Archive for the 'Thailand' Category

O the girls are so pretty,
The girls are so pretty,
So spicy like curry,
They come to the city,
And I am not picky,
And the girls are so pretty,
In Kanchanaburi.
—Traditional Thai Song

The Thais say, “Where are you going?” instead of “Hello” or “What’s up?” when they greet someone in the street, and the most usual answer, the “Not much” reply, goes, “To eat rice/food.”

Thailand is an unquestionably touristy place—as much so, at first glance, as Disneyland or any theme park. Once you look beneath the surface, however, by a little patient observation or humble questioning, there remains in the jean-wearing, mall-shopping, apparently Western culture of Bangkok much to assert that This is Asia.

[Something about Thai tattoos will appear here at a later date; but for now know this—there is a certain tattoo, a gridwork written in Pali on the shoulder, that imparts the invulnerability; and Thais under eighteen years old are not allowed to wear it, because they often have it applied and go pick fights with the cops, because they are invulnerable.]

Take, for example, the Thai prostitute: the bargirls lining Pattaya and Khausan, the choir of, “Wel-come! Thai massage!” as the single farang male walks down those streets, the small Thais supporting the arms of a crusty European deviant, sad an image as Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid.

And yet I tell you this, Reader, with absolute confidence: The principal client of the Thai prostitute is not the salty British shipwreck, but the Thai!

Interestingly, and unknown to me until a recent elucidation by an American who studied in Bangkok, most Thais, be he university student or businessman, see regularly a woman of ill-repute, in addition to any unpaid relationships he may have. This is intentionally plural, as most Thais, in addition to wife or girlfriend, maintain a gik or two.

Gik (noun): Something like a sex-buddy, or a friend-with-benefits, though traditionally it was very platonic, and still can be in these libertine days. Well-dressed Thai boys prefer the modern definition, and Thai girls prefer foreign boys for this reason—they do not cheat around. Don’t think, though, that the Thai girlfriends are entirely monogamous. By no means exclusive to men, Thai girls can also have several gik, in addition to their declared boyfriend, though they do not necessarily take these men to bed.

In other ways the Thais demonstrate a strange conservativism: It is considered improper for a Thai lady to be seen about town with a gentleman who is not her husband, boyfriend, gik, or of some family relation. It is simply not done—unless the gentleman is leaving money on the dresser on his way out the door.

Like the Russians, most Thai girls bear children when they are very young and then send them back out to Mom and Pop on the farm to raise, while the girl works for her living in Bangkok, a custom which tends to lead Thai girls towards the same profession as the women of the cold north—that is, the first profession of the human race.

Ah, Bangkok! Debauchery is cheap here, and all things are cheapened by it. I returned to the Bamboo Guesthouse, where I had stayed during the Red Shirt strife three weeks before, and returned to my favorite food stalls, and nearly returned to my old schedule of late hours:

That night, America played England in the World Cup qualifiers. Whoever led the bracket would face the second-place team from another, and whoever got second-place would inevitably face the dreaded Germans. “Football goes like this,” quoth the Brit who explained it to me,—”You kick the ball, you shoot at the goal, you score, and then Germany wins.”

Thanks to the miracle of Time Zones, the game started at 1:30 am, so I went off to Soi Rambutri, because that’s where they play the blues, had some noodles at my old favorite place and saw the card trick the boss had been perfecting—Red Jacks, he called it. Then I went over to the blues bar and watched the second half of South Korea and Greece on the flatscreen hung over the singer and the guitarist, with a sweet harmonica in the back, and I sat with an Argentinean who was all nerves and cigarettes because of his team’s high hopes.

There were plenty of Argentineans out that night, and plenty of Brits, and only a few Yanks, which had me excited as an underdog. We all expected Big Things as we watched our two teams play. Something had to happen, someone had to win; both teams had chances and both teams scored, and in the end it was a draw, but a draw where the drunken Brits could walk down the street and mutter, “Yeah it was a tie, but it was on such a bullshit goal, ya?”

The reason I was in Bangkok was that I wanted a suit—a good tailor-made suit, that I could wear with pride back home, as some sort of trophy of my travels. So I went to the commercial district of Bangkok, to a clothier called Rajawangse, a well-known label under two master tailors, father and son, Jesse and Victor—Punjabi Sikhs who had been handling needle and thread since adolescence.

Their business was a narrow cubby, the walls lined with bolts of European cloth, with a table running down the middle on which they would work. Victor was on a computer there, and Jesse was in the back, gray-bearded with the gentle stoutness of happy prosperity, checking the fit on a jacket that was all whit seams, chalk-lines, and pinned on sleeves, telling the farang wearing it that he looked good. The shop was crowded and busy on that late afternoon.

I told this figure of twilit skill, “I heard about this place through a friend, Sam from Seattle,” and received no pleas or bargains, as would be common in most Thai tailors, only an offer to glance around the shop. I picked, by gut feeling, a dark gray pinstriped cloth and had the Thai apprentices pull it out so I could check it over. And the price? Twelve-thousand baht, nearly $400. I asked for a deal, throw in a few shirts maybe, but Jesse intimated, with professional courtesy and justifiable curtness, that it was not that sort of place.

Well, I was about to politely leave when I noticed the Secret Service ash tray on the desk. “You treat your customers well,” I remarked,—”Even the Secret Service comes here?” Jesse said yes and waved at some photos and clippings on the wall—and what’s this? He had made suits for both President Bush and President Bush, for spies and diplomats from the embassy around the corner, for CEOs and generals. There were autographed pictures of Barack Obama and Nancy Reagan. In the dressing room, their prestigious cards were pinned to the glass, and running around the ceiling of the store there were badges for governments, agencies, and departments of the law.

This man was a royal tailor. I knew I needed to have a suit of my own.

And so I passed a week in that city, waiting for the Sikhs to craft my suit, and reading and writing and eating and watching football in between fittings at Rajawongse, where I was royally treated.

Victor would ask me pleasant questions in a business-like way, and Jesse would offer me a beer and who am I to refuse? Yet with my arms pinned at my side, as the clothier marks runes on my jacket with his chalk, how can I drink it? And my business is concluded, and there is that cold beer on the table, still more than half-full! Do I wait and finish it, do I take it with me—do I leave it there? A wasted beer! Luckily, a real aristocrat, or maybe a bureaucrat, is standing by, who haughtily leaves his beer barely sipped, so I know what to do. I abandon my unfinished beer with a tragic sorrow, go back onto the humid street, and walk a mile to the bus stop where I can get a lift back to my humble little neighborhood.

I saw a few movies at the Bangkok theaters, stood up with the rest when they played the anthem of the king before the show began. I celebrated my birthday, though I was too modest to tell any of my few acquaintances there. I listened to the blues in the street cafes on Soi Rambutri, where the waiter had more card tricks, and I watched the games and talked to strangers.

I picked up my finished suit on Saturday, and I stayed in Bangkok on Sunday, to Make a Plan. I had an old China Lonely Planet from my guesthouse, and a few bits of paper on which other travelers had written recommendations for the region, and using these I marked in broad strokes a route across the geographies of a map totally unfamiliar to me—up through Laos to Yunnan Province in China, and thence through Guilin to Canton, north to Shanghai and Shandong, to Beijing, and then by boat from Tianjin to Incheon in South Korea or Kobe in Japan.

Too many wonders here: I have to be exclusive! Only the future chapters will tell how closely I stick to the rough guide I recorded in a little notebook (my netbook being at this point destroyed). It’s always better to show some adaptability.

A crowded day followed this planning: I mailed my suit and some other things and took a number of buses to the edges of Bangkok, and then a final bus out west.

Before heading north I detoured to a town called Kanchanaburi, sprawled amidst hills of limestone and jungle, around a Bridge over the River Kwai.

I walked from the bus station, along the main road and past the new bridge, then swerved off around the cemetery, where the prisoners of war await judgment, past their museum, and on to the traveler’s ghetto—a street with a bend, lined on the right-hand side with bars and restaurants and pool halls, and on the left with alleys running down to guesthouses on the Kwai that look east across lily pads and a humid shimmer to the old Bridge—to a famous guesthouse.

Down a back alley between a bar and a bookstore, past a few tourist agencies and shanty houses, you come to the gateway and its sign: the Jolly Frog, with a cardboard cutout of Wolverine to one side.

Entering there is the restaurant, which is fair-priced and generally full of travelers and Thais. The acrid, throat-burning scent of frying chilies comes out from the kitchen, and waiters in Kermit-green shirts watch television in the corner and occasionally slink out to throw a menu at someone. Music plays on the speaker, an endless tape of the same five sappy Thai hits, playing over and over, so that by the end of a week I could sing the obnoxious songs.

Out in the back, between two wings of rooms, is a wide riverside garden, with hammocks strung between the coconut trees and a pleasant quay down on the Kwai, where one can see the sun set over the Bridge, dimming the karst hills and making rainbows of the clouds. It’s easy here to slip into a coma of loafing and reading and meeting travelers—the old “sublime uneventfulness” of Melville’s topmast—and it was this very chain of relaxation that had arrested Tobias the Bavarian and Francesco of Padua for nearly a week.

I had met Tobias (the Reader will recall) in my last days in Yangon, and met Francesco on my first arriving there three weeks before. Some chance brought them together on the same flight to Bangkok, and they came upriver to Kanchanaburi. By yet more chance, they were still there when I arrived, in rooms just down the hall from my own monastic accommodation in a wing of the inn.

This Hallway was on the second floor and ran from a treacherous scaffold staircase on one end to an open balcony on the other, with a half-dozen rooms on either side, and I describe it because of how much time I spent out there—a group of us sitting in deck chairs and smoking and chatting and watching the lizards hunt and fornicate on the ceiling, because it was too hot to stay inside, in those days before the monsoon cools the world—too hot to do anything, in the sun-rain lands.

Well the day I arrived was, by a final happy chance, Tobias’ birthday. We grabbed a German woman Tobias had met, Elke by name, and asked an English lass, Charlotte of Devonshire, who happened to be in the Hallway, to join us, and went to the Kanchanaburi night market, just outside the tourist ghetto.

Now the Thais are very Western in their love of three things: sex, bad music, shopping, and cheap food. The latter two can be found at the night market, where even on weeknights, so long as it is not raining, crowds of Thais stroll through racks of cheap clothes and non-functional Chinese electronics, and long rows of vendors selling fruit shakes, pearl tea, grilled meat and fish, old sushi, spicy green papaya salad, and heaps of noodles, in wasteful Styrofoam containers and plastic bags, the whole complex set up in the hour of sunset in a parking lot, and removed by ten that same night.

The foremost of Thai loves—sex and bad music—can be found on the street to and from the market. “Welcome!” they shout, the bar girls, splayed languidly on stools in the empty bars, five girls and no customers, or perhaps a dirty old Saxon buying them drinks. It sounds like “whear-KAHM—” and is cried out of every bar as one walks past, by at least one girl, so that we wondered if the girls are paid by the Welcome.

These bar girls, as far as I can tell, do not work for the bar: they are prostitutes in a symbiotic relationship, bringing in customers to buy drinks in exchange for a place to sit, and there are more of them than the Reader would care to believe.

“Welcome!” is their mantra, “Thai massage!” their motto. They add more if a passer-by looks their way— “Where you go? You look for boom-boom?” “Hey, I know you. You boom-boom my friend. Why you no boom-boom me?” “Good drinks, good price. Hey— hey!”

After dinner, and after running back through the gauntlet of girls, the five of us ended up at a pool hall where the waitresses offered us a birthday discount on Tobias’ account. The meditative Bavarian had not had a drink in over a year, but he accepted gracefully the shot of sambuca that our hostess brought him, along with a bit of cake they had scrounged up somewhere.

They had Nevermind on repeat, and Charlotte succeeded in explaining to me what the hell “off-sides” meant, and some Thai professionals were playing pool in the midst of a crowd, and the waitress brought out Jenga for us from her collection of games. We made it a condition that whosoever toppled the tower had to buy Tobias another sambuca, and proceeded about our turns with that style of intense concentration that accompanies drinking. Eventually Tobias left, and the two girls, and Francesco and I stayed to play a bad game of pool and have another beer before going back to the Frog.

The Reader may be familiar with Thailand’s best and tastiest rice beer, the exported Singha, and there is another local brew called Leo that is similar; but were drinking Chang, cheaper and with less taste and more alcohol. The cheapest label, at a buck for a large bottle, is Archa, which can only be found in 7-11. Singapore is making a big push with its Tiger beer, as they are in most of the region, but the import remains prohibitively expensive. Another Singapore beer available everywhere, ABC Stout, is a disastrous attempt at breaking away from the Asian trend of beer types, generally limited to Premium and Extra-Strong.

The worst thing about Chang is that it gives the ardent drinker an awful hangover the next morning—as good an excuse as any for an uneventful day.

I read the Bangkok Post over breakfast and read a book in the garden until it began to rain. At night I went with Elke to a very local restaurant I’d found: three carts, one with noodle soup, one with boiled chicken or pork and rice, and one with a wok, lined up side-by-side on a patio of plastic tables and chairs, in front of a small convenience store, where the diner can buy a beer to go with the menu. I had found the place the night before, since it was still open at two in the morning.

I ordered some spicy dish from the wok and added generously to it from the ubiquitous Thai condiment tray—chili oil, chili powder, chilies in water, and sugar, with bottles of soya and fermented fish sauce—and Elke and I made plans to go to the Erawan Waterfalls the next day.

There are seven of these, running down the forested hill in picturesque teirs of cerulean pools and lyrical falls, each of a different height and character, be it snaking stream or boulder-wide cascade or ridge-high cataract. Elke and I followed the shady path up past Lai Kuen Kung and Wang Mancha, to Pha Nam Tok, where there were monkeys in the trees and Thai boy screaming in alcoves under the waterfall and a snake in the thatch roof of a structure.

We swam in the pool beneath the fourth teir, Oke Nang Phee Sue, diving into cool clear water from the rocky and root-columned shore. Schools of Tor Soro nibbled at the feet, overanxious for dead skin. At Bue Mai Long the water slid down a gentle sloping boulder, slick with algae, and two Irish girls and an English one were climbing up the tangled creepers on one side, to slide down into the pool. We were at this for some time. Dong Pruk Sa was the sixth tier, and Phu Pha Erawan the seventh and last, where the water fell from the top of a high ridge, and the pool was sky blue and slick with white moss.

The three Islander girls rushed down from there to catch the last bus back to Kanchanaburi, but Elke and I proceeded at a more leisurely pace and succeeded in missing it. I proposed hitchhiking, and some adventures later, and after waiting out a monsoon deluge under the eaves of a police station by the side of the highway, we found ourselves in the empty truckbed of a Chang delivery truck. Elke was ecstatic.

“Have you read Into the Wild? This is like what he does. Getting around by hitchhiking, riding in the backs of trucks. I can’t believe it.”

The beer truck dropped us off near the night market, and we sated ourselves on street food before heading back to the Jolly Frog. I left a few hours later with Jarno, a hacker of Amsterdam, and Francesco and Tobias, to Tai Thai, a favorite place of the Dutchman, who had been in town for some time. They had a flatscreen television at Thai Thai and a projector that Jarno had fixed, and they were showing the England-Slovenia game on both. At my lone request, they changed the television to the USA-Algeria match.

Both England and America needed a win to advance from the qualifiers, and I watched intensely through two halves of close misses and bad calls until Donovan scored a goal in stoppage time for a last-gasp victory that called for celebration at the Ten Baht Bar out in the street. This was a lemonade stand with a line of local liquor bottles, most of them costing ten baht or thirty cents a shot, and a few paint buckets in front for stools. The bar across the street usually had a lonely Thai bard wailing Western covers, but nobody ever sat in there when they could get such cheap drinks outside.

O so full of cheer was I, and surrounded by a crew who would discuss nothing but the Cup. I drank a cup of Obama whiskey for ten cents, and I gloated with the young English, because we were the best in the group, and gloated with the Americans I met, and smoked my Burmese cheroot in glee.

We talked about football a lot, sitting out in the Hallway, with citizens of Holland, Germany, and Mexico, and always a few Brits around, all intimately and animatedly involved with the sport and its World Cup.

The Mexican had his whole heart in the contest. “We’ve done well in our group, but we play Argentina on Sunday. It will be close.”

“Come on, you guys can win.”

“I don’t know man. I hope so. Jesus Christo.”

The Mexican was supremely vexed, because his flight back home was on the same night, and unless they showed the game on the airplane, he would miss what could be a supreme moment in the history of his nation.

That possibility kept people watching and talking about it. Who would win? Who would go home? America and England could both be knocked out. The French team was falling apart in a ridiculous farce of Gallic proportions, bickering and going on strike. The Dutch had to face Cameroon, and then either Brazil or Portugal. The Germans could win or lose that very night, and Italy, who won four years ago, was not doing well. And it was a different intensity in the Jolly Frog than at home, because all the tribes were represented.

Francesco was brooding over Italy’s chances, and the Germans were anxious for their skillful team. The Mexican had been traveling with two tall Dutch girls, Caren and Leonie, who had orange shirts to wear when Holland played the next day. The Lowlanders revere their football players more than their royal family, and the fairer sex is no exception to the rule.

We all sat in the Hallway between our doors, that night the American team won, and I was flush with victory and Ten Baht whiskey. A Thai brought us beers, and Jarno brought out his laptop, which routed a European satellite network through a server in Amsterdam, and turned on German-Ghana game at half-past one in the morning. Everyone leaned over his shoulder to watch it; and Elke cheered the sole German goal, and even Tobias was not insensate to the sport fervor. We watched it until the end and talked of the games to come and the wonders we had seen and the places we would go.

The following evening, Italy played Slovakia in a desperate match—only the victory would advance from the group stage. I met Francesco and Jarno at Tai Thai just after it ended, in a 2-3 loss for the champions of yesteryear. The Paduan was shell-shocked. “You should have seen his face,” said Jarno, “when Slovakia made the first goal.” The Italian team finished last in their group, heralded as the easiest.

“I think I need a drink,” said Francesco.

We went to the Ten Baht Bar and ordered rice whiskies with ice. Jarno went back to his new guesthouse—he had moved to a nice one with clean sheets and air-conditioning, since his Thai girlfriend would come from Bangkok the next day to meet him—and we sat with a Quebecois and talked nonsense.

Francesco had worked odd-jobs in Italy and wanted to live somewhere else. He said he was looking while he traveled for a place to establish a hostel. He liked Laos in particular, for its natural beauty and its relaxed mood.

“So you’ll settle down there, marry a Laotian girl?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said in his slow measured way, with only a trace of the Latin accent by which he had won over so many German girls on holiday in the Adriatic nightclubs south of Venice,—“I don’t know if I like the girls in Southeast Asia. They are very bubbly.”

I knew what he meant: the high-pitched voice, the Jezebel smile, boiling over with bawdy humor and an ebullient interest in fun, and the skin-deep sense of themselves and the world.

“Then which girls are best?”

Francesco bashfully confessed, “I think the best girls come from Italy. They are very passionate, very beautiful.”

“They’re classy,” I added.

There are flavors of home you cannot deny. I have seen all manner of beautiful geographies all across the map of continents, and would chose over any the endless forests and rough-sketched grandeur of my Pacific Coast. As for women, I file that as a Mediterranean prerogative, a loyalty not shared by this man of grizzled Oregon.

Well, Francesco would leave the next day to meet a Canadian girl in Bangkok. I had to stay, because the US was playing Ghana.

“So I’m lucky Italy is out,” said Francesco. “Now I am free.”

We talked football and we talked nonsense, and this old Irishman was telling me about SETI, on the night when the USA played Ghana in the Round of Sixteen.

“All I’m saying is who put these guys in charge? Who elected them to beam out messages to outer space? All this whale song and Beethoven and paintings and flags—and directions straight to Earth. It’s like an advertisement. Come on down, it’s great here! But who decided that aliens are going to come and be all friendly and helpful. Do you really think that? We’re nothing. We’re an inferior species. They’re going to look at us same as we look at cows or ants. What did you have for dinner tonight? That’s what I’m saying. We’re nothing, just meat, just a resource.”

It was after midnight, and all my friends had gone to bed. I’d met two American girls whilst walking down the street after Uruguay crushed Korea earlier that night—West Coasters like me, teaching in Bangkok, and here to have a Good Time, as advertised. They bought buckets of whiskey and coke at the Ten Baht Bar, and we sat with a big group of young and dressed-up British volunteers, who thought I was a marvel for traveling for so long (and one girl later told me, “I thought you were weird”).

I asked my American compatriots about the Bangkok uprising, as they taught there and not far from Rajprasong, but they had fled at the first stroke of revolution. They were my age and three times as lost in the world, still all song and dance and let’s just have fun, but spoke of getting Old and Settling and Marriage, as if time was short between now and dying alone.

I let the girls wander off down the street with the Brits, singing “I Gotta Feeling” and haggling with a tuk-tuk driver to go to some club, and went back to a bar we’d passed along the way that was set up in front of a bookstore and crowded with the shipwrecked forms of expats, bent masts in a marina after a storm; withered souls suffering from the tropical fatigue of hard-boozing and whoring and excessive lethargy—and I preferred their company because at least they know what they’re about in life.

One was a San Franciscan whose distinguishing features were his big gut, his stars-and-stripes bandana, his white walrus whiskers, and his way of speaking with that muttering sailor’s talk of the crazed, like, “Yeah we’re gonna fuckin’ beat ’em tonight, you know what I’m saying, we’re going to fuckin’ beat those pussies if our boys can keep together and pass the fucking ball, right Martin, right, yeah, fuck, let’s get another beer.”

Another was the Irishman with whom I spoke, of history and cycles of empires, of global warming and technology. Like most Catholics, he saw the world coming to an end—in carbon fire, genetic modification, and nanotechnology—and I saw these as shifts in the pattern of life on Earth, and some would adapt to them and some would be left behind. It’s as scary as all change is, but it had happened a million times in human history and a billion times in the history of the planet. That humans as a race would stop evolving, that’s the real horror.

I told this to the Irishman and he said, with that good-natured ribbing natural to the Irish humor, “You know what I think you are Jon? I think you’re a peacenik. I think you’re a liberal. Oh, it’ll all work out, I’m sure. Well you know what Jon? It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes life is focked, and sometimes we have to do something about it.”

That’s when the Irishman started talking about SETI, “And I’m sick of them sending those messages out. If aliens come here, it’s because of their damn peacenik messages.”

Generally when people tell me crazy things I let them talk and ask a few questions, but at this I couldn’t help but laugh and say, “No aliens are going to come here!”

“Oh yeah? And how d’you know that Jon? How d’you know there’s no life out there? Stephen Hawking says there’s life out there. Are you smarter than Stephen Hawking?”

“Well,” I said, thinking for a moment, first about how I always ended up in these weird conversations, and then about the question at hand,—“yes, there’s most likely life elsewhere in the Universe, probably in our galaxy, but the nearest potentially habitable worlds are hundreds of light-years away, in distant solar systems. If there is an alien race with the technology necessary to transport out of the heliopause of their star system, to shield themselves from all the cosmic radiation of interstellar space, to travel faster than the speed of light, and to breach our heliopause—and as far as we know this is all beyond possibility— Well, I’d say if they could do all that, they could find us without the help of whale songs.”

The Irishman said they’d need our resources, and I said they had asteroid belts and keeper belts and hundreds of unspoiled worlds and moons at their disposal; and he said I thought it was crazy, and I did, but I was interested enough in the conversation.

Anyway, I watched the game at half-past at the Pizzeria. It was up on a projector screen, and the French owner served me a beer, and served the few other Americans present: three teachers, one of the West Coast girls from earlier, and the curse-muttering San Franciscan.

“Just shoot the fucking ball, it’s easy, you run and you shoot, don’t stand around. Come on, come on.”

Ghana can run, and America excels at the underdog roles. Boateng scored a goal in the first five minutes, the US team rallied after halftime, Donovan got a penalty kick, and it’s 1-1. The Irishman came in after a while, and we started talking about Islam. I drunkenly defended the faith, which I admire, and he had been to Saudi Arabia once and called me a peacenik and punctuated it with, “And you know what? I don’t like talking with you Jon.” I said, “Alright,” and the Irishman went over to mutter about me with the San Franciscan, sending over sideways sneers.

Asamoah Gyan scored in the third minute of the extra fifteen. The Americans seemed to give up after that, taking the ball into the box without the resolve to shoot it home. Come on, come on. But it was over, and the next morning I had a horrible hangover and a disillusioned sense that was worse.

I went to the street cafe that Tobias had showed me, an outdoors kitchen cart wedged in an alleyway and a few tables with a tarp for a roof, and got some rice and chicken and coffee. There was a man sitting in the corner near the sunshine, with bandages thick around his bald skull and a forearm and a calf, the cloth wet with blood and scarring fluid.

He shouted, “Hey man, you have a cigarette?” He had a strange accent, almost British and half-gone.

“No,” I said. “Don’t smoke.”

The man shuffled around and said, “I’ve got nothing now. I got a lady last night. I was kind of drunk. Took her to my room, fucked her, fell asleep for about half an hour, and when I woke up, she was gone, with twenty-five thousand baht from my wallet.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. I’ve got nothing man. Twenty-five thousand baht is a little money. So, man, can you help me out, give me twenty baht?”

Despising all Westerners who beg for cash in Asia, when they have things to sell and while maintaining their room and appetites, when there are people sleeping and starving in the streets, and despising pretty much everything worth the effort that morning, I said, “No,” and went back to my food.

We talked nonsense and we talked of politics out under the bare light bulbs and hunting lizards in the Hallway. We sat with our feet nestled up in the seats to protect them from mosquitoes, and our hands waved the bloodsuckers away and killed them when we could. The little tuktoo lizards chased moths up the wall, and in the garden a big gecko croaked out its name.

One night, sitting in our circle of lawn chairs, there was a Canadian girl who worked upriver at a house for children—not always orphaned, for some had mothers who had remarried and forgotten them, or fathers who could not afford to keep them; but they were all Karen refugees of the violence in Burma. Some had walked out of the blood swamps into Thailand when they were five-years-old. Some had not left the town for seven years, since the house was founded.

“It’s crazy!” the Canadian exclaimed,—“Most of them don’t have an identity. They left Burma when they were two, or they were born here in Thailand. But they’re not Thai, and Burma doesn’t recognize them. They’re not allowed to leave the camps.”

“So they’re just swept under the rug. Everyone ignores them.”

“Yes, exactly. It’s crazy. How can you children go without any identity. They’re completely innocent, and it’s like they’re being punished for some crime.”

She added that many of the Kachin refugees, who had fled into China, were deposited in Himalayan concentration camps or sold as slaves by the indifferent Chinese. At least her kids could go to school.

Although these citizens of nowhere had been through the Thai education system, getting identity papers to work or study outside their little town required a considerable donation, grease for the wheels of benevolent bureaucracy; and the house did not have much. It was an independent charity, and most of the funding came from ex-volunteers, a network that always responded to pleas.

“One year we had rabies in the house. We always have a few dogs that sleep inside with us, and we all sleep together. Two of the dogs had rabies and had to be killed. Then all of us, over fifty kids and volunteers, had to get shots, which are really expensive. We sent out an email to everyone telling them what happened, and pretty soon all this money came in. We were fine. It was close though.”

The house has investments in a few acres of rubber tree plantation, which take seven years to mature. When the first are ready to go to market, it should cover the college tuition for some of the older kids. In the meantime, they get by. Most of the locals think they are rich—all farang and all charities are rich—and try to send their children there. Even the well-off families try to get their daughters in for free schooling and one less mouth to feed, but the house turns them away. Some mornings, though, they wake up with a bundle on the doorstep, and then it cannot be helped.

Yet though the house was crowded, though its inhabitants subsisted on meager helpings of rice, sometimes with leaves and grasses they had gathered, and though there was sorrow behind them, it was always full of light and laughter and music. All the children were learning to play at least one musical instrument, and one of the veteran volunteers donated the equipment for a recording studio.

One of the kids called the Canadian while we talked. She laughed when she hung up. “They’re playing some game, and he wanted to call me. They’re good kids.”

We talked of the violence from which the Karen fled. The Karen are a Christian ethnic minority in Burma and, like most minorities, are brutally opressed by the ruling Burmese junta.

I mentioned Rambo 4, and the Canadian told me that parts of the movie had been filmed in her village (and the children of the house put on a musical performance for the film crew). Much of the graphic violence—peasants herded across minefields, villages razed, grown men killed and women and children sent away as if we still lived in the days of Assyrians and Huns—was true to life, she was sad to say. Yet things were changing.

Last year the Burmese generals commanded all the insurgent armies around its borders (the Karen National Liberation Army, the Shan State Army, the Kachin Independent Army, etc. etc.) to contribute troops for policing political prisons, or risk a renewal of violence with the state. Universally, the armies refused.

There was some startled looks around the room, for none of these armies had ever agreed on anything before, and were as used to killing each other over opium profits and old revenge as they were to fighting off the Burmans. The army of the oppressor—called Tatmadaw—having lost much face, quickly revised its manifesto, demanding that the insurgents contribute only a few guards for these prisons in a few months time. Again the answer was no.

Oh, sayeth Tatmadaw, well in fact we meant to say at the end of the monsoon season.

Oh yes, sayeth the armies, I’m sure you did.

Meanwhile, from their swamps and forests and mountains, they correspond with each other for the first time—

We’ve always been enemies, you and I, but is it possible we could be friends? And if we were, imagine our strength! Alone, we are like solitary sticks, to be stepped on and broken in two at the leisure of our common enemy, but bound together: they will not break us again! Yes, when the monsoon rains have ended, there will be a reckoning, and we will liberate our people.

Now of course nothing may come of it, O Reader, as nothing came of the successful revolution in 1988 but a change in name for the military dictatorship and a tightening of the chains with which the junta has bound up their country. China benefits too much from the kowtowing generals of Tatmadaw, who send gifts of oil and natural gas as tokens of vassalage, to permit them from being overthrown; and India would be terrified of a minority uprising in a country so close to the seven states of Assam, already wracked with ethnic violence. If violence broke out, Thailand would at least permit all the refugees encamped just across the border to enter the country, but Thailand has enough on its plate to worry about neocon crusades.

Who knows what will happen, a truce or a war; but if anything can be learned from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or from the peace process in the Middle East, it is that change in a country has to come from elements within. No outside force will ever, ever force a change. So, American, watch what happens in Burma, and hope that the same will happen against the dictators of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the same realizations will strike Palestinians and Jews, and be safe in knowing that the USA will never get involved—though China might.

We talked politics and we talked of home, trying to translate foreign mysteries known only to those who have lived in a place.

Immigration has become a universal issue— The French can’t decide on a suitable definition of “French”; half a million Anglos voted for the British National Party to keep Britain British; in Holland, the xenophobic politician Geert Wilders, who has been banned from entering the UK, won over fifteen per cent of the country with his agenda of ejecting all foreigners and Muslims from the Lowlands. My own Union was not lacking in such news, as anyone who looked un-American was now legally suspected of being an illegal immigrant in Arizona.

And we smoked cigarettes and cheroots and sat in lawn chairs out in the Hallway, and the same sappy songs floated up from the restaurant, and the sun colored the karst hills, and the Kwai was brown with silt washed out by the monsoon.

Francesco scoffed at the news from northern Italy, one nationalist party blaming the immigrants for their poor performance at football: “Good,” say the racists, “next year it will be Italians playing for Italy.”

Once I asked Francesco about Berlusconi and the habitually incompetent politics of his Italian Peninsula.

“If you want a job, a contract, a position in the government, you have to know somebody—a patron—and get it from them. They all put their friends or family in power. Some offices, everyone is cousins. It is all about favors.”

“My history professor showed the first scene in The Godfather to explain Roman politics. Some bad boy is messing with the undertaker’s daughter, and Marlon Brando gets rid of him in exchange for a favor from the undertaker later on. It’s all about patron and client.”

“Yes, it is like this. And people just accept that it is like this. It has always been like this. Nobody thinks this can change.”

Another time, Tobias and Elke told me about this series of child mystery books they remember from the eighties, titled with “Alfred Hitchcock” and three question marks like ???, wherein three teenage sleuths—two boys and an intelligent girl—would solve mysteries in Rocky Beach, California, not far from Hollywood. Sometimes they worked with famous actors, especially Hitchcock, who was a sort of Mentor or Dumbledore to the gang. They called the Director when they needed a hint, and he appeared at the end of the chapter to say: “Reader, did you notice this clue?”

I wondered with exceeding wonder at this. Later I learned that the series came from America, where it was called The Three Investigators, but was always more popular in Germany. In the US, the series ran from 1964 to the late eighties, with 48 books published; and in Deutschland, translated versions of Die Drei Fragezeichen, or The Three Question Marks, continue to be published, while German writers add six new ones each year, bringing the 2010 total to 152. The radio-dramas, or Hörspiele, likewise remain popular.

“They were really very smart,” said Tobias,—“very clever crimes and clues to find.”

I watched the game between Germany and England in Tai Thai with Tobias and an Israeli flight stewardess named Meira. The whole place was full of English, so we took a table outside the wide door and watched the game proceed on flatscreen and projector screen. Tobias became increasingly animated, as Germany scored goal after goal, until he was jumping up out of his chair, saying, “Oh, wow!” Other than the Thai commentators, his ejaculations were the only noise in the bar, for the English had grimly lowered themselves into their bottles and no force in the world would coax them back out.

“It’s so great,” said Tobias, regaining his seat and his composure after another goal. “I never care about football at home, but this is really great. I can see my Dad and everyone shouting at the television. Oh man.”

The next day we went to the small restaurant Tobias had found and got Thai dishes and iced coffees from the kitchen cart. One of the Jolly Frog waitresses had given Tobias a card with her phone number.

“You should have called her.”

“I know, but come on, look at it.” The card said Honey on it. “Would you call? I thought it was for a Thai hooker or something. Like, You’ve been here a week and you’re probably lonely.”

“I think Honey is lonely.”

“I don’t know. I thought about calling her. But I made this trip to go to monasteries and work on meditation, not to bang Thai girls.”

We were both leaving the next day, going in different directions, and Tobias worried that he did not have one, or that he would not be able to chose from the several options that presented themselves; but he had a reason for traveling, his meditation, which might lead him to one of the last Perfected Souls in Thailand or to a monastery in Laos. And having a reason is far better than having a plan.

We talked about the importance of traveling with a purpose, not just to “find yourself,” having met more than a few of these wretched soul-searchers at the Jolly Frog. Too busy looking inward to see the world without, they tumble willingly into the pits of drugs, or the harems of yoga gurus, or the meccas of “fun” and “letting yourself go” like the Pink Palace, Paradise Beach, Ko Phangan, Pai, or Vang Vieng.

Meanwhile, I worked on writing, with half an anthropological bent, and Tobias developed his inner calm. So I asked him about meditation and why he enjoyed it.

“You have this whole life of experiences, and you never go through them, never process them. That’s what meditation is. Slowly you process all these emotions, these fears and worries, the traumatic experiences and expectations, the addictions and needs. You address them and put them away, and then you have this sense of inner peace. You’re in the moment. If you don’t meditate, it just builds up. It’s not good, I think.”

“So it’s like exercise for your mind? That’s how I understand it. You go to the gym to work out, you meditate to exercise the brain.”

“It is difficult, of course. In vipassana, when I started, you sit there for seven days, trying to think about nothing, and your brain is going all over the place. You keep thinking, Why am I doing this? This is a waste of my time. I’m just sitting here! And then you calm yourself down, your mind is quiet, but the doubts come back. You think, Alright that’s it, I’m leaving. You think, My back hurts, I’m hungry, I need a beer, need some pot, want to have sex. You recognize those needs, and then put them aside. There are all these harmful appetites, that can become addictions so easily.”

“Are you addicted to meditation?”

Tobias laughed. “Well, I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. You know, once I finished a few classes, finished meditating in Bangladesh and in Burma, I feel so new, so fresh, with such a clear head. I don’t need to smoke a joint anymore, don’t need to drink a beer, don’t need to fuck some girl. I feel really good. Like, I can go home now, and it’ll be great. But then the teachers say, ‘Yes, it feels good, and it only gets better.’ I can’t imagine it getting better, but I couldn’t imagine how good I would feel now before I started.”

I’ve finished my noodles, and Tobias’ plate is almost untouched, and I hope he stops talking so I can go catch an afternoon bus to Bangkok and a night bus to Chiang Mai, but he looks off into the sunny street.

“I could call Honey and drink a beer and go home and all that, and I don’t think I will fall back into my old habits, my addictions. I think I’m stronger now. But it could get better.”

People are too chicken shit to travel to Asia.
—Maddox

I came to Thailand on the eve of civil war, amid an exclamation of headlines and bloody photography.

The Red Shirt rebels had massed their ranks in the Rajprasong intersection, the center of the Bangkok commercial district, to protest what had happened in their country. They came down from the northern hills, from the city slums. Tens of thousands gathered around the crimson banners—urban and rural poor, living and sleeping on concrete steps under the brassy megaliths of corporate greed, the concrete citadels of modern consumerism, in a country where economic progress has left many behind. But this happens every year in Thailand. Last time it was the Yellow Shirts (the People’s Alliance for Democracy), who blockaded the airport and demanded political succor. One of the chief commandants of that campaign is currently the Thai’s foreign minister, one of the many officials that the rebels want removed.

At issue today is a resurfaced discord, this recent activity only an eruption of pent up tectonics like Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, a clearly foreseeable violence and destruction, little squiggles on a seismograph somewhere, and perhaps not preventable, in the way that most human history is inescapable.

In 1997 Thaksin Shinawatra, businessman of Chang Mai and then prime minister of Thailand, passed a new constitution, “the people’s constitution,” the first not drafted under military supervision—that opened up access to political involvement, information, education, and especially commercial opportunities for the masses, allowing them to grab at some of the staggering profits just then pouring in through exports of agricultural and industrial goods, and especially from Western tourism, which today makes up forty per cent of Thailand’s commerce.

The country took off like a roller-coaster under Thaksin’s businessman guidance. The prime minister famously said, “A company is a country, a country is a company.” Thaksin especially profited: he amassed a huge fortune by various corrupt means and, rather than face a court decision over it, absconded into self-imposed political exile to Montenegro, where he is now a citizen.

A supreme court removed Thaksin’s allies from power—the Red Shirts call it a coupe, looking back to the old days of military involvement, but who can say?—and installed the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva—aliases: the tyrant, the dictator, the murderer. The Red Shirts (their full group title is the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, or UDD, and they are aligned with Thaksin’s old Puea Thai Party) demand the dissolution of parliament, a fresh election, and a return to the 1997 constitution. Abhisit and his allies demand the Red Shirts dispersal. Two sides, each a magnet for fearful ideologues. And in the way of fearful ideologues, neither side appears willing to talk or compromise, and the situation threatens to burst like magma into mob rule or violence.

Same same but different, as the Asians say. All this happens with horrific regularity in Southeast Asia, even in Thailand’s model democracy, so that it is rarely reported. Yet in April the skirmishes near Phan Fa Bridge dragged open the lidded eye of the world onto the Thai struggle. The ministers dubbed it Operation “Ask For A Return of Public Spaces.” The colonels then asked their soldiers, stationed around the bridge encampment like a besieging army, to march on the rebels with riot shields, without having a clear idea of the Red Shirt numbers and organization or responding to any of their demands.

The Red Shirts fought back as cornered animals, with hands and rocks and signposts and the improvised urban weapons of mobs. From among their rabble stepped men in black, entirely covered but for a slit of the eyes, a cool glance of professionalism; men without faces or names or provenance, experienced and armed with assault rifles and worse, who slipped out from the red waves and shot down police and soldiers, then blackly stole away into the crowd. They say that the men in black were mercenaries hired by the exiled Thaksin to bolster his northern rebels, but no one knows for sure. Abhisit calls them terrorists, calls all the Red Shirts terrorists, just as the Red Shirts call the Democrats dictators.

The violence escalated. An actor named Methi Amornwutthhikul and a company of Red Shirts tried to retake the neighborhood around the Satriwitthaya School, and he was one of the rebels who managed to tear weapons away from the security forces. The rifles were later found in the trunk of his car. The soldiers started to use real bullets, first to fire warning shots in the air, and then lowering their guns in self-defense, against the men in black, and neither side backed down. The fighting went on into the deep dangerous black of night.

In the morning there was the most unexpected result: a complete stalemate. Twenty-five were dead, twenty civilians and five soldiers, and over 800 wounded. Streets full of wreckage and carnage and casings. On Khausan, the principle road of Bangkok’s thriving tourism, travelers stepped out of their hostels to survey the broken cars, the blood splatters, and the bullet holes. The hospitals ran out of transfusions, but most of the Red Shirts had already donated during a campaign two weeks before to carmine the cars of certain politicians with their own blood.

The international press caught wind of the carnage and swooped down like vultures, but in Thailand, and I here quote Suranand Vejjajiva, relative of Abhisit and ex-minister of Thaksin: “no one in the government ever apologized. Instead, state-controlled media bombarded the audience with one-sided stories of what happened. Some Web sites posting video clips of the shootings and beatings, other than the official versions, were blocked.”

The television stations showed footage from years ago of the army crackdown on protests against Thaksin’s government, full of violent beatings and horror, and said, “Remember what it was like under Thaksin?” The Red Shirt television station was shut down. Rumors spread that Thaksin had hired the black mercenaries with his extorted wealth, and that he paid most of the Red Shirts 500 bhat a day to come into Bangkok from his strongholds in the north. The Red Shirts denied everything and said that they were the victims—a fair statement, though perhaps not in the way they mean it.

Who can tell what is happening here? Yet the confusion of the violence appeared to exhort both sides to more, to exasperate their hatred and their sense of being wronged, and to strengthen their moral convictions that only their way was right for Thailand’s future. The southerners and the workers of Bangkok grew to hate the Red Shirts, for their violence and backwardness and their “men in black,” and for the excesses of Thaksin, revived by the media. The pro-Democrat Yellow Shirts, who had suspended their involvement, promised to resume it by Sunday the 25th. The government promised a crackdown.

And the Red Shirts cried injustice. Abhisit’s tyrannical government was against the people and the monarchy, the good King Rama IX—disband the parliament! restore the 1997 constitution! revenge the fallen! Their dead were martyrs, the “men in black” irrelevant. They hunkered down, those vast and wretched ranks, a grassroots army muscled into the political trenches by the rich and the powerful—they abandoned the Phan Fa Bridge willingly and concentrated all their forces in the Rajprasong intersection and made speeches and flew crimson signs and banners that said, “Truth today,” though truth has never felt further away.

Some pleaded for discourse, but most demanded blood and more blood. They would not reconcile or compromise, not when they knew that everything was at stake, not when they feared for their very survival.

In his appeal, quoted at the chapter’s beginning, Suranand Vejjajiva also wrote (and take heed of this, America), “If this were a black-and-white world, right and wrong would be easy to determine. But we live in a world with shades of gray. Behind the scenes, the power play and the issues at stake re intertwining threads of public interest and private ambitions—no-one has a monopoly on morality, be they the red, yellow, military, elite, businessman or politician,” and dare I add, Democrat or Republican? “Sometimes we just have to muddle through the gray world and make deals to move the country ahead rather than to embark on killing each other until there is nothing left to deal with.”

And I had not heard anything. The battle of the bridge happened on April 10, three days before my flight to Bangkok, to the terror and confusion of my mother. “Do you really have to go to Bangkok? Sounds just great there,” and soon after she wrote, “The NYTimes is reporting that Bangkok airports are closed. Could you let me know that you are safe and what you plan to do? Yes, I do worry. Mom.” I hastily looked this up, and finding only confusing reports, and with my visa expiring the day my plane left, I accepted that I would just have to go to the airport. Whatever happens, happens.

I was out of the loop. I had not even heard of Songkran, the water festival held on the Thai New Years, until an American named Tucker, from Santa Rosa, told me about it at the Calcutta airport; and I did not realize how big a deal this festival was until we took a cab downtown and saw trucks driving around, Thais crowded in the truckbeds like Somalis at the Battle of Mogadishu, but armed with super soakers instead of Kalishnakovs, with a great 40-gallon drum of cold water weighing down the middle. In the north, especially Chang Mai, Songkran takes on a more spiritual significance, but in Bangkok it’s really just a three-day water fight, a way to cool off at the end of the hot dry season.

Our cab driver Reggie, who could not understand Tucker’s name and called him Tiger instead, so we called him Reggie—Reggie would not go into the worst of the fighting around Khausan, where we hoped to find a place to stay, so he dropped us off at the entrance. The drive in was interesting, seeing all the huge glass skyscrapers and clean highways that did not match with my mental picture of southeast Asia, but here we saw thousands massed in the streets, all shooting each other in total anarchy. Some huddled around makeshift bases on the curb with buckets or coolers full of water, which they threw by the bucket at passers-by. Skirmishers rushed up to these to replenish their empty canisters with ammunition, and the Thais cried, “Five bhat!” Some of them were making a fortune, selling guns and beer and water, with signs that advertised such a strange combination of merchandise, and their profits presumably made up for getting constantly sniped at.

Indeed no one was sacred. Camera, book bag, baby stroller, leather purse, fine dress, or that you were currently driving a motorcycle did not exclude you from becoming some laughing gunner’s target—nor did backpacks containing everything you owned in the world! And this had me saying, “We should really find some place to put our stuff. Really.” Tucker and I dodged past the hooligan mobs, who seemed unaware of terms like noncombatant or friendly fire. We walked with a purpose, not too slow and not too fast, not trying too hard to avoid getting noticed or splashed, because that would only invite greater volumes of aimed water.

Getting to the Lonely Planet hotel involved walking down one of the worst streets, Soi Rambuttri with all its backpacker hostels, where every storefront had a big barrel of water with a hose stuck in it and a group of laughing Thais gathered around with buckets, and people sitting at the streetside cafes kept their guns on them and shot at those going by. Eventually we made it to a place called My House, checked into our room, took things out of our bags to dry, then went out and got guns and water and beer.

Pumping our squirt guns—therein lies a test: if you did not giggle, or even crack a smile, I’d say you are admirably innocent—pumping our squirt guns, Tucker and I wandered down through the press of the crowd on Khausan, everyone having a really good time of it, laughing and shooting each other in the face. There were girls dancing on top of the ice boxes where the big restaurants kept beer, music blasting, and everyone shot water guns at them. Those without guns had little buckets of talcum powder and water and they would rub this on your face or chest and say, “Swadi-pimai!”—Happy New Year!

There is a Thai word and custom, nam-jai, which means “kindness,” and is amazing to see in effect. The Thais see thousands of tourists a year, all these drunken Brits haggling for their women, and are still overjoyed to have a foreigner talk to them, curious and complimentary and fascinated, though always easy-going, always with a winsome sense of humor. Tucker and I fought alongside Thais using ice chests as cover, coordinating our fire on some tall guy with a gun or some pretty girl. We shot at girls and then went and talked to them, and found the Thai girls were all charmingly cheeky, even saucy, in their conduct.

Women are the aggressive sex among the Thais. A man in a crowd or club can expect to be grabbed or captured, or to bear the brunt of lewd or obscene comments and looks. This sociability does not apply only to the prostitutes and lady-boys, though it certainly facilitates their careers. Thai men are naturally reserved and require or are accustomed to such goading, taking on the seducee role of Western women. For one as myself unused to such earnest female attention, and doubly so after fearing it in India and Islamdom, Bangkok was a pleasant if sometimes disorienting surprise, and I heartily took advantage of it.

Now as for the famous Thai hookers, there were many in that city of sin, latitudes apart from shame and guilt—young and vacant-faced sylphs on the arm of some sex-slick bastard, experienced prostitutes at the corner of tubetop and miniskirt, and lady-boys that laughed and joked and groped. It is big business. The old men head straight to well-known establishments of ill-repute, or they come here on organized sex tours. The young blokes of vague intentions wander into nightclubs where every cheap drink puts them closer to taking up one of the working girls on her offer. A row of five Thai girls danced on ice boxes on the curb in front of a bar, and a sitting farang there, a Caucasian snake, pointed out one of the gyrating nymphets with a pretty face and called over the owner, presumably to negotiate a price. Prostitution is not a clandestine business here, even though it’s illegal.

One custom the Reader may not be familiar with is the paid girlfriends, essentially a concubine for a week. I had it explained to me, by someone in no way averse to the custom: “You pay them maybe $100 a day, and you get a girl to guide you around. She is like your girlfriend. She shows you around, translates for you, and you take her shopping, and then at night you have sex. What’s the problem? It’s not so bad, I can say.”

The interested party—I would not go so far as to call him a gentleman caller—makes arrangements with his little lover’s agency beforehand, including how many girlfriends they will have and setting a quota for how many times they will be “serviced”—but how just detailed are these girlfriend arrangements? Are there clauses contained for hand-holding? You see many of these old bachelors holding hands with their little Thai sweethearts as they walk down the road, glaring at everyone who wets their stupid shirt.
Does he establish beforehand how much he will spend on a cell phone? How many times he has to take her out to dinner? For how long he will wait for her to pick out a dress? I wonder, just how pimp officiated, how governed by contract, is this relationship?

One night as we rambled back with our heavy ordnance, water tanks empty, shirts soaked, we passed going the other way an Old Cantankerous with two vernal caryatids supporting either flabby arm, and then twenty paces later, a block-headed Brit, young and stupid-looking, also walking along with a little Thai girl in hand.

I said, “I know the old men with the Thai girls are paying them, that’s why they came here—but what about all these young dudes?”

“Yep,” said Tucker, “I think they’re all paying them.”

“I don’t get it. These Brits just out of high school, coming here to pick up hookers.”

“Probably all came here virgins.”

“I don’t get it. There’s got to be a few real couples here, a few dorky foreigners working here who have just picked up Thai girls.”

“Probably a few.”

“Maybe one in twenty,” I guessed, “but ninety-five per cent are with hookers. What the fuck? I just don’t get it. There’s got to be easy tail on the beaches for these idiots. I talked to like three girls tonight who were totally trashed. I told this one girl who wanted to buy my water gun, I said that she should just spit on people. We talked about it for a while.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Would you pick up a hooker here?”

Tucker looked away to think about this and answered, “Maybe when I was younger, if I was really drunk and my friends were like, Let’s get hookers! But I wouldn’t come to Thailand for it.”

“Yeah, exactly. Everyone comes here for the same reason.”

Yet I for one had not come for the bacchanalia. I was still seeking a romance of adventure and far-away fantasy, rather than one of hookers and drunk Brits. As I wrote in a message, “I feel half isolated from all the weekend campers in this part of the woods. It’s all little kiddies having their first sip of beer and taste of sex, couples out of Old Europe who have booked all their accommodation, and salty British perverts.” It was difficult to find anything of Thai culture not already debauched and mapped out in a vacationer’s brochure.

But Thailand is a place where many worlds coexist—lust, debauchery, tourism, alongside earnest spiritualism and politics. Approaching Bangkok or looking down Khausan’s line of clothes stalls and crowds of farang or passing the third 7-11 on the block, it seems at surface level like any city in California, yet as soon as you talked honestly to any of the Thais, even the ones gracelessly screwing around with tourists, you learned that underneath the jeans and Hawaiian shirts they are still Thais, affectionate and superstitious, devoutly Buddhist and adamantly political.

The second day was a second offensive, and we proceeded more tactically. Tucker and I moved up the lanes in a SWAT team crouch. We took cover behind beer coolers, street stalls, or plants, and worked with random arrangements of people who happened to be shooting at the same other random arrangement of people as us. We rushed down the covered alleys between Khausan and Soi Rambuttri and charged out into the light. Once a whole team of us assaulted this high platform on Khausan where a girl stood firing a pressure washer at a low setting so the mist came out like the blaze of a flamethrower. We advanced under covering fire, knelt in the street, and created an enfilade, all shooting at the face of the poor confused Thai girl at the top of the platform.

All along the street there were venues set up, playing music and selling beer. Thais and Anglos danced wildly in front of them, and sometimes a few danced up on a stage. At night, flesh-seekers crept in and pointed out one or the other of the girls, then negotiated her price with a nearby pimp, but during the day things were fine and sunny and wet and only vaguely sexual. Between the stalls there were vendors selling noodles or spring rolls or barbecued pork on sticks, water guns or plastic bags to hold valuables, and often cold water for ammunition. They charged 5 bhat for this, but we always managed to get it for free.

Some skirmishers wore costumes: business suit and tie, Mexican wrestling masks, frog suits, SCUBA masks, etc. The girls all wore clothes that clung to them as soon as wet. Some of them screamed very satisfyingly when you shot them, especially with cold water, which I preferred for the reactions it brought. Cold water also kept them from retaliation: a target hit with lukewarm tapwater will just turn and fire straight back at the shooter, unless the shooter hits them in the eyes first thing and keeps them blinded, then runs off to better cover while the target reorients. I became very good at hitting people in the eyes straight off.

Ah, the liberty of it! All those crusty Brits there to rape children, with one girl under each arm; those buzz-cut GIs with a gun slung over each shoulder; those stuck-up princesses with raised noses and a fearfully quick gait, lest they get their fine dresses wet; those swaggering broad-chested ignoramuses on a gap year and a drinking binge; those effeminate, squealing Thai boys—what a joy it is to shoot these stereotypes in the face with a water cannon!

Sometimes we stopped and stayed somewhere for a while—at the end of an alleyway where a man was sitting with a hose, at a beer stall where the long-haired Thai in the Hawaiian shirt gave us free ice water so long as we helped him shoot girls with it—and ambushed anyone who passed. Great skirmishes were fought, all the combatants smiling and laughing with each other. Is it Mars or Bacchus who is king of this war?

There were dozens of Red Shirts gathered around the Democracy Monument, a few blocks from Khausan. The government had expected most demonstrators go to home to be with their families for Songkran, but the stalemated violence a few days before had given them all fresh resolve. The movement stayed strong. They set up a poster-board at the end of Khausan with gory pictures of some of the protesters who had died on April 10, as martyrs, and they had some of the coffins there, inside big cases with Buddhist carvings, Thai flags laid over the top. Clever propaganda showed an arm-wrestling match between a general and a man of the people, the general’s hand weighed down by tanks and divisions, the man’s hand barely supported by the combined efforts of a dozen Red Shirts.

A few days later I surveyed the Rajprasong intersection and found the rebel camp organized and relatively apathetic, discouraged by the heat and the long period of inactivity. Red Shirt commanders took the stage to sing patriotic songs and deliver manifestos about the injustice of the Phan Fa Bridge battle, to keep their spirits up, but only a few gathered around the stage. Most of the rebels sat around on mats in front of the commercial high-rises or in the shadows of the overpass. They snacked or read the paper or gave each other massages. The camp had areas set aside for showers and offered free lunches—a good way, perhaps the best, to move the masses. Guardsmen in red swaggered around, making sure things stayed ordered, and there were only a few tourists. Leaving the area I came to the police blockade, the armored cars, the lines of soldiers, smoking cigarettes with helmets at their feet and riot shields close at hand.

Around midnight on the second day of Songkran, a detachment of fifty Red Shirts, some walking and some riding in three pickup trucks, red flags and Thai flags hung limply over their heads, came from the Democracy Monument down the street toward Khausan, where the Thais were dancing and laughing and spraying water. One went ahead, red bandanna about his mouth like a mask, shadowed by the brim of his hat, and his shirt said, “We Want the Truth.” Some of the Thai revelers, the wet shirts, turned on this Red Shirt with a drunken anger and began throwing curses and then bottles at him, hating him for disturbing their celebration, for disturbing the peace of their city and politic. Few southern Thais empathize with the mostly northern Red Shirts, and many openly despise the rebels for causing chaos and carnage and commercial strife.

The Red Shirt so attacked retreated into the midst of his gang, suddenly energized, as they had been waiting for a fight with police or whoever they could find, and a gang formed of wet shirts as well. The Red Shirt commanders started grabbing every rebel they could find and shoving them forward, like the Soviet commissars at Stalingrad, saying, “Go, go, go! Forward!”

The crimson wave charged like blood right down Khausan and stopped in a stumbling mess twenty paces from the soppy revelers. The rebels threw some bottles at the crowd, the crowd threw bottles back, and then the Red Shirt mob retreated, as if thinking, “What are we doing? These aren’t our enemies.” The captains crushed them back. “Run, run, move, move,” they cried, grabbing anyone that appeared to be stationary and shoving them back into the breach. This happened a few times, the Red Shirts moved forward and backward with the collective will of an army or a wave and threw bottles whenever it got close enough to the revelers, without doing any damage. Eventually the mob of revelers grew, and they advanced fearlessly so the Red Shirts had to run, leaving their vehicles behind.

In the morning we saw these cars, or what was left of them. The windows all broken, the tires smashed, dents everywhere, red flags waving like torn banners over some fallen war host. Wrecks, just waiting for a tow truck to take them away.

While all this was happening, I was a long way away, sitting on the fifth floor balcony of our hotel with an English couple, listening to the wet chaos of the streets compete with a set of iPod speakers. My hamstrings hurt from running around the city in a tactical crouch, and I didn’t want to go anywhere.

Lee and Kelley, the two Brits, were childhood friends from the small isle of Jersey in the English Channel, a peaceful idyl eternally warmed by the Gulf Stream, yet Lee’s father’s family originated in Bengal, or rather in today’s Bangladesh. They were in the line of succession for the Bengali throne, at some distant branch, had the partisans not interfered. One of Lee’s cousin nevertheless fashioned himself Shah or Prince. Lee could do the same, but he chose not to.

Growing up in Jersey, Lee never believed the stories his father told him of his great-grandfather, who was the fakir or shaman of their village in Bengal. As fakir, he would pace around the town at night, pounding his staff into the ground to scare away the wild animals. He also performed miracles. One year when the rains did not come, the fakir had all the village children go out and play in a stream. The very next day it poured. Lee did not believe it, until one night something happened that shook young Lee’s confidence in the rational world.

When he was thirteen he woke in the night to a sound in the kitchen of footsteps and tapping: two steps, one tap, two steps, one tap. Anticipating an intruder, he got a pool cue from his closet and went out, searching the benighted house. “I know you’re there,” he called into the deep, dangerous black, “and you had better come out.” But there was nothing, and he went back to sleep. He woke again to a strange sensation. It was as if someone was holding his ears shut with gnarled fingers and driving thumbs into his eyes. This grinding screech pierced his eardrums. Lee tried to move, to scream, but could do nothing except lie there totally paralyzed. And then all the force and noise was gone, and the boy bolted out of his sheets, grasping at his pounding heart in confusion and terror.

He ran upstairs to his sister’s room and pushed open the door. Now on the floor was a fiber optic light, and when Lee crashed through the portal, the light exploded from its dim glow to a blinding white, and then burned out to nothing. The boy curled up in his sister’s bed and stilled his beating heart and went back to sleep.

“The next day I told my dad what happened,” Lee explained, “and he said, ‘What did you do wrong?’ I told him, ‘Nothing, I didn’t do anything wrong,’ but he just asked me again, ‘What did you do wrong?’ I only realized it a few years later. My great-grandfather was protecting our house, and I ran out with a pool cue and threatened him. It changed me,” he continued. “I used to be a little shit, a bastard, a real cunt to everyone, for no reason. I was always bad. After that, though, I started being a little better. I kept having dreams like I was suffocating, but as I got better, they came less and less, and then not at all. Now I am very different than I was before. I was a little shit! Now I know I am where I should be, where my great-grandfather wants me to be.”

I listened with empathy and fascination and believed every word. It’s not in my nature to doubt what someone else says, no matter how far-fetched, because there’s something to be learned from everything. Lee said, “Thank you for believing me. Most people hear this story and they say, ‘Bullocks, that can’t be real,’ and I say, ‘Sit my dad down, he’ll tell you the same thing.’ It was real. I feel changed because of it.”

That was when the Belgian girl Zaza returned, and friend Tucker soon after, with the same look of animal terror on their faces. They had been in the streets when the skirmish began, with Red Shirt band leaders howling battle cries as they shoved everyone forward into the bottle storm, but this was all happening a long way away from our happy gathering. We listened with a passing interest, without being able to make sense of it, and unworried.

Lee got out his guitar and started jamming, then playing along to Tenacious D. He and Kelley had nearly finished their rum bucket, and Kelley stood up and started dancing around the hall, inviting Zaza to join her. A big-chested, long-haired traveler from Baltimore and of the tribes of Israel, named Hellal, came and sat with us. Just that day, some thief had picked from his pocket both wallet and passport, and he was looking to cure his grief with our merrymaking—an osmosis of moods.

At first I said I would not go to The Club, despite Kelley’s extensive descriptions of its chairs and decorations and high urban ceiling, but eventually I complied. Tucker was smitten with young Zaza, and when she said she was too tired to go, he volunteered to stay as well. The rest of us ducked through the streets to a 7-11. Lee and Kelly got more rum for their bucket, and I bought a Singha for Hellel and myself.

“This isn’t how I expected my trip to go,” he said, “getting other people to buy me things. I saved for months for this.” I told him a story of when I was down and out in Odessa and how someone helped me because it was the only thing to do—thank you Honore.

We went to the Club with a bare minimum of splash damage, chugged our beers, and entered. I danced with Thai girls in the dim light who all asked for drinks at the end. They tipped their cupped hands back and waved to the bar to show me what they wanted, and I demonstrated some excuse and went off to dance with someone else until this was no longer feasible. Tired, I said goodbye to the others and went home. Street food stalls still sizzled, and trash piled in the gutter, and the wet street of Khausan reflected the sleepless neon, red and blue and purple.

Such a picturesque setting reminded me of an old movie, a cult classic called Blade Runner. It has always been a dream of mine to replicate, as much as possible, the first scene, where Harrison Ford/Deckard Cain eats a bowl of noodles from a stall on the side of a Chicago alleyway drenched with rain and neon. There are people around, but he’s alone in a city of millions. The deluge hangs down in curtains behind him, and he runs through it with the futile gesture of a newspaper over his head.

I don’t know why I hold such an affection for this scene—its film noir romance, or perhaps the bleak urban wasteland, the cosmopolitan confinement of a Chinatown alley, the power of nature—but there’s nothing I wanted more than to eat noodle soup from the alleyway counter of a dim little kitchen, lit within by a charming crepuscular glow, and with the torrent at my back, flooding down the edges of the awning like Niagara Falls, and beyond that the hostile streets, gray rapids in the gutters, shadowy figures in long coats with purposeful strides, women with umbrellas stumbling by the passages in the wall and their menace, a slosh of cabs that look empty, and the ghosts of neon signs float overhead like words from Poe in the narrow and not-quite-exact reaches of the urban canyon, the criss-cross of escape ladders and the lifeless windows, and the neon casts down a spectral illumination that befriends the blackness rather than shuns it; my meal is but a respite, the stall but a warm waystation before I must venture out into cold dark midnight danger.

The reflective streets of Bangkok made me remember this fatal yearning, though it wasn’t raining, and though I couldn’t see any noodle stalls that exactly fit what I needed for my reenactment. Still the food was delicious. A principle aspect of my travel, ever in my mind and on my itinerary, was cuisine, and this was available on every Bangkok street corner. From push carts or kitchenettes mounted on scooters like sidecars, the greasy cooks fry pad thai and spring rolls or served sausages in bags with sweet chili sauce. They serve noodle soup with chicken and dumplings, or with big platters of squid and seafood to choose from, or cold noodle salad with pork sausage, or they had big tureens of homemade curry and a full rice-cooker.

The Thai food of Thailand’s streets was very similar to the Thai food of back home, though simpler in composition, and often spicier. Asking for a dish to be “Thai spicy” was asking for as many chilli peppers as noodles. The story goes that a long time ago, when the Thais were an impoverished people, a meager meal consisted of a bowl of rice, one of soya sauce, and one of chilli peppers. The Thai ate a spoonful of rice, with a little soya sauce, and then two full chilli peppers.

Today the chilli is ubiquitous as table salt. Indeed you might say that noodles and chilli are the Thai’s bread and butter. Most restaurants provide trays of chilli oils and powders, plus jars of ground peanuts, sugar, fish sauce, and other condiments preferred by the Thais. They serve cucumber slices with chilli peanut sauce, and pineapple or grapefruit with chilli salt. Restaurants also serve a cup topped off with ice alongside each meal, to be filled with soda or water or instant coffee or just snacked on, depending on preference.

On the last night of the festival, Tucker and I went to a supermarket that carried Tim-Tams and Oreos, Nutella and peanut butter, and bought some bread and tomatoes and cucumber—but no cheese! Then we went outside to a street-corner noodle soup stand. The portly cook served out pork soup from his steel cart, and we sat on plastic stools around plastic tables; and with a little suspended belief, I could imagine this present scene as the opening of Blade Runner, though the skies were clear, the streets not rain-slick but spray-slick from thrown buckets and emptied super soakers, but that sinister element was in the air, a human danger worse than any jungle beast.

Songkran had lost some of its interest and was even weighing on my nerves. We had not participated much that day, and it was frustrating that you could not go out and walk around, at any time of day or night, without expecting to be soaked. Tucker was on his way out, on a night bus, to the diving mecca at Ko Tao, and he would wear his swim trunk on his way to the station. I tried to conjure my own plan. I wanted some islands and beaches, but also thought, “I should come back to Bangkok for the monsoon. It’ll be pouring and I’ll find a good noodle stand. I’ll have a good opportunity then.”

That’s assuming that Bangkok yet stands!