’t come the raw prawn with me.”
“How could I do that? I don’t even know what it means.”
“It means taking the piss.”
Quite beyond the usual British penchant for “winding people up,” Mick loved the abuse. He understood that. But the full extent of his self-loathing did not come out until he cut me in on a heroin score, purchased from the pool hall down the street for a thousand baht per gram, which came in a cut-off plastic straw burned shut on one end.
By that point, in less than two years we had exhausted all of Bangkok’s lurid novelties. Mick said the whores and the whoring would get better, but they never did. A couple of those bargirls were so unresponsive they made me feel like a necrophiliac. One had a sales slogan she repeated at the front door when leaving, “Thank you. Please come again,” and giggled at the pun. Another working girl had an enormous scar curling up her stomach from a botched Caesarian section. After I got up to find her bathroom in the middle of the night she tackled me and wrestled me to the floor, thinking that I was trying to fuck and flee without paying. In the morning, she wanted to take me to meet her mother so we could decide on the dowry before we got married. To escape her greedy clutches, I had to run through the slums of a shantytown and leap into a tuktuk, with her and her sister in hot pursuit.
Two other dancers we picked up from a go-go bar on Soi Cowboy and whisked off to a “short time” motel with curtains around each parking space, mirrors on the ceilings and a contraption in the corner that looked like it belonged in a gynecologist’s office. Barely had the curtains opened for the act of lust and she was already moaning, “Ohhh, Mick… Mick,” turning a potentially erotic production into a bedroom farce. I had to stop and explain to her, half in Thai and half in English, smiling all the while so she wouldn’t lose face, that if we were going to try and pretend we were lovers and actually liked each other we should at least try to remember each other’s names. She found that funny, but once we started laughing we couldn’t get back in the sex groove again, so, for the remaining hour she serenaded me with treacly pop songs and taught me dirty words in Thai, laughing hysterically each time I mangled the correct tones. I liked Watermelon. She was sweet and pretty and good fun. Already a widow and the mother of a young daughter nicknamed “Duck,” at the age of twenty-one she was much more mature than either Mick or me, who were a decade older. But even though we saw each other on and off for a few years, the differences in our cultures, educations, personal histories, and languages were so vast that nothing as puny as an erection, or as flimsy as a few banknotes, could ever bridge them for long.
From time to time, I would see older foreign men sitting with younger Thai women (obviously bargirls: the makeup, clothes, pidgin English and the volume at which they spoke, like everywhere was a bar, gave them away) sitting together in a restaurant, not talking, picking at their food, both of them looking miserable. I’ve been there. And it’s lonelier being with someone you can’t talk to than it is being alone.
Mick coined the best expression for sleeping with bargirls that I ever heard. He called them “phantom fucks.” “The next morning you wake up with a stonkin’ hangover and think, who was that bird? Was it Noi or Nok or Nit? Or was there anybody here at all last night? Maybe I just had a wank and fantasized about her. Phantom fucks. That’s all they are is phantom fucks.”
We were sick of Bangkok, too, a cultural Sahara with nothing but commercial schlock for movies and concerts. At that point in the early nineties, thanks to double-digit economic growth, there was something like five hundred new cars and a thousand new motorcycles driving onto the streets every day. Trying to go anywhere in a taxi took hours. On every third or fourth street was another construction site for new condos, malls and office monoliths. Around the clock, jackhammers bit into the concrete, steel girders clanged, drills whined and dust devils drifted up noses and down throats, making Bangkok into the world’s most polluted megalopolis, as it slowly became what Sulak Sivarasak, the country’s most caustic social critic, called “a fourth-rate Western city.” But the shiny new surfaces and familiar facades of convenience stores and fast food franchises could not hide the lack of basic amenities like a subway system and proper telephone lines. Mick and I would try booth after booth to call Mohammad for work; either the coins would drop straight through or the machine would swallow them. Even if we found a working telephone those glass booths were like microwave ovens in the tropical heat, so we’d keep the door open, but th
en the traffic was so loud we couldn’t hear what Mohammad was saying. Every conversation became a shouting match and after a few minutes the phone line in his apartment would click off and we’d have to call the operator again who couldn’t be bothered to answer half the time.
The heat, the noise, the dirt, the traffic, and the communication breakdowns all became unbearable. Mick said, “Bangkok is hell on earth.”
Since we had no money to escape to the beach we retreated to his room for a chemical vacation, where we each had a bed to nod out on after snorting lines of heroin or smoking it—“chasing the dragon”—from strips of tinfoil. “Hard drugs for hardened criminals,” said Mick.
But heroin is not hard. It’s soft. It’s the softest drug in the world and the closest you can come to returning to your mother’s womb, floating in those warm tropical waters with never a worry and nary a doubt intruding. We might have been sprawled out on a dirty mattress with the occasional cockroach running over our faces, but it still felt like a lagoon in the Garden of Eden. Scratching my balls and itchy nose had never been so pleasurable. This was better sex than I ever had with bargirls. The drug was warming my blood, massaging my brain, stroking my neck and caressing my shoulders like the most loving of masseuses.
Sometimes we’d have to throw up, but that was no big ordeal either. Any drug that can turn vomiting into a pleasant experience is one you should be very wary of.
Heroin, Mick said, was the only painkiller strong enough to kill his pain, but his anguish came from a much different place than I had ever imagined. In my books he was a kind of modern-day Charles Dickens character, one of those witty street urchins and orphans in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Mick encouraged people to think that. He led us on, dropping all sorts of hard-luck fairytales about “sleeping rough on the streets of Manchester since I were a lad.”
Mick had dammed up so many of his feelings and so much of his past behind this hard-man façade that once the dyke was washed away by the flow of opiates coursing through his bloodstream, the confessions came pouring out one after the other. Far from the guttersnipe he had pretended to be, Michael Winston Jenner came from a middle-class family of white-collar workers. His father was a senior clerk for British Rail, his mother was a housewife, and his older brother owned a string of dry-cleaning shops.
Had it not been for a severe case of dyslexia, Mick would have followed his father or brother’s example and resigned himself to living his entire life in a ten-kilometer radius. “I couldn’t read at all when I was a lad, and I could barely write me own name, but I didn’t have the bottle to admit it. So I larked about, played the class clown and refused to do any homework. I was rubbish at maths too. The teachers and other kids called me ‘thick’ and ‘daft as a brush.’ So I left school when I was twelve and knocked about with a tough lot, sold weed, nicked motorcycles, shoplifted—a right scallywag I was.”
I could only listen to Mick’s confessions for so long before I’d have to snort another line and sink back into the womb again, basking in the most beautiful memories that I could not recall ever remembering before. James Strate and I were playing ice hockey on the outdoor rink in our neighborhood. I could see the sun glinting off his skates, hear the slap shots in the crisp air and the puck rebounding off the boards, feel the winter wind numbing and then warming my nose, smell the cups of hot chocolate in the dressing room. Heroin catalyzed a 3-D movie version of my favorite memories, all in Technicolor and surround sound.
When I resurfaced, usually because a cigarette had burned down and singed my fingers, Mick was still doing an inventory of his failures. “I wanted to be a professional footballer, but I didn’t have the talent for that either… another crushing defeat.”
Brought up in a staunchly Catholic home, this was his form of confession. Not that he expected me to play the priest. Not that he cared about my opinion or craved my forgiveness. For all he knew, I was on the nod and couldn’t hear anything he was saying.
On and on he went, only pausing to light another cigarette or drink some more cola. “Got married to a lovely lass from Scotland for two years. Swear to God, I loved her to death I did. But at the end of the day we had a big bust up. Dunno why really. I couldn’t give her all the attention and security she wanted and Mary Lou thought my life of crime was out of order, well out of order. Can’t say I blame her. Who’d want to stay married to a fuck up like me? By then, the only things I could do was fight, steal and sell drugs. How many failures can one sad bastard have before he gives up hope?”
Now that I understood his estrangement from the world a little better, and the deep-rooted sense of failure that drove him, I felt a kind of brotherly love for my partner in crime, because we did have a few failings in common after all. Even if I had the power of speech to tell him that it would have been of no use. He’d only say, “Steady on, son,” again. Mick was well past the point when a few kind words from a family member, wife or friend would make any difference. Only he could forgive himself for not living up to his family’s and his own expectations.
Mick propped himself up on one elbow and scratched his nose in slow motion. His voice was as thick as honey, “When I make the big score and finally get enough dosh to buy a real business, then I’ll leave the crime world, get back in touch with my family and prove to them once and for all that I’m not a daft bugger. But when will that be? Fifteen years of petty crime and bollocks and no pot of gold in sight. If I don’t get the big score, I won’t settle for second best, d’ya know what I mean? Fuck that. I’ll go down with both guns blazing like Jesse James.”
He tried to smile, but it was sideswiped by that sad sneer of his. I only made a couple of confessions of my own when Mick had entered the land of nod, a waking dream state of memories and fantasies as real as movies. “One of the first things I can remember is my father getting drunk and taking a bullwhip to my brother and I, but…” I got choked up and couldn’t continue.
Later I started in on another one. “Sometimes I believe what’s written in the Bible, ‘I am infinite. I contain multitudes.’ At other times, I just feel like I’m nothing and no one, a blank, a cipher, a nullity, a non-entity with no real skills or redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
Mick hadn’t moved. He didn’t hear a word. That was fortunate. When I looked at him a little more closely I saw that he’d passed out with his face in an ice cream cone, which had melted and was now smeared all over his cheeks and lips.
True to that vision in the cracked and fogged mirror in the Thermae, with his long curly blond ringlets of hair and pretty-boy features, Mick looked like Cinderella gone to pot and smack.
Nancy and Cinderella. What a sad couple of wastrels and would-be gangsters we’d turned out to be.
This wasn’t the “blaze of glory” Mick had promised. It was more like a puddle of artificially sweetened misery.
TO CELEBRATE MY move from Khaosan Road into a proper apartment, outfitted with all the high-tech trimmings and designer attire of my ill-gotten gains, I threw a Christmas party for 1996, except I hadn’t factored in that Mick and Martin would bring three different bargirls each, nor had I considered the possibility that all eight of them had been up smoking meth for the past three days, nor that Mick insisted my “Christmas prezzie” was getting a blowjob in the bathroom from one of the go-go girls while the rest of them helped themselves to my opium stash.
And I had definitely not anticipated the possibility that the girls, high on meth and opium, would start stripping their clothes off and screaming along to the new Thai pop hit by Miss Moddy that translated into English as something like “Throw Him to the Dogs” and use that as the soundtrack for a six-woman lesbian sex show in my living room. Nor had I ever imagined I would turn to the two Brits, who both had the collars of their polo shirts rolled up, and say, “I think this is gonna be the best Christmas ever, lads,” and they would be too high and wide-eyed with boyish lust at this wet dream come true to do anything except grin.
But the euphoria did no
t last long before the paranoia set in. Completely naked now, the women were screaming too much as they paired off in a lewd pantomime of male-female copulating—“Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Ohhhhhhh…”—and the music was way too loud too. The neighbors were going to call the cops and the cops would break down the door to find all these beautiful, stoned women eating each other’s pussies and they’d spot that brick of opium a friend had brought me back from Vientiane. Then they’d see that I’d made an opium den on my balcony—and what sort of retarded idea was that anyway?
Before long one of the women had fallen into the balcony window, smashed it, and blood was gushing out of a gash in her leg. She was sobbing, Martin was yelling at her, “Leave it out, love,” Mick was yelling at him, “Don’t throw a wobbly at her. It’s not her fault she’s hurt, you fucking cunt,” and two of the women started bickering about who knew what, and the other girl kept sobbing and the blood kept gushing even though her friends were trying to wrap toilet paper and then a towel around her leg, and I turned off the music and started screaming at everyone to shut up, but they were too high to care and Mick kept braying like a donkey and laughing at me, “Oi! Look at Nancy givin’ it all this,” and another surge of paranoia sent me scuttling off to get the brick of opium, but no way could I ever flush that down the toilet, so I tried to hack it into pieces with a meat cleaver but it was too hard and my coordination was too skewed and Mick kept braying and Noi or Nit or Nok or whoever kept sobbing and Martin was singing along tunelessly to a Celtic jig by The Pogues after I’d told the prick not to put any more music on, when the room started spinning like helicopter blades and I barely made it to the toilet before my stomach turned into a live volcano, spewing up all the toxic excesses from a few misspent years on Khaosan Road: of bad drugs and sour beers and sordid sex and ugly camaraderie with these ignorant hooligans.
And when I’d finally cleaned myself up a bit and brushed my teeth five times to get that acrid taste of puke out of the back of my throat, I found that the orgy was already over, even though it was not yet 10 p.m., and almost everyone had passed out, save for one of the young women, dressed now in just her red bra and panties, who gave me some sleeping pills and invited me to lay down beside her, but Mick was on the bed too, almost invisible in the darkness and he put his hand on my shoulder in a brotherly way and said in a near whisper, “You’re not nothing and no one. You’re a diamond geezer, a top bloke, one of the best blokes I ever met.” Unbelievably, he’d actually listened to my confessions, as I’d listened to his, during that week we spent doing smack in his room.
