The Wet and the Dry

by Lawrence Osborne

  Inside the freezers there were the largest frozen turkeys I have ever seen. One was graspable, but barely, and so I staggered back upstairs with the two bottles and the enormous glacial bird slipping constantly from one arm. I stumbled back out into the snowstorm and the impenetrable darkness and began to run gleefully back to my miserable shack. I daresay that I have never felt such a sense of personal triumph, such a complete lack of shame or moral compass. However, as I was sliding across a great expanse of frozen snow, the architect’s security system suddenly sprang into vociferous life. Arc lamps cunningly mounted on the roof flashed on and a siren wailed across the mountaintop. Caught in the crosshairs of four beams, the thief was illuminated and transfixed.

  My architect had once told me that his system was directly wired to the Hunter police station. And so, pursuing a drink, and because I could not do without, I barricaded myelf in my shack with a frozen turkey and two bottles of Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes. Drenched in sweat, I hacked the bird into four pieces with a wood ax that the Albanians had marked with the instruction label FOR BEARS. I caught sight of myself for a moment in the mirror that hung in the front room: bare-chested, sweating, heaving an ax, and surrounded by shards of frozen turkey.

  “Time to get a life, you sorry fuck!” I screamed at myself.

  When silence and security had returned, however, and the police had still not come, I opened the first bottle of the ’95. I drank it in a soup bowl. “Aromas still on the rise,” I wrote in my witty IOU, which I later left under his doormat. “It’s not a bad year at all, old chap.”

  Getting a Drink in a Civil War

  Every man, woman, and child on earth drinks the equivalent of six liters of pure alcohol a year. The biggest drinkers, as far as I can tell, are the weary Moldovans, with eighteen liters a year, followed by the far less weary Czechs at sixteen. The Moldovans can rarely be sober, and in fact they should all be dead. But all the nations of the Eurasian northern hemisphere consume more than twelve liters, and according to various professional health bodies they should all be dead by now. The Balkans, though, drink less than the Finns; the Italians and Spanish are outdone by the Germans and the French. In Russia one in every five male deaths is by alcohol. Two and a half million people die every year, we are told, because of drink. Alcoholism is now classified as a “disease.” It is like cancer or rabies. Its sufferers are helpless as its pathogens rage through their bodies; their sickness is passed on genetically from generation to generation.

  Besides the toll it takes on the liver, there are aspects to this disease that can never show up in medical statistics. There is the yearning for conviviality, for the breakdown of a loneliness that otherwise cannot be so easily dodged. The transcending of the self. There is the unhappiness that comes with mundaneness, with normal life, which after all—and without undue exaggeration—leads to old age and death. So the departure from the self makes sense, and it’s as easy as walking away from a mask and leaving it useless on the ground behind one.

  The drinker is not adrift from normality because he wants to escape the mundane. He is the side effect of an insane belief that the mundane is all that there is. He is like the asylum inmate in Fellini’s Amarcord, the mad uncle who climbs into a tree and refuses to come down, who beats his chest and shouts that after years in the asylum he wants a woman: “Voglio una donna!”

  Yet stuck in that metaphorical tree, alone and frustrated, he will also want to climb down eventually. Terra firma beckons.

  On the landing of the Pink Lady’s eleventh floor in Hat Yai, seven Malaysian tourists, all men, stood among discarded drink trays, indolently looking down at their overpolished shoes. The landing was strewn with emptied vodka bottles, and there were little images of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej in white regalia pinned to the room doors. The walls shook with techno music. The Malaysians were waiting patiently for the elevator that would take them to the Relax Club downstairs.

  Through a window spanned with chicken wire, we saw the night vista of Hat Yai: rusted tin roofs, warehouses, a fragment of a decaying mosque with moss spreading along its walls. Expert punters, the Malays discussed the price of Black Label shots at the Pink Lady bar. It seemed like the shots were pricier than the girls, given that the girls could be had for about thirty dollars. I asked them, as we came into the Pink Lady’s lobby, if they came here for booze or for the Thai girls. Booze with girls, they said with grim practicality. Why one without the other?

  The lobby of the Pink Lady is not lacking in temperamental religiosity: grandfather clocks, mystical paintings of shrines in lakes, haloed Buddhas, and photomurals of saints. A talisman store stood next to two karaoke lounges, and girls floated past with trays of tequila and ice buckets. The Muslims seemed to find this mixture of religious kitsch and merry whoredom as irresistibly seductive as it was inconceivable. They blinked nervously. In the main hotel nightclub there was a “fishbowl,” a seating area with benches raised like a small amphitheater, where numbered girls in togas awaited their customers, who merely had to call out her number to the mama-san. It’s a familiar system in Asia. The painted background here was a scene of jungle ponds and shrubberies, a corner of a primeval forest. It looked like a panorama in an ancient Parisian zoo.

  That night, however, there was only one Thai girl there. She was doing her knitting and didn’t even look up. The Malaysians were disgusted and decided to go to the bar. We sat in the suffocating cocktail lounge and compared our phallic-shaped plastic room keys decorated with the words Hot Pink. I picked up some Malay sexual slang. “Cock” is burung, or “bird.” “Pussy” is nonok. “Copping a feel, a grope” in the bars is known as raba raba. The noble act itself is merodok. It might come in handy one day.

  They were professional white-collar types from Kota Bharu who had driven up together in a rented minivan, passing through the border at Sungai Kolok, a rancid village also famous for its liquored-up brothels. They were at the Pink Lady for the whole weekend, during which they expected to get laid at least five times apiece and to drink at least a whole bottle of Scotch each. That was not including the gin fizzes, the Royal Stag Indian whisky, the rum and Cokes, the Sex on the Beaches, and the Grey Goose shots en masse. The idea was to fuse sex and booze in ways that only a Buddhist country would permit.

  “Then what?”

  “Go home to Malaysia and sleep it off, la.”

  It seemed like a system. The cabaret started, and a few girls came prancing onto the stage in top hats and Moulin Rouge feathers. They held up gold amphorae to no effect. It was quite mysterious. The Malaysians seemed indifferent. They asked me instead what a farang like me was doing in Hat Yai, and I said I was traveling through the Deep South of Thailand in order to sample its nightlife. I was, in effect, traveling from Hat Yai to their own hometown of Kota, and I was doing it to see what made men like them tick. I was curious about the way they drank and the way they found their amusements. This made them roar with something that I took to be laughter, but that on second thought I was sure was its exact opposite.

  • • •

  It is sometimes hard to unravel the quasi-mystical workings of Thai politics, or to fathom why it is that this otherwise pleasure-driven nation should be plagued by the largest Islamic insurgency outside Iraq.

  The Muslim insurgents of the Thai Deep South have never made intelligible demands, other than to evoke the possibility of a nostalgic resurrection of the Sultanate of Pattani. The Sultanate was a small Islamic state of prior centuries erased from the map when the British, then masters of Malaya, donated the three southern states to the Kingdom of Siam in 1909. The British, as no one now remembers, got trading rights from the Thais in return for the three hapless provinces. The Thais got a hundred years of fatal resentments, though they themselves had tried to dominate the region in the eighteenth century.

  While the West has been focused on the recent political struggle in Bangkok, the longer struggle for the soul of Thailand has been evolving in the south. But the two are con
nected. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted by a bloodless military coup in 2006, is the éminence grise behind the faction known in rather Dr. Seuss fashion as the Reds, who recently brought a near-revolution to the streets of downtown Bangkok. Before 2006, however, Thaksin was in charge of the war in the south. He took it personally. When the violence became savage, he took much of the blame for the army’s reprisals against Muslims: the festering war may have done much to delegitimize, and ultimately fragment, his government.

  No one really knows who the insurgents are, nor how many of them there are. For almost forty years up until 1998, a variety of guerrilla organizations operated in the south, committing sabotage, assassinations, and kidnappings in the name of creating a separate Muslim state. A group calling itself the BRN had formed in 1960 after the Thai government imposed a secular education system in the South. The BRN were anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and “Islamic socialist” in the manner of many movements in the Muslim world at that time, and they talked openly of rejoining Malaysia as part of a pan–Southeast Asian Malay-Muslim socialist union. They rejected the Thai constitution and proclaimed the supremacy of armed struggle.

  By 1998 the Thais had suppressed the insurgency, but serious violence erupted once more in 2001 when Thaksin took power. He transferred security arrangements to the police, who are mistrusted and hated for their corruption; the insurgents meanwhile simply regrouped. By 2004 the violence escalated to sinister levels. Buddhist plantation workers and monks were shot, beheaded, machete’d to death. To this day the perpetrators remain, like criminal secret societies, eccentrically enigmatic: they include the Mujahideen Pattani Movement, PULO, and its military subgroups like the Ma-ae Tophien group and the ultraviolent Runda Kumpalan Kecil, or RKK.

  In 2006 Wan Kadir Che Wan, the leader of Bersatu, one of the separatist groups, claimed to Al Jazeera television that the Indonesian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah was helping to launch violent attacks inside Thailand. It was the same group that bombed bars in Bali in 2002 and 2005, killing hundreds.

  Now, as a Buddhist army occupies a Muslim land, the war seems ever more futile and obscurantist, more random in tone. It is, deep down, a cultural struggle with no possible resolution, an impasse that will never dissolve.

  In the Pink Lady, meanwhile, my brothel punters were all too aware of the irony in their coming across the border to get away from sharia laws while the Thai Muslims were bombing everything in sight to get sharia law imposed in that same place. Irony is perhaps not quite the right word for dogged awareness of so ham-fisted a paradox. They pointed out, also, that even Hat Yai has had its share of malignant detonations. In 2006 bombs went off at the Ocean department store and at the Brown Sugar Pub, killing four. One of the dead was a Malaysian tourist, and one assumes he didn’t enter Paradise. The scrofulous old farangs who used to come here for the girls got the message, but the Malaysians kept coming because they had nowhere else to go. It was their cheapest quick fix for sex and affordable Johnnie Walker. And what would they do without Johnnie Walker?

  We drank it now with piles of off-tasting ice, and the men seemed to go into a state of catatonic contentment that derived as much from the brand name as from the alcohol itself. It was the partaking of a forbidden fruit, the quiet cocking a snoot at a taboo, a group transgression, and an escalating mind-alteration all at once. There is something undeniably fraternal about getting drunk in a group, particularly when the disciplines of family life and religious custom are absent. I asked one of them why drinking like this was so much better than boozing in their homes in Kota Bharu. “We not hiding inside,” he said. “Total sharia almost in Kota, la.”

  Kota Bharu is in Kelantan, the easternmost state on the Thai border and the stronghold of Malaysia’s most radical Islamic party, the Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the PAS. The party’s leader, and the chief minister of the state, is Nik Aziz, who has pushed for full sharia law to be implemented. This includes amputation for theft and stoning for adultery: the standard civilities of hud law. The federal government has obstructed the outright imposition of sharia, but the PAS has won control of five of Malaysia’s thirteen states.

  I heard about the recent sensational case of the Malaysian model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, who in 2009 was sentenced by a sharia court in the state of Pahang, one of the five PAS-controlled states, to six lashes of a cane for drinking a beer in a hotel bar. The sultan of Pahang commuted the sentence to community service the day before it was due to be executed, but had it been performed, it would have been the first judicial caning of a woman in modern Malaysian history. In February 2010 three women actually were caned for sex outside marriage, and most people think canings for drinking alcohol will now begin to rise as Islamization sweeps across the country. Drinking will become increasingly dangerous. Its allure will soar, and the border will boom.

  Only half of Malaysia’s twenty-six million people are Malay Muslims. The rest are Chinese and Indian and could not be covered by the laws anyway. “Islam is a soft, gentle religion,” the redoubtable Nik Aziz has said. “We want sharia adopted across the country by consensus.” Thailand, meanwhile, has the most radical Islamic state in Malaysia right on its border. It’s both a curse and a grotesque business opportunity.

  A few days later I took a private car from Hat Yai to Pattani. It’s a two-hour drive to the coast, passing estuaries clogged with spike rushes, rice paddies, and orchards, the flimsy houses ringed with bamboo birdcages hung on strings: the ubiquitous, sad songbirds of the south. A hot, flat land with an exhausted lushness to it, a feeling of ebb and no flow.

  Halfway to Pattani the road signs begin to be in Arabic script, and the first roadblocks appear. Thai Army units in their jungle camouflage helmets lounge under café parasols armed with M15s or sit with expressions of exasperation behind walls of sandbags. By five o’clock the roads are empty. After nightfall insurgent gangs roam them with opportunistic ferocity. Even at three in the afternoon my driver was eager to be off the highway. The minivans that are the usual transport between towns in the south have often been stopped, the travelers ordered out and shot on the spot. Local police stations have been hit with rocket-propelled grenades, and Buddhist roadside food stalls sprayed with automatic gunfire.

  Few people come to Pattani now, though there’s a sizable university, and its riverine neighborhoods of old Chinese shop houses used to draw Thai artists and bohemians. The city is under a hit-and-miss military curfew, and the only unrepulsive hotel is the now-ghostly CS, a mile out of town. It, too, was car-bombed (in 2008, two hotel employees killed) but was restored with Malay decor and Malay piped music; it now sits mostly empty at the end of a cul-de-sac behind armed guards, sandbags, and tired security cameras.

  When I arrived, a few Muslim businessmen were on the outdoor terrace, drinking tea with Tea Pot brand condensed milk, the only thing served there. Tea, condensed milk, and sugar. With my cranky Thai I was able to persuade one of the hotel clerks to lend me his motorbike for cash. Taxis in Pattani are virtually nonexistent. They protested that it was suicidal for a farang to ride around on a bike, but it seemed a reasonable risk to get a cold Singha. Why would anyone shoot me anyway? It was Buddhists and other Muslims they hated.

  I soon got lost, speeding through the Pattani hinterland, alongside the sleepy canals, warehouses, and rice paddies stilled within an unnerving calm. I was stopped by heavily armed Thai soldiers at a roadblock. They came out with their cameras to snap me astride the dirt bike, and I was high-fived: Buddhist recruits in complicity with the six-foot-five Englishman mistaken for an American. I asked them in Thai where the bars were, then how they felt to be posted here to Pattani, the most feared city in Southeast Asia, unable to even go to a bar when they were off duty. They were lackadaisical. The southerners were backward bastards, that was all. They were dying to get back to Bangkok for a weekend. We chatted about our favorites among the 120,000 watering holes in Bangkok, exchanging cigarettes, and I realized that our political complicity relative to the insurgents
was centered on what the latter loathed most: drink.

  That night there was a Chinese New Year festival in Pattani’s old town. I rode there on the bike, through alleys where the lamps had been cut off, lit by overhead strings of red Chinese lanterns. A whole small city without neons, submerged in an atmosphere of latent violence and paranoia. Nocturnal running gun battles between police and insurgents are hardly uncommon in the streets of Pattani; nor are assassinations, executed with a chilling casualness from the backs of mopeds. Circling the town for an hour by myself, I didn’t see a single night spot or bar, and not a single Malaysian tourist either. This is now by default an Islamic city that has stepped back from participation in modern Thailand. But the New Year festival had a rock concert and a dragon dance: I wandered through it with an iced litchi juice, while the girls in headscarves at the food stalls told me shyly that they didn’t even stock Coke. Was it disdained in some way?

  The Deep South does indeed feel like a place that has slipped away from modernity. The go-go bars, the obsession with technology, the raucous sex, and—perhaps above all—the relative freedom of women in the workplace? For Thai Muslims, one might say, it’s Thai Buddhists with their easygoing tolerance who are “the West,” the Dar Al Harb, the realm of infidels. The people who permit everything.

  Back at the hotel, the lobby was a morgue, and the terrace wasn’t even serving Tea Pot. It was nine-thirty. I wandered out into the grubby plaza beyond the security barriers and noticed a rose-lit establishment of some kind where the usual Thai waitresses in slit dresses were lounging about at sticky tables. An astonishing sight. Sure enough, it was a modest one-room karaoke lounge of some kind, and I was able to order a Singha beer. It was clearly set up for Chinese businessmen staying at the CS or the occasional naughty Muslim willing to brave death, but there was no one there. I asked the girls where they were from. Unsurprisingly, they were Buddhists, some of them from the north, and they were uneasy working at perhaps the only bar in Pattani and so close to a hotel that had already been bombed. But business was business.