'Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone' by Nick Nostitz

Review by Alexander Turner

"NOW YOU ANGRY ME,
YOU LOOK ME SAME DOG,
BUT AFTER YOU LOOK PUSSY ME,
YOU HAPPY TOO MUCH !"

Way back when, in the days when the Madonna was a Virgin mother and teenage girls swooned over a slim crooner called Frankie, Udom Patpong had a money making idea. His dad had requested an access road from their teak house to Suriwong Road. Bangkok, at this time was flat and undeveloped land. The young Udom felt there was gold in this undeveloped bit of real estate and decided to built, not an access road but one linking Suriwong to the canal that has since been concreted over and turned into the bank heavy Silom Road. And on this road he would encourage businesses to set up shop. By all accounts his dad, a Chinese immigrant by the name of Poon Pat, was none too impressed but Udom was going to prove to his dad what an astute business man he could be. In 1950 the first shops were built on the land and in 1956 someone had a new business idea imported from overseas. Thus The Bangkok Onsen, the first massage Parlour in Thailand was born. It closed two years later. Maybe the time was not ripe.

But development continued and the money rolled in. It's fair to say that Udom's acumen was established and when the first bar on Patpong, the Roma, was opened the Gods must have been smiling on the Patpong family. The Roma's reputation was enhanced by the fact that it was frequented by some of the most appealing women of loose virtue in town. From this point on and through the Sixties Patpong's reputation grew amongst those visiting Thailand as well as those living there. When American troops came to the region with dollars to spend and stress to be relieved they probably headed more for the density of bars on New Petchburi or the seedier brothels by the port of Khlong Toey but as time when on Patpong became a key R&R location with Thai women aping the sixties styles popular back in the US and doing better business than anyone of their class had ever done before.

By the end of the war bars like Grand Prix had fused go-go dancing from the States with prostitution. Thus the legend of Patpong was established in the zeitgeist. I am not in a position to speculate at what point Patpong became so famous or why it displaced the other areas in the minds of tourists. Maybe it was the sense of intimacy available on a narrow soi. I suspect people got to know each other and created little families. Journalists, writers, diplomats and servicemen and tourists probably found it more pleasant to go to hang out together on a smallish strip that was friendly to them than brave the more mixed Asian ambience of the other areas. At the outbreak of WW2 Udom Patpong, himself, had lived in America and joined the Thai Seree, an American trained Thai resistance movement whose aim was to oust Japan . Maybe he left a little legacy in the land to make it more appealing to his allied friends. For whatever reason, when Patpong died in the mid nineties he was a significantly wealthy landowner whose name was synonimous with go-go bars, ping pong shows and prostitution.

The German photojournalist Nick Nostitz managed to lose himself for seven years in the world for which Udom Patpong is nominally responsible and has brought out a book of photographs chronicling this time out entitled Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone. And in many ways this world does have some similarities with an episode of the Twilight Zone. It's a pity Rod Serling wasn't around to do an introduction. The crisp suited, chain smoking scary guy, would have delivered an expert narration for how the characters in Nick's book had just taken a walk beyond the realms of everyday reality into the realms where normal rules no longer apply. The step beyond which no return is possible is taken as easily as one drag on a menthol tipped smoke.

Nostitz is identified on the cover notes as having sold work to various publications including the magazine "Colors", but this is the first time I have seen his work. One of his strengths is in not hiding behind some moral stance. How many stories and films I have waded through where the film-maker was this rare voice of justice in an immoral and corrupt world of vice. Most journalists I have met in Bangkok whore around as much, if not more, than an adolescent on a sex tour, yet go home to write stories that decry the evils that lead to this sickening trade in human flesh. Nick has no such pretence. He is in there living the life to the full. His friends and compatriots are junkies, minor criminals, whore-fuckers and bargirls themselves. He puts these people centre stage where they belong. He is not writing about Christian Aid workers or reformers he is writing about and showing us pictures of the people who jump head first into the sex industry and has the courage to admit to being one of them.

"It's about addiction. Addiction to a crazy, hedonistic lifestyle that is also a refuge. I see a subculture where the exchange of money for sex is only superficial. Most people see only the prostitution and the exploitation: my images challenge this view and go much deeper. For everyone caught up in the nightlife - bar girls and transsexuals, transients and tourists, refugees from their respective societies - there is an emotional addiction; an endless cycle of happy illusion, ecstasy, intensity, doubt and despair, my work symbolises these stages."

And those emotions are all there in the book. Most significant for me to see were the images of people enjoying themselves. Da from Pretty lady in 93, who I knew briefly, laughing broadly enough to allow a dental hygenist to give her teeth a good going over. Kat, who gave my son a small stuffed lion, laughing while dancing naked with a friend in Hollywood Royale. Numerous girls who I have met or chatted to. Friends of friends, friends of girlfriends, friends of my wife's appear with regularity and the bar seems to be the part of their confused lives where things come into focus while joy and flirtatious energy are the best tools of the trade. Some did well, some fell into drug use and did badly, but joy and laughter was a huge part of life in the bar. The crusaders against sex tourism may be troubled by this. Not that the lifestyle doesn't have tremendous pitfalls which Nostitz shows us. A girl in a bus terminal just a little past her sell-by date sniffs glue and offers herself.

"Hello. Hello ! I come wit' you. Where you stay ?"

But there's none of the stock shots of girls looking bored to death standing together with one hand on a pole, which is how the bars have been traditionally presented in the Western media, usually accompanying an article about child prostitution, lock up brothels or AIDS. The Bangkok Nostitz presents is a city I recognise and it may be the first time I've recognised it while not actually there.

The opening chapter of the book introduces Nostitz's fellow travellers. Lost souls to a man and yet somehow happier for living in Bangkok than they ever could have been in the West. He conjures them well with photos and some choice character traits hammered into our minds with some economical prose. George, a head shaven, luckless, hippy with an Aleister Crowley stare is painted:

"How can I ever describe George ? He is an alien from a faraway star, a relic from the summer of love still living the life. Brilliant astrologer, drunk, dopehead, uncontrollable, energetic, electric."

And one of his fellow travellers who, for good or ill, was one of my fellow travellers too back in '92. A guy called Robert who most of the bar girls on the Cowboy referred to as "Eizat", literally meaning "this animal" or "this demon" depending on what provincial slang your depending on, who was a man just abounding in contradictions gets the full Nostitz treatment.

"Robert the rat. Ratbert, chess genius, Puerto Rican Jew from New York (maybe the only member of this minority). Dreaming of becoming a gangster, stealing chocolate bars from Seven Eleven. Peddling AIDS medicine in Soi Cowboy, selling photographs of his high school diploma."

All very accurate stuff. Robert tried selling me a copy once. He was universally reviled and seemed to enjoy being universally reviled and yet sometimes he did these almost heroic things like risking his life stopping some big German beat up on little Benny, who was also universally reviled but for different reasons.

The next few chapters of the book are photos linked by chapter headings like go-go bars, blow job bars (including a classic bathroom photo of a bin overflowing with sperm soaked kleenex), discos (mainly King's Lounge), the Thermae, and back street brothels and massage parlours. One long chapter is devoted to katoeys ending with a series of photographs of the uncut glamour queens in residence at the Casanova bar. Typically the katoeys pose for the camera with professional ease of someone posing for the cover of vogue or the centre pages of a wank-mag. It's always startling how beautiful katoeys look in such photos. Nostitz's one slightly off note is when he tries to build a guilty mystery around Casanova:

"The place everybody knows, but nobody likes to talk about except in hints, whispers and smiles. Nobody wants to admit going there, on strange journeys of psychosexual experimentation."

I always found it to be the bar that provokes the most regular discussion and blurted anecdotes. There are plenty of Bangkok stories end with some hapless tourist being left rat-arsed in Casanova trying to score a short time ?

Some of Nostitz's most powerful photos are reserved for a chapter entitled The Street. A child with a puppy sleeps rough on hexagonal Sukhumvit paving stones beneath the window of a restaurant through which we see a couple of Thais enjoying after dinner coffees. A crippled man with knuckles for fingers, ulcerated legs and a face as tortured as a ghost in a Thai comic book attempts a deep wai while holding a tin mug for pennies. A long-haired man with bare blackened feet begs to be killed as suicide would be an offense to the Buddha.

The final chapter is really Nick's confession. Through the stories of Ae, a good friend of my wife's, who has gone from being a young laughing bar girl in 93 to a wasted looking ya ba smoking 25 year old in 99, and Nang, the first bar girl he slept with in 91 who's sweetness is contrasted with Joy who claims to have AIDS and refuses to let him wear a condom. He has seen himself change. He writes:

"We were all so naive, and had no idea that serious things were waiting to happen. We came from all backgrounds, some of us had no education, most had left careers behind. We went out together, shared women. And Bangkok's night became our prison. We were addicted to the lifestyle, slaves to it; intoxicated by a moral set-up incomprehensible to anyone outside the scene. And in turn we couldn't understand other people anymore, their bigotry, their double standards, trapped as we were in a bubble of illusions."

All of which is very fine and truthful but the moment I fell for this book was on seeing one particular photograph. First I should explain.

When Nan was Twelve years old her father came to her room and, as her sister slept, held a knife to her throat and raped her. It must have been pretty brutal because she was still bleeding weeks after. She told me this once, very matter of factly, in her strained form of English while we sat in her Ruam Rudi Metal Room. It was called the Metal Room in reference to what I don't know. She just had that spelled out on her front door. I don't know if she had ever really trusted anybody ever again after what her father did to her, but she was a good friend to me. She scared the Hell out of me on more than a few occasions. She slashed her wrists and had the name of some ex-boyfriend, Paul, carved into her chest. She was willing to fight on behalf of anyone she thought of as a friend and carried a razor just to make this okay. But I think we were friends because I was a self confessed idiot and there was never anything sexual between us. Most men, even if they are idiots, act like they know what they doing. I have never thought for a minute I knew what I was doing which made us cool. If I remember Nan I always think of her laughing at some wild thought in her head or being ready to kill. She was never mentally still for an instant. Generous with stories she would tell of everything she had seen and all the stupid things that she had done. Her sister had wound up in Japan. She had some pictures of them together when she was much younger. In the young pictures Nan wore glasses, but I had never seen Nan wear glasses nor had I seen her put in contacts so I guessed she was half blind most of the time. I could try describing her. The way her hair hung around her face lifelessly while her eyes looked lost in some world of private thoughts that would soon be shared. I could try describing her broad full mouth and the way it would break into a smile with ease yet always looked nervous, tense. Once she had friends by the dozen, when she stayed in Ruam Rudi, but they would always let her down. The bar girls who found husbands and a clean bourgeois life abandoned Nan as soon as the good times beckoned but before she had put them all up in her room so they wouldn't have to travel far to get to the Thermae. The last time I saw her we spoke about my family. She told me she was so happy for me that I had a good wife and a beautiful son but she still couldn't bring herself to believe such things were possible. She had seen enough to conclude that human beings were basically rotten and selfish. "We born alone. We die alone. And in between... We still alone." She told me. Years before during a wild night she had scared me by saying she was prepared to die for her friends.

Yet in all the time I knew her she never really changed. She was always somehow decent. Crazy, fickle, with mood swings set off by the mildest perceived sleight, but decent. I wish I could describe with words that had some gravity something of what she was like. What was inside the torrent of hurt and moods. If I had the gift to describe that I'd be a genius.

I was flicking through the book in a bookshop and caught sight of a picture of Nan. A monochrome picture of her standing in the Thermae It's dated 13/12/93. I could have been there on the very night that picture was taken. Maybe I was standing a few feet away. In that picture Nostitz captured Nan. In the one shot you can see the lifetime of hurt and fear and hopes shattered all there in one silent expression neither happy nor sad just accepting. Nick must have known her beyond this casual encounter as there is a picture of her in that same room off Soi Ruam Rudi wearing a pakkamaa. She looks beautiful in this second shot. And thinking of her face it could have been the face of a model if she wasn't so damaged.
For the genius of these pictures - for the genius and honesty of this whole book - I am awed. I don't know if that shrewd businessman Udom Patpong would appreciate that his name has now become a description, not just of a street, but a whole way of life. At least someone has finally managed to hit the west with a book that shows that way of life as it is, and not just as some politically minded folk would have us believe it is.
One final note and Nick Nostitz fifth on the list of Bangkok Survival Rules:

"If a woman cries on your shoulder, get bottles, glasses and ashtrays out of her reach."

I can't think of any more essential advice in the entire pantheon of English literature.

Patpong : Bangkok's twilight zone A photographic diary by Nick Nostitz (2000)
Published in UK by Westzone Publishing Ltd Price £25 208 pp

Review copyright Alexander Turner 2001

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Wish to buy 'Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone' by Nick Nostitz, you can buy it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Patpong-Bangkoks-Twilight-Nick-Nostitz/

© Jago Turner. All rights reserved by the author.