TurkFist's World...final

Some loose ends to singe before this shy hagiography may be put away.

Turk comes from England and things have happened there, which have hooks in the present presumably. A few stories sketch the shadows of his ante-life.

Like so many poor falang who illuminate the Thai night life scene virtual and otherwise, Turk’s previous incarnation was less than a bed of roses, specifically failure to be sustainably intimate. Though many of his co-pats grumble, probably justifiably, about feminazis and others have been royally fucked over by a divorce, dutifully maintaining children they rarely see, Turk only wispishly describes two women of his youth. Sarah, a falang woman we suppose, appears in 'Invitation' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/258994/post/258994/hl//) as his long-term partner, effectively betrothed, who comes home from an all girl bridge night with spunk on her breath. Such indiscretion degenerates on another occasion to gluey “underwear that would stick to a wall like well cooked spaghetti”.

'Once Upon a Time in the Eighties'(http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/once-upon-a-time-in-the-eighties.html) describes a gentler cut. In London, with his first recorded Thai girl Jinni, he falls mutely in love, marries to allow her a UK visa, and loses to a virile Italian adulterer, Roberto. Did she though throw open the French windows on paradise?

“Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye' (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/reflections-in-a-bloodshot-eye.html)  offer more clues to his qualia. Turk and husbandry may sit ungainly together yet he lives satisfactorily off a modest income generated by some sound investments avoiding “attachment to people, ideas or the outcome of events we have no control over… (this being)…. the primary cause of all human misery.” His gentle misanthropy is thrown into primary relief by the discovery “while still living and working in London. (that) the world is full of cunts and it’s really really hard (maybe impossible) to tell the few nice people from all the cunts so it’s probably wisest not to trust anyone or believe anything that anyone says ever”. Yet he responds to this despair sweetly and economically by being “as decent as (he) can be without sacrificing anything or making (himself) unhappy ... (to). feel the benefits without ever getting screwed over”.

There is more three legged bar stool philosophy in “The Art of Failure' (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/the-art-of-failure.html) when wistfully he wonders, “If we all had wonderful wives who understood us and took care of us and put up with our shortcomings in Farangland then the chances are we’d have never ended up here in the first place” .And observes that: “Many men who have escaped from bad marriages seem pretty much agreed that farang women have lost touch with whatever it was that women were supposed to be in the first place”.

Turk is gracious and loyal to his eclectic mix of friends and they reciprocate in many ways, particularly by being there during Nam’s worst excesses. There is a faint incense perfume of requiem about their portraits however, since they are mostly practitioners of the art of failure whose apotheosis is surely a death, of one kind or another.

Richard, a doctor, first appears in 'Blood' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/255216/post/255216/hl//) though is not much developed elsewhere beyond a movable drinking buddy. Swedish Vic is a middle aged well-to-do hotel owner, "part child, part Santa Claus" 'Legless'(http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/262998/post/262998/hl//) who "collected women who could do strange tricks".. 'Beaten' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/258674/post/258674/hl//). Turks oldest friend Jack, (Invitation) is an investment banker married to a beautiful woman living in Bangkok and very successful by orthodox canon. He is antithetically clean living which Turk accommodates to his credit.  A hapless south London postman, Jim, merits a bitter sweet story. He holidays in Thailand one month a year, miserably combating the demons of return each time, until it is marvellously turned around in “Suicidal postman.' (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/suicidal-postman.html) Jim,(another) and Bobby are falang acquaintances in “Going home' (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/going-home.html) who affect Turk surprisingly deeply. They are all neighbours in The Miami apartments and are railing under the pan xenophobic pressures of the ugly modernity that Thai society is embracing, moving Turk to smokily reminisce:

”When I first came to Bangkok everyone told me that it wasn’t as friendly as it used to be…….. I saw the young girls replace the old girls and all ask for money up front. I saw the prices of a beer in a bar rocket ahead of inflation. I saw crackdown after crackdown on what we could do. I saw the year of Amazing Thailand when the baht was devalued to such a degree that tourism went through the roof. I saw how greedy everyone got when visiting farang were treating their baht like bits of waste paper. I saw the ebbing of heroin addiction and the rise and relative fall of ya ba. Things changed all the time but through all that time these old farang hung on. Now even this was changing”

The most fully realized characters are Bob and Sawannii. Bob is an IT specialist who likes ladyboys, Sawannii is one and they are together. They both first appear in 'Shemales On Heat' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/255019/post/255019/hl//) and despite Turk’s barely suppressed and slightly exasperated homophobia it is a touching portrait. They figure in several other stories, funny, touching and sad until finally they bravely accompany him along wilder shores of the narrative. Among the most human in the stories, articulate in their ordinary heroism.

Notwithstanding his earlier London experiences none of Turk’s Bangkok friends is a cunt and curiouser not one straight Thai male is substantially or sympathetically rendered.

TurkFist’s writing is catholic in terms of fictional motifs too. The supernatural, mystery and horror are elusively woven in the tales and much of this is literary or merely pot boiler. 'A Cheap Room' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/258416/post/258416/hl//) straddles these. But 'Bob’s Magical Mystery Trip' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/257022/post/257022/hl//)is gnostic and profoundly unsettling. Bob, Sawwannii and Turk enter a weird world dominated by a hermaphrodite seer, where none of them is comfortable. “Legless”  also is far reaching, between beauty and the grotesque.

Usually so laconic and self deprecating, the humour in 'So F***king Cute'(http://www.thailandstories.com/article/humor/fiction/so-f-ing-cute.html) and 'Turkfist in public'(http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/254406/post/254406/hl//) is somewhat anomalous, bordering on farce. Here an uptight stooge is ridiculed. In the first story, set in a hostess bar, it is Mr Skegness with whom Turk and friends do business while in the second a prospective employer, Mr Fotheringay and Turk visit a go-go with sexually slapstick result.

The stories are also, possibly unwittingly, a beautifully written love letter to a city at a moment in time and its grain in Turk’s identity:

“Dawn breaking over Bangkok can be a beautiful sight. Splashes of colours that don’t belong on any kind of naturalistic palette spreading across the sky in vistavision shapes. The soft hued glow of that sky casting an unearthly beauty over the market stalls setting up and the early morning traffic”. 'Sleepless in Phrakanong' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/261013/post/261013/hl//)

And:

“I tried to think about what I really loved about Bangkok. Turk Fist… Shit. I didn’t used to be Turk Fist. I used to be a regular person with a regular name. But the colours of the bar and the gentle and almost lyrical obscenity of Bangkok’s nightlife made Turk Fist a better name to use. It wasn’t just the nightlife I loved. Maybe it was the stink and the poison rising up in every street that made you feel it didn’t matter what you did. The strange incongruity of beauty buried behind tatty shop fronts. This was my home now. I didn’t ever have to leave.” ...'Going Home'

Monogamy and sobriety are taboo. When I was casting round for origins the author wrote me that “To some extent I think of him being born in a bar with a whisky to hand and no responsibility to anyone” Turk, the fangled Buddhist cohort, for whom “alcohol is a great way to avoid attachments because, for all its ill effects, it kind of kills the very parts of you that hangs on to shit”.(Reflections in a blood shot eye) also considers “alcohol has always been a harbinger of good fortune……. (that)….. when I've had a drink or two the women seem to come at me in droves,”... 'Singing in the rain' (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/256113/post/256113/hl//) and when “sufficiently drunk, every woman who offers herself to you in any way is the one true love of your life right up until the point she excuses herself to go to the bathroom and you see another woman. Alcohol and women complement each other perfectly….” (Reflections in a bloodshot eye)

Though many stories open with the blasting aftermath of a hangover and very occasionally Turk can be stricken by a terrible feeling of wasting his life, the happy and the sacred is generally maintained by the garlanded ethanol served last night in the Falang Wat, lubricating the rites with the priestesses who are also sacrificial, a deeply satisfying amalgam

Years ago, before I had studied at the University of Bangkok I first read Turkfist fairly disposably, as merry night life tales, even if such carelessness never satisfied. This review has been a journey. On the way some stories were obviously unsatisfactory. The least memorable do not avoid cliché, are peppered with brittle humour, pastiche and unintentional parody. Rarely there is mean-spiritedness. Characters are introduced and hardly developed and Turk himself grows little. Nam is properly the end yet the later stories pursue her. TurkFist the author can even appear captivated by his own Karaoke lights.

But this is only carping. The stories and characters do engage on many levels, certainly the readers’ enthusiastic response on the internet are testament to that. Effortlessly, at times the work is brilliantly comic, quirkily knowing, terribly sad, chillingly violent, and more. It may be a lucid chapter in the eternal febrile war of the sexes or the red-blooded tales of a sex-pat. A blue collared gnarled wisdom born. This tilt at universality is very impressive but still not fatigued.

More deeply, Turk is a wounded every man enmeshed in a religious paradigm where sex, and violence to a lesser extent, represents a really aweful experience for our amagical era; unsanitised myth making, the need for which was aching, in me anyway.

© Icarus. All rights reserved by the author.