Asiatic Moments

by Al Culler

  Fake promises - make a house for my mother, and I will marry you and be yours for life. The reality, buy the house and land in my mother’s name, even if we get married and divorced you will never get the money back! Build me a house upcountry and I will wait for you to come back. The reality, don’t bother with marriage, just bung me the dosh, I’ll wait until you are out of the country for five minutes before trying it on again; by the way, got five farangs to pay for the same house! I could go on, but it gets too depressing...

  Oh alright then. Go upcountry, build a dream house for the babe of your dreams. She’s happy right? Well, as well as wanting a car, farm land, houses for her family, etc., she has probably got you to pay two or three times over the odds for the building work and every time you buy building materials she’s getting a ten to thirty percent kickback from the building merchant.

  Yes, I know you thought you were doing something wonderful for her but it simply isn’t enough; not with family and pimps hollering away about how rich are farang and demanding more and more dosh. Don’t want to believe it, this is a country where the parents will sell their kids to brothels for easy money - so what chance do you think you have?

  Don’t want to play the game? The babe will smile sublimely whilst ranting and raving to anyone who will listen, spreading rumours every which way. Make love to her twice a day, she will tell everyone that you are seriously ill and can’t get it up any more. Tell her if she doesn’t shape up you’ll move on to a newer, younger babe, she will tell everyone that you can only make love to ten year olds. Show indifference to her sexuality, tell her to do what she likes, she will tell everyone you’ve gone gay. We’re talking serious bitches beneath the smiles and beauty!

  Stop the money, make the mangda (pimp) or family lose massive face, chances are your food will begin to have a metallic aftertaste. Other signs of arsenic poisoning: blurred vision; skin eruptions, bad breath, muddled thinking... okay, it would be easier just to finish it but then there’s always the small chance that the farang might get way ahead of the game, get lucky with some sublime Thai babe! Too much potential loss of face!

  Foreigners have a couple of things going for them. They can get on a plane, get the hell out of the country! The populace is also generally as ill-educated as it is arrogance; to a certain extent you can play the game, just go along with the stupidity and enjoy the amazing sex. Pleading poverty at a certain point in the proceedings is usually an excuse for a dignified exit... just get out of the country for a couple of months, let the babe find a real fool to feast upon.

  Thailand isn’t unique. Vietnam probably worse, arrogance and nationalism rules. Laos just doesn’t have any babes available who make the grade, unless you want to move there for a couple of years and get deep into scene (which means marriage). Cambodia would probably be as bad as Thailand, save for the men’s habit of exterminating each other. About three times as many gals as guys. AIDS is rampant and one wrong move will get you a bullet in the head - only for the brave or mad. Burma is just a mess but the men prefer to have gay sex than send their women out to work, so at least the possibility of a genuine relationship exists.

  Manila is a unique case, most of the gals relatively highly educated and few of them interested in the local males. Many use the bars as informal meeting places, plenty of what could loosely be termed good gals around, but a huge number have already dropped a kid or three and have the kind of priorities that at best can be described as boring. Always worth a look but staying more than a week can be soul destroying as the heat of the night rules.

  After that little ramble, back to the joys of Bangkok. Despite all the repeated horror stories it is a sublimely safe city to stumble around; anyone attacking foreigners and thus threatening the massive amount of money that rolls in, will have the full weight of law descend upon them. Not withstanding the odd farang who turns up dead in back alleys and who no-one comes forward to identify. Pattaya, by the way, is famous for the number of healthy males who end up dead in their beds - heart attacks according to the locals.

  Bear in mind, that the further you get from the capital the less notice they take of the law and the deeper ya go into the heart of darkness. Where a quick death, a compliant doctor and indifferent police (all oiled along by loose change) means you can disappear off the face of the earth!

  If you want a coherent answer to what all the forgoing adds up to, forget it. Just enjoy the easy sex, keep your heart for a real babe who hasn’t been ruined by the scene (basically someone in the eighteen to twenty age range) and get lucky!

  Around the horn, or thereabouts...

  There are bad nights and good nights everywhere. The last diatribe obviously one of the former. My removal was so far from reality that I hit out for Manila, just as that country was being lashed by one of the seasonal typhoons. The plane ducked and dived quite a bit and my dinner ended up part of Thai Airway’s in-flight entertainment. The plane reacted by lacerating my finger, a sharp edge of metal on the seat tore off a chunk of skin. The hostesses were too nice about it, double-wrapping sticking plaster on the wound, for me to threaten to sue.

  In a world record, and despite the howling gale, a Filipino taxi driver actually agreed to use the meter, throwing me into an immediate paranoia that it was rigged to double or triple the normal rate. It wasn’t. Pays to go up to the departure level even though you have to be X-rayed again to actually get out of the exit! The taxi driver spent the entire thirty minute drive ranting and raving about the President, helped along in his rage by the fast disappearing peso (52 to the dollar at that time). 90 peso to Makati, the rates haven’t gone up despite the petrol price increase.

  Despite the power of the dollar, hotel rates in Makati had been slashed yet again, though still more expensive than Bangkok. The penchant of the Muslim rebels towards kidnapping having turned off most foreigners to the, er, charms of the country. I was pleased to see that the surly and dubious looking guys in my favourite hotel had been replaced by women, though it took an intense amount of complaint to get the receipt out of their hands - I suspect they were ripping off their farang boss. As long as they didn’t rip me off, I didn’t care...

  Sunday night isn’t a brilliant time to hit the bars in Manila, a lot of the girls take the day off. Chaos the latest name of the bar next to the Traders Hotel... at least I think I got the right bar as it seemed further away and the usual great density of babes on the stage was entirely absent. There are a couple more bars on Roxas but I didn’t bother with them, figuring that if the best one had gone that downhill it wasn’t worth risking the Culler frame in the dark patches of street between the oases.

  Cars, cars everywhere but not a taxi in sight. In the short walk back to Traders hotel I had to fend off urchins going into begging pleas, some reprobate who was convinced I was gay and a couple of ankle breaking holes in the road. Finally thrust the Culler body into a taxi, only to find the blighter wanted 200 peso to go to the Firehouse complex on EDSA... had to leap out of the car at 10mph, left his door slamming back and forth in the wind.

  The next taxi driver agreed to use his meter but the youth drove like he was in a GP race, full revs and much twirling of the steering wheel. Luckily, I’d already thrown up my dinner. He screeched to a halt outside the oases, only after an excess of illegality and demanding that we divert to an apartment full of wanton women. I let him down gently that the 2500 peso he reckoned cheap was way over the top.

  The Australian Club (or whatever it was called...) was absolutely wall to wall with young, slender babes. The neon, along with the beer, did funny tricks to the mind - up close they were a lot less attractive. The one I finally agreed to buy a drink for scurried off to put on some clothes (why, I don’t know) and then spent the next thirty minutes telling me how ugly she was, how her father hated her and how she had no choice but to sign up for a sojourn in Japan.

  Being a good old boy, I explained how she would end up servicing 20 Jap’s a day for six months just to pay off the debts incurred in
her trip but she clung to the hope that she would just be an entertainer. The mamasan wanted me to pay the bar fine but I demurred, though as it turned out she was the best babe I saw this time around. Didn’t quite go for her face (close up) and I also had the feeling that given even a minimal amount of attention I would never get rid of her. She scowled wonderfully when she worked out that I wasn’t going to free her from the bar.

  Oz Club I don’t normally like, so had high expectations for the other bars. Mildly amused by some punk(ish) gals with dyed blond hair who seemed about fourteen and gave me a look normally reserved for the dirty mackintosh brigade (thanks!). The usual sublimely slender and tough ex-GI gals were totally absent, they had probably all found husbands! The latter lucky until the babes had their foreign passports in their greedy little hands.

  Bit of a disappointment all round. Back to Makati and Burgos Street. The first bar I went in to - don’t ask which because they all look the same to me and I was getting a bit incoherent by then - some sublime young babe was all over me. For the time it took her to work out I wasn’t going to blow 250 peso on a lady’s drink (ten of the blighters if you want to take her out of the bar) then I ceased to exist.

  Something strange has happened to the humidity in Manila, despite the rain and wind, every ounce of water was drawn out of my body in the short march along Burgos and I ended up feeling like I was carrying fifty kilos on my back! Manila is totally knackering even after somewhere like Bangkok. Pissed as I was with the Big Mango I had the immediate feeling that I should head back there! No pleasing some people.

  First impressions weren’t mollified by a couple of nights in the scene. There are a few really wild babes in Makati bars but they are totally into the game, only interested in making as much money as possible. They will give the same kind of attention to a rich orang-utan as they will to a movie star; worth a hike if you are an ugly and rich bastard. Being just ugly I was totally out of time and place...

  Save that there were plenty of ogres who would’ve suffered the Culler attentions for loose change, though even they went a bit hard of eye when I suggested they should pay for my beer. I ended up taking out my angst on the hotel’s female security guard who conveniently finished her shift just as I was waking up. Young and lean, she refused all offers of money but only the fact that her passport was being processed stopped her insisting on accompanying me back to Bangkok. Have to try another hotel next time!

  There are still hordes of Filipinas wanting to do the marriage dance with foreigners - mostly virgins, too - but you have to be totally serious and really have friends in the country to make the contact. All my mates who have married Filipinas tell me to piss off when I bring the subject up. Ah, the pangs of fame!

  Used to say that Bangkok was about ten years ahead of Manila, but back in town it seemed to be a whole different planet. I was high just looking at the familiar sights and spent the whole evening gorging on the gals in Nana Plaza.

  The go-go bars packed out with babes, even some genuine country gals turning up - most having dropped a kid or two, alas, but so fit I couldn’t work out if they were sporting a touch of puppy fat or showing the degradations of child birth. Relatively shy, you have to make the first move, big smile or drinking gesture does the trick.

  Some suited prick told the mamasan he wanted the one I had my eye on but the sensible lass refused to have anything to do with the idiot - what kind of moron runs around Bangkok of an evening sporting a tie? His jaw dropped down to his large stomach (I doubt if he was a suitable candidate for the Culler Diet plan - too messy!) when she embraced the Culler form, renegade hippy in Buddhist splendor (shaved head, wake up!).

  Just her mane of black hair was enough to get me going, let alone the wild heat running out of her taut little body... f..k me, turned out she was 29 and had dropped two kids - I figured nineteen and not far off virgin territory. But my first night back in Bangkok I didn’t have it in me to complain!

  Run a mile...

  Packed out everywhere - Patpong, Nana, Cowboy etc - with babes. Paradise found... or so I thought. I’d wander into a bar, collapse on to a stool, grab a beer and just gape at the excess of women. I’d stay clamped there for a couple of hours, sometimes... either fighting them off if I hadn’t been in that particular bar for a while or being ignored once the word was passed about how kineao (cheap!) I was.

  Some gals went into a minor rant when, after buying them a Cola, I refused to pay the bar fine. Wasting their time! Others kept at it, all over me, refusing to believe I could resist their charms. Some of them wanted crazy money - 2000 baht for the night - and looked bewildered when I said it sounded about right - for a week. A couple were even willing to go for free but they didn’t have enough charm for me to pay the bar fine.

  I really do pity any innocent who turns up in the Orient for the first time. Haven’t got a chance of surviving the attentions of the gals, just so totally overwhelming in their beauty and the amount of attention they pay to the punters, whether they be eighteen or eighty.

  I was in this Cowboy bar around Midnight and it was like someone had cloned the perfect Thai girl. 40-odd kilo’s of tempered steel muscle sheathed in dark brown skin, wildly beautiful face, crazy black hair and heart breaking smile. About fifty of them, a tribe right out of heaven.

  After I put my brain back together and reinserted my eyeballs, I realised that they weren’t really all the same. And the more I observed the worse things became. These were your young Buriram and Surin babes, Cambodian at heart and full of a wild kinda heat.

  Famed for f..king anything that could front the money and then breaking the guy’s heart into a million pieces once his bank account was empty. Heady stuff to play along with as long as you can get out of the country fast when things turn nasty.

  As my vision focused in on their skin I kept seeing big purple welts everywhere - thighs, shoulders, middle of backs and stomachs. Skin gone cancerous, a sign that HIV was turning into AIDS. The girls say it was an inoculation gone wrong or a motorcycle accident but you don’t get that kind of ruined skin that way. The first time I saw it was on the katoeys in Patpong but they, these days, seemed to have cleaned up their act.

  Some of the gals had the lesions lasered off, others hid them with tattoo’s. One enterprising lass had a laser job and then had a tattoo atop the ruined skin, which looked embossed and easy to pass off if you didn’t know what to look for. It was in the small of her back, by the way. (One good reason to avoid Bangkok tattoo parlours, what?) Another lass merely pulled her bikini up and over the offending lesion, save that the strap kept falling down.

  The only gal who showed no signs of skin cancer had big, circular patches of discoloured skin on the cheeks of her bum; made me think she needed a bloody big needle full of antibiotics to ward off some wild disease. A pity, she danced like a snake, had a hot little body that in better times I’d have fallen for. Save that close up her face seemed to spasm into a frog caricature; too much beer!

  Just about everyone else in this bar was affected. Might’ve had something to do with the boss insisting on screwing every girl who came to work for him, or maybe the gals were recruited from upcountry brothels. Mostly under 25, not showing any signs of drug addiction, it didn’t really make sense that they had the virus going rampant so early - the usual incubation period, ten to twenty years.

  More likely they were infected with several different strains of HIV, mutating fast into a stronger, more destructive virus that wrecked their bodies from within. Already, the Thai strain of HIV has become much more easily transmissible through straight sex than the Western type!

  A small minority of people highly resistant to HIV, don’t get infected. Others carry the virus with no ill-effects for more than twenty years. Bear in mind that’s HIV not AIDS, if you have sex with someone with a full blown case of the latter no telling what kind of stuff is going to be running around in your veins or how quickly it will do for you.

  As it happened, it was pay day and one gal
who had clamped herself to my lap, whose skin lesions were hard to discern but there nevertheless - and I don’t reveal this stuff with any kind of pleasure, it’s heartbreak city - was complaining about the stoppages in her pay. Turned out she had been fined a 1000 baht for not having a blood test that month!

  Used to be infected gals would change bar every month to avoid an AIDS test, now they just have their money cut. Same shit with the pimps, used to be many bars wouldn’t take a girl with a Thai boyfriend but now it makes more sense as the frail is much more likely to keep working in the bar than go off with some farang.

  Bear in mind, a few years ago the one Patpong bar that did regular, as in thrice weekly, HIV tests with a reliable doctor, quickly lost most of its gals (many were katoeys, which didn’t help!) and was then closed down! The only good thing about all the madness, the dreaded pimps will finally get their well-deserved comeuppance.

  The Cowboy bar had a central stage with tiered seating around it; most of the punters sat on the former, myself the only one braving a stool on the edge of the stage. By two o’clock in the morning the guys in the tiered seats were looking like rejects from hell - ruined eyes, jowly faces and hunched up like battered ancients; I probably didn’t look any better to them! I wanted to wail, what am I doing here, over and over... but managed to restrain myself until throwing out time.

  Exiting into Sukhumvit in the early hours of the morning wasn’t exactly the safest move in the world. A motley collection of mad transvestites, weird hookers and drugged out babes gave me the eye as I made a mad dash for the nearest taxi - there were about 200 of them double-parked!