Bangkok A - Chapter 2

“Marriage is like diving into a swimming pool when all you wanted was a glass of water.” Prince Phil snorts through his aristocratic nose. “I have had three wives, divorced two and out lived one. If you ask me it is a game for fools.”

We are sitting in a bar on the Nana Road, Plaza side, and a marriage reception is being arranged on the other side of the road. The guests are beginning to take their places along the rows of tables that line up outside the Nana hotel. A song plays on the bar stereo, the title of the song is ‘White Wedding’ and the artist is Billy Idol. I surmise that it is more down to chance, than an ironic gesture, that the bar has chosen to play this particular song.

You can spend hours at this bar looking out onto the street, watching, trying to guess their game, their secrets. It is, however, no secret what most are here for. Apart from, perhaps the wedding guests, they are either males looking for sex or females offering sex. The desperation is the same for both parties, if born from different desires. The men desire sex, the woman desire money. Put the two together and you have a thriving industry, supply and demand. The time is just after 3pm and the road has a nice sedated feel to it, like the calm before the storm.

“Well I have had one marriage and one divorce, Phil, and I am not looking for another.” I tell him.

“You know why divorces are so darn expensive?” Phil asks.

“No,”

“Because they're worth it,” Phil laughs into his beer.

“My third wife was Thai, you know?” He tells me, looking over at the Thai bride arranging herself for a photo shoot across the road.

“What happened?”

“I made the mistake of taking her to the States.”

“She didn’t like it?” I noticed that the groom was of Western decent, Caucasian, what the Thais call Fa-rang.

“No she liked it. I didn’t like it. I recall the parties back in the States. I have never met more dull dead people than those married to Thai girls. I am talking about the majority that settle in the West. There are exceptions and I can count them on the fingers of my left hand,” Phil illustrates by raising a few fingers, one of which - what he would call the pinkie - is missing from a shooting accident, “but most are too dull to secure the interests of a fellow country woman. To live in the West with your Thai girlfriend means that you become branded the same, often ostracised by family and friends. You find out who your real friends are, that much is for sure. But the get-togethers where the Thai women sit on the floor and eat pungent salads and the men sit around looking at each other with nothing to say,”

“Sounds grim.”

“It is, Joe, I can tell you. And the family don’t want to know you either. I was written off as an old fuck with a cane, and a pension scheme not worth litigating over. My Grandchildren were under the impression that one glance at me would turn them into a sexual deviant in later life. I was godless, demonic, a disgrace to my family. I was out of bounds by all. Sitting at home jerking off whilst my wife explored the wonders of an American shopping mall coupled with an American credit card.”

“So what did you do?”

“I left her there, I left her to it. I flew back to Thailand. As far as I know she is still in the good old US of A.”

“I thought you said you outlived her?”

“No that was the first wife. I outlived the first wife. The third one as far as I know is still kicking around in the States. Probably found a boyfriend her own age and started a massage therapy business.”

“What did you do after it broke up?”

“I had the marriage certificate so I applied for retirement visa. I am too old to be messing about on these Visa runs that you kids talk about.”

“Well, you’re not missing much.”

“So how is business?” Phil asks with a grin “Uncovered any scams lately?”

“It’s been quiet, I am getting bored with chasing bargirls around town. It is all so samey.”

“Can’t be all that bad, Joe, chasing bargirls around.”

“It’s not all that bad but it’s not great either.”

I continue “Most of the time I am ruining hopes and dreams. Sometimes I think maybe it is better for them to live the dream a little and then find out for themselves.”

“And waste a lot of money.”

“Well there are worst things than to waste money on than a shot at happiness with a beautiful girl, I don’t need to tell you that.”

Right on cue a bargirl walks past our table and looks up and half smiles at us. Her eyes are foxy brown and she wears a low-cut pink blouse with ruffles on the cuffs and collars. She wears a smile that hits you in the nuts.

“You want to give that up?” Phil motions down towards the street, “You're more crazy than I thought, and I always thought you crazy.” He adds.

“It just seems bad for the soul, you know?”

“Kid, there’s no such thing as soul. What you are is an animal with a heart, a stomach and an arsehole. You brain is just some circuitry board with electricity running through it, you don’t need to cleanse your soul, you need an electrician, or failing that a large Vodka.”

“I’ll take the Vodka.”

“Good.” Phil takes off his panama hat with his left hand and waves it towards the bar by means of getting some table service. He looks with disgust at a dark ring of a sweat stain on the inside rim and then puts it back on his head.

“What you going to do in Bangkok to make a living, now that you are a reformed character?” sneers Phil, “join the moonkhood?”

“I just might do that,” I tell him and I take a long hard pull on a horribly strong local cigarette, “I just might.”

The vodka arrived and I take a look at it, the way a bulimic might take a look at single chocolate within a full chocolate box. I knew that this drink will lead to many more as it always does. I knew that this drink would lead to a drunken soul zipping around Nana Plaza telling all that would listen about how the world had swallowed him up and spat him out. Although the swallowing was enjoyable, and the spitting inevitable, I still felt slightly slighted. I knew however, like the bulimic, that I would eventually be sick and have my hand on my knees, crouching down in some darkened corner of the plaza. If I were honest to myself then I would say that the drink had got to me and made me into one his demonic disciples. Alcohol is a good slave, but a bad master, and I knew that I had to get away from the scene; my head could not take the constant pulling on its extremities, the tugging of the hair in the morning and the shaky delirious tremors that preceded the first drink of the day. I had, it seemed, turned into an alcoholic of the most typical kind. I had not developed into the type of alcoholic that gets himself into trouble at the turn of a panama hat. I have a bit more class than that; I simply drink to install the confidence to perform my duties of a private investigator who’s focus is purely on confirming the fidelities or as it often is infidelities of girls that work long hours in the number of bars that make up Bangkok’s seedy underbelly. I say underbelly, but I am not sure that Bangkok has anything resembling a clean side. The decent civilised side that is often illustrated in daytime Thai Soap dramas is a mystery to me. I have no idea if there is a decent clean side to Bangkok, and if there is one, I haven’t seen it. Then again, why should I have? The last few months have been an alcoholic blur of neon lights, dancing girls, and desperate foreign boyfriends calling from desperate foreign lands. I have somehow become the go between, between the two. And to be honest, it bothered me. All the drinking and lies bothered me. I had become soft.

Prince Phil has no such worries, he was probably so advanced in the ways of alcoholism years ago that he doesn’t even know what sobriety actually is. Perhaps some distant memory years ago during his time in military service, but more than likely sobriety is sometime after 3pm and after the first eight beers had taken effect in a bar on the outskirts of Nana. For a man of 84 he has an amazing tolerance to alcohol and I would imagine that for him to stop drinking would cause such a shock to his system, that he would probably die. I don’t tell him this of course, because I like Phil and last thing I want is for him to stop drinking, and snuff it.

“No, that’s it.” I tell Phil. “I need to rest for a while, thinking about going up country.”

“What’s up country?” he said.

“It’s not about what’s up country, it’s about what isn’t up country.” I reply.

“Anything worth a squirt up country is already down here.” Phil says with a grin. “The dross is left in the countryside, whilst the gold is on a fast bus to Bangkok .” He looks straight into my eyes, “Did I not teach you anything kid?”

“What you taught me was nothing I didn’t already know.”

“That’s because I explained it in a way that you would comprehend. You know, a wise man explains a difficult thing in an easy way. An intellectual explains an easy thing in a difficult way.”

“Freud?”

“Fuck no. Bukowski.” Phil shakes his head in disgust “Fucking Freud stole most his ideas from a throat and mouth specialist and fed his subjects cocaine.”

“So he was a nose specialist?”

“Exactly. When he could determine that between his arsehole.”

“What about Otto Gross?”

“Don’t get me started kid, I know more about the workings of the mind than any fucking shrink, and you, my main subject, should know fucking better. Get another drink in.”

And that, I did.