Paradise Has Its Price

The Welshman was a drunk, a psychopath, a one man walking disaster area. He liked his drink, and the drinking made him turn up the volume on his bleary ranting. You always heard him before you saw him, which was really a blessing in the form of a warning, for he was generally to be avoided.

To the Welshman, a quiet little chat meant waving a bottle around and a lot of shouting. It was beer for breakfast, more for lunch and whiskey for his tea, as up and down his wiry arms danced crudely etched naked ladies spouting cruder slogans – fading souvenirs from every prison he’d ever graced, and he’d graced quite a few. HATE adorned the knuckles of his left hand, LOVE ran across the right.

His face was like the front of a truck sorely in need of a coat of paint. The first night I met him he was covered in bandages. I asked him why. "Crashed me bike, din-aye," he screamed.

Apparently, he’d had a tiff with the wife – part of an ongoing, never-ending dispute concerning intimate financial matters, I later learned – and had taken off on his motorcycle, in a blind, drunken rage. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten to turn the bike around before departure and had launched himself headlong into the jungle at the end of his driveway. He was a mess, but that was nothing new. I never saw him without some kind of cut, bruise or bandage on him.

The Welshman's wife was a very different story. Breathtakingly beautiful she was, with a body of the type that kept adolescent boys busy under the covers well into the night. Every man within 20 kilometers was on her scent like dogs to a barbeque, and the Welshman knew it. She was like a bowl of overripe fruit, succulent and forbidden.

The Fifty Million Baht Question was, of course, why this lovely creature, this tropical treasure, would stay with a rat-faced bastard like him. And the answer was obvious: the money. Nung held herself, rightly, among the finer specimens of womanhood, and she deserved, as she saw it, all the finer things: clothes, jewelry, a new motorbike upon which to parade the above, glamour-filled nights on the town – all these things she required, and she required them on a regular basis.

Fortunately for the Welshman, somewhere between one bar fight and the next he had gone and had himself classified "ment-ul," certifiable, unable to work -- and was therefore entitled to a monthly government stipend. Certainly, he was deranged; there was no arguing that point. But unable to work? Hardly.

He seemed fit enough to hoist beers from table to maw from morning until night. And he appeared perfectly capable of cashing his dole checks right on schedule. It was also said that he did a tidy business dealing whiz whenever he went back to the old country to collect the dough. The Welshman’s mates back in Cardiff must have shat green as they ogled the photographic evidence: a house under swaying palms, a delicious golden bride – and all courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government. He must have appeared to them as an evil genius of almost mythic proportions: the man who had committed the perfect crime and made it pay.

There was only one problem with this idyllic little arrangement. Keeping his wife financially satisfied required certain, shall we say, sacrifices on the Welshman’s part. His hobby was drinking and it cost money. And the damned thing about money is, there never seems to be enough of it around. Especially if you suck down the booze faster than a sperm whale can swill plankton. For although he did, after his own fashion, truly love the girl, the real love of the Welshman’s life was alcohol, demon alcohol -- to have and to hold, to love, honor and cherish, until death did them part. And if he was an ugly drunk, he was even uglier in the sober light of day. Hence, the ongoing, never-ending feud between the Welshman and his beloved bride. She wanted to wear his money; he wanted to drink it.

To be honest, there was another little fly in the ointment. Nung was looser than a skeleton’s slacks. Well, be honest – can you blame her? What would you do if you were the finest thing on two legs for miles around and your husband was the town joke? Work it, of course. And work it, she did.

She had them all: farangs mostly, and the swankier, the better. She liked them tanned and trendy, all decked out in the latest crap, and with too much cologne, a fancy cell phone and a gold chain to boot, if possible. It was like a bad sitcom that just kept repeating. One minute everything would be hunky dory, the Welshman with a Chang in his claw, spouting off about something or other. Then he’d swivel around on the stool and she’d be gone. Off with some shiny prick from Chicago or worse, out to the disco to have herself a proper night out.

Everyone knew exactly what would happen next. The Welshman would whip himself up into the usual frenzy, cursing her name to anyone who would listen. Then, preparing himself for business with a couple of whiskeys, he’d stagger to his bike and gun it into the night to search for her.

The local bouncers knew the script backwards. They were all too familiar with this foreign lunatic and his run-around wife, and they pretended not to understand his peculiar dialect of pidgin Welsh and shattered Thai. The Welshman may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that they knew exactly what he was after. They’d just been paid to keep their mouths shut, is all – and with his money, no less.

And so the Welshman would smash a bottle or two on the pavement for dramatic effect before swerving dangerously into the sweat-drenched darkness to make the round of the town discos, shouting at doormen, hurling garbled threats at no one in particular.

Being a pragmatist at heart, he was really just killing time; paying to get into every disco in the vicinity would have seriously cut into his drinking money. So he’d wait until the discos closed. He knew that eventually Nung would have to go back to the bastard’s hotel. There were only two in town with air conditioning. And Nung loved air conditioning – you learn things about people when you’re married for long enough. Any hotel without AC was not worth her patronage.

Sometimes he found them. If he did, he would beat the fucker mercilessly with his fists, HATE and LOVE raining down like hail before a tornado. Then, his anger spent, he would retire for the evening, leaving Nung to make her own way home. He never laid a hand on her in anger.

Once he went too far with a repeat offender and hired some Cambodian goons to thrash the man brutally with cricket bats. The recipient of this treatment barely survived. Multiple mangled fingers, shattered bones, internal bleeding and grave cranial injury were the Welshman’s gift to the hapless victim. Turns out the Cambodians hit the wrong fellow by mistake. No matter; he had made his point.

But whether or not he was able to exact his pound of flesh, daybreak usually found him blood-spattered from a recent driving mishap, bellowing hoarsely at the mute, white face of some European architectural aberration. Bloody but unbowed, he would always forgive her. Paradise has its price.

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