TurkFist's World..part 2

"I learned at a joyfully early age that I preferred whores. I trust whores, or, at least, I trust the fact I can’t trust them and in not trusting them I can trust them more than women I might be fooled into trusting and would then send me into a three month bout of depression when they turned out to be completely untrustworthy" (Invitation Thai 360)

Blood there may be, but the lithe body of storytelling is intact. After Beer Bar 7 come a sheaf of slightly left field boy/girl P4P encounters. Although, with the possible exception of “Manhater”, none of them have the near perfect formal construction of the first story they are all told deftly and salted with a Buddhist impermanence.

The emotional territory of “Yung Kat”, “She Had No Teeth”, “Zombies”   and many others vary from humour and tenderness through to something even quite dark. Turk is essentially kind though occasionally not so in his dealings with the women depicted, his flawed heroines. You sense that he struggles not to love them while loving them. Or maybe the other way round. The core ambivalence. Less beguilingly these stories too often  end with a syncopated and mannered finality on one note or another, which is a rare instance of style trouncing content in TurkFist’s work

If the general tone of a piece is usually discernable what strikes on a close reading are the shadings and shifts evident within any one of them.  Bert the mosquito finding a new supper in “Yung Kat” http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/yung-kat.html is probably winsome while “she looked like the junkie she was” is surely harsh and “I kind of thought that she might make a useful cunt in a glass case. Break in case of emergency” skirts full blown misogyny. As an aside, taking the optimistic view that experience civilises, this reader supposes “Yung kat” an early story considering the absence of the humanity later present in the authorial voice. But note that Turk is never ‘reconstructed’ in the modern occidental sense of manliness, neither here or there.

Overall Fang (She Had No Teeth http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/she-had-no-teeth.html ) performs well to a comic strum after "she'd barely set foot past (his) front door…the gnashers came out and were deposited in a glass of scotch and water". And then mid smoke when “She stopped just long enough to drink some of the Scotch from the glass her sparkling white teeth were soaking in.” Later though she surprises with a restrained aggression and vulnerability when her disfigurement threatens to become spectacle, Turk remaining bemused though dignified throughout.

Mavis (Zombies http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/zombies.html ) too is elusive; the story kicks off with the familiar punter’s starfish lament, while gently sideswiping at “Internet message boards… filled with tales about short time floozies who've rocked the poster's world". Later when she sobs, over his detumescence he is world weary and wise, responding generously but firmly to her reflex avarice with; “Fifteen hundred baht. It's yours. Take it. But don't take the fucking piss." When, “Without another word she was gone” the reader is probably left less frustrated than the whoremonger protagonist by the general air of semidetached humour.

Porn (How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/how-many-fingers-am-i-holding-up.html) is interesting. She was only on the periphery of the scene and Turk still had "traces of youthfulness when…(he)… met her. (He) was only a few girlfriends in and was getting that first sense that afflicts all of us from time to time that maybe, just maybe, (he) wanted something better and more meaningful in (his) life.” This early salvo of vacuity means that even if “How many fingers..” is based on a grotesque erotic joke there is in counterpoint a bashful love story which declares itself unashamedly toward the end when she announces:

"Have my boyfriend. Him come from . "Him send me money every month. Him pay my apartment. Him take care me everything. I can't lose him. Him rich man more than you."

She held my eyes for a few painful moments ….. I almost said something about loving her.

But ultimately Turk is saved from an absurd comedy of love by the brittleness of Porn’s beauty and youth and what’s more; (ruefully) "she had a cunt like the Mersey Tunnel."

"Old Girls"  http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/old-girls.html is something of a minor manifesto; from the opening declamation that “True happiness lies not between the thighs of some teenager” to Turk finally swept up with“ a younger girl with her pretty face and adjusted naivety.” Octogenarians don’t “have any less right to an active sex life than anyone else” He also asserts. Lek is only in her forties though and like Porn on the fringes of prostitution, this time by virtue of waiting in a farang place. She subjects Turk to a slow seduction and tenderness until after their first sex he sees “her body for the first time. She was beautiful. Her body was beautiful. It just wasn't young.” But her legitimate insecurities are; “I know you find young girl. Young girl very beautiful. Not same me” and though wanting to bullshit her it doesn’t happen and they go their separate ways to meet only one final time. She has a proper boyfriend by then.

Sunny  performs blood rites, Ae the katoey is dipped in an ink of stoic pathos, Ling decamps enigmatically, while Ying “rented out a beautiful lie”……  but it would be forlorn to catalogue every woman…

With substantial repetition 22 stories of the stories on Thailandstories.com and 15 on Thai360. can be coarse classified as boy mates girl, excluding the gothic love story with Nam (Thai360) which will be considered elsewhere. The order in which they appear on Thailand stories can be a fugue: opening with the mature aware nihilistic tenderness of Beer bar 7, the movement of the whole opera crashes immediately to an emotional desert before climbing again, winding up through humour, wackiness, pathos and aggression with many detours toward the high plateau of "Manhater" http://www.thailandstories.com/article/fiction/manhater.html , one of the most recently published. Or possibly they are careless in scrambled sequence.

Whatever. This cluster of tales is not primarily pornographic. Many descriptions of sex hardly excite, are sometimes lacklustre, even pedestrian, yet in every other way the characters are rich. When Turkfist does record stereotypes it is for the most part through eschewing cliché, and beyond coupling, he has fashioned ‘place’ in a large and literary sense of that word. Although there is obviously much writing up of this concrete world, at the same time and, more profoundly, the author is creating a resonant ‘Bangkok with figures’ of the mind.

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