Asian Heat

by Leather, Stephen

  Of the half that lived in Bangkok, about a third were too old and another third were just plain unattractive. But even so I was getting between five and ten good prospects every day.

  I’d reply to the ones I thought fitted the bill and start chatting to them by instant messaging. Some of them were really stupid and would ask for money right away. They needed to pay their rent or their mother was sick and one even had the cheek to say she couldn’t chat for long unless I sent her money because she had to pay for her wi-fi. Chatting through messages gave me a good sense of how good their English was and whether or not they’d lied about their educational qualifications. But after an hour or so, if they hadn’t asked me for money, I’d give them my phone number and ask them to call me. I used pay-as-you-go simcards that I changed every week or so. If the phone chat went well then I’d suggest we chat using webcams, through Skype if they had it. If the phone chat didn’t go well then I’d just cut off contact and move on to the next girl.

  Webcams are brilliant. The girls can Photoshop their photographs – many do – but they can’t mess around with their webcam pictures. Some of them try to get out of the webcam chat but I always cut off contact with them. I didn’t want any nasty surprises when I finally got to meet them so a webcam chat was a must.

  The webcams rule out another third or so, those girls who’ve lied about their attractiveness or their age. I know it can be difficult to judge the age of a Thai but even I can tell when a woman is in her forties. And if they look rough on a webcam they’re going to look even rougher in real life. The webcam also gave me a chance to get a look at their figure, and show me any obvious tattoos.

  If the girl passed the webcam test, it was time to arrange a face-to-face meeting. I spent a lot of time working out the best place to meet the girls, and I found the perfect spot. There’s a sort of café area on Sukhumvit Road in front of the Landmark Hotel, raised above the pavement so you’re looking down on it. That means there’s plenty to look at while you’re waiting because half the hookers working in Nana Plaza walk by from the Nana skytrain station.

  I usually arranged to meet the girls at about seven, just as it’s starting to get dark. And I always ordered a coffee because I didn’t want them to think I’m a pisshead. That was the first test for the girl, too. If she ordered a beer then that was a bad sign. Coffee or a soft drink, that’s what I wanted to see.

  Sitting out in the open put them at ease; they didn’t feel trapped and there were plenty of people around. I got to see what they looked like in the flesh, and to see how they handled themselves in public. The Landmark staff are great, very attentive and polite, and the way the girls reacted was a good clue to their background. I wasn’t looking for a girl who was too shy, but I didn’t want one who treated the staff with contempt. I was looking for politeness and good manners.

  I usually chatted with them for about an hour, I think that’s the minimum amount of time you need to size up a person. I spoke mainly in English because my Thai isn’t really good enough to hold a conversation. If the girl was hi-so –that’s what they call the upper class Thais - then her English would be good because she probably attended an international school. But if she was obviously a bargirl then good English is a sign she’s been around for a while and has had a few Western boyfriends or sponsors. I was looking for honesty, because in my experience lies are like cockroaches – for every one you find there’s a dozen hidden ones. It wasn’t hard to catch them out in a lie. I took notes when I talked to them on-line and when I was face-to-face I double-checked everything they said. I was looking for tattoos, and checking out their clothes and jewellery. A black t-shirt, tight jeans and too much gold screams bargirl even if she told me she’s as pure as the driven snow.

  I didn’t talk about myself too much; I told them I’m a teacher and that I lived on my own, but I didn’t talk about money. If they kept asking about money then that was a red flag. Some of them even told me up front how much they expected me to give them. Seriously. Sitting there over coffee they’d tell me that for three thousand baht they would go back to my flat. It’s as if they had completely forgotten everything they had said on Skype about wanting a relationship and wanting to meet the right guy.

  Anyway, after the hour was up I would pretty much have the measure of the girl. If she was an out-and-out gold-digger or a bargirl, then I would just tell her I had someone to meet and I would head off to Nana Plaza. That’s the beauty of Bangkok - my worst possible scenario was a night looking at naked girls dancing around chrome poles. If she phoned me again I wouldn’t answer, and I would ignore her on the internet. Girls like that soon get the message. They didn’t care because all they were after was money and they were probably meeting as many men as I was meeting girls.

  If she was a shop assistant or a hairdresser and her English was fairly good and she seemed fun, then I would offer to take her to The Huntsman Bar in the basement. They serve Western food and there’s a Filipina band that aren’t so noisy that you can’t talk. The lighting’s quite romantic and there are booths that give you the chance to sit together and get a bit of physical contact going.

  If she was a good girl but quite shy then there’s a good Thai restaurant in the hotel that I could take her to. That gave me the chance to show that I understand Thai food, and she would be in an environment where she felt safe.

  If she was hi-so then I would take her to the Rib Room at the top of the hotel. It’s one of the best steak restaurants in the city and the view is spectacular. It would be overwhelming for an average girl but the hi-so girls love it. I would watch what they ordered, though. If she started taking the piss and ordering the most expensive things on the menu, then that was a red flag, but I would still pay because the surest way of getting a hi-so girl into bed is to splash a bit of money around. Plus I love a good steak.

  I guess you’re wondering what my success rate was? Well, cross my heart and hope to die, if I take them to eat then it’s pretty much one hundred per cent. If they let me take them to dinner then half the time I ended up going back to their place afterwards. Of the rest, half would sleep with me right away. But because they live in a shitty room far away then I’d take them to a short-time hotel. The rest would sleep with me on the second date. That was pretty much guaranteed.

  But the face-to-face does root out a lot of undesirables - girls who just aren’t pretty, or who are after money, or who are just plain boring. I’d say that accounts for about half the girls I meet. Of course for every one I meet outside the Landmark, I’ve already rejected ten or so. So in the grand scheme of things, I reckon for every hundred girls I meet on line, I meet ten and I end up in bed with five. But that’s five stunners, and they don’t ask for money. If they do, I don’t see them again. That’s an absolute rule. As soon as they ask for money – even if it’s just the cab fare home – then it’s over.

  So basically it’s a matter of numbers. For every one hundred girls you connect with on ThaiLoveLinks, you get to have sex with five stunners. That, to me, seems like pretty good odds. It worked for me, anyway, and I ended up getting laid every other day by a new girl, plus I have literally hundreds of phone numbers of hot girls who are just a phone call away.

  Now the question you’re probably asking is why are the girls so keen to sleep with me? Why is it so easy? The thing is, I don’t know. I’m not the world’s best-looking guy, not by a long way. Back in Derby I’d rate myself a seven, eight on a good day. In Thailand I’m better than the average Westerner just because so many of them are bald, overweight and tattooed. But like I said, I’m no Brad Pitt. On the positive side I dress well and I make sure I smell nice. The Thais hate body odour so deodorant and aftershave are a must. I’m polite when I talk and I tell them I’m looking for a girlfriend. I tell them I’ve met the wrong sort of girls before – but I claim never to have gone into a go-go bar or a massage parlour. I tell them I’m a bit lonely and that I want to spend time with someone I care about. That and a few lingering looks seems to d
o the trick. And they’re usually the ones that make the first move. They ask if they can see my apartment. I always say no. That’s an absolute rule. I never allow them back to where I live. It’s just too risky. If anything goes wrong, they know where you live, and a Thai girl out for revenge knows no bounds. I know one guy who ended up in prison because a former girlfriend planted drugs in his flat and then grassed him up to the police. Another found a girl on his doorstep who had slashed her wrists, and another got into the flat and destroyed all his clothes. So they never go to my flat. I always make an excuse, tell them the place is a mess or I have a friend staying over. More often than not they’ll then offer to take me around to their room. And as soon as they do, I know that means they’re going to have sex.

  The only times it gets a little complicated is if they don’t invite me back to their place because then I have to suggest a short-time hotel. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I play it by ear. Frankly, I prefer to do it in their place because then you really get a feel for the girl. But at the end of the day it’s the sex that matters, not where the bed is. And I’ve had a lot of sex.

  I’ve been with university students, nurses, beauticians, shop assistants, two police officers and one immigration officer, air stewardesses, hotel workers, personal trainers, waitresses, factory workers, pretty much an A-to-Z of the working population. All of them young, all of them pretty, and not one did I pay for. Not one. Mind you, I barely gave them time to ask because another of my rules is I never stay overnight. No matter whether I’m at their place or in a short-time hotel, once the deed is done I shower and I’m off. Then it’s up to them. If they call me back and they want to see me again I add their number to my list. If they don’t call me back, that’s fine. But they only have a week at most because I keep changing my sim cards. I don’t use my real name, either. I tell them my name is John. That’s actually my middle name. I never tell them my family name and I never ask them theirs either. If the sex is good and they don’t ask for money, then I might think about telling them my real name.

  I can’t believe how easy it is, and it makes me realise how stupid I was for spending all that money on hookers. I get laid for free and I get to practise my Thai instead of throwing my money away on watered-down drinks and barfines. I was like a kid in a sweetshop. Or at least I was, until I met Nok.

  Nok’s profile picture was cute, but no cuter than hundreds of others. She was twenty-three years old, long black hair, olive skin, nice little upturned nose and her picture suggested quite large breasts. She was from Saraburi, in the middle of the country, but she lived in Bangkok and worked as a beautician. She wanted a good man to take care of her and she liked reading and music and walking on the beach. Her contact details arrived on a Saturday along with almost sixty others and I didn’t get around to replying until Sunday morning. She didn’t get back to me until the evening and we chatted on the phone and then switched to webcam and I have to say she was hot. Just over my height limit, which was good, but with a very sexy laugh and fairer skin than most Thais have.

  My first vacant slot was for the following Thursday so I arranged to meet her outside the Landmark. Nok arrived in a very short dark blue dress that showed off an amazing pair of legs and cut low enough at the top to show me a bit of cleavage. More than a few heads turned as she sat down opposite me. Her story was typical of what I heard from the girls I met on ThaiLoveLinks. Her father had left her mother when Nok was young, the family was always short of money, and Nok had come to Bangkok to earn a decent salary so she could send money to help support her mum and her siblings. There’s no social security system in Thailand – if you don’t work, you don’t eat.

  I’d pretty much decided to take Nok down to The Huntsman when I caught her smiling at me over the top of her Coke. “What?” I said. “What are you smiling at?”

  “You’re such a butterfly,” she said.

  A butterfly was a man with lots of girlfriends, moving between them like a butterfly flying from flower to flower.

  “What do you mean?”

  She pointed at a beauty parlour on the other side of Sukhumvit Road. “That’s where I work,” she said. “I see you here with many girls.”

  I laughed. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Every day,” she said. “And every day a different girl.”

  “You’ve been spying on me?”

  “Not spying. But I could see you when I was upstairs. Then one day I saw your profile on ThaiLoveLinks.”

  “And you still wanted to see me?”

  “Your profile looked nice,” she said. “And you’re quite good looking. But your profile doesn’t say you’re a butterfly, does it?”

  I sat back in my chair. Busted. I shrugged and waved at a waitress for a bill.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You want to go?”

  “You’re right, I am a butterfly,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why sorry?”

  “Because you’re looking for a man to marry. You’re looking for a man to marry you and take care of you.”

  “And you’re not that man?”

  I grinned. “Not by a long way,” I said. The waitress brought me the bill and I paid.

  As I stood up to go, she looked confused. “You’re going?”

  “I don’t want to waste your time.”

  She pouted. “I though we could have a drink. In The Huntsman, maybe.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’ve nothing else to do,” she said. “And I like you.”

  She really did. She liked me. I kept thinking she was going to hit me up for money, but she didn’t. We went down to the bar and had a few drinks – I was on Carlsberg and she drank white wine. We had some food – I had fish and chips and she had Pad Thai. We listened to the band and we talked some more and at eleven o’clock she leaned over, kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear. “I want you to come home with me.” So I did. Well, it would have been rude not to.

  She lived in a small room in a block off Sukhumvit Soi 11. It was a fifteen minute walk from the Landmark. I’d been in dozens of rooms just like it. It was about thirty square metres, with a small bathroom at the far end and a balcony where she did any cooking and hung her washing out to dry. There was a double bed and a small dressing table, a cheap wooden wardrobe and a small flatscreen television on a table. But unlike most of the rooms I’d been in there were no cuddly toys on the bed or pictures of Korean pop stars plastered on the walls. There were a few framed family photographs by the bed and a picture of the King above the door.

  There was no small talk. She gave me a towel and pointed at the bathroom door and I went and showered. Then I lay on the bed and waited for her to shower. She came back wrapped in a small white towel and lay down next to me. She started kissing me, pulled off my towel and rolled on top of me. Her body was spectacular. Her breasts were so perfect that at first I thought they were fake but as I cupped them I could feel that they were real. Her skin was flawless, not a mark or blemish anywhere, and touching it was like brushing silk. There was no foreplay and she didn’t say a word. She just slid down onto me and began moving up and down, her eyes fixed on mine. I matched my movements to hers but she was going too slowly so I rolled her over onto her back and began pounding into her. She laughed and raked my back with her nails, bringing her legs up so that her knees dug into my waist. I came in less than two minutes and then rolled off, panting for breath. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For being so quick.”

  She laughed again. “You can take longer the second time,” she said.

  She was right, the second time did take longer. And then I went home. She didn’t ask me stay the night and she didn’t ask me for money, both plus points. But I didn’t call her. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t going to do the chasing.

  A week went by and she didn’t call and then I changed simcards. Three more weeks passed and I had pretty much forgotten about her when she got in tou
ch through ThaiLoveLinks. “You not want to see me again?” she said in a message.

  I messaged her back with my new number and she called me straight away. We chatted for about ten minutes and then she asked me if I wanted to go to her room. I did. She was only wearing a towel when I got there, and she didn’t ask me to shower, just knelt down in front of me, unzipped my jeans and took me in her mouth. God, it was the softest, most amazing, blow-job that I’d ever received, and I had been with some real professionals in Pattaya.

  I thought she was going to let me come in her mouth but at the last moment she pushed me onto the bed and mounted me. We came together, then she leant down and kissed me full on the mouth. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “Why did you call me?”

  “I like you,” she said.

  “But you’re still looking for a man to take care of you?”

  She rolled off and snuggled up next to me. “Still looking, yes.”

  “No luck yet?”

  She kissed my shoulder. “If I have luck, why did I call you?”

  She had a point. It was a stupid question. We lay on the bed together for a while and then she undressed me and made love to me again. Afterwards I showered and put my clothes back on and left. She didn’t call me for a month. This time I was on Skype and I saw her come on line and then she Skyped me. Half an hour later and I was in her room. That became the pattern for the next six months or so. She’d call, we’d have great sex, and I’d leave. She never asked me for anything. It was the perfect arrangement, for me anyway. I was still seeing other girls – lots of them - but I always looked forward to seeing Nok.

  After about six of these monthly visits, Nok Skyped me and asked me to go around and see her. I could tell from her voice that there was something wrong, but as soon as I stepped into her room she pushed me on the bed, ripped off my clothes and practically raped me. Afterwards, as she lay in my arms, she told me she’d finally met a man who was going to take care of her.