Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  ‘So, this is where I’ve been staying for the last few days.’ He grinned, looking rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Lucky man, she’s fucking gorgeous!’

  ‘No fucking, actually; we’re just friends.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  ‘No, it’s true. She and Nok and I kip down together, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Nok?’

  ‘Yes, that’s her friend, she sleeps here as well, and yes, she’s even more beautiful than Miaow.’

  ‘So where am I going to sleep?’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the balcony with Miaow and you can hop into the bed with Nok.’

  I’d yet to meet Nok, but I immediately approved of the sleeping arrangements. Philip wound up the bamboo roller blinds and opened a door that led out onto a balcony with a thin mattress on the marble floor. I took out a duty-free Marlboro, but then Miaow asked if I’d prefer some Thai stick. She handed me a four-inch bud of sticky green grass wound around a thin stick. I held it to my nose and inhaled its sweet, pungent aroma.

  ‘You like?’ she enquired, knowing full well what my answer would be.

  ‘I like very much, thank you, Miaow.’

  I sat on the balcony bed and rolled a thin joint of straight grass, while Philip replenished our beer bottles and poured us a shot of Jack Daniel’s each. Above our heads a fan whirled silently as the sound of the Doors’ ‘L.A. Woman’ wafted up from a street-level bar below.

  ‘That’ll be Woodstock,’ said Philip. ‘It’s the local rock-and-roll bar, run by an Aussie bloke. It’s a go-go bar where the girls dance to ’60s music. We’ll check it out later, if you like?’

  ‘Sounds fun. Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘Fine. Why don’t you make yourself at home and we’ll be back in a bit. Miaow and I are invited to the opening of a friend of hers’ bar in Patpong.’

  I had no intention of going anywhere; I’d barely slept a wink on the plane and had got quite pissed in the transit-lounge bar at Moscow airport. What’s more, the weed was starting to kick in, and though I was a seasoned hash smoker, I was not prepared for the buzz this stuff was giving me. I poured another shot of bourbon, took a swig of beer and lay back on the bed, looking at the fan on the ceiling. I imagined I was on the set of Apocalypse Now, recalling the scene in which Martin Sheen, wearing only a sarong, cuts himself while punching a mirror after doing some kind of convoluted t’ai chi exercise. Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was playing at the Woodstock Bar below, and I wondered what Nok was going to be like.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been sitting in Heathrow airport with my one-way ticket in my hand, wondering what I was getting myself into. I often got butterflies in my stomach before I left home, but this time I had no plans, or even a ticket, to go back. I had enough money for a few weeks and then I’d have to get a job, whatever work I could find. It had been days since I’d spoken to Philip about my flight-arrival details. Would he be there to meet me? What would I do if he wasn’t? Now these worries were a million miles away. The booze and weed were taking effect, and I slid effortlessly into a deep sleep.

  A soft nudge woke me, and I rolled over to find a sleek body next to mine. I scanned my brain for a few seconds, but the computer in my head crashed under the weight of information overload. My eyelids flopped shut, then opened again to see the chopper blades overhead. I blinked and sat up. Outside it was light, but a sheet had been hung over the bamboo blinds, bringing a pinkish hue to the room. At the edge of the window a shaft of light shone into my eyes, its misty particles suspended like fairy dust at the head of the bed. Wiping a fine layer of moisture from my brow, I spied a sink in the corner of the room and remembered how dehydrated and thirsty I was. While pouring a glass from the tap, it occurred to me that it might not be a good idea to drink the water. Just then a hand touched me on the shoulder, and I turned to see my sleeping partner, with her long dark hair and ivory-white teeth, standing beside me wrapped in a pastel-blue sarong. She leaned over to a small fridge in the corner of the room and pulled out a plastic bottle of mineral water, which she held up to my lips with a smile.

  ‘You are Philip’s friend?’

  ‘Yes, and you must be Nok?’

  It felt strange shaking hands with someone I’d just woken up next to, but it seemed like the right thing to do, so we both giggled awkwardly as we officially touched for the first time. Nok pulled a cord next to the window and reeled in the bamboo blinds, revealing my first daylight glimpse of Bangkok down below.

  ‘You take shower?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The toilet I’d used the night before doubled up as a shower, and as the water washed over my body I could hear my new friend singing along to the radio next door. My first day in the Thai metropolis was getting off to a start I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams, and I scrubbed myself as if I were washing away my old life to make way for the better days that lay ahead.

  We sat in an American burger bar having breakfast. Nok assumed that, like many of her Western friends, I would not enjoy the local cuisine, so we sat eating a horrible chicken sandwich wrapped in a Stars and Stripes napkin.

  ‘Let’s eat Thai food for dinner, Nok; I can eat this kind of food where I’m from.’

  ‘OK, but first I’d like to take you to my apartment.’

  ‘I thought you lived with Miaow?’

  ‘No, I’ve been staying with her, but I have my own place. Would you like to come and stay?’

  We took an air-conditioned taxi for 15 minutes and pulled up outside a high-rise apartment block. She insisted on paying the fare, which was just as well since air-con taxis were not really in my backpacker’s budget. I stood next to her in the lift, with my rucksack at my feet, admiring her lithe body. She had a stunning figure and large obsidian eyes that peered up at me as she smiled. The apartment had little in common with Miaow’s place. The main room was three times the size of the other place, with glass sliding doors showing a panoramic view of Bangkok. I headed straight for the cassette player while she disappeared into the shower next door. On top of the machine was Neil Young’s Decade album, which I slipped in and then pressed play. ‘Cortez the Killer’, one of my favourite songs, was playing. I was in heaven. To this day I’m unable to listen to songs like ‘Old Man’ or ‘Ohio’ without being transported back to that apartment all those years ago, such is the associative power of music.

  Nok appeared again, with a brief sarong barely covering her body, and took a cold beer out of the fridge for me before returning to the bathroom. Wandering around the room, I noticed a number of photographs of her with a red-headed guy I guessed to be around 35. There were pictures of him with his parents taken at some Midwest barbecue, and one of him wearing a yellow hard hat, standing shoulder to shoulder with an Arab wearing a red kaffiyeh. Nok had mentioned her boyfriend over breakfast. He was an American working for an oil company in Saudi Arabia who kept a place in Bangkok for R & R. She was a kept woman in his absence but clearly had no trouble making cash on the side. After a couple of beers, we decided to go out and find a suitable place for me to have my first Thai meal. I wanted to go to one of the colourful street stalls I’d noticed across the road from the apartment block, but Nok insisted on taking another air-con taxi to a market area a couple of miles away. We came to a bustling street with an open-air restaurant every five yards. Outside each stall was a large sloping table covered in ice with an immaculately arranged selection of colourful seafood. Behind the chilled marine offerings, a man stood next to two large gas rings, tossing the food in a wok. Next to him, a woman with a huge, razor-sharp meat cleaver sliced vegetables and chopped up squid, whose inky entrails she rinsed in a large vat of water. Nok spoke to her in Thai, and she looked up to smile at me while continuing to slice the food on the wooden block in front of her. Her face was friendly and welcoming, and she waved her head towards a couple of free seats available a few feet away. I was convinced she was about to cut open her fingers with the dangerous-looking kn
ife in her hands, but no doubt she could have done her job with her eyes closed. I ordered a bottle of Kloster beer and Nok bought a small bottle of Thai whisky and a big bottle of Coke. I tried a sip of her drink without a mixer, and it tasted more like cheap rum than anything you might find in Scotland.

  ‘Is this a good spot to eat?’ enquired an ashen-faced couple from the north of England.

  ‘Dunno, just got here myself.’

  They sat down on a bench across the way, she with her back to us while he glanced at us from over her shoulder. He looked mildly envious as he admired Nok’s sleek stature. His missus looked older than him, and when she began to read an English translation of the menu he took the opportunity to grin and wink at me. I tried to crack a smile when I felt a hand on my thigh. Turning, I saw two bowls of rice and a massive plate of mixed seafood before us. Prawns the size of small lobsters lay next to tiny pink crabs and jade-coloured clams, while the squid glistened like purple coral. Within seconds, another plate arrived with steaming stir-fried vegetables over dried noodles.

  ‘There’s nowt wrong with that then,’ said the Englishman across the way, though I was unsure whether he was referring to the meal or the girl.

  ‘Ooh! Look at the size of those shrimps,’ said his wife, turning to look.

  The meal tasted as good as it looked and cost less than the third-rate KFC-style dive we’d eaten in earlier. Afterwards Nok wanted to take me back to Nana Plaza, where her friend had a bar. I suggested we take a tuk tuk that was a quarter of the price of an air-con taxi, but she wouldn’t have it, saying tuk tuks were dirty. The bar in the plaza was run by a German guy and his Thai wife, who looked like junkies and probably were. He wore a pink Balinese shirt and slacks, and had long blond hair and pale-blue faraway eyes with pinhead pupils. She looked like Siouxsie Sioux in 1979, with thick make-up obscuring her cratered complexion. They were friendly and warm and gave me a drink on the house on account of my being Nok’s friend. I propped up the bar while Nok did her rounds, sidling up to chubby Americans perched awkwardly on bar stools. I got chatting to a friendly guy from Texas who worked in the oil business in Qatar. A pretty girl called Phong joined us and the Texan bought her a Coke. She had a friend in tow, who sat next to me before Nok hissed and waved her away. The bar stereo was playing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which was fine with me. I’d been into punk music in my early teens, but later I’d fallen in love with the sounds of the ’60s and rarely listened to any current music. In Bangkok it was as if the ’60s had never ended, and there was still a large community of Vietnam veterans who’d stayed on after the war and married Thai women.

  Philip turned up after a while with a new pair of girls I didn’t recognise that he’d met in a bar on Patpong road. The manager of their club had offered him a job as a doorman, which involved handing out leaflets and hustling foreigners into choosing his place over the myriad bars on the strip. He said he’d probably give it a miss and take his flight to Rangoon sooner than expected. Bangkok was doing his head in, and he wanted to go down south to Koh Samui when he got back. He gave me a card for the go-go bar that had offered him a job and told me to contact a guy called Barry. We made vague arrangements to meet at a bungalow on the island, and he disappeared with the two girls.

  Nok was busy with her American friends, so I flagged down a tuk tuk and showed him the business card Philip had given me. He nodded and off we went through the traffic towards Patpong. We pulled up outside a bar called Suzie Wong’s and I paid the fare. Young Thai girls lingered in the doorway and grabbed my arm as I walked past. Inside another two girls took over, sitting me next to a stage and bringing me a cold beer. A fat Western-looking man was on the stage with two girls. They were taking turns to suck him off, but his penis was flaccid and he couldn’t get it up. Our eyes met, and I noticed his were pinned. Another junkie trying to pay for his next fix, I thought as I glugged on my bottle of Singha. A girl to my left tugged on my shirt and pointed across the room to a guy in a black Jack Daniel’s vest with a handlebar moustache. It was Barry. I left without saying hello and took a tuk tuk back to Nok’s bar.

  She was waiting with an air-con taxi. I climbed into the back as an American at the bar winked at me. Nok had her hand on my lap all the way back to the apartment. When we got there, she walked straight into the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a couple of minutes she came out and handed me a towel with the shower still running. I cleaned my teeth as the cool water splashed over my grimy skin, then I wrapped myself in a sarong and walked into the main room. The room was almost dark, but I could see her silhouette in the shadows by the bed. The bamboo blinds allowed horizontal bands of light to shine on the wall, giving the room a film-noirish feel. I lay beside her and she rolled over for a cuddle, then raised her right leg up to my waist until I could feel her moist, warm parts rubbing up against my thigh. Running my hands through her hair, we tried to kiss, but I felt awkward and told her I just wanted to hold her for a bit.

  ‘You don’t like me?’

  ‘I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,’ I said.

  I wasn’t lying, but something was holding me back. I lay there frozen, wondering why I was unable to make the most of the greatest opportunity that had ever come my way. But the missed opportunity would be replayed, again and again, with a very different outcome, as I lay in my cell in Shanghai prison many years later.

  I got up and lit a cigarette, which I smoked out of the window as Nok slept. A cool breeze blew across the Bangkok skyline, and I felt a chill for the first time since arriving in the country. Then we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  A sticky pool of warm clammy juice trickled between the follicles of my chest hairs into my belly button, where it quickly crystallised in the freezing air of 8th Brigade. The night watchman paused momentarily outside my cell door before continuing on his ten-minute rounds of the wing. After a minute, I reached over to my shitbucket and tore a few pieces of toilet roll off to wipe myself down. I wondered what kind of life Nok had ended up with. Had she married one of her American boyfriends who worked in Saudi and returned to some sleepy town in Idaho or Texas to bring up his kids? Or had she, like me, fallen through the cracks, condemned to while away her days pondering what might have been?

  Thinking of what had become of the beautiful Thai girl and my unforgettable introduction to the country, my mind drifted back to my second visit to Thailand, which had been a very different experience and changed the course of my life for ever. Hard drugs demolished much of the sense of morality I’d previously possessed. High-quality heroin was easy to come by, usually bought in small glass phials for a few dollars. Unlike the ‘brown sugar’ from Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Hindu Kush, ‘Chiang Mai White’ was a highly refined and insidious form of the drug. It had a soft, fluffy texture and was extremely powerful when snorted in even the tiniest lines. An English friend, Jonathon, and I had got into it after we found ourselves hanging out in a guesthouse near the Khao San Road in Bangkok’s backpacker area. We were both heading for Japan, where we planned to teach English, but we had several weeks in Thailand before our respective flights left.

  These were fun times, but the drug drastically altered my personality. Perhaps it would be truer to say it unleashed dormant character traits that would have surfaced anyway, but there was no question that heroin was a catalyst that had a profound effect on my behaviour. I’d always been afflicted by a sense of guilt, though it was never clear why, and heroin is the friend of those who wish to lay down such burdens. This is why junkies find it very easy to lie, cheat and steal from even their closest family and friends. Heroin will take your conscience and kick it for six every time. No questions asked; its powder dissolves the soul.

  My music taste changed, too, and after years of listening to my singer-songwriter heroes I fell in love with the drug-addled Rolling Stones. I’d always thought there was something a bit naff about the Stones and had never really appreciated their music. My teenage punk heroes had dismissed
them as overblown rock poseurs who’d ‘sold out’. I was familiar with their big hits and there had been a few greatest-hits albums around the house when I was a kid, but now I discovered the brilliant sequence of albums between Let it Bleed and Black and Blue, a period in which the once squeaky-clean pop group degenerated into a down-and-dirty rhythm-and-blues outfit, turning out a succession of superb albums best appreciated at four o’clock in the morning with Class A drugs running through my veins. Exile on Main St. was my favourite, closely followed by Sticky Fingers and Beggars Banquet, and we stocked up on bootleg cassettes from the multitude of street vendors on Khao San Road. The only ‘current’ album that came close was The Cure’s The Head on the Door, whose lyrics we interpreted as containing endless references to heroin, real or otherwise. I’d met Robert Smith and Simon Gallup at Norfolk’s premier punk venue, West Runton Pavilion, years earlier, and the singer had given me a guitar plectrum as a gift, while both scribbled their names on my arm with a biro. Now I was lying on the tiny guesthouse bed listening to ‘Kyoto Song’, convinced every word was written for me.

  My lovely Thai girlfriend Lek was not impressed with my new habit and flushed the powder down the loo when she found it. I was twenty-one, while she was at least five years older and had seen the stuff destroy many of her friends who’d fallen prey to its sinister charms. Jonathon and I bought another phial and hid it on a ledge under the guesthouse stairs.

  ‘We shouldn’t do this stuff every day,’ said Jonathon, ‘or else we’ll get hooked.’

  I agreed, so we settled on every other day, which quickly reverted to every day. No other drug is quite so good at deluding its users into thinking a day has passed when it hasn’t.

  I got a bit of work teaching English, which I thought would be good practice before the move to Japan. Jonathon was dabbling in petty crime, kiting credit cards ‘borrowed’ from other travellers, so I went along for the buzz. The card-owners would go to one of the islands in the south and after 24 hours report their credit cards missing. In the meantime, we’d go on elaborate shopping sprees determined by the spending limit on the credit card. We ate in five-star hotels, and in the gold shops of Chinatown we bought two-thousand-dollar gold chains. I was terrified of the armed guards in the gold shops, who sat in the corner with shotguns on their laps, staring at us while we waited for confirmation from the credit-card company. The spoils were divided between the card-owners and Jonathon, while I’d get to enjoy the freebies along the way. Some of the shops we went to were in on the scam and allowed us to buy what we wanted, even checking the card limits for us. We stocked up on clothes for English-teaching in Japan, as we only had jeans and T-shirts, and soon we had several outfits to make us look like ‘real’ teachers.