by Al Culler
Well, nearly all the guys. The previous bar had three orang-utans dressed up as human beings who thumped away on the bar out of tune with some seventies romantic swill (that’s music in case you’re completely lost) and tried to imitate humans singing, failed dismally. They almost looked like Americans, at least in their clothes, but the hard eyed stare totally lacked any innocence. The girls, sensibly and despite an harangue from the mamasan, refused to have anything to do with them.
Back to paradise, rather than waiting until the end of her dance routine, the Sophia babe climbed down from the stage and up on to my lap. She demanded that I caress her breasts whilst she did a mild lap dance. Took a microsecond for the waitress to appear and, for once, I gave in and blew 250 peso on a drink. The other girls gave me the thumps up, wandered off in search of another fool with more money than sense.
The drink lasted about thirty seconds, the empty glass quickly taken away and a waitress demanding that I buy more drinks. No chance! Sophia (I never did catch her name) pouted, stopped squirming around, although she seemed to like the breast massage. After half a dozen more attempts to extort money out of me the waitresses gave up. I was then supposed to buy her some Pizza, she didn’t seem too amused when I squeezed the very minor spare tyre around her waist and told her she was fat enough already! After a bit more pouting she decided she had to go off to dance again. I was obviously a bad customer!
It was obviously going to be one of those nights. Decided Jools would be a welcome relief. Huge place packed out with women of all types, it runs to a cabaret show and live band, as well as the usual dancing girls. The waitress reckoned there was a show charge of a 150 peso on top of the beer, after the usual argument I gave in!
Soon surrounded by women; somewhat less pressure from the waitresses though they still buzzed around. The problem with most of the girls, they were ex-USA GI - the girls worked in the bars around the bases as young as thirteen, fourteen, means anyone over twenty years old is a bit dubious. You wouldn’t believe what they got up to back then, the least of it live sex shows, often three guys on one gal!
May, for instance, was 27 years old, must’ve been mind blowing when she was eighteen. Still had a great body, only mildly scarred by dropping a kid or two, beautiful face without the usual cynical smile but her eyes were kinda of spaced out, man, as if she couldn’t believe her life was down to this. She may’ve been on some kind of mild narcotic, don’t know... Many more girls all dressed up rather than dancers; too lazy or bodies too ruined by dropping kids.
A new face in town, I had loads of women chatting to me but, I don’t know, they were all just that little bit too used up. Filipinas tend to have great hopes of the first love of their life, if that falls through and they lose their virginity, they tend to go off the rails rapidly, a vicious circle in which thinking themselves worthless they look upon anyone who shows some enthusiasm for them as even more beyond the pale.
They haven’t quite adapted as well as the Thai women, who have generally trained themselves to endure the attentions of farang whilst blowing all his money, and keeping a Thai man in the background for the serious sex and loving.
Jools is great entertainment, a bit more relaxed than the smaller bars (you have to drink a lot of beers to justify the show charge, though!) but I’ve never seen a babe I could go serious over in there.
Burgos area is generally safe. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog, let alone some of the mad, rabid, packs that abound in Bangkok - they are either killed or eaten by the poorest of the poor. Still some beggars, kids mostly who make all big-eyed at you, but they respond to a minimal amount of violence.
I was cutting through a back alley when a real piece of danger emerged out of the ether - probably the sewer! A bloody big transvestite rigged out in a ridiculous get-up - ultra short dress that showed the top of her stockings and suspenders. Ravaged ugly face that thrust into my own and poked out an outrageously long tongue. He said he would do me, and I’m sure he wasn’t kidding. I flung my arms about and sidestepped, ran like hell for the nearest bit of neon. The only thing that saved me, the monster couldn’t move fast on high heels!
I dived into the nearest bar, clutched an ice-cold San Miguel to my mouth. A converted car park, I think, at least I had to go down stairs to get into it. The boss was a dapper midget done out in an expensive suit, bald head gleaming. More bloody girls, coming at me from every angle.
I grabbed hold of the Tequila girl, sublime little body without an ounce of fat, all lean muscle that only youth or fanatical work-out artists attain... wasn’t sure about her face as the mamasans go into a frenzy if any girl turns up without a deep layer of make-up and excess of lipstick - stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course, she wanted me to buy her a Tequila and look astonished when I made noises about it being gut rot and poison. Okay if you want religious visions... she soon did a runner.
I had that urge for one last bar. Toss a coin... okay, hit Fridays. Weirdly, there’s some kind of church above the bar. I made the sign of the cross... pays to be on the safe side! First shock, some cherry girl I’d seen a year ago who didn’t want to know me, was all over me as if I was a long lost love. She’d been sublime back then but the dead eyed, pudgy frail who stood before me bore only a passing resemblance to her. I tried to explain gently that she’d blown her chance but she was in some fantasy world where I’d come back to save her! Took a whole ten minutes until she did a disappearing act.
A trio of young girls tried it on next, but one look at their eyes turned me to ice. They only desisted when some lovely young creature with the body of a sixteen year old threw herself into my arms. Sensual overload. Her face was beautiful in a Catholic kind of way, her smile and eyes still intact. She reckoned she was nineteen - maybe! The waitresses had already given up on me; quick learners!
Shit, she’d already been to Japan - doing god knows what - and was planning to go back for a second round! When I told her she was too lovely for that kind of life she told me I wasn’t the first to say that, and she didn’t care... as in its my body and soul, I’ll destroy them if I want to! I was so drunk and out of control I felt like bursting into tears. What a waste.
As pissed as I was pissed off, I made a fast exit. One more bar? Nope, I’d had enough for the night... only problem was I couldn’t quite recall the name of the hotel or where it was! Help!
Those Bangkok Bars
Nana Plaza has seeded lots of bars down Soi Nana and even deep into the side sois. Nothing stood out as being packed out with wild babes, more the watering ground of your serious sex tourist, going on seventy and running low on dosh. Worth, as always, giving it a going over as the old rules in Bangkok are in abeyance and you could get lucky at any time in any place. Or not!
Washington Square (now a building site) meanders along with its clientèle of old timers and washed up babes. Soi 22, into which it exits, proliferates with small beer bars - put it this way, by the time you’ve done the rounds beer consumption will be so high that the one attractive gal hiding out there will have her work cut out to get the deed done! The whole soi saturated with mangda’s. I miss the old Laotian disco under Washington theatre, though part of that scene was rabid fights between B-gals and rejected pimps.
No, as far as sheer density of babes goes, Nana Plaza rules. More babes brings more customers which brings more babes which... the youngest girl I spotted was sixteen and absolutely sublime; eighteen the age of consent for commercial sex, by the way, and fifteen if she’s just doing it for kicks.
Just a very small trickle at the moment, but some relatively nice girls are surfacing in Nana and other venues, the economic recession forcing them into the nitery entertainment arena. Possible to find girls worth marrying. Used to happen all the time a decade or more ago but the intervening years the bars have been awash with ex-brothel gals, hardcore babes and women desperately keeping their mangda’s (pimps) in motorcycles, gold and easy money.
Find someone decent, do a hit and run job on her - ie get her ou
t of the country as fast as possible (and good luck with the visa if you’re British or American!).
In one Cowboy bar I found a really stunning seventeen year old virgin but she had a firm grip on things, making large shovelling gestures suggesting the amount of dosh she was going to take off the right farang. The beer was warm and the air-conditioner marginal but I lasted half an hour before exiting; she didn’t even scowl when I failed to tip her! God, I could’ve lost my heart to her but she was too into the great farang rip-off to take seriously.
Upcountry gals are still sublimely nice at 15 to 20 years of age, all it takes is a three, four hour bus trip out of Bangkok to get into things; and a rudimentary knowledge of Thai... chances are, though, you’ll be picked up by a hooker on her way home. The guys will try to muscle in on the easy money but just pretend not to understand them even if they speak English.
You really wouldn’t believe the babes I’ve seen in places like Petchabun, makes wonder-models like Kate Moss seem pedestrian... and they come on with smiles that if they could be patented would generate a minor fortune.
Back in town, Patpong is fast becoming the place for overseas Chinese, with the odd Filipino gangster throwing thousand baht notes around. Still plenty of Western tourists but most consider it merely mild entertainment. The attractive girls are inspired by the ethos of the Chinese brothels - that is, doing a half a dozen, or so, customers a night. Neon rule one, worth taking note of, the more money you throw at a Thai babe the greater the contempt she holds you in - ignore it at your peril!
The Pong is also infested with katoeys (transsexuals and transvestites), which is okay in the bars devoted to their craziness (easy to avoid!) but more disturbing when they are littered amongst the real babes - the surgeon’s artistry and modern drugs mean that they are becoming increasingly difficult to spot.
If you get wise, tell one of them that they are a katoey, you’ll either get a fist in the face or a whining complaint about there being no problem as they have a fresh, newly minted, pussy!
Beyond these relatively obvious neon magnets, also every back alley on Sukhumvit has some kind of bar, coffee shop or massage parlour; Silom soi’s not far behind. Banglampoo another area where bars are proliferating, with plenty of free(ish) backpacker chicks (or guys, if you must!) thrown in for kicks. Try to avoid the speed tablets, though, as they are lately mixed in with ecstasy, tending to cause moral and physical disintegration!
Basically, Bangkok is becoming the neon city of the Orient, with an excess of beautiful babes, reasonable prices and a general lack of hassle from the police and mafia (unless the babe’s got a boyfriend in one or the other, when you can expect the old drugs found in the room, 100,000 baht thank you very much, routine).
Having ruined its economy in most other areas Thailand doesn’t seem to have much choice in the matter, living off its best and most ubiquitous asset - the beauty of its women - too easy to resist. Enjoy!
Illusions and Delusions
Nothing is quite what it seems in Asia. The other night, for instance, the old dear I was wandering around with insisted on entering an innocuous looking bar right in the middle of Soi Cowboy. Despite already having done the deed several times, she pushed me to the back of the joint, past the toilet and up the stairs. Weird shit, thought I, can’t keep these horny old bints down, despite already juicing her in every conceivable manner.
To my poor farang mind, I always thought Soi Cowboy exclusively full of babes, albeit those off the par or, very occasionally, new to the scene. A couple of the bars, rumoured to be owned by the cops, did some vaguely lewd shows, and some of the bars had the saner variety of katoeys in residence, but it was, overall a pretty innocent place, as these kind of dives go.
But you always learn something new if you hang out with the natives long enough. The old dear bounced up the stairs like a five year old, the displacement of her mini-skirt sending me all agog (well, it was free sex, which is rare enough in my life, let alone in Bangkok).
By the time I caught up with her I had to fight my way through a bunch of Thai men. The joint so dimly lit that it took me a little while to figure out where I was. It was one o’clock in the morning, the bar packed out with Thai guys, mostly sporting lacklustre moustaches and wearing sunglasses; well weird considering the dimness of the lights.
There were a few haunted looking Thai women, and a couple of stunners, surrounded by the surly, not particularly attractive men. I’d found mangda nirvana - pimps and gigolos to put it in plain English.
A bottle of Johnny Walker was placed on the table; I hastily passed the 1800 baht bill on to the old dear who didn’t seem in the least fazed by such largesse. It’s surprising how quickly a few Thai men, a drunken old hooker and yours truly could get through a big bottle of whisky! The table was soon littered with empty bottles!
The other group of gals were celebrating a birthday. I could just imagine her farang’s face if he knew how his dosh was being blown. You can’t fight the logic of it, the gal tells hubby she is going to celebrate her birthday with a few female mates - totally true and only the most churlish would object, save that she missed out the bit about the minor orgy that was going to go down later.
Said it before but it’s worth repeating again, I suppose. The same kind of heat, lust and sexual ardour that farang see in Thai girls, the latter see in the local men; double the intensity of the sex and all kinds of weird shit goes down! 99.99 percent of the time it’s the silly old game of farang for money and Thai for love.
The gals lie their hearts out, claiming to hate Thai men, and do it so convincingly that most farang believe them; mainly because they want to! Bear in mind that you are dealing with Thai time. The girl can in what is left of her mind be absolutely convinced that what she is telling you is the truth at that moment in time; but what she feels and thinks a minute later has absolutely no relationship to what she said a minute ago. Hence the perfect lie!
The old dear disappeared to the toilet with two of the lads but I didn’t mind as she was already full of my juices, which meant a massive loss of face for the Thais! Ten minutes later, they came back with a serious air of grievance over their fat faces; perhaps they had learnt she was giving it away for free to a farang.
The bill was fast approaching 10,000 baht, so I made some excuse about seeing a mate and coming back in five minutes. The old dear was so far gone on the whisky that she had probably forgotten she was paying for everything; a massive loss of face for everyone if I didn’t pay up! So I left her to it, she had enough gold chains to take up the slack in any monetary embarrassment.
Pretty pathetic when you think about it. The gals spend their lives lusting after farang money and doing god knows what to get it and then extract a kind of revenge by buying sex from the local men; who are even more vicious and greedy than the girls.
My exit coincided with a couple of escapees from the birthday party who were muttering about the madness of their friends. Too true, as the guys probably didn’t use condoms and would f..k anything that moved.
I somehow ended up sharing a tuk-tuk with the girls - that is paying for it - which rattled and rolled over to Patpong. I was persuaded up a steep flight of stairs into Lucifier’s disco - well, one of the gals looked barely eighteen and could’ve passed for a movie star to my blurred vision.
Neat place, though the dance floor was relatively small and already packed out. Three beers cost 360 baht and I received a lovely scowl from the waiter, who was fitted out in a silly red hat, when I counted out the correct money.
Lots of Thai women on the make and farang who thought they were getting ahead of the game by cutting out the go-go bars, which also cut out the cursory health tests. Made a surly groups of Thais for yet more mangdas, though the eighteen year-old almost fell out of her minimal clothing, gasping that there was a movie star in the corner. Given her intake of whisky and the minimal neon glow, who knows?
Could almost smell the scent of easy money and women on the make. Typically, as so
on as the gals had their drinks they disappeared; sighted the eighteen year old later on the arm of a fully dressed banker type. And you know what rhymes with banker, don’t ya?
Incidentally, the band downstairs in Radio City are excellent but spoilt by being limited to doing retreads. I quipped to a friend that the Elvis Presley imitator was bound to be followed by Tom Jones later and damn me if I wasn’t right!
I managed to use the ladies toilet by mistake - no signs that I could see - and copped a load of some foreign bint realigning her tits. She looked fit to scream so I made a hasty retreat, almost falling down the stairs. By then the demon heads on the walls looked like they were about to come alive and I had to get really violent to fight my way through the packed dance floor.
One of the waiters had nicked my beer, pretended not to understand me when I complained. He walked off, came back with a fresh bottle but the cheeky blighter demanded yet another 120 baht. The scowl really pissed me off and I only just managed to stop myself from hitting him over the head with the bottle. Gave him six twenty baht notes just to annoy him whilst flashing a thick roll of purple notes.
Six or seven beers later, I was ready for the road. Thermae beckoned, things were getting that desperate. But the eighteen year-old popped up out of nowhere and demanded I escort her home! A bit of intimate hand work on the way down the stairs convinced me that she just didn’t want a free taxi ride home!
The babe was a bit pissed when I insisted that we walk all the way to Rama 4 to avoid the rip-off taxi artists loitering in the immediate area. The ten minute walk was worth it as we bumped into the banker, lurching along with some incredibly large katoeys in tow. Laugh? I almost fell in a sewer which some kind bugger had left open!
