by Al Culler
No sooner had I grabbed hold of another ice cold beer than half a dozen Thai men surrounded me, whipping down their underpants; it soon became apparent that any gay Thai with an erection bigger than a few inches (and there didn’t seem that many of them!) had an irresistible urge to show it off. At least no-one looked as if they were about to expire and the live sex show was mildly entertaining; the athleticism making up for the lack of essential manliness; would have ruined my back in short order. By the time I’d finished my second beer I was getting lots of nasty looks, my lack of sexual interest disturbing the ambience - these people insist in travelling in packs and don’t like outsiders.
By then I’d had enough and was longing for Patpong but I didn’t want to go back the same way as I came (you never know who might be waiting for you) and was literally dragged off my feet into another bar before I could escape the area. If I was actually gay this would’ve been paradise! The eighteen year-old age of consent had been inverted; apart from the bouncers and barman I couldn’t see anyone who was likely to have broken through their eighteenth year on planet earth. One of the guys seemed to be about eleven!
Polished skin, lean muscle bodies, great hair, wild smiles - in fact, every farang’s nightmare, just the kind of guy Thai girls like to fall for. A couple of the foreigners were fellow devotees of the go-go bars, grinning devilishly in revenge mode, full of themselves on what they could get away with for a few hundred baht. I almost felt sorry for the Thais, it soon became evident that they had the same expectation as the bar girls, some guy coming into town for the first time who’d set them up for life - they were all over me when I told them I’d just arrived! Which I hadn’t but it was amusing to hear what they really thought about me when they spoke to each other in Thai.
My final sight on exiting was the eleven year old all over some ancient, not even bothering with the short-time room; all part of the entertainment, all part of the momentary kicks. Before I could hit Silom again I threw up, violently sick as if my soul was trying to force its way out of my body. My throat was so rancid that not even the Laotian whisky helped; hell, you can only take so much shit and that was about my limit! Either that, or the wild continuum of sexual diseases from the disparate sexual acts had mutated the AIDS virus into a form that could be breathed in from the very air; wouldn’t put anything past the evil bastards.
Up-Country Run
Too long in Bangkok, mind too frenzied, brain all a-buzz, body bloated beyond belief - gotta hit the road, man! Or the Morchit bus terminal... I’d taken the precaution of filling a couple of bottles full of Lao whisky, just in case things went surreal. Which, of course, they did the moment I stepped on to the bus - some Western children’s cartoon on the TV with Mickey Mouse gabbling away in a particularly frenzied Thai! The volume turned up so that it tried to bounce my eardrums out of my head. Dignified Thai faces gone all loose, goggling at the magic box.
I’d once tried to educate a DJ in a Patpong bar who’d turned the bass up to maximum, grinding my teeth down to nothing. I’d staggered into his booth, turned down the bass, received a round of relieved applause from the other farang and bemused looks of incomprehension from the Thai girls. The DJ gave me a vicious scowl, turned every control up to maximum, emptying the bar in short order. Obviously endowed like a hamster and couldn’t afford a big car to prop up his ego.
The Thai youth next to me sniffed his nose when I took a slug from one of the bottles, suddenly alert at the possibility of free drinks. By the time the bus moved out of the chaotic terminal, the first bottle was empty and the Thai lads at the back of the bus were getting raucous. Can’t hold a drink, these kids! The Mickey Mouse cartoon, when I looked up, replaced by what appeared to be hard-core porn but turned out to be the latest Alien or Species or something movie with monsters exploding out of bodies during copulation. Just what I needed!
There were plenty of babes on the bus but they travelled in packs and wouldn’t meet my benevolent gaze. The drunken Thai youth next to me had lost all the lines in his face, doing a reasonable impression of the village idiot. By the time the bus had managed to exit Bangkok proper half the occupants were drunk out of their heads and all the drink was gone.
I needn’t have worried, a purple note bought a case full at the first stop, no-one trusting anyone and the buses stopping several times on route to be checked over by inspectors. I snagged a bottle to myself and promptly passed out when I’d finished it, my last impression was of a screaming harridan with a good pair of legs trying to keep the Thais in the back in order.
I woke up with a searing pain in my stomach and some lout screaming in my ear - pee, shit, pee, shit. Sounded like a good idea to me, anyway. The bus was empty, my bags gone and the bus station in almost pitch blackness. Being a cunning old bugger, my dollars were stashed in my boots and my Thai money plus passport in my underpants - both too unsavoury places for even the most desperate Thai man to contemplate investigating.
I staggered off the bus, couldn’t find anything that looked like a toilet so unleashed the by now desperate pecker on to the back wheel of the bus. Immense relief turned into desperate embarrassment when the bus started and motored out of the station, leaving me still emptying my bladder in full view of the town’s only awake inhabitants - four bar girls by the look of them!
After stowing the member back where it belonged, I hopefully shouted, ‘Chiang Mai’ at the babes which just got bemused looks from them. After screaming at them in a mixture of Thai and English they reluctantly, as if it was some kind of state secret, revealed that I was in Phichit, which at least explained the driver’s invocations. I’d managed to get about a third of the way to the Northern Capital!
The youngest of the bunch didn’t look half bad, at least in the minimal illumination, and I tried my most benevolent smile upon her. The combined sum of each other languages added up to a five minute courtship and her insistence that I go off with her to her home! Ah, the joys of foreign travel.
The girl had a wrecked motorcycle - some sixties Honda step-thru so old it might make it as a valuable classic - that reacted as if it was going to fall apart under the unusual Culler mass but it was a straight if pitch black journey. Towering over her, about ten thousand insects were splattered against my face, some surviving, seeming to crawl inside my eyeballs! Good job I was more or less sober, else I would’ve torn my eyes out!
Her home was a wooden shack on stilts, lit by a singular neon tube that glared minimally in the pitch black sky - no street-lamps out in the countryside. You don’t know blackness until you’ve been in the Third World.
Bangkok is a noisy old bastard of a city but the Thai countryside’s something else! About ten million crickets had set up home outside the house in some kind of mad courtship ritual that involved cack-cack-cacking at each other at about 1000 decibels. Almost, but not quite, drowned out several packs of dogs who were trying to see who could make the most racket.
The mosquito netting at least saved me from the immediate attention of those insects but it didn’t stop the cockroaches and rats from giving the collapsed Culler frame a going over. Didn’t seem to bother the babe any, the heat of her naked skin infusing me with the pure energy of lust. I eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion! Woke up to find her giving me another going over, not sure if she’d stopped for any sleep at all! Not something I was going to complain about, anyway.
Fell back to sleep, woken up by a monster sized cockroach trying to enter my mouth. Not the first time this has happened, for some reason, but it still blew my mind! It moved fast enough to avoid being splattered! A small but strongly lean dog waited at the bottom of the house’s ladder, growling deep in its belly and baring yellow fangs. Close enough to get a sniff of the Culler odour, it whimpered, scampered away almost on its belly, fear pouring out of its eyes!
The toilet was a splendid construction of rusty corrugated sheet and rotten wooden posts. A hole in the ground over which to crouch. The mosquitoes went into a feeding frenzy on the unusu
al texture of farang skin whilst I decided if I should throw up from the stench or drop a load due to the searing pains in my stomach. The latter won out - just!
Mai returned as I staggered out of the toilet, a large bucket of water at each end of a bamboo pole on her shoulders. 45kgs of pure tempered steel muscle, with a lovely velvet sheen. Honed by thousands of years of pure breeding, generations toiling the soil. She looked even better in the daylight, no make-up and neon trying to take away her youth. Make a fortune in a Nana bar if she could steel her heart to the walking dead.
She wrinkled her nose, I took the hint and threw the buckets of water over my naked (except for rancid underpants) body, a minor and temporary relief from the incredible heat of the day! One major benefit of Bangkok’s pollution, it cuts out some of the sun’s force!
Mai’s parents had disappeared, leaving her in the care of her grandmother who had died when she was 15. Her inheritance, a wooden shack and the small piece of land on which she lived. A Thai guy took her virginity and then married someone else! She sometimes worked the land for a 100 baht a day, other times hung out around the bus station with some friends, whores in the Western sense but really just desperate women trying to get a little ahead of the game.
We had hardly any language in common, came from totally different cultures, but we sort of melded straight off! Most of that down to the way Thai girls go to extremes in the early days of a relationship to ensnare their men; the hell breaks loose later!
Westerners feel sorry for apparently poverty stricken farmers upcountry but the truth is that the men spend only a couple of months working, pay absolutely no taxes and have some of the most beautiful women in the world going out of their way to please them. If they own a little bit of land they are set up for the life of Reilly! Only blow it when they become totally addicted to Laotian whisky.
Wandering around Petchanbun province on the wrecked Honda, some four hours out of Bangkok, I was deep in the heart of darkness - another age where primitive black magic still rules! Mai decided to take me to visit all her relatives, spread over the province - many of them not willing to speak to her because she had no money! With a farang in tow she was greeted much more warmly, you could almost see the scams fermenting in the relatives’ brains.
Except for a couple of cousins who’d snared farangs, none of them were exactly rich, happy to do a conjuring trick with the money I paid out for the drink and food, inflating prices a little. Upcountry, four big bottles of Beer Chang go for a hundred baht but I was getting three for my red note... that kind of stuff. I wasn’t complaining, it was still working out cheaper than hanging out in Nana of a night and the fresh air was cleaning out my lungs.
Christmas was totally ignored, New Year celebrated over a long weekend of drunken madness but Mai kept me too busy for most of the time to let me get truly wrecked. The heat, even in the night, at sauna levels, combined with the unusual amount of exercise and Laotian food meant I was shedding pounds at a rate that Slimmer’s World could only envy. Despite being eaten alive (and probably eating them as well, judging by some of the food that was served up) by mosquitoes, rats and cockroaches I was having the time of my life!
The mad exodus back to Bangkok, after the New Year craziness, passed me by, though Mai told me of many dead and hundreds injured in road accidents. Only in the second week of our relationship did reality begin to intrude (farangs who holiday for a week or two in Thailand invariably only see the good side of their women!)...
The next round of motorcycling was looking at houses. We stopped outside a two-storey white concrete house, partly obscured by some trees. 800,000 baht, she told me. Farang husband from England. Apparently, the girl had several kids with a Thai husband before he was killed in an accident, then she met, in a Cowboy bar, an English guy who married her. They had one kid, only the girl had a Thai boyfriend on the side, who everyone reckoned was really the father. They’d gone off to the UK, leaving the boyfriend - he scowled at me suspiciously from across the road!
She took me to every farang house in the area, I think. I eventually worked out that she was giving me a hint as to our future, at least with regards to the money expected to build a property. From the tales she told there was an inverse relationship between the amount of money the farang spent on the property and land and the amount of fidelity received!
Farang jonn, I kept explaining, which meant foreigner with no money. She kept patting my still large stomach as if such a protuberance was impossible to maintain without a high income. Monstrous farangs welcomed with open arms in Thai bars, though called farang moo (foreign pig) behind their backs (or even to their faces if they are first timers and don’t understand Thai) because they are assumed to have gained such outrageous mass through excess wealth. Thai girls lying through their back teeth about liking such obese creatures whilst treating them like overgrown babies.
She couldn’t understand that the six hundred dollars I was carrying on me wasn’t loose change but the total sum of my personal wealth! She was all for blowing that on the foundations of her new house, a mansion-like structure she’d shown me in a magazine! Between extreme poverty and excessive wealth there appeared no middle ground.
By the end of the second week, the sex had declined to once a day with me doing all the work whilst she sported a sullen look. God knows where marriage would’ve led! The grinding sameness of the countryside eventually boring me out of my head. I tried to persuade her to accompany me to Bangkok but she didn’t want to know.
Her sullenness drained all the youth out of her, giving me a frightening glimpse of where she’d be in ten years time. Watching her watching me, as the bus pulled out of Phichit, I felt a huge sense of relief and a great longing to be back in the bright lights of Bangkok! Amazingly, I was stone cold sober and revelling in having broken back down through the 100kg barrier. Way to go, boy!
Bitches
After two weeks up-country, Bangkok was all noise, bright lights and a carcinogenic level of pollutants. Nana Plaza, the first night back, blew my mind away, the contrast so heavy it was just like being in town for the first time ever. Being off alcohol didn’t help!
My sojourn out of Bangkok must’ve imbued me with a patina of innocence, had plenty of young yet hardcore babes all over me in the larger bars until I spat out some Thai; soon got rid of them. By nine-thirty the big bars to the right downstairs were packed out, no sitting room!
Every time I spied some gal of sublime beauty, had the poor old pecker twitching and the eyeballs out on stalks, a close examination of her naked body whilst she gyrated on the stage revealed the tell-tale skin lesions, suggesting that HIV had turned into AIDS. Ask the girl, she’ll say it was from a motorcycle accident or birth defect but you don’t get big purple welts from the latter and they were in some very odd places for the former. Better safe than sorry.
The big Nana bars are wonderful entertainment but there’s something wrong with the girls, for all the density of beauty packed on to the stages. Just a waste of time if you want to get even half serious.
The smaller Nana bars always worth a look. Half the time they are totally deserted of customers, especially when the attractive women have done a runner for the night. A mixture of really hardcore babes, katoeys and the odd near innocent. I was eyeing one of the latter in one of the upstairs’ bars when some old dear pounced on the frail Culler frame.
She decided I needed waking up, clamped her lips on mine and made with the mouth to mouth magic. She’d evidently been trained by a pack of GI’s in her youth, leaving the poor old Culler lips bruised and tongue bitten raw. She wouldn’t give up, not even when I refused to buy her a Cola. Kept going for half an hour.
The young babe was long gone by then, the old dear going a bit sullen when she had to go dance with sign of neither a tip nor a drink. If her wrecked stomach was any guide, she’d dropped half a dozen kids.
Still, there’s always hope. I know one 55 year old bar girl who finally got lucky (after about twenty years!), m
arried a Belgian guy of the same age and went off to live in Switzerland with him where they run a restaurant. Her attitude was one of devotion to the man of the moment and no pressure for money, plus some advanced sexual techniques that left the poor old bugger drooling and weak at the knees.
A lot of farang have never had good sex before and go crazy when they realise what’s available. He was already married, even brought his wife to Bangkok and let the Thai girlfriend make a birthday party for her (she didn’t know the Thai woman was his girlfriend - then!). Thais love to take the piss like that! Divorce only happened after he’d got most of his money out of the country, Western divorce laws ridiculous! Along the way, he’d bought her some land up-country and built a house. He was happy to get her out of Thailand, though, because he suspected she was into young Thai boys on the side. Nothing’s ever simple in the Far East.
Things turned weird in one bar. This real wreck of a guy told me an amusing tale. He was living with an ex-Hollywood babe, paying her 30,000 baht a month clear profit, plus money for food and shopping. Sex had dwindled to once a week.
Insult added to injury, she claimed he made too much noise and she preferred to sleep with her female friend, who he was also looking after and who slept in the spare bedroom.
Coming home early one night he caught them in the act. Nope, not a lesbian show. The friend was actually a guy, dressed up in woman’s clothes, wore a wig and went wild on the make-up. Made a change from claiming the boyfriend was the brother, anyway!
Catching them in the act was such a shock that he had a mild heart attack, collapsed down on to a chair. Whilst he was incapacitated, the pair took his money and anything valuable that wasn’t bolted down on to the floor. That was the last he saw of them!
