“No no, if anything I want to get off the drugs. I am looking for younger love, love from a virgin,” I said, my eyes lowering in the hidden shame of my request, as I picked the seeds out of the weed I was threshing meaninglessly in my palms, becoming clumsy with the voicing of the solution-sapling. Unlike the dead weed seeds in my hand, the plot I hatched began to grow.
Hatching a plan, till it is thought to perfection is supremely easy. Acting upon it, I found it shameful, left fumbling, now that the thought had been emitted from my mouth, and in the words written here for you to enjoy. She noticed my inability at the conversion of a cigarette into a simple joint and took the reefer from its eventual contents, rolling with steady hands, wetting the joint with her saliva in gentle licks from her raspy-soft pink tongue, eventually lighting up, extending the joint gently my way, like an offering to her God, smoke curling away from a stick of incensed narcotic.
She taught me, making joints should be an extended prelude to smoking them.
“You mean a young girl or a virgin? Virgins are a bit messy, and not that enjoyable. That is what we advise our clients,” she added.
“Why so?” I asked, wanting to extend conversation, not that I did not know why.
“Well, they are scared and often not very compliant. The crying and the weeping can be a bit of a turnoff. You don’t seem the type for that kind of thing. Young girls, I can understand and help you with, so your holiday is made livelier than with an older woman like me,” she smiled all the while. There was no hint of her having felt rejected or discarded by me; she was seasoned, simply a whore, happy with the week of steady employment behind her. “In fact, if you want a young thing for a few extended weeks or more, we can arrange that too.”
The prostitute, she was perfect, like a Goddess for a God she found each week.
Back in the room, she left me by myself, returning with large photo albums.
“Here, take a look if you like anything,” she handed the portfolio of nymph-prostitutes my way.
I checked the tremble to my fingers as I opened the album, dreading the picture of Li Ya that may stare back up at me. Inside, was a neat alluring arrangement of prints, one on each page, annotated with nationality, spoken languages . . . lies for the tourist to study and pick off the menu. Most poses were ordinary, meant to showcase detail that draws attention of a male connoisseur. A few appealed to an audience, dressed in leather and chains, and, a very few were in school dresses, with buttons of the uniform blouses undone till the navel. I dwelt on one such school dressed girl, just momentarily, but long enough for my attendant prostitute to notice. “She is nice, very young, do you want to see her?”
In time, I became the richest man in the Bangkok and all women attended to me in prostitution, whether they liked it or not. The winning and the ruling, it was in my restrained reaping.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I answered, kneeling before snorting the line of powder white that she always laid out for me after our temple visits.
On the following evening, I moved brothels, waiting for the school dressed girl I had chosen from the catalogue. While waiting, I was comfortably stoned, the new room being not very different from the one I had vacated.
The promise in the photograph was not inaccurate. When the young prostitute was brought to me, she was in the same school dress which had been used for the catalogue. I imagined a large wardrobe of school dresses, arranged neat in ascending sizes, making them useful over and over again, on objects including grown up women. The dress was blue and seemed to melt like molten wax on her firm pink-white body, turning to a white paraffin river, streaks of blue flowing over her body. It had been a week since I had landed in Pattaya, and unsurprisingly the cocaine began to speak to me, whispering was more like it. I made a mental note of abstinence. From tomorrow, I would seek out the beach and a stretch that was suitable for running, before checking into a hotel, ensuring it had a gym-room I could use each day.
Another talk, of me with my failed self.
When we were by ourselves, she undid her school shirt well below her navel, and blurted playfully, “Can I have some of your coke,” she had spotted the white powder remnants on the table, and more revealingly, the bath-robed tension-twitch of her customer.
She was Asian, strangely well endowed, a lithe body running down and away from a flood of breasts above, built for the purpose she served, derivation of sexual pleasure. On purely sexual grounds, this was a major elevation from the relatively mature prostitute with whom I had spent the last week.
She was not mine; the young one, and neither was she mine to be.
“Sure,” I threw a little white packet of pleasure at her, my own high imagining her rubbing the drug in her crack, from where too absorption into the stream of blood is made possible.
“Do you have a credit card?” she asked, checking if her nasal-ways were blocked, her thumb pressing against her nostrils, one at a time, determining which passage may offer the strongest gale for insufflations.
“Yes,” I handed her a cancelled one, to separate the lines. She snorted straight up, right nostril pressed to the pedestal glass top table without any currency notes or cutaway straws helping direct the drug brain-wards. She was a seasoned narcotic partaker; I could tell by the way she rubbed the remaining coke into her gums, leaving the table top glass clean, like a whistle. She eased back, resting on the bed post, her hands stuffing her short blue skirt between her thighs, naked knees jutting upwards like soft silken flags.
“Now what?” she opened her eyes in about ten seconds, smiling. “Why did you pay for me for the night? I know you cannot go on all night old man.”
“Do you like music,” I asked, sensing that it would be a treat for the young, those who had not stoned in days.
“Yes,” she, jumped spring-like on the floor, “What do you have?”
“David Bowie,” I said.
“Is that the name of your stereo?” she asked.
“No, it is the name of my singer, it is the only one I have on my laptop,” I said, connecting the speaker to the PC after it booted up; the minutes in between were boredom enough for us to shoot up again.
“Do you have Justin Bieber?” she asked, a bit calmer after the boot-up, her eyes shot with blood, seeking the refuge of rock and roll.
“No, but if you want we can download him,” I said.
“Can you please, please please,” she moved towards the phone in the room, asking for the wireless password, rushing to my PC, before getting online.
Baby, Baby…
I did not mind it, since I too was getting progressively high. The brothel manager came knocking, leaving, after collecting the broadband tariff.
She danced with her shirt completely undone. Beads of sweat were soon flicking off her forehead, frenzied hips throwing her skirt high in the air. She tore off her shirt and danced into the crescendo of the song.
Then she lay besides me, in the vacant silence between songs, topless, reducing the volume and dimming down lights, allowing me to play David Bowie, the gold of her pubescent breasts still heaving in the exertion of her silly dance.
“How old are you?”
“As old as you want me to be?” she asked, jamming one palm between her skirted thighs, squeezing with the force of rubbing legs, while the other palm landed gently over her own breasts, caressing mounds.
This is Major Tom to ground control; I’m stepping through the door. And I’m floating in a most peculiar way.
Rock music came belting out of my stereo. “Do you get high every day?” I asked.
“No, in fact very rarely, that too only pot; coke is a treat like the moon,” she said.
“Do you come often, when you are with customers?”
“No, except when I am on coke,” she said. “What do you want to do, oral, anal, in my tits, missionary, doggy, yogic what would you like?” she asked quite directly.
“You don’t talk like a teenager, come on tell me how old are you?” I asked again, aroused, yet dete
rmined not to have sex with a kid.
My guess, she was anywhere between sixteen and nineteen.
“I am as old as the pimp told you,” she said. “Come on let us get on with it. Just fuck me and do what you imagined you want to do,” she started to undo my shirt.
Why did she want to get on with it?
Because, if she satisfied me, then her age would not matter, meaning I would have no reason to fuss over payments, not that I intended to, just that her experience taught her not to leave sexually dissatisfied customers, it was bad business and tarred her reputation.
“Wait, I need to visit the toilet,” I left, and masturbated in the toilet, dwelling on acts that she had suggested earlier, ridding myself of the pressure that temptation built.
“Do you want to eat, are you hungry?” I asked, after I emerged, knowing that within the hour the coke would lead back to the territory of sexual craving. If she remained with me, naked and comely, it could be quicker than the hour.
“Yes,” she jumped with glee and picked up the phone again. She ordered sandwiches and ice-cream, which arrived in about ten minutes.
She ate by herself, devouring mindlessly with no care for the calories or fat that she consumed.
My appetite had been killed by the coke, a week ago. “Is it Ok if we just spoke for a while first?” I asked.
She stopped eating, threw the half eaten sandwich back on to the plate and looked up. “Look I don’t like this kind of thing. You will talk and then you will say you want a refund since you did not have sex. Come on, I can make you happy,” she thrust her index finger into her mouth, licking clean the mayonnaise from her sandwich.
“I am not going to ask for a refund, if you want you can have your tips in advance,” I reached for my wallet and gave her a ten dollar leaf.
“Okay, but I have one condition. We can talk for an hour and if by then you decide not to do anything, I will leave, at least I can have my regular customers and make some more money tonight. OK?” she asked, grabbing the note before returning to her meal.
“But, I paid for the entire night,” I protested, mildly.
“Hey Mister, if you don’t want to do anything, just go to bed and let me go. I can earn a bit more that way,” she said.
Slut, it was pointless reasoning with her, and in any case, the hour would be enough to seek what I lost.
“Since when have you been in the trade?” all the while I held my wallet, waiting for the moment to whip Li Ya’s image out, asking if she had seen her.
“A few years.”
“Why do you want to do this? Why don’t you seek a better life?”
“Yes, I will go back to my village in Vietnam in about ten years and there I can live like a Queen of the grocery store I will buy. My agent paid a large sum to my uncle before shipping me here, so I have to pay back his charges and then save for the future before I can quit.”
“Will you be accepted in your village again?”
“Yes, since I will be the rich one. Families may even ask for the agent’s numbers from me. I will get a husband too.”
I hoped her uncle died prematurely of unnatural disease, before she ruled dowager over the village, kneeling before pissing on his grave each day.
“How can you live a life like this?”
“It is OK. Only the first few months are a bit scary, after that it can even be fun, particularly if you like sex. Most of the customers are gentle, and if an odd one becomes violent the pimps jump in and rescue us.”
“Do new girls enter the trade regularly?”
“Yes, but it happens in batches, every few months. The pimp prepares them mentally before the customers are allowed to enter them. It is quite humane.”
“How can sex with a thirteen year old be humane?”
“After the first few months it is all right. The body gets used to it.”
“Do you hate customers who seek out young girls, virgins?”
“No I don’t. No more than I do any other customers. You are making too much out of the whole thing. Can I go now?” she rose, buttoning back her shirt.
“One last question,” I said, pulling out the photograph of Li Ya from out of my wallet. “Have you seen this girl anywhere?” I asked, letting her look at the photograph.
“No,” she said bluntly, moving to the door and leaving me alone.
At night the worms arrived, mostly aphids, first crawling under my skin before spewing all out of my ears. I knew it was the cocaine yet I felt scared like a child, alone in the dark with beasts. Screams leapt like cats, screeching in my anxiety. I searched for that pain in my chest, a final pain which the tag on my toe, at the morgue on the following day would confirm as ‘Overdose’.
I slept and snorted that night almost on the hour.
On the following morning the sleep had deprived me of drug for over four hours. My bed crept with the hallucination of insects that were buried in the evolution of my primeval brain, and the nest of mattresses from which they spewed out. I lay in the comfort of knowledge, it was the cocaine that was crawling, and if I had not cardiac arrested in my sleep, I was okay for now, medically speaking.
I awoke, still stoned and craving for drug, given the abstinence of sleep, sensing immediately that I was not alone. A fragrance of fresh Jasmine rose in my nose. It was an illusion at first, an olfactory one, but, when I tried to sneeze it away, it persisted, turning its character to a clinging stench, like from an armpit soured and pickled in a dead-day’s sweat. The sour-jasmine notes, before I learnt to love them, I had to understand them. They were coming from the doll-dressed body of Miho. She lay in my bed of worms, startled as I woke up to her, registering her presence.
I stood frantically, with all of the bed clothes wrapped around me. “Who are you?”
“I am Miho.” Whispering, she lit two joints held between her teeth, handing one on to me. The contents of my wallet were strewn on the bed. She smoked my joints, not feeling any discomfort at revealing the mounds of breasts that pressed braless against her silken blouse. She was Asian, stunningly beautiful as the first sight of morning. Her voice was laden with a sharp Asian twang. English was certainly not her first tongue.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked. My displeasure was spontaneous, stemming from the rude invasion of privacy. I wanted to get a hit desperately, to face what came with the morning. Physically, my thighs and buttocks itched in craving. I wanted to scratch with nails, drawing blood, which only the fabric of my pyjamas prevented.
“We wanted to ask you the same question,” a butterfly sound glided in, its wings beat-less like a predator perched high in the winds. It was Thuy Binh. She was standing near the window through which sunlight streamed, dispersing and bouncing off the sheer fabric of her Thai tunic. She was much more of a woman than Miho. Miho was childlike in her high stocking-legged boots and her silk pinafore, two arrow straight black pig-tails falling on either side and away.
The ceiling of the room turned to clouds, clouds saturated beyond retention with worms, and I felt them rising up through the floor, straight-up into my feet. Desperately, I brushed my palms over my arms and legs, wanting to be rid of the hangover that cocaine causes. I began itching irresistibly. With a bit of will I could cold turkey, but on that morning, with two strange intruders I wanted a hit, of which I got from the coke that was left on the table from the previous night. I wanted it in me before it disappeared into any of them; it was my coke after all. Animal like, I completed my wild morning’s insulations. Then, I pulled on the joint that Miho handed me. Almost instantly, the feeling of being myself returned.
“Listen whoever you are, just get the fuck out of my room before I cause trouble,” I rubbed my nostrils noisily, still breathing remnants of coke off my fingers, moving towards Thuy Binh, my finger pointing at her. Deadly Miho, she leapt feline from the bed, landing on my chest, her knees pinning me to the floor, leaving my legs flailing behind her. I stopped struggling when she pulled the Tanto from its scabbard, thrusting its
pointed edge gently under my right eyeball, drawing a drop of blood, the crusting of which I noticed much later. In that position my struggle would simply make untidy, and dangerous the delicacy with which the knife’s blade-tip got placed.
A few pregnant seconds passed where nothing happened, except, the appearance of a faint smile that ornamented Miho’s face. She began to toy, moving the cold blade of the Tanto slowly across my face, drawing a faint line of red, the blade announcing my losses as it trended downwards.
“You have already caused trouble,” Thuy Binh spoke calmly, adding a tch-tch-tch as she raised her hand and waved her palm upwards, exactly one-slow wave, as if to a dog or a horse who is accustomed to instructions from its master. Miho eased her knee from the crook of my neck and went back to the bed where she lay down, returning to her smouldering joint in the ashtray.
“What sort of trouble,” I asked sitting up, desperately wanting to work my way out of this strange mess.
“We don’t like it, when our customers snoop around, not consuming paid-for goods,” she moved towards me, throwing my wallet in the air.
“But I paid what I had promised last night? What wrong did I do?” I asked. My tone low, as if in an interrogation that could end badly for me.
“You didn’t even touch my girl last night, instead you asked unnecessary questions. We don’t like that, it feels like free money,” Thuy Binh said.
Inside my wallet, I peered and found a vacant transparent window where Li Ya’s image had stood on the previous night.
“You are fucking big-pimp, are you not?” in one fluid motion I leapt, gripping Thuy Binh’s neck in my arm. Her back was athletic, fitting well in the grip of my body. In the mirror, I saw Thuy Binh smiling back at me. In the same mirror, behind me, Miho was standing militant, the blade-tip of her Tanto firm between her fingers, raised high in the drawn slingshot of her right arm. I was completely vulnerable and she, Miho, would kill me if I made any move to hurt her mistress. My grip loosened and I simply whispered into Thuy Binh’s ears “You know her, right, you know where Li Ya is?”
Lost in Pattaya Page 7
