Ingrid's Fateful Passion

They say that Ingrid first drew attention to herself on a balmy day in March in the year 2001. Not far from the imposing spirit house on Beach Road, she had stopped a young man who was hustling people to get a tattoo at a small shop on Soi Eight, not far from where I was staying four years later in the Flipper Lodge Hotel. Ingrid had said that she wanted the name Heinrich tattooed on her right calf, done in sharp reds and blues in a classic Germanic script and of sufficient size to extend from near her knee to just above the ankle bone. She agreed on a price and a time to get the tattoo done. But before the young man with his loose-leaf binder of examples left to move farther down the beach in search of more business, Ingrid said she did not believe that one day and the amount of time allotted would be enough for Heinrich to be written on both calves. The vendor, a small and unimposing Thai man with one front tooth tipped in silver and a large pimple on his Adam’s apple, said that was true, and if she wanted the other leg done she would have to return a second time for an equally long session. He then added that the price would be double what they had agreed to. Ingrid looked incredulous, and she said no, she would only pay the initial amount they had discussed, and it would be for both calves. That, surely, was their agreement. The vendor said he was certain that he had understood her the first time, his English being better than hers. They argued, and finally he agreed to give Ingrid a discount for the tattooing on the second calf. This was still not good enough for her, and in feigned anger, thinking it would be easy to take advantage of this mere beach vendor of tattoos who was only half her weight and shorter by three inches, she slapped him hard in the face. There were several people around when this happened, and feeling thoroughly humiliated--losing face, not a good thing in Thailand and these other Asian countries with rich histories and textured ways of behaving--the young man returned the blow to Ingrid's cheek. It was, I was told by my informant, a glancing slap of really little more than show. Ingrid, however, again hit him, and this time harder. And she also spit on him. Now she had gone too far. He flew into the air without warning and hit her square in the liver with one of those crushing Thai boxer kicks. Ingrid was knocked to the ground and fell unconscious. She had to be taken to the hospital. She suffered no noticeable injury, but nevertheless filed charges against the man. Her effort was to no avail. This is Thailand, and there were witnesses. If there is the slightest doubt in any dispute between Thais and farang, Thais favor their own.

Ingrid got the Heinrich tattoos one week after she got out of the hospital in another shop. The tattoo artist charged her double what she would have originally paid to the vendor she publicly insulted. Thai tattooists have an extensive network, and like most Thais on most matters and with rare exception, they always act as family. Ingrid had made the first of several mistakes.

It was not long after this that Ingrid took her place on the exposed and not terribly attractive beach with a lazy surf along Beach Road. From the beginning, she laid nearly prone in a blue and yellow striped cloth chair that she would rent by the week from one of the many locals who plied the beach serving the sunning needs of mindless Europeans and North Americans who are eager to burn themselves in the punishing tropical midday sun.

Ingrid soon fell into a routine. She would arrive between ten and ten thirty in the morning, rent a sunning chair, and strip to a skimpy Day-Glo orange bikini bottom that was hard to see in spite of its flashy color because of a large roll of stomach fat. She would spend the first ten or fifteen minutes looking up and down the beach, smiling at anyone who came her way. Ingrid was eager to draw attention to herself. After several people ignored her--the norm, I gather from my interviews--she would lean back and close her eyes and slip on a crème-colored sleeping mask. On most days, she would sleep until 12:30 or 1:00, and then flag down one of the beach vendors and buy thee or four chocolate or vanilla drumsticks, what locally on the colored boards that are carried by the charming vendors are described as Cornettos and Paddo Pops. She would buy them one at a time, telling the vendor to return after she had finished each one. She would promise a tip, which was rarely more than five baht. After this predictable part of her ritual was over, Ingrid would once again lie back and fall asleep. She would remain in her beach chair more or less asleep until three o’clock or thereabouts, and then disappear to a room in the nearby Eastiny, the Sunshine, or the Flipper Lodge, the latter my hotel of preference. She would change hotels every couple of days without prior notice, and for no apparent reason that I could decipher from her notebooks.

During her whole time in Pattaya not once did Ingrid rent an apartment or make any effort to buy a home. I also learned that she came to the beach with a small bag that contained reading material. But there are few reports of her reading while at the beach. I encountered only one person who claimed to have seen her with a fashion magazine in her hands, and this was on a day when she had just finished eating the last of several ice creams. I must also mention that sometime after the first year of her residence on the beach (and I think residence is the proper word here), Ingrid began making short trips to the nearby spirit house, usually leaving a plate with one apple sliced into eight pieces, three durians, and a can of Sprite with a straw in it. I do not know the significance of this ritual, if there was any. I can only speculate that it had something to do with her increasing desire to draw attention to herself and do what she could in the smallest of ways to ingratiate herself to the thousands of young Thai women who were the ultimate object of her beach behavior.

What I have thus far not made note of were Ingrid’s absolutely enormous and, according to all that I have learned, growing breasts. I have made no prior mention of this because I personally find very large breasts aesthetically unappealing. At this point, however, I must say a few words about Ingrid's considerable endowment because herein lies the crux of the story I am relating. Let me be clear: I do not in fact know how large Ingrid’s breasts were when she first began going to her sunning chair and facing directly into the overhead sun in the late spring of 2001. But I can attest to their considerable size, for I have seen photos taken some four months before her death. From my perspective, they were a genuinely frightening sight to a man of my tastes regarding the aesthetics of the human female body. I would guess that Ingrid’s breasts were someone in the range of a 44 or perhaps even a size 46 and with a cup size that must have required custom fitting. When I first saw the photos of which I speak, I was not just taken aback by the size but also by their ungodly, nay, disturbing shape. I thought then and still do in now thinking about them that they resembled a messy mud flow, and of a most peculiar sort, for here and there on her sprawling breasts were irregularly shaped scarlet red and deep lavender spots, some oval and others more appropriately described as linear in shape. I do not know what these were, but I can surmise that they were either precancerous or cancerous growths.

I have gotten a little ahead of the story and need to backtrack to explain what Ingrid was up to with her peculiar behavior. In the year 2000, in December to be more exact, she had come to Thailand with her husband Heinrich, on what was to be a three-week vacation celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They spent a week in Bangkok and then four or five days in Chiang Mai in and around the old walled city. They made a short side trip to a Kareing hill tribe, and then spent two days in Phuket. Then, with a few days remaining before they were to catch a flight to Berlin via London and Los Angeles from Bangkok, they flew to Pattaya, infamous the world over for having the largest geographically contiguous sex bazaar in the history of the world. Larger than anything known in the most decadent decades of the Roman Empire, I have read. Thousands of young Thai women work in go-go clubs and strip shows and outdoor beer bars, all of them available for the night for the price of a drink and a small sum paid to the bar or club—a “barfine,” and then an additional amount paid by the customer to the girls directly for sexual favors for the night.

Heinrich, from all I have learned, had no interest in the girls or the often nude and sometimes lewd shows of Pattaya. But Ingrid did. She was utterly fascinated by them. Like so many women in Europe, Australia, and North America, she found it utterly disgusting what the young Thai women were doing to feed themselves and their children and, for some, send money home to parents and siblings. "Rank whores," she wrote at one point in one of her red notebooks. She was as judgmental as they come at the sight of so many men her husband’s age—he was fifty-six in 2000—and younger who had came to the Land of Smiles for these women. Had they no self-respect, and in particular respect for women of European origin? Ingrid wrote. And there was another matter that weighed heavily on her mind. How could these robust and large-boned men of Anglo-Saxon heritage find these tiny, dark, and poorly endowed women attractive? Were they sick? Most of all it was their small, almost inconsequential breasts, that so greatly upset Ingrid's sense of what was wrong with these unconscionable Western men of many nations who came to Pattaya. After all, what could any man of European descent, accustomed by history and a long and complex evolutionary past, find attractive and comforting in a young woman who had little of obvious nutrient substance--in Ingrid's very parochial view--to offer a child? Surely, Ingrid reasoned, with breasts so small, a woman could not adequately provide enough milk for a child to be able to have a mind as healthy, as active, and as creative as men and women of Germanic or eastern and northern European stock.

(I should note that this way of seeing matters would strike an anthropologist or evolutionary biologist half worth his or her salt as perverse, a kind of profound ignorance of what natural selection did and did not do on the human stage since Australopithecus came on the scene some four to five million years ago. But such are the ways of the mind, and of Ingrid's very peculiar Teutonic turn in this instance. Reason at times, anthropologists and psychologists and other students of human behavior remind us, is not a faculty that is anything like what reasonable people might take it to be. Common sense, culturally speaking, can be as variable as the difference between a rhinoceros beetle and a two- or three-ton rhino in the southern African bush.)

In the year following these few days spent in Pattaya and among all of these young Thai women with small breasts (not that this was the first time she had become aware of this physical aspect of Thai women), a trait of little apparent consequence to men just like her always faithful Heinrich, Ingrid became obsessed with righting a biological “wrong.“ One finds in her notebooks a real fear for the fate of offspring born of a Thai and European marriage. Ingrid, in her twisted mind, had to get these “lost” men of the West back home, and the only way to do so was to remind them, daily, incessantly, that what they needed they could not find in Thailand or other Asian countries. In ample breasts, Ingrid found herself thinking again and again, is to be found the enriching and abundant milk that leads to the formation of great minds, and great music, and great Western (and particularly Germanic) literature; and even--one can read between the lines of her copious notes--great empires. Men who were like her own Heinrich who came to Pattaya—and yet were not like faithful Henrich—might, in a generous moment, be excused for their momentary lustful ways, she reasoned. But they must never be allowed to forget the enormous “physical and intellectual capital” (her words, as best I could translate them) to be found in large breasts.

With this much information at hand, I began to see Ingrid as certifiably sick. And who would not come to a similar conclusion? But it is not really my job to clinically judge. I am, you see, a mere traveling journalist, an amateur anthropologist at heart who wanders the world in search of small stories. Whatever, Ingrid was eager to find a way not only to remind European and North American and Antipodean men what they had lost sight of in all their lust and desire to recapture youths long gone, but also to convince all of these young and sinning (Ingrid was a good Calvinist) Thai women that large breasts were not just highly desirable but NATURE’S WAY. Yes, NATURE'S WAY--words in capital letters to be found in the red leather notebooks I reviewed in detail. She could not, she realized, change what had already happened to these “poor and pitiable women so weakly endowed.” But she could, she was certain, convince them that large breasts were highly desirable. Once they realized this they would understand the superiority of Western women over their meagerly endowed Asian counterparts, and, as a result, they would want to enhance what little they possessed. Who did not know, even in Thailand, that the technology was now available to give all of these women breast implants? While it might seen uneconomical for them to have these rather simple but dramatic operations, Ingrid wrote, they would quickly recoup their investments because they would be found so highly desirable by men of the West. Again and again, one gets the strong sense that Ingrid was certain that Western men would make a dramatic turn toward Thai women who appeared to be as well endowed as she was. This “turning” (her way of putting it as best I could translate with my German dictionary) was—yes, and once again--NATURE'S WAY.

(Even in a close second reading of Ingrid’s three red leather notebooks I still could not fathom her “logic,” and I had to conclude that it was as confused as she was about the superiority of Westerners. She also seemed to have no understanding of the fact that breast implants would not increase the milk or nutrient output of the mammary glands. Nor could I understand why she had any interest at all in changing the physical appearance of Thai women when she was so harshly judgmental about the behavior of farang men in Pattaya, and so intent in so many places in her notes on making them see the light and return to their home countries and large-breasted women like herself.)

So, Ingrid, thanks to the considerable monetary settlement she got from the insurance company after Heinrich was killed in an automobile accident in southern France, put up the initial investment for a building and equipment in Pattaya and convinced a plastic surgeon in Bangkok to establish a breast implant center. To her complete amazement, it never got off the ground. In the first nine months of business, there were exactly six women in Pattaya who had breast implants. (While I have failed to make note of such, it is obvious to one and all who have traveled in Southeast Asia that while Thai women on average do indeed have smaller breasts than women in the West, there are many who are surprisingly amply endowed. Variation, as we all know, is the norm no matter how we classify human phenotypes and therefore the reason that "race" has so little legitimate currency when speaking of humans.)

Despite the failure of the implant clinic, Ingrid would not give up on her consuming madness, and by the summer of 2004 she began to regularly go to the go-go clubs and discos in Pattaya and make scenes that caused concern. After a couple of drinks she would stand and shout obscenities at the foreign men for their bad behavior and misguided tastes in Thai women. When she finished with them she would then turn on the Thai women working in the beer bars and go-go venues. On several occasions, Ingrid was forcefully removed from the clubs by the police or by doormen.

Soon Ingrid became a source of endless jokes and ridicule (many too crude for me to repeat). Yet she continued to go to the clubs and discos and the beach and sleep topless as she had done for some time. And, according to what I have learned, she grew larger. Her weight, some said, approached 360 or 370 pounds, and a disproportionate amount of the weight increase went to her breasts. It was as if her God--the punishing Calvinist God of high moral ground--was on her side; and yet sending a message that no one heard.

Some three months before I arrived in Pattaya, Ingrid disappeared. No one knew what had happened to her, and the prevailing assumption was that she had finally seen the futility and the utter madness in her mission. Maybe, some of those I interviewed reasoned, Ingrid had come to appreciate that breast size was no more important than penis size is as a true measure of male sperm quality or the ability to satisfy a woman; or that anything whatsoever is to be made of the great difference in sizes and shapes that one sees between Asian and Caucasian noses (a continual source of fascination to many Asian women, as travelers and expats have often noted). But then, it was speculated, maybe Ingrid just gave up and went home, returned to her native Berlin to resume whatever she had been doing before making that first trip with Heinrich on their silver wedding anniversary.

Ingrid, in fact, never left Pattaya. On the 18^th of April (2005), I met some middle-aged Germans (I am often taken for being German) and a couple of young Brits and Kiwis. The seven of us, a raucous bunch of pissheads if I must say so, soon found ourselves making the rounds of some of the nastiest and most provocative go-go bars in Pattaya. We all got plastered, fucked up, pissed, wiped out--you name it. And each of us had our way of describing how we were blatantly abusing ourselves that night. I cannot count the number of beers and rum cokes and tequila shots we had. We went nuts, we really did. To a person there were nary a one of us of sound mind when the lights went out on Walking Street and staggered forth. We could have all headed back to our respective hotels, drunk as the proverbial skunk, there to puke and pass out, I suppose. But this was not our way on this night of high and low revelry and uncouth behavior. Before closing, we filled several plastic bags with bottles of Singha and Heineken and rum and scotch and headed for the beach.

I have no idea how far we got. I, like the others, just stumbled along and fell, and then passed out. When we woke, we collectively smelled of stale smoke, dried puke and musty sweat, and I don't think there was a one of us who didn't regret what we had done. And then we started walking down the beach, once again drinking, no destination in mind.

Suddenly, there she was, the famous Ingrid I had heard so much about. Willie, the Brit was the shaved head and a dozen tattoos of old girlfriends and meaningless Thai script and the silver nose ring that belongs on a bull in Madrid, was the one who spotted her. She was lying on a broken beach chair, arms splayed to the ground, stiff as a well-fried fish on Beach Road. But the sight was not what I, who had heard so much about her, was prepared to see. She was cold dead, icy and pasty in appearance, and her face was the color of chalk sprinkled with lemon juice. This was not, though, what really arrested and brought all of us up short in minds still very groggy from the debauched night before. For what lie before us was a woman of very considerable weight indeed. But she had no breasts, none at all. Her chest was as flat as the table in this Internet Cafe on Soi Eight where nightly, after a dinner of Pad Thai shrimp in a nearby café, I have been composing this story. Someone had surgically removed every last vestige of Ingrid's breasts and then neatly stitched the cut folds together. And then--and this was the really eerie part for all of us, even tough and loud Willie--someone had tattooed words in red and black across her ”new” chest. It was a job as well done as the marvelous huge scorpion I had put on the brown savanna above the root of my own fitness two days after arriving in Pattaya. The words on this very dead woman of misguided intentions were in Thai, words I would not understand until I turned to a curious local and asked what they meant. The words read: Goodbye Sweet Ingrid.

How simple, how ironic, how deceptively Thai, I thought. And that, at that moment, is the only thought that came to mind.

Korski

© Korski. All rights reserved by the author.

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