Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  And all I could do was mumble, “Sure, Mick, whatever, man. Look, I’m trying to snuggle up to this girl here, so you can sleep on the floor.”

  But that gorgeous, honey-skinned phantom, who probably couldn’t remember my name either, had her back to me and I couldn’t roll her over because she was already asleep, or faking it, and the last I thing remember is that she had her fist clenched around something and when I finally opened it up I saw that the greedy gold-digger was clutching a one-dollar coin from Canada.

  The three of us fools woke about thirty hours later to find that the women were gone and so was most of my stuff: the TV, video player, stereo, microwave, my clothes, shoes, jewelry and other appliances. Some criminals we’d turned out to be: drugged, mugged and totally outfoxed by these rice farmers’ daughters who had about six years of schooling each.

  Nearly everything I’d acquired from three years of “import export” was gone now, except for my passport and bankbook still safely stashed in the pages of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the 1924 edition with an introduction by Carl Jung), and all of my books. That was where the real riches lay anyway.

  As a Christian might reach for a Bible in a crisis situation, I reached for a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The book is less a novel than a how-to guide about surviving the depths of degradation and poverty that one man can sink to without losing his mind or his sense of humor. Tropic of Cancer is to the staid and overly mannered literature of the 1940s what the Sex Pistols were to the bombastic art rock music of the mid-70s: raw, aggressive and brutally honest.

  When Miller moved from New York to Paris with only a one-way ticket on a ship and twelve dollars to his name, he was well into his thirties and trying to start a career for himself as an author after many years of failure and rejection. I could relate to that. It looked like a game plan worth emulating and a welcome respite from the academic school of writing and researching in libraries, of dissertations and giving lectures, of applying for arts’ grants, of supporting one’s literary endeavors by working as a journalist slavishly conforming to “style guides” so they end up with no styles or voices of their own, whereas Miller did his undercover “research” in the streets, whorehouses and Bohemian bars of Paris, his “style” a series of what read like ranting and rambling diary entries about spitting in the face of art, man and God, about fucking women so they stayed fucked, and about the stupid code of macho honor that permits no backing down, whether from screwing a prostitute when Miller and his friend are too tired to perform or from attempting to cool the simmering hostilities that sparked World War I.

  Long before Jack Kerouac and the other Beats hit the road in search of kicks and books, Miller led the way in showing that as a writer you had to hunt down your characters, subject matter, and experiences, because Tropic of Cancer is also a kind of literary travelogue. As Miller observed, “The destination of journey is not only a place but a new point of view.”

  At different points in my life I reread different parts of the book that spoke to my present circumstances. In Bangkok, I had no interest in rereading any of the sex scenes that caused the book to be banned in his homeland of the United States until the 1960s. (We had been living out those scenes—and worse—on an almost nightly basis anyway.) The part I needed to find was where he lost everything in Paris and wound up a homeless bum. Instead of bitching, as many would do, Miller wrote, “I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man alive.”

  It’s a great two-liner, but it’s not intended to be glib, because he went on to explain that all he’d really lost were his illusions. He himself was still intact.

  The more I thought about it the more accurate it seemed. I hadn’t really lost anything except for my illusions either: the illusion that Mick was some kind of modern-day Jesse James and Charles Dickens character (he was a middle-class kid who thought he was special and deserved better, same as me); the illusion that there was any rebellion or romance in being a criminal (crime is just another job with more irregular hours and not nearly enough danger pay); the illusion that Bangkok is the sex capital of the world (it’s the bedroom farce capital, in my books); the illusion of “heroin chic” (a man passed out with his face in a melted ice cream cone is not a fashion statement); and, the biggest illusion of them all, just because you changed your country, your job, your name and nationality many times over it didn’t mean you’d become a different person. The old you is still waiting in the wings, thinking old thoughts, dreaming old dreams, and ready to reprise roles you thought you’d long outgrown and cast off.

  Behind me, the two of them were plotting a revenge scenario.

  Mick said, “I’ll knock those slags for six.”

  Martin said, “Now both me fists will smell like dead women.”

  Unable to express themselves with anything but violence, taunts and sex, what else could they do?

  So they went out looking for revenge while I went back to rereading Tropic of Cancer.

  That was the last time I saw either of them.

  I WAS NOT all that surprised to hear of Mick’s death in the months that followed the economic earthquake of 1997, which spread from its epicenter in Bangkok to send shockwaves all over Asia. His passing never made the local or English press in Thailand, but the word on Khaosan Road was that he had either committed suicide or been murdered. Both possibilities were plausible. In the latter case, Mick had made enemies all over Bangkok. He’d been in dozens of fights in the Thermae and the bars of Khaosan Road. And he had constantly violated every single criminal code of honor by discussing everyone else’s shady businesses.

  That was one theory: an old enemy had returned for fresh payback.

  Another theory was that, since the economic crash the crime world around Khaosan had turned info a free-for-all of gangs informing on their rivals and making power grabs, so Mick had been killed after trying to muscle in on someone else’s turf, or tried to form his own human trafficking gang.

  Those who suspected that he took his own life retold the rumor that Mick’s “suicide note” supposedly consisted of him spray-painting “FUCK THE WORLD THIS IS HELL” across the wall of his one-room apartment in big black letters. That sounded like his signature style of hateful hopelessness.

  Mohammad also agreed with the suicide theory. “He is having anger management issues for years. Mick was very unhappy with his life and lack of success.”

  I had to give some credence to his opinion, because the strangest thing about our Bangladeshi boss was that his entire story checked out. Many of the customers we imported from places like Afghanistan and exported to Japan would tell me later when I ran into them, after thanking me over and over again for helping them and their families out, said, Yes, he did have ten sisters, yes, he was the only son and a former headmaster at an exclusive boys’ school, and yes, his first name really was Mohammad.

  Via email we kept in contact for years after I left Thailand and he relocated to Malaysia, where he eventually had four children with a Malay-Muslim woman. Depending on your prejudices, he was either a pathological criminal or an astute businessman eager to comply with and cash in on market forces. After the economic crash of ’97 he changed his whole operation. “My customers are now political prisoners from repressive regimes,” he wrote in one email. “Therefore, I am sending them to Canada and other merciful nations where they apply for political asylum and refugee status.”

  Neither of us could do much mourning for our deceased partner in crime. Mohammad said, in his textbook-perfect English that always came off sounding a little robotic and insincere, “Mick was teaching me many things about football and cricket, for example, the expression ‘sticky wicket.’ It was not an idiom I had any familiarity with before encountering this sporting chap.”

  I said, “Mick rolled the most beautifully cylindrical spliffs I’ve ever smoked. One time, on the rooftop of the guesthouse, I saw him roll this five-paper joint—yes, five papers—that he called a ‘Bob Marley stealth bomber.�
�� It took us about a week to smoke that missile.”

  No, we couldn’t mourn the person he was, that miserable, racist, homophobic bastard, that violent thug giving out “Glasgow kisses” and turning men who reminded him of his older, much more successful brother into gargoyles spewing blood instead of rainwater, that nearly illiterate hard man with all his pipedreams, posters of cowboy outlaws and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

  But it was easier to mourn the person he could have become, had he not been dyslexic and so uncourageous in the face of failure: the man who coined those tell-all expressions like “phantom fucks,” who possessed such deadpan panache, “Court appearance today, Yves?” and lampooned the hypocrisy of those who love reading about criminal activities but are too afraid to commit any themselves, “Virtue is for folks who don’t have the balls to do crimes.” I liked that Mick a lot. That guy even went out of his way to comfort me on that Christmas Eve when the orgy went awry.

  In the days leading up to and after the crash of ’97, I know that there were much bigger thugs operating than him, and many worse real estate developers selling properties back and forth between themselves to inflate their prices, thereby creating a bubble economy whose balloon was pricked by greedy currency speculators. There were many more corrupt cops, military generals, thieving politicians and directors of financial institutions who absconded with billions of baht. I know that, you see, but I didn’t know any of them personally like I knew him.

  And I also know that nobody else thinks of him this way, but in his greed, stupidity, violence, amorality and obsession with being on the winning team, he was the figurehead of that era for me: a larger-than-death figure deserving of his own lengthy obituary.

  That is what I do now. After returning to the West I pursued the genre of writing that I have always found the most engaging and meaningful: obituary columns.

  As an editor for a large tabloid, I was given cart blanche to overhaul and sensationalize the obituary section. No question Henry Miller would have approved of the shock tactics. By way of an example let me share one with you. After an alcoholic garbage man who had served three different prison sentences for assaulting and battering at least eight different women passed out beside his garage in sub-zero weather and froze to death, I decided, after meeting with the paper’s lawyer, to publish a letter (read: lengthy tirade) written by one of the ex-wives he had beaten and never paid alimony to, along with a host of other legal documents and photographs of him posing with a shotgun and a severed elk’s head on the hood of his pickup truck. My headline read, “Good Riddance to Bad Garbage Man.”

  You would not believe the thousands of hate emails generated by that column. To be fair, there were just as many positive responses, mostly from women who had also been victims of domestic violence. Rightly or wrongly, these scandals sell papers and bring tens of thousands of “unique visitors” to our website every day. That’s why they pay me the big money and how I can afford to drive an Italian sports car.

  Perhaps it was all those years of consorting with criminals in Bangkok, but I have to acknowledge that even the most seemingly despicable of characters, like this wife-beater, had a better side too. His only son phoned me and broke down in tears when recalling how his father had taken him along on all his hunting, canoeing, snowmobiling and cross-country skiing trips as a boy. So the son had become a forest ranger, headed a wildlife conservation group and, after watching his old man drink himself into a floating grave, was a life-long teetotaller. In the interests of fairness, the interview with him ran in a follow up column headlined: “One Woman’s Trash, Another Son’s Treasure.”

  Honestly, I think this new series of obituary columns on the fifteenth anniversary of Mick’s death, which ties in with the anniversary of that economic debacle, will eclipse the garbage man scandal and create many more crossbones of contention to stick in the throats of our readership. I am already anticipating the hate emails. “How dare you pay homage to this criminal and drug fiend. He was a scumbag.” To which I will have to reply, “It takes more than one scumbag to start an economic crisis. In any such era, the scumbags become the defining characters, whereas the men and women of virtue and cowardice settle for writing whiny letters to the editor or waving placards around.”

  As a tabloid hack, not a man of letters or intellectual, I hope that I’m not overstepping the boundary lines of my profession when I say that this series of obituary columns that you have just read excerpts from are more than just a remembrance of one man’s past. They are also obituaries for an era when scores of elite scammers and swindlers propelled an entire nation to record-setting, double-digit economic growth; for a Bangkok boomtown gone nearly bankrupt; for a time in our lives when the most shallow subjects of he donism and serial sex with as many possible partners became profound obsessions; for a road that was the main drag of trailblazing travellers and Southeast Asia’s biggest “safe house” for criminals, before it became sanitized and turned into a glitzy strip for a new breed of young package tourists; and finally, an obituary for the dreams of millions of petty criminals like Mick gunning for the one big score that will turn their lives from little tragedies into Cinderella stories. In the end, they all have about as much of a shot at the big time of the crime world as the secretary buying lottery tickets every week has of becoming a millionaire. Is anything sadder and more commonplace than the striking-it-rich dreams of small-time crooks and office workers who believe that wealth is the cure for all their woes? Entire lives are wasted in such fruitless pursuits—deaths also deserving of obituary columns.

  Mick always wanted to do something exceptional. That was another thing we had in common. Given his mediocrity as a student, a son, a footballer, a criminal and a husband, that was not possible. But now he’s going to star in the longest-running, serialized obituary column in newspaper history.

  By cobbling together different rumors and eyewitness reports, I have finally been able to recreate Mick’s last moments, when two of the Brazilians from a rival human trafficking gang came bursting through the door of his apartment with Martin the traitor timidly bringing up the rear.

  The Brazilians waved a gun in Mick’s face. They demanded that he write out a suicide note. With his severe dyslexia how could he do that? That task fell to Martin. He spray-painted the suicide note like a graffiti tag across the wall, “FUCK THE WORLD THIS IS HELL,” and signed Mick’s name to it.

  Imagine Mick’s shame over not being able to write his own suicide note. On the long list of failures that defined his life, this would be the last word.

  But I can’t let him die like that. Not under those shameful circumstances. Not in a one-room apartment with a metal sink on the balcony under a laundry line and a rattling air-conditioner, in a building by the river surrounded by all these half-finished condos that still stand as tombstones for an era when the line between businesspeople and criminals has never been thinner, and even the small fry like him thought they’d grow to the size of sharks.

  In my books, Mick made his last stand. He went for the gun, the gun went off, he took a gut shot and slid down the wall, staring up at the portraits of Billy the Kid and Jesse James.

  It was the outlaw’s death he had always craved, and for once that smile of his was not sideswiped by a sneer, and for once that miserable, malicious prick was perfectly happy.

  I wonder what Mick would have had to say about all this?

  “Fucking hell. Don’t trust that Nancy boy with the steam off your piss.”

  (In Memory of Michael Winston Jenner, 1964-1998)

  THE PHANTOM LOVER

  For Joellen Housego

  How did Ying wind up in an abortion clinic holding the hand of a woman she didn’t even like? A woman whose legs were splayed open while a doctor in a surgeon’s mask pushed the nozzle of a hose between them.

  Benz’s nails dug into the palm of her hand as the vacuum began whirring. The vibrations ran up her fingers and into Ying’s arms, sending her gaze flying around the room like a
trapped and frightened bird, glancing off the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, the air-conditioner, the pallid walls, and the baldhead of the doctor, until her eyes alighted on the colored illustration of a female body. The body had no skin. Her eyes darted past the heart and lungs to the intestines and, for a blurry flash, the enlarged illustration of the Female Urogenital System.

  Ying blinked and blew back her long, ketchup-colored bangs. She looked at Benz. The model’s face was crumpling like a Styrofoam cup squeezed by an invisible fist. Sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, Ying looked down at the hose sticking out from the sheet covering Benz’s torso and thighs. She knew it was rude, knew it was sick, but her eyes were riveted to that rubber hose. It was like watching a rape and a murder all at once.

  Slitting her eyes, she forced herself to look at the blank wall. Gooseflesh pebbled the backs of her upper arms. Oblivious to the nails digging into her hand and the sobs beneath the hum, Ying closed her eyes and clenched her thighs together. The whirring of the machine was drilling into her skull and mining it with migraines.

  Ying should not be here. She and Benz barely knew each other. At their university Benz was the leader of the glamorous set of actresses, models and would-be beauty queens, but Ying was part of the indie rock scene. All her friends made scathing jokes about Benz every time she passed by in the hallway with her retinue of male admirers and female flatterers in tow. “She isn’t even a real beauty queen. What did she ever win? Miss Guava?” “No, Miss Durian.”