Going Home

There are compensations in a life like mine. You wake up in the morning with a hangover and a twisting gut but at least, as the day progresses, you know this will ebb. It didn’t help that the air felt like half set jelly and smelled like burning fish but Bangkok is the City of Smells. If you can’t take the odd dodgy aroma you shouldn’t be here.

Things were starting to get bad for my fellow farang. A large percentage of the guys I knew were living here as English teachers and there was a general belief that the day of the white English teacher in Bangkok was on the wane.

I stepped out into the courtyard of my apartment complex with the sun half way to setting. A couple of farang Jim and Bobby were already back from work and already drinking. I shot them a wave and bought a half bottle of Saeng Som from the provisions shop.

“Hi Turk” said Jim as I placed the bottle in the centre of the chequered stone table.

“How’s things?” I said knowing full well from both expressions that things were shit.

“This place is going to hell.” said Bobby in his measured Southern California drawl. Bobby had been mildly depressed since arriving in Bangkok in the late eighties and had grown steadily more depressed for every year he’d stayed. “These people have no morality and no gratitude. They’ve always hated us but up till now they’ve had the good manners to pretend they didn’t. But now they think they can do everything without our help the place is just going to turn into a fucking shit hole.”

Jim poured himself a glass of Saeng Som emptying the old bottle and starting the new. “Bobby hates . That’s why he’s been here twenty years.”

“Eighteen years… And for what it’s worth I’m not going to be here much longer. In six months I’m going to be out of here. My company’s downsizing and I’m part of the size that’s being downed. I can’t put myself back on the market out here. I’m too old to go through all that shit and I don’t want to end up one of those farang always looking for a handout. Probably just as well… My mom’s getting old now. Most of her other kids started families. Maybe I’ll go and take care of her for a while. Then… I don’t know what.”

“You’re serious?” I said. It just didn’t seem real that Bobby who seemed as much a part of Bangkok as the pigeons who shit on all the monuments could ever leave.

“Yeah. In fact the sooner I get out the better. Don’t want to start blowing what little money I’ve put aside on whores and liars.”

I took a drink with them but it didn’t feel good. Like every Englishman I guess I’m a conservative at heart. I liked things the way they were. It wasn’t that I’d miss Bobby in particular. It was just the fact that guys like Bobby were being edged out. When I first came to Bangkok everyone told me that it wasn’t as friendly as it used to be. This was the cliché that always stuck. 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.

I drank with Jim and Bobby for a while. Clearly Jim felt that he wouldn’t be here all that long himself. He was an English teacher at a big girls school. He was a prime target for downsizing. It only takes one murdering nonce to make the whole expat community grow horns and a pointy tail.

After a few minutes I was just too depressed to carry on sitting with them. I took a walk down Petchburi Tat Mai and watched the traffic streaming down street. 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. I’d seen friends desert the place for the increased sanuk potential of Pattaya or the step back in time aspect of Phnom Penh. But for me all that was bullshit. Or maybe I was starting to feel my age.

I’d been with some girl two days earlier. We’d slept together most of the day without having sex and she insisted I give her three thousand baht. I was drunk and knackered so I wasn’t blaming her but it struck me that, even if I had the money, there was something wrong here. I didn’t give her what she was asking for. I gave her one thousand five and still felt like I’d been robbed. It felt nasty. Maybe I’m not as devastatingly handsome as I used to be but I thought that maybe it was time to give these hookers a rest. Wait for that little spark of magic. For an hour or two I’d wondered whether I still had any business being here myself. But I soon came down. I’d been stupid and picked a young pretty one. There were still plenty of girls around the town who had the same attitude as they’d had when they started.

The sun finally shot its last red hues on the evening sky. Someone was cooking sausages nearby. I bought and ate some having a quick joke with the vendor that wasn’t really funny but which we both laughed at. I saw a lot of smartly dressed Thais chatting and drinking and discussing the business of the day. Young girls sucking Fantas and Green Spots through bendy straws. It wasn’t a hedonist’s paradise but it was a nice place to be. I walked past the mad dogs, now sleeping, and the ladies living in the slum shacks washing their clothes in river water. The scooters scrambled past the cars and all the rush hour drivers seemed to be completely cool with their surroundings. I wandered down Nana Neua and felt that inexplicable rise of excitement that I was getting closer to the Nana Plaza. I laughed at myself. I’ve been here for thirteen years and I still get that buzz. Walking past the money changing shops and the Grace Hotel and seeing the inexorable rise of colour as I got closer to Sukhumvit.

You see it really doesn’t matter what else happens. Once you fall in love with this dirty stinking beautiful motherfucker of a town it always holds on to you.

I was close to where guys were drinking and laughing and flirting with girls who drank and laughed and flirted and the bars boom boomed their beautiful stupid boom boom music and the vendors sold their beautiful piles of takkataan grasshoppers and other assorted bugs. And Lights of green bathed one beer bar full of pleasantly chatting farang while Lights of lilac bathed another beer bar full of pleasantly chatting tourists.

And as taxi meters and motorbikes congealed by the entrance of Nana Tai I saw the girls all made up and beautiful and gleaming with the appearance of joyful sexual intent. And everyone seemed so fucking happy.

This was being alive; just being here in this place forever. I felt sorry for Bobby and Jim but they were content to just sit there in the Miami courtyard waiting for the axe to fall. What kind of life is that?

I went and sat down at a beer bar outside the gogo and had a beer. The beer tasted so cool and sweet that I drank it quickly and ordered another. With the second beer sitting in the middle of Nana Plaza it suddenly didn’t feel like I’d ever been anywhere else. I was born here and here I would die. A girl wrapped herself around me and told me, drunkenly, that she loved me and that I was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. I told her that I loved her too and that she was almost certainly the most beautiful girl in the world. She smiled contentedly knowing she had her latest trick and I smiled knowing that there are compensations in a life like mine.

© Turk Fist. All rights reserved by the author.

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