Jim Algie

by Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime, Sex,and Black Magic

  Much of the Western’s appeal is the scenery: mountains, forests, rivers, deserts and wide-open plains. The grounds of the resort, complete with a small stream and an orgy of tropical botany, rope in city slickers, even though most of the Thais prefer riding around on mountain bikes rather than horses. “They call me and ask if I have horses, but they don’t want to ride, only look and take photos,” Yuttana laughed.

  We were supposed to go trail riding the next morning with Yuttana, but Shooter and I were hungover to the point where we already had horses galloping through our heads. Considering what Ping Pong had told us about how she’d stopped riding horses after getting bucked off four or five times, the three of us settled for the easier and more popular option of having a ranch hand walk us around on horseback while Jason took photos.

  At Pensuk Great Western, most visitors prefer shooting photos to blowing off guns; the main afternoon action in High Hill consists of photo sessions among families and friends. The buildings are used as backdrops. One Asian visitor I overheard compared it to Universal Studios in Hollywood. Nobody at the resort seemed to mind if we borrowed some cowboy hats and toy guns from the souvenir shop to stage our own photo shoot. Going down in a blaze of glory after a showdown at high noon was the usual finale to our childhood games, but as with everything at the resort, there was a weird twist—now it wasn’t some lawman or desperado pretending to plug me full of hot lead, it was my girlfriend, foreshadowing darker chapters yet to be written.

  COWBOYS VERSUS INDIANS

  It didn’t dawn on me until around dusk, as Shooter and I were moseying along the main drag of the resort’s Dodge City section, toy Winchester rifles in one hand and beers in the other, that the anniversary of 9/11 was looming. On a restaurant TV, a news programme showed a retrospective collage of clips from ground zero, as well as sound-bytes from George W. Bush. In reference to Osama Bin Laden and the other members of Al-Qaeda holed up in Afghanistan, he drawled, “We’re gonna smoke ‘em outta their holes.” Talking about John Howard, the then-prime minister of Australia, Bush added, “He’s my deputy sheriff in Asia.”

  Thankfully, nobody at Pensuk Great Western takes the old cowboy rhetoric that seriously. In fact, the big theme show held every Saturday night is full of the ludicrous slapstick seen on Thai TV programmes, so it’s easily understood by non-Thai speakers.

  The show takes place outside the restaurant. Tables are set up in front of the stage, where a live band in cowboy costumes plays everything from the Beatles and Elvis to Hank Williams and Creedence Clearwater Revival during the dinner buffet. Off to the left is a row of miniature chuck-wagons used for their original purpose: serving up grub. Mostly it’s Thai food, although they also roast a pig on a spit every Saturday night.

  As you’d expect, the show boasts some gunplay (with blanks, of course), some fisticuffs and horsing around. But as you may not expect, the Indians are central characters with actual speaking parts. The show begins with some drunken Thai cowboys staggering around with beer bottles. They kidnap a lovely Indian princess and threaten to sell her into slavery. It’s a far battle cry from the old Westerns, where the natives were usually portrayed as whooping savages, forever scalping decent Christian folks with tomahawks, and setting their wagons on fire with flaming arrows. (Many of the derogatory names for Native Canadians and Americans like ‘wagon burners’ that we heard as kids came from those movies.)

  But the resort does a much more adroit balancing act in its portrayal of frontier America’s two great enemies. Inside the old wooden building near the paddock, for instance, are photos of celebrated Indian warriors like Kicking Bird and Two Hatchet from the Kiowa tribe, along with brief descriptions of the famous battles they fought against the US cavalry. Yet another sign in the big barn of a restaurant lists a few Native American beliefs such as ‘Remain close to the great spirit’, and ‘Show great respect for your fellow beings’.

  In truth, the Indian iconography at the resort are as plentiful as all the cowboy motifs. And the most colourful and popular accommodations are the elaborately decorated teepees, with TVs and en-suite bathrooms, which sit in a concrete circle surrounded by gaudy totem poles.

  During the show’s centrepiece, an Indian chief rides in on the front of a train engine to save one of his warriors from being hanged by the cowboys. Accompanied by the owner’s young daughter, Shania (who is named after the Canadian country starlet, Shania Twain), the chief walks through the crowd so people can take his photo, jumps on-stage, grabs the microphone and berates the trench coat-wearing cowboys, as if he were a professional wrestler. This was then followed by some corny jokes in English about the ‘three hows’, like “How are you?”

  Then it hit me: the show is a cleverly constructed satire about how the Wild West was tamed, how the cowboys in trench coats are stand-ins for criminal elements, and how the Indians lost their traditions. When you can come up with egghead interpretations like this, you ain’t never gonna be no real cowpoke.

  The Asians in the audience all warm to the communal rituals, like at the end of the show when everybody gets to carry a lit torch around in a circle, while the band plays the Hank Williams tune about a wooden, cigar-store Indian named ‘Kawliga’. Later on, there’s line dancing. And you thought square-dancing was goofy? For such tough guys and gals, country ‘n’ western fans sure listen to some sappy songs and do some flatfooted dances.

  The rowdiest folks at the resort this weekend turned out to be our Thai neighbours across the street in the ‘bank’. Employees of an insurance firm in Bangkok on a team-building trip, they were only too willing to share their big bottle of whiskey with a couple of pseudo cowboys from the West. At this point in the evening’s guzzling, no one was too coherent except their boss, who kept insisting in between guffaws, that “Johnnie Walker is our most important world leader. He makes everybody friendly. Stop war and drink whiskey!” Because he was the boss, nobody dared to interrupt him.

  One of the other men in their group said it wasn’t a real cowboy town because there was no brothel or all-night saloon. Which is true: the bar closes by midnight and a lot of the guests are families who stay in log cabins named after Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

  The weekend hadn’t quite worked out the way we’d fantasised—the trail riding had turned into cantering; Shooter and I had been spooked by an insect; we’d both been shot down by our girlfriends (in more ways than one); and neither of us could have hit a barn with a blunderbuss on the shooting range. But in spite of the drawbacks and misfires, we’d still gotten to relive our childhoods by playing costume-party cowboys, staying in a real live ghost town and tying on the feedbag from some chuck-wagons while watching a surreal cowboys and Indians show.

  By 1am, I was the last man staggering around High Hill and Dodge City. Even my sidekick and our partners were getting some shuteye. But that’s the way it was in the darker Westerns and the rustlers and ranchers novels of Cormac McCarthy like All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. The anti-heroes never got the girl, never got rich, never even found a place to call home. Nope. They kept drifting like tumbleweeds, always ending up very much alone. And that’s what keeps the old cowboy tales from being put out to pasture for good, because sometimes every wanderer on every continent can relate to that.

  THE SEX FILES

  The Black Sex Magician of the Body Politic

  Back in September 1995, headlines on the front page of The Nation in Bangkok cast a spell over readers: ‘Novice Faces Action After Bizarre Baby-Burning Rite’; ‘Defrocked Novice Vows To Carry On With Black Magic’.

  The man in question was a Buddhist monk known as Nen (a novice monk) Aer, and this black-magic ritual made him Thailand’s most notorious practitioner of the occult. For the right price, he dispensed curses, sex charms and blessings for the hoi polloi and the elite.

  An orphan who grew up in a temple in Saraburi province, Nen Aer first became a household curse after an article appeared shortly before that—complete with gruesome photos—in the Tha
i weekly magazine Cheewit Tong Su (‘Life’s A Fight’), which showed him performing a series of rituals to grill and preserve a stillborn baby in order to transform it into a magical charm. He admitted to purchasing the baby from a mother for 100,000 baht, not long after the infant had passed away.

  According to the magazine, Nen Aer (whose real name is Harn Raksajit) had preserved the corpse in a special potion of chemicals and ‘holy water’. Afterwards, he and several other monks recited incantations over the dead baby for nine days at Wat Nong Rakam, a temple in Saraburi province. Then they collected the ‘drippings’ from the corpse to concoct love potions and produce a powerful ‘baby ghost’.

  None of these rituals had anything to do with Buddhism, which is why he was defrocked even though he denied that it was the clergy who made him give up his robes. Thirty-five years old at the time of his first arrest, the self-proclaimed sorcerer, whose body and face are covered with magical tattoos, told The Nation, “It was my own decision to be defrocked for the sake of Buddhism. Nobody forced me. My practice has tarnished Buddhism and I would like other monks and novices who follow such practises to be defrocked, too.” But at the same time, he vowed to continue “performing occult rituals to the best of my ability”.

  Later in 1995, when I was still working at The Nation, a Thai colleague informed me that Nen Aer was in the building for a press conference. We walked over to take a look. He was dressed up like an American gangster (or a jazz musician) from the 1940s, in a black suit, fedora and shades. During the press conference, he compared himself to Khun Paen, one of the two friends and main characters in the fabled Siamese folktale Khun Chang, Khun Paen, of which there are many different versions. Like the defrocked Nen Aer, Khun Paen also studied the black arts at a temple when he was a child—a common practice in ancient Siam during the wars with the Khmer and the Burmese when the occult was used as a weapon in the military’s arsenal. One of Khun Paen’s wives dies in the story while pregnant, so he removes the foetus and ‘grills’ it to make a powerful baby ghost called a khuman tong which can supposedly control people’s minds. An effigy of this ghost, in the form of a young boy, is still worshipped on some Thai altars.

  To the shock of many journalists at the press conference, Nen Aer announced that he’d been offered two million baht to play the lead role in a film based on his life. Shooting for the film had already begun—deliberately scheduled for the day of a total solar eclipse. Such eclipses are marked by the more superstitious Thais with firecrackers, the banging of drums and pots and pans, and even gunshots as they try to frighten Rahu, the Hindu God of Darkness (often portrayed in India riding a chariot pulled by eight black horses), into regurgitating the sun he is swallowing.

  The movie, Nen Aer said, would portray him in a positive light as a practitioner of white or ‘sympathetic’ magic, which can supposedly ease suffering and cure illnesses. The film would also trace his early studies of mysticism at a temple in Cambodia from the age of nine. The Khmer can be counted amongst sorcery’s true believers. Their occultists are among the most respected and feared in Southeast Asia. Many Thai men sport magical, protective tattoos with Khmer script. ‘Smoke children’ are the Cambodian equivalent of the khuman thong and are created in much the same way. Such ritualistic practises have been attributed to the ancient Angkoreans and the more recent Khmer Rouge; documented cases still occur today among the country’s backwoods folk.

  Fielding a question about what the selling points of the film were, Nen Aer gave a cold-blooded laugh. “The tattoos all over my body, the grilling of children and my background.” With the sunglasses on, it was hard to tell if he was practicing his acting by trying on the villain’s part, or if he was genuinely villainous. An outcry from the general public and the Federation of the National Film Association of Thailand ensured that the film was later canned. Eventually, Nen Aer was sentenced to six months in jail for damaging a corpse and failing to report a death. He was also prohibited from practicing any form of black magic for five years.

  During the press conference, however, the witch doctor boasted that three political parties had already asked him to run as a candidate—not far-fetched in a country where politicians are known to dare their rivals, during parliamentary debates, to swear an oath on the revered Emerald Buddha at the Grand Palace. If either of them is lying, the spirits are supposed to put a curse on them. This is also a fairly common way for Thais to settle disputes of honour or insinuations of thievery. Politicians, too, curry favour, seek blessings and try to appease deities and spirits. Even the more progressive Democrat Party has a logo depicting the earth goddess, Mae Toranee, wringing out her hair in order to drown the minions of the Buddhist devil. Amulets bearing images of Khun Paen on one side and the ‘golden child’ on the other are easy enough to find, particularly around more superstitious areas like the Khmer-style temple of Wat Khao Phnom Ruang in Buri Ram province, where souvenir stands sell them for as little as 60 baht.

  In 2002, Thailand’s then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister lit the main candles to commence a ceremony in homage to the God of Darkness at the Srisathong Temple in Nakhon Nayok province. The famous fortune-teller Attaviroj Sritula said the pair became believers after Thaksin barely escaped death on a Bangkok runway the previous year. “The plane exploded [on the runway] before he got on board because Rahu protected him.” At the time, the prime minister was supposed to fly to Chiang Mai to cut the ribbon for a relaunch of a shopping mall managed by his sister Yaowaret, who had asked Rahu to watch over the place. Unlike in India, Rahu is an auspicious deity in Thailand.

  An astrology buff, Thaksin refused to speak with the press for weeks towards the end of 2005 because Mars was not in a favourable position for him, he said. Only a few months later, after a series of financial scandals and a laughable reality TV show about poverty eradication, the premier found himself bogged down in a political quagmire. Battling against the People’s Alliance for Democracy, and an ever-growing number of protestors clamouring for his resignation, he once again resorted to the occult. In the northeastern province of Surin (famous for its tuskers and Khmer influence), Thaksin rode an elephant to strengthen his tenuous grip on power, and performed the same ancient rite as Siamese soldiers once did before a big battle: walking under an elephant’s belly to absorb some of its might. When he was given a magical elephant prod with which to scare away his enemies, he told the press, “I will use this prod, along with spells and talismans, to control the fierce opponents who are trying to oust me.”

  At the same time, his political foes tried to use black magic against him. A senator from Buri Ram province named Karun Saingam advised the hordes of female protestors in Bangkok to hold photos of the premier, or pieces of paper inscribed with his name, against their crotches while cursing him three times. Whether such rituals have any power or are mere mumbo-jumbo, the prime minister stepped down in April 2006 after winning an election that all the major opposition parties boycotted. An election that cost taxpayers two billion baht, with no opposition, in which the winning party still ended up losing? Since logic only makes a rare cameo in the tragic farce that is Thai politics, why couldn’t a black magician become a premier politico?

  Although he boasted about having many big-name politicians as clients, Nen Aer’s threat to run for political office back in 1995 never left the starting blocks. For the next few years, I only heard a few anecdotes about him. A female colleague at The Nation told me that she’d seen him on a chat show, along with his new bride, and that he appeared to be trying to whitewash his tarnished image. Where else in the world would a practitioner of the black arts and ‘serial baby-griller’ become a chat-show celebrity? Even sensationalistic American programmes that air shows such as Single Moms on Crack would have found that objectionable.

  Not long after the five-year ban on him practicing the black arts expired, Canadian photographer Steve Sandford caught up with the sorcerer at his home in Saraburi province.

  Did Steve find him particu
larly evil?

  “Criminally evil, cagey... he had a bodyguard in the next room and a kick-boxing ring outside the house. He showed us some of his human skulls—not a real nice guy—and he was braggin’ about the photo on his wall of him and the politician Snoh Tienthong.”

  The black magician showed him some vials of what he claimed were a love potion made from melting the chin fat of corpses. (“It’s not like basting a turkey for Thanksgiving,” said Steve, laughing.) These vials, known as nam man phrai, sell for up to 10,000 baht, because one drop of the potion on someone’s skin is said to have enough power to make that person fall in love with whoever put it there.

  Nen Aer told Steve that he had ‘grilled’ a thousand babies, having stolen some of them from cemeteries. The shrunken and mummified corpses could then fit into a trouser pocket or purse. Unless the owner appeased them with soft drinks and sweets, the spirit of the khuman thong (‘golden child’) could wreak havoc on them, bouncing up and down on their beds at night until they went mad.

  To show off his purported power, the former novice dripped wax from several candles on his tongue (a classic trick amongst Thai spirit mediums and sex-show performers) and jabbed himself with a long sword to show that it didn’t draw blood. The sorcerer warned Steve not to write anything bad about him as he poked coffin nails into the eyes of a tiny voodoo doll. One of the skulls in his home, he claimed, was that of a foreign journalist who had dared to betray Nen Aer’s Khmer mentor in the black arts.

  Some four years later in July 2005, Nen Aer darkened the pages of the local press once again, after 100 cops encircled his huge compound in Saraburi province to snare him in a dragnet. The police had received a multitude of complaints from women that the magician had violated them sexually while performing esoteric rituals designed to increase their powers of attraction and seduction. According to his conquests, Nen Aer had thousands of female customers. The police also uncovered a stash of videotapes showing him engaged in carnal relations with some of his female clients.