Minor Fugue

Time ago, July 2003 for chroniclers, Carousel was closed for refurbishment and the dancers had moved over temporarily to Cascade, all on the top floor of Nanaplaza. Those weeks too were the last of the daring there before the social crusade sanitized the zone. Watching them moving around naked even mingling and the shows were penetrating.

Why does anyone ever notice a girl? Night after night maybe you don’t, jiggling to the music any one of a cohort could be taken home. The noise and tipsiness distracts, there are so many inside the bar, amorphous but not always.

Pai had caught my eye on the stage perhaps because her hair wasn’t straight or her stomach pouted charmingly enhanced by a slightly flawed geometry of vertebrae and hip. There was too an appealing definiteness about her face behind a vaguer uncertainty.

She sat with me diffidently as a few girls will still do and I liked her more though was not yet one much for buying sex. Would she just like the money for short time, barfine thrown in, coitus optional, I wondered, musing too whether she had met such a proposition before. My entangled motives were a little fun and a quiet life but after thinking for what seemed an age she said 'go with you'.

Meetings became about monthly and our erotics unspectacularly took off. She was from Buriram, mother of an infant boy and a few months into the scene, not yet able to completely disguise the shame and occasional distaste for what she had chosen. An older friend dancing there in the same bar was inductress.

Though my feline love had settled in the Cowboy that autumn there remained a fine delicate shadow in seeing her, such that one night, with the cat away, Nit not yet off my horizon and Pai lamenting ‘no customers’ I did this: cross town to barfine Nit, now accomplice, we returned to Carousel to collect Pai and as a three, went to The Bar, propelling the one to look for work.  On the way, as all this was explained to Pai, relief. She said ‘I no believe you come bar see me with lady’ though I fancied Nit smiling bitterly, knowing worse.

There we sat together and the lady boss came over to kindly offer employment. They were easier days those and Pai said an almost curt ‘no’ while judging herself beautiful enough; ‘many lady dancing have baby already’. She too of course though only a doctor would have known. ‘No have friend’ was the real block. We gracefully rewound that evening but there were few others. I saw her less and less after that without us sulking, rather, both secretly glad, at not having to face them all working the same bar. It had been another fool’s errand.

Months later shortly before Pai went home. When Tik, the beloved and I were in the Plaza seeking a beautiful fugitive dancer, there was a lull. We slipped upstairs to salute her in a mute crossfire of inchoate rivalries I could have anticipated just thinking on what she said before about accompanying women. How badly my practices from the West transposed.

She was away a long while nurturing her son. Her friend from Carousel kept me in news and made sure I always had her number but what was the use?

Even so, when she came back I managed to be uncharitable while sitting in the Robin Hood pub. She had called, newly exiled in the city asking for money. My threshold set too high. Genuine bar girl distress not registering until after I had rung off with an arid ‘chok dee.’ May the powers forgive me though I was able to make it lukewarm up two nights later. She still hadn’ t found a fuck and accepted my tiring familiar offer as a soft landing under the sky of friendship which was good in the wider sense.

She lasted there 3 weeks, and only summoned me one more time when I left a 100 baht tip.

Then an SMS:

‘I cannot stay Bangkok. Tomorrow I go home take care baby’

She had the last text.

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