Asiatic Moments

by Al Culler

  Quite a large number of navy police were wandering around, keeping everyone in line. My haircut had them all wired up, trying to figure if I was one of the grunts - bloody cheek! By the way, one of the effects of shaving all my hair off is that it’s growing back in places I haven’t seen hair for decades. Just to go with the flow, I’m growing a beard and as soon as it has grown out will rename myself Rasputin. If you can’t beat ‘em, join them, is what I say.

  It’s probably just as well that I’m not armed and dangerous because I would have shot the girl who was trying to sing in Bamboo bar (where Beach Rd runs into the walking section); it might’ve been called Bambee bar, by the way (yes, the usual incoherence). Thais haven’t got a clue about singing slow Western romantic songs and this bitch was so bad she almost caused my heart to jump out of my chest in sheer rage. Four songs into the dirge she got better, getting into an old Patti Smith number (seventies punk goddess who had a waif-like body that wasn’t far off Thai perfect; ruined it all by getting pregnant and going all maternal).

  She eventually got into her stride and wasn’t half bad. But nowhere near as good as the band in Larry’s Dive across the road. Typically, all the punters and girls were in Bamboo bar. The latter much more of a pickup joint, although one elderly tourist caused much hilarity when the girl he asked a waiter to send over refused. He then went and sat next to her, again getting the cold shoulder. He stormed out, muttering German obscenities.

  In one of the beer bars, one old bint - one of the many gals who must’ve majored during the Vietnam war - was trying to explain to a new girl how she could simultaneously service five grunts. The young girl look confused at first then almost jumped out of her skin with fear when she realised what was expected. Don’t know why, but American servicemen love to have sex in packs; something to do with their training? Not the kind of thing you could ask them. The old dear then muttered about the stupidity of modern Thai girls.

  Don’t know if they were brought in for the navy, or if they were part of another wave of poverty stricken country gals, but there were plenty of class women in Pattaya go-go bars. Time was when you might find one or two Thai men working in a go-go bar - one pissing around with the DJ equipment, the other harassing those who wanted a piss. Both usually had women working in the bar, would occasionally go off the deep end when the girl got too enthusiastic about the farang. These days, though, I wander into bars in both Pattaya and Bangkok where there are more Thai men than farang customers. They seem to be especially thick on the ground in some of the more expensive Pattaya bars. Rumour is that the family usually spend all their spare cash educating the boys but I have never seen any positive effects from such largesse.

  The real assholes, though, were out in the street. Wandering around with bloody big snakes wrapped around their necks or particularly vicious looking gibbons clamped on their shoulder. These reptiles found it really amusing to sidle up behind farang and place the creature under their ears. No doubt, a lot of the tourists got the first bus out of town next day. Talk about thick and ignorant - I bet they didn’t even bother to de-fang the cobras; and god knows what viruses the monkeys were carrying (or their handlers, for that matter). I skirted around them, my lead pipe stuffed down my pants in readiness and hidden by the tee-shirt!

  Still had me jumping out of my skin - the shuddering neon in the sois and a mild indulgence in beer meant I was mistaking flickering shadows for bloody big snakes about to eat me alive. It’s almost as bad as watching some beautiful babe feed on cockroaches, though at least they were (usually) dead and fried.

  Compared to the heat, though, these were minor inconveniences. The open air beer bars were a waste of time, the thick, water-sucking air was hardly affected by mere rotary fans. I sat there in a puddle of sweat; even I could smell the odour. And walking left me totally drenched. The only safe havens were the air-conditioned go-go bars... any excuse, eh?

  The Pong...

  Long-termers, the kind of guys unlikely to get off with an early parole if the authorities ever caught up with them, tend to dismiss Patpong as being too full of tourists to be worth bothering with. The scene has largely been ruined by a majority of the bars being owned by one group, who have advertised heavily in Japanese and Chinese publications. The resulting influx has made short time the norm and prices ridiculous. I’ve walked out of the scene numerous times and headed for saner quarters of the city, though for some reason I find myself coming back for more...

  I was in this Patpong bar, supposedly one of the better ones, hugely amused at two of the aged Romeos/mangda’s (pimps). They had bodies of kick-boxers but the combination of long, permed hair and faces bloated with whisky made them both laughing stocks. Their women had just gone short time with a couple of tourists, come back to the bar and started ordering bottles of Johnny Black.

  The guys moved in for the kill! The two tourists thought they were on top of the world whilst the regulars were laughing at the scene. Fair enough, the tourists were fat, bald and aged... deserved whatever shit went down. The ugliest of the pimps - if you told me his ruined, bloated face was done in by the dreaded virus I wouldn’t have argued; he wasn’t far off elephant-man status - kept swaggering over to the bar, getting the waitress to write out tabs for the ladies drinks and stuffing the receipts in his shirt pocket. The tourists too elated or far gone to notice when he kept adding the bills to the pile already in the beaker on the table. Don’t know how the guys were introduced to the tourists - gay friends, brothers, katoeys? I had this strange urge to take the lead pipe out of my boot and smash it into the mouth of one of the pimps but I managed to restrain myself!

  The owner of the bar always seemed a decent enough chap, so I’ve no idea why he lets this shit go down (though one of the girls has been there for a decade, probably his best earner). There were another pack of guys behind the bar but I don’t know what scene they were into; they kept scowling at me even though I was going through the beer like an Aussie just returned from a month in Saudi.

  Patpong Two doesn’t have much to offer except for the big gogo down the Silom end. A couple of bars do live shows, one does blow jobs and the big bar on the corner with live music serves warm beer - I almost got in a fight with one of the arseholes over it. A couple of pick-up joints full of women too lazy to dance or sporting bodies ruined by dropping kids; hardly worth the price of a beer.

  If I’ve got a babe in tow, I occasionally hit the katoey bars (Kings Castle 3 and Kings Corner), just to see how far surgical techniques and heavy doses of hormones can take things. Most of the trannies on the huge side, easily recognised, though not to be trifled with as they sport the equivalent of barely restrained steroid rage. The new generation katoeys much harder to spot and therefore much more dangerous; the only give-away left their lower voices. Don’t bother going in alone, too risky!

  I’ve never managed to work out if the guys taking out the katoeys know what is going down or not. The trannies will do absolutely anything sex-wise, though they act all insulted if someone tries to pay less than the going rate for real women. When they try to latch on to the Culler body I always tell them they will have to be pay me - lots of money! Always goes down well.

  The other Kings Group bars are good for a laugh and there are certainly some beautiful women in there. The odd new country lass stands out; all the other girls seem too well trained and versed in the art of bullshit. If you can get one of them to linger over a Cola for more than a minute you are doing well. The Jap’s do a double-take over the bill - can’t believe how cheap the drinks are but they, like the overseas Chinese, tend to travel in packs and the girls have to work hard to persuade them to desert their mates for a ten minute sex session. You get the odd Triad type swaggering around; they don’t take it too well if you whack them on their toes with a heavy-duty boot!

  It’s all kind of amusing if you already have a babe in tow (but don’t leave her alone as either the mangda (albeit bisexual) waiters will try it on or one of the gals will go into bitch mod
e, bad mouth ya, even if she has never seen you before). It’s not the done thing to hit the upstairs shows with a girlfriend; in fact they should be avoided altogether. Some of the upstairs joints, just to add a bit of fun and games to the night, are rip-offs - 2000 baht for a beer.

  I’m sure the last time I was in a down-and-out Patpong bar, one of the waitresses behind the bar spat into my beer whilst I was in the toilet. Something floating on the top of the beer and it tasted odd. I downed it anyway and ordered another to clear the taste. Figure they should open a crèche upstairs, given the number of babes who had dropped kids. The gals aren’t the only ones who can get bitchy, ya know. An interesting manoeuvre, by the way, is to do a quick shuffle over your shoulder just after you have started to walk out - half the time the wild grin on the babe replaced by a nasty scowl!

  Many bars have weird waiters who can’t decide if they are gay or pimps, or some Thai combination thereof; and clock the huge number of Thai guys loitering outside. An insult to the intelligence of farangs - but that shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise, should it?

  A couple of decent live music venues, a good disco (Lucifer’s) and about two million stalls selling the usual replicas and copies but trying to price them at five to ten times the going rate. Even the 7-11 has got in the act, overcharging for a pack of cig’s last time I was there. You can also shuffle off down to Silom Soi 4 come one o’clock in the morning if you don’t mind the high percentage of gays hustling in the bars, discos and nightclubs. Bring earplugs if you are over twenty and watch out for the underage gals looking for some action.

  Dazed and Confused...

  Songkran the usual madness... at least according to friends and the local press - I did what every rich Thai in the kingdom does, spent a week out of the country (the details of which had better remain murky as I don’t want to be arrested just yet). 400 Thais died in road accidents - the mass flow from and to Bangkok over the four days of the water festival causing total traffic chaos - and the police gave up counting the number injured due to the mixture of drunken revelry and the water play getting way out of hand.

  Just about everyone upcountry spent the long weekend drunk out of their heads on cheap rice whisky, strung out on the back of the disintegrating economy, not to mention the way their society was falling apart - the only people getting rich, the whores, drug dealers and gangsters!

  The state of the Thai economy about as massive a loss of face as the Thais could have, taking their revenge whenever and wherever they can on hapless farangs - who are so much better informed about the ways of Thai girls and their pimps that such rip-offs are actually verging, these days, on hard work! Tut, tut!

  As always, returning to Bangkok was a welcome relief and it didn’t take me long to get into the swing of things. The temperature was marginally lower but you could still fry eggs (not to mention brains) on the pavement. The beggars seemed particularly desperate, waving what was left of their limbs around and screaming imprecations, and the rats, bloody big things, were crawling out of the sewers and totally ignored my threatening boot - we’re Thai rats, f..k off farang, their eyes seemed to suggest! Throw in packs of wild, rabid dogs... it was about as close to the wildlife scene that I’d like to get!

  Soi Cowboy seemed saturated with the dodgy birds. I was lounging at the bar in one small dive and a couple of the local louts wanted me to move along so they could get a better view of the dancers. I went into Zen mode, made like they didn’t exist and they eventually got the message. Turned out their babe had gone on an all-nighter but it didn’t matter, they just ordered a bottle of whisky and put it on her slate. Kept giving me the evil eye, especially as some of the gals lavished a bit of free attention on me!

  Maybe it was just the end of the Thai New Year, the usual flood of country refugees - now totally customary for the guys to live off their women; all hell breaking loose when the expected dosh doesn’t turn up. That is only a little bit of the badness, when their women are out working they take on any gals going, often sharing her amongst their friends. Up country, one guy buys a brothel girl out for the night and then shares her with his mates with no more thought or concern than sharing a bottle of rice whisky. The ten percent AIDS infection rate amongst young men probably an underestimate.

  Nana still rules with regard to the sheer density of women, a lot of them under eighteen. Don’t ask me, I can’t make much sense of the place, no idea if the women are genuine or running pimps or ex-brothel or full to their earlobes with disease or virgins or whatever. Just hit and run on some babe, see what happens, the only advice I can offer. Plenty of new faces in Nana, more than Cowboy.

  Dislocation rules. If she’s working in Bangkok take her somewhere else (Chiang Mai is good) for as long as possible, do it on a whim, give her no chance to get in contact with her pimp, etc. Even better, go on a motorcycle, bus or car tour into the depths of the country... just disappear off the face of the earth! Doesn’t mean that much, alas, as these gals can keep their locals going over years and years of separation; money means more than anything else!

  Beer bars everywhere in Bangkok, especially the sois off the lower end of Sukhumvit. Soi 7 the most notorious, the usual mix of newish babes and old-timers, mostly ex-cocktail lounge and brothel - the more attractive girls doing five, ten Thais a day before getting too old and moving on to the beer bars. The upside of such places - if that is the correct expression - short time for as little as 200 baht, no bar fines and cheap beer, though you really need to be drunk out of your head to enter them in the first place. The go-go gals in Nana call such places chicken farms! Bear in mind, the combination of loitering katoeys and African men (nothing against Africans it’s just that most in Bangkok are scam artists of a particularly low order) doesn’t bode well if you look weak and drunk, exit at two, three in the morning... make sure you wear shoes that will let you run - fast!

  Plenty of old faces around, bar girls who had married farangs, gone to live in the west and come home for the Thai New Year. Full of themselves, or at least their easy money - many who left their husbands at home sauntering around with their Thai pimps as if they owned the world. One, married to an English guy, regaled me with tales of taking on all-comers (sic!) in Petchabun during a Songkran orgy (water fights, rice whisky, cheap amphetamines and even cheaper sex - get the picture?). When I stupidly asked her about her husband and sex, she glared furiously, said hubbie had run out of serious money and therefore couldn’t have any sex any more - shock, horror, she actually had to go out to work in a restaurant, her husband reduced to being her taxi driver, hotelier and cleaner! But she was working on a replacement, just had to get that valuable British passport first, so she could then bring all her family over. Figured she could pack them all in a free council house!

  Weirdest shit so far, though, this gal in a local restaurant (not one that is a front for a brothel) I frequent - a real sweet little nineteen year-old right out of heaven - stopped giving me a scowl (I spent about six months smiling and staring at her to no avail - I’m a stubborn and persistent bastard if nothing else) and bunged me a smile to die for! I only needed the slightest encouragement... Figure she went home for Songkran, told her family some farang kept giving her the eye (I know she knew because she complained to the waiters who kept looking at me as if they wanted to string me up!) and rather than commiserating with her about ageing farang not knowing their place probably told her to go for it. Things are getting so desperate up country that even the nice girls are giving up on the life. Way to go!

  Cha Am Charades ...

  The large, loutish farang gay seemed to be having some kind of fit, trying to tear the seat out of the bus’s substructure. His Thai boyfriend tried to calm him down, looking panicked as the conductress wobbled up the aisle. The farang screamed at the conductress that the seat’s backrest wouldn’t go back to the vertical, no way he could take three hours stretched out half horizontally. His petulance verged on hysteria when he was told that he couldn’t move to the empty seats at t
he front as they were already booked.

  He gave no thought to the main reality that I was the one who was really going to suffer as my seat was immediately behind his, a major league contortion act needed to fit into the minor space left by the ruined seat. He was still muttering obscenities as the bus moved out of the Southern Bus Terminal, the Thai swapping places with him. The Thai man muttering along with the farang that the woman was stupid; obviously scared shitless that he might upset his means of support. I began to get the feeling that a couple of days sojourn in the South was going to turn into the usual desperate madness.

  I wasn’t even armed with any whisky, the new frail far from amused by the antics of drunken farang; been forced by pure lust to clean up my act! Oh well, you can’t win them all. Apart from a Finnish guy with a Chiang Mai woman, all the other farang/Thai couples were gay men... that didn’t stop the conductor from glaring at me for the whole length of the journey, thinking I was the cause of the conductress’s massive loss of face - bloody cheek! Luckily, I had the Bangkok Post with me and hid behind it.

  Halfway down the road to Cha Am, the gal came back from the toilet, complaining mem macma and shagwell... so god knows what the gays had been doing at the back of the bus! Well, He probably doesn’t want to know. I certainly didn’t. Luckily, all the gay couples were on the way to Hua Hin, so it was just us and the Finnish guy plus woman sharing the baht-bus down to the seaside resort of Cha Am. A 20 baht touch for a five minute ride.

  Cha-Am consists of a small town and long bit of sea with hotels and restaurants lining the strip; a large, snake-infested forest separating the city from the beach. Mostly small hotels, one large resort type building The baht-bus driver hopefully dropped us off at one of the more expensive hotels, figuring a bit of commission on top of the fare. The Chiang Mai woman didn’t want to wander the strip with luggage and demanded that the Finnish guy install them in the first hotel at 500 baht a night for an airconditioned room. She’d already accepted the taxi driver’s offer of bit of a commission if she persuaded the Finn to take the baht-bus as his means of transport around the area!