Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  Though I was happy to benefit from these shopping trips, I didn’t have the nerve to do them myself. It seemed suspiciously close to stealing, and even the smack did not lead me down that road. Had it done, I imagine I’d have been an even worse thief than I later became drug smuggler. I’d always had jobs and crime never really suited me; I was too honest for my own good and my conscience would have plagued me.

  Sex was something my conscience found rather easier to approve, and the heroin opened a Pandora’s box of debauchery. On my first visit to Thailand the previous year I’d had a beautiful girlfriend called Lek, a bar girl who’d come to Bangkok from a small village near the Cambodian border. When we’d met, I was down to my last few hundred dollars and was planning on going to Australia to work. She had her ‘paying’ boyfriends, who were usually older men, while I was what she called her ‘love’ boyfriend. There were strict rules in the guesthouses about ‘working’ girls coming into the rooms at night, but the family who owned the place befriended Lek and allowed her to stay when she liked. She continued to see her customers, but always came to me at the end of the night and kept her other dalliances to what she called ‘short time’. In spite of the slightly unorthodox arrangement they were happy times, and when I left to find work in Australia we kept in touch and rekindled our relationship upon my return.

  Australia had been hard work, but I’d saved every penny I could in the six months I was there. I wanted to see Asia, and the land down under held little interest for me. I’d got a string of lousy jobs and kept my head down, starting with the dismal fruit-picking season in Victoria state. I’d heard you could make decent money in the orchards, and perhaps if you arrived at the right farm at the right time and knew the right people, you could. But for me it was a disaster, and I barely earned enough to feed myself while living in a grubby shack in the outback. I’d hitch-hiked from Melbourne, a pleasant enough town, and on the first day I was fired for picking unripe fruit: the only fruit available at the time. I was thrown off the farm there and then, and nearly got arrested for vagrancy by some hick coppers in a four-by-four. They reminded me of the rednecks in American films about the Deep South, while I was the black drifter one step away from a chain gang.

  Things improved when I got to the next farm and by chance ran into some old school friends from Norfolk taking a year out before university. They were on their way to Sydney and said I could join them later on. With a new plan of action, I needed to come up with a couple of hundred quid to make it to the big city and applied myself to the loathsome task of picking pears for ten hours a day. I hated the work and spent the evenings getting drunk on cheap, nasty booze with Aboriginal lads. With barely enough saved to buy the bus ticket, I decided to hitch to Sydney instead and got a ride with a psychotic truck driver who scared the hell out of me. He drove one-handed and used the other to rant to his mates on his CB radio, using his knees to keep the steering wheel steady while he changed gears. Presumably his mates were up ahead, telling him what the traffic was like, because he was uninterested in which side of the road he was driving on and went round blind bends on the wrong side. I was exhausted and needed to sleep, but he wanted company and said I could get out and sleep on the side of the road. I stayed awake all night.

  We pulled into an industrial estate on the outskirts of Sydney at six in the morning, and I found a pie shop opening for the early morning bake. My friends Bobby and Simon had got a place near Bondi Beach and were sharing with two Kiwi girls and their cousin Stu, a guitarist and recovering heroin addict. I took an immediate liking to Stu, a very chilled-out guy and good company. It was cramped, but they said I could stay for a couple of days until I found my own place. I stayed five months and slept on the sofa for a peppercorn rent. We all signed up for an agency called Dukes and were rarely out of work. Some of the jobs were OK and some of them weren’t. They kept sending me to a powdered-milk factory for ten-hour shifts, and I’d have to spend an hour washing the disgusting, sticky grime off my body afterwards. The foreman was a sleazebag who liked to brag about getting the ‘cherry’ of 13-year-old Filipino kids on his visits to Manila. I wanted to punch his fucking lights out.

  It was shitty work, but I was earning and saving around a hundred dollars a week. If I kept it up I’d fly back to Bangkok with a couple of grand in my pocket, enough to hang out for a while and fly on to Japan. At the end of the week we’d go to a bar called the Bourbon and Beefsteak, an all-night drinking den in King’s Cross. This was the start of my penchant for bourbon, which climaxed the following year in the karaoke bars in Kyoto.

  Bob Dylan came to town with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and I saw them twice: my one extravagance while in Australia. The first time I got so drunk I have no recollection of the show whatsoever. I can only remember being woken up by the prod of a policeman’s truncheon on the side of the road a good mile from the stadium. Later I talked Bobby and Simon into coming to a second show, which they reluctantly agreed to in spite of the expensive tickets. The gig was in one of those awful aircraft hangar-style venues, better suited to corporate events, but I did remember the show. Unfortunately I got thrown out for lighting up a cigarette in the squeaky-clean dive and stood out on the street while Bob played ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

  I was still thinking about Lek, but I started to meet new girls and before long had a new girlfriend of sorts. Belinda was cute, but we weren’t well suited. She had a junkie boyfriend called Lance whom she was still seeing, while her sister, Judy – whose flat she lived in – had a boyfriend who was on the run for armed robbery. Judy was cute too, but I felt they were both damaged. They’d had a difficult upbringing and had been removed from the family home by social services. Judy’s boyfriend, Bill, was a bad lot. I took an immediate dislike to him and was not surprised to learn he was violent and abusive towards her. Fortunately he only arrived intermittently, usually late at night, as the police were looking for him. They caught up with him in the end and he went to prison for many years.

  After six months my visa was running out, and I had my two grand saved, as well as the second half of my return flight to Bangkok. Bobby and I took a few days out to see more of the country and caught a bus up the coast to a place called Surfers Paradise, a hideous Torremolinos-like resort that I hated. It was off-season, and we holed up in a cheap motel, drinking and watching TV. The beach was deserted, as was the town, and the sea was choppy, with danger signs every hundred yards. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge a holiday resort off-season, but I got the impression it would be even worse full of people. Soon I’d be in Thailand and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the money I’d saved in this dump.

  Within a week, I was back at the airport waiting for my flight. Belinda and I had parted company on good terms, and I’d given her a silver St Christopher pendant my mother had given to me. Some years later I got mail from her with a San Francisco phone number included so I could call her. We spoke for a while, and I was pleased to discover she was happy and settled with an American guy. She’d had a shitty start in life, but things had turned out for the better. She asked if I wanted her to return the St Christopher, but I told her to keep it, saying that maybe if we ever ran into each other again I’d have it back. Unsurprisingly, I never saw her or the necklace again.

  Back in Thailand I wanted to party before going on to Japan, and I had the cash to do it, for a while at least. Jonathon and I moved away from the backpacker district to a guesthouse near the Malaysia Hotel, an old Vietnam War R & R hangout. It was an agreeably seedy neighbourhood, with a small cafe bar frequented by Vietnam veterans and over-the-hill bar girls. The Americans tended to be bearded, with Jack Daniel’s vests and Harley Davidson tattoos. Many had tried to settle back home, only to find they missed the ‘edginess’ of the war zone and the girls they’d met in Saigon. With fond memories of the region, they’d used their army pensions to come back, start businesses and settle down with willing Thai girls. The Malaysia Hotel was a dump that had seen better days and looked more like a
nasty block of flats than a hotel. It was a notoriously ‘smacky’ neighbourhood, and the hotel was at the very centre of the sleaze. It was common to see ambulances parked outside and another dead junkie being taken away. In the basement there was a 23-hour bar, but you could take your drink and sit in the garden for the hour that they were cleaning the place up. It became our end-of-the-night local, where we could have a nightcap and stumble home to our crummy guesthouse down the street.

  We met a couple of Londoners called Tony and Ronnie, who’d just come from Australia with thousands of pounds’ worth of traveller’s cheques, which they’d ‘lost’ on arrival. They successfully claimed them back from American Express, even though Ronnie had cashed in the originals on a quick jaunt to Singapore. Now they had money to spend and they wanted to have fun. We started going out to bars and clubs, buying Captag on ‘slimming’ pills from the pharmacy and drinking all night. We went on a blitz of one-night stands and before long had acquired a variety of STDs.

  It wasn’t my first visit to a clap clinic; I’d been to one with Lek after picking up a ‘dose’, as Ronnie called it, on my previous visit to Thailand. Lek had taken me to a central Bangkok hospital, where westood in a huge line for over an hour before being seen by the doctor. The patients were mainly women, but there were men, too, and even Buddhist monks in saffron robes. Eventually we got to the front of the queue, which opened into a large room containing curtained-off cubicles with a bed in each, and a man sitting at a small table with a Bunsen burner. In his hand he held a small tool that resembled a tiny model of the immersion heaters we’d had at boarding school to boil water for Pot Noodles. It had a wooden handle with a long wire sticking in it that coiled up at the end and back on itself. The Bunsen burner was there to clean it between patients. Nobody spoke English, but Lek asked the doctor to see me and explained the problem. He asked me to drop my trousers as he stuck the grim instrument into the blue flames to kill off my predecessor’s germs. Then he stuck the end in a bucket of water to cool it down.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind coming to the Thai hospital?’ Lek had asked me earlier. ‘There is a falang [foreigners’] clinic, but it’s very expensive.’

  ‘If the Thai hospital is OK for you, it’s OK for me,’ I said.

  Now I was regretting the decision, but it was too late. The doctor plunged his knobbly wire into my urethra and wiggled it around to get a sample of the discharge. The sensation was both agonising and ticklish, and I let out a yelp as he dragged the wire back out before wiping it on a piece of glass with my name attached. I pulled up my jeans and underwear, and he handed me the sample back and called for the next person, as he waved his tool over the Bunsen burner again.

  We managed to find a seat in a huge waiting room that looked more like a train station than a hospital. I figured the worst was over, until I saw the size of the injection heading my way. Our numbers had come up on the wheel above the entrance to the waiting hall, and we’d been called up to take our samples into a doctor’s office. The door was slightly ajar, and I was standing outside rolling up my shirt-sleeves when I saw a man lying on a bed. The syringe looked like a veterinary hypodermic for delivering horse tranquillisers, and I’m the kind who is scared of tetanus jabs. The doctor held the dreadful contraption up to the sunlight and squirted out the air pocket before plunging it into the man’s stomach. I turned to look to Lek for reassurance, but she’d already gone in to have her check-up and was nowhere to be found. Finally it was my turn, and I lay down as the doctor thrust the stainless-steel spike into my gut, where he left it for what felt like an eternity.

  Now a year had passed, and we were waving down a tuk tuk on the side of the road on the way to sort out our respective ‘doses’.

  ‘Bangkok Hospital, please,’ said Ronnie, as we set off through the city smog.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ I said, and began to recall my tales from the previous year.

  ‘Make that Nana Plaza on Sukhumvit Road instead, please,’ said Tony.

  So off we went to an English-speaking clinic in the posh part of town, which charged us five times as much, but it was worth every penny.

  Tony and Ronnie were not impressed with our use of skag. They were a few years older than us, with a lot more common sense, and when I turned up at their rented flat with an American Vietnam vet called Steve it was the last straw. Steve was a junkie living in Kathmandu who had been hired by a distraught Canadian family to find their son, who’d gone travelling the year before and had not been heard of since. He’d been trekking in Nepal, but had flown to Bangkok at some point and had subsequently gone off the radar. Steve seemed a strange person to entrust with finding anyone, let alone dealing with the police and embassy staff. He looked like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now and had a full-blown heroin habit. We’d met in the cafe opposite the Malaysia Hotel, where he was staying, and he’d taken one look at my pupils and decided I was a good person to help him find some gear. We scored a phial and stopped by at Tony and Ronnie’s place, where Steve fell asleep on Tony’s bed and had to be lifted out of the room.

  ‘You gotta knock that shit on the head, Dom,’ said Tony, ‘or it’ll be too late before you know it.’

  He was right. My brief flirtation with smack was getting out of hand, and it was time to get a grip. It was getting me in trouble, too, and I found myself in a fight with a lady boy at six in the morning in the bar of the Malaysia Hotel. He’d kissed me with thick red lipstick on my brand-new white shirt, and I’d called him a stupid fucking faggot. Three people had to drag him off me, and we both got barred from the sleaziest bar in town. My body couldn’t take the powder, either, and I was prone to projectile vomiting out of the windows of taxis. The force of the jet from my stomach was such that it didn’t even touch the sides of my mouth. Thai girls I was sleeping with started telling me to get out of the country. ‘Thailand no good for you,’ they said. ‘This one no good,’ they said, rubbing their noses.

  It was time to take their advice and go. My second visit to the country had seen me go from being a squeaky-clean kid who liked to smoke the odd spliff while listening to Van Morrison’s Moondance to a strung-out loon lying dazed in dingy hotel rooms listening to the Stones’ ‘Sister Morphine’. My personality had changed and would likely never be the same again. Lek had been replaced by a long line of girls whose names I couldn’t recall, although we remained friends. I hadn’t visited one temple in three months, but I’d got drunk in half the bars in town. I’d swapped museum visits for clap clinics, malaria pills for tetracycline. I was gaunt and skinny, with sunken eyes and pallid skin, and rather than wait for Lek to do it for me, I emptied my last phial of heroin down the loo.

  Tony and Ronnie were also leaving, heading back to London to get jobs, having blown the proceeds from their traveller’s cheques scam, while Jonathon flew to Japan to meet his English girlfriend. I was on my own and the fun had gone. I had enough money to buy a ticket to Osaka, with a short stopover in Hong Kong, but I had to clean up my act before going to Japan, where drugs were frowned upon. I moved back to the Chuanpis Guesthouse behind Khao San Road and spent my last days with normal backpackers, eating good food and steering clear of any chemicals. I felt like I’d been through a maelstrom and now I’d been spat out the other side, wondering what the hell had happened.

  ‘You crazy boy!’ said Lek, sliding her hands through my hair.

  We were making up for lost time, lounging around the guesthouse drinking juices and counting down the hours till I’d go away again. I promised to send her some cash when I got up and running in Japan, and that I’d be back soon to see her. She was the only thing that had been constant about my first year away from England, and I’d missed her terribly when I’d gone to work in Australia. Now I was on my way again, and our time together was coming to an end. She had a new ‘money’ boyfriend, an older man from England whom I had a beer with at a street bar. He seemed a nice enough bloke and looked after her well. She was hoping to get married to give her family the
life she wanted for them, and had saved all her money to build a house in her home village in the countryside. Her family were everything to her, and her own happiness was secondary. I was the opposite and was only really interested in myself. Perhaps the heroin had made that easier to deal with.

  Lek wanted to come to the airport with me, so we took an air-con taxi across the city. We were still good friends, and she was concerned about the state I’d got into. I felt I ought to give her a little cash before I left, so I asked the taxi driver to pull over outside the Nana Plaza bureau de change. As I pushed open the taxi door there was a crash, and a guy somersaulted over the bonnet of the car and into the road in front of the cab. He got up shaking his wrist, which was clearly bruised, and started having a slanging match with the cab driver. The driver helped him pick up his motorcycle taxi, which was lying on its side, and then they both began to assess the damage. The taxi door was slightly dented, but the bike’s petrol tank had a large bump in it and would need to be banged out by a mechanic. Obviously they both decided I’d be footing the bill. Lek was outraged, sensing that they would be getting the spare cash I’d planned to give to her, and she was right. I ran into the money-changer and cashed in a hundred and fifty dollars, and gave the hundred to the bike guy, which I told him was all I had. Then I slipped Lek the fifty and told her to go home so she didn’t have to pay to get back from the airport. We kissed goodbye on the side of the road before I got in the cab and drove to the airport. She was still standing there in her pretty pink dress, smiling at me as I turned to look out of the back window. I never saw her again.