Careful What You Wish For

I've decided, after years of complaining that Bangkok combines the worst aspects of Calcutta and Omaha, that maybe the City of Angels isn’t so bad. The revelation came during my last visit to the capitol, when I undertook the obligatory trip to Patpong Road that all men have to make so that their friends won’t think they’re gay.

It was my last night in the big city and I had found everything on my wife Mem's shopping list in two fairly painless hours at Burnsogood Department Store. I crossed Sukhumvit, found a wobbly table outside a bar called Flagrante Dilecto and dropped my bags and my butt onto a pair of sticky cafe chairs. I ordered a beer, lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair. I decided long ago that I would only enter a Patpong bar when I found one where beautiful, young Asian women buy drinks for fat, middle-aged foreign men, so I tend to spend all of my time out on the street.

I was prepared to be shocked, as I usually am, by the seediness of the night life on Patpong, and just as prepared to feel all smug and superior about it too. But with the clarity of vision that comes with seeing a familiar scene after a long absence, the first thing I noticed was the cleanliness. The street was swept, the vendors' stalls were arranged in neat, orderly rows with plenty of room left for foot traffic, and there were no offensive odors. In fact, the whole street smelled like floral air-freshener. It smelled like an airport men's room.

In Phuket we have two main red-light districts: Patong Beach for the tourists and Poonporn Road for the locals. In both places it is common to see rats running along the gutters and mangy dogs digging in the piles of garbage on the street corners. In the Patpong I saw last week there were no piles of garbage evident, no mangy dogs, and the only rats were the toy kind that run around on the end of a string.

The touts hanging around seemed to be in a playful mood, and not at all threatening. I saw one of them walking purposefully down the street counting a fistful of US$ 50 bills. The meanest, baddest mofo in New York wouldn't dare do that on Times Square. The tourists, while they looked as goofy as ever, appeared to be having a good time, and didn't appear to miss Happy Hour at all. I saw one lady tourist enter a go-go bar alone, something she never would have done in the strip clubs of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

I noticed that even the air was noticeably cleaner than the first time I came to Bangkok in 1969. This may have been due to some unseasonable winds or the reduced traffic over the long ASEM weekend, but I like to think that it's a result of the un-leaded gasoline that Anand Panyarachun introduced to the city in 1992. His was the same administration that declared that my son could be a Thai citizen even though his great-grandfather was Lithuanian, so now Andy can go to school with the other Thai kids whose great-grandfathers were Chinese or Indian or Malay.

Some things have remained the same, of course. Just as on that first visit, the most attractive woman I saw on Patpong last week was dressed in Levi's and a T-shirt, selling fake Rolex watches in the middle of the road. And here's an old joke: What's the difference between Jews and canoes? Canoes tip. I still get the same dirty looks from taxi drivers and waitresses that I always have.

And what was most easily felt as I sat and smoked and rubbed my aching feet and watched life's passing parade was that Bangkok enjoys an energy that my beloved Phuket does not, and most likely never will. It's an energy that only exists in big, vibrant, dirty, dangerous cities, an energy that I can clearly remember enjoying immensely as a young man in New York. There were no Muslim fishermen mending their nets on Patpong Road that night, no gangs of happy villagers singing the songs their ancestors did as they pick rice in fields that their ancestors carved from the jungle, no country bumpkins in sarongs and sun-faded shirts telling dirty jokes in southern slang and laughing around a mouthful of betel nut pulp.

The people on Patpong were all well dressed and almost all of them quite young. Even the ones who spend all night standing on one spot of pavement appeared to be in a hurry. Every single person on the street had the sum total of their abilities focused like a dental laser on a well defined goal. Granted, that goal was totally unenlightened self-interest, but nobody ever said Patpong was Historic Williamsburg and nobody sells it that way. They used to sell Disneyland as an educational experience, which is just as sleazy a tactic as any of the menus for the "upstairs" shows at Patpong.

I returned to Phuket 48 hours ago, and except for three minutes of almost unbearable pain in my sinuses as the plane descended over the airport, nothing about my trip was as memorable as that feeling of raw human energy I felt on Patpong.

I'm writing this column in my office, which is a narrow, windowless room fifty meters from the beach. I write on a lap-top, which despite having been twice pried open and "serviced" by a clutch of grinning monkeys with tool kits full of magic beans and gecko bones, still has enough battery capacity for two hours' labour without external power. This means that I could go work on the beach. But after almost a decade on the island of lost souls, last Christmas I asked Santa Claus for an air-conditioned office, and I got my wish. Now I only see the beach out of my car window as I drive home.

A moment ago my computer belched and dumped two paragraphs of text. I cursed those grinning monkeys with their technical school diplomas and island-wide monopoly on computer repair, and wished for the N-th time that I lived someplace where people actually delivered what they advertised. Thoreau eventually left Walden Pond, and Gauguin left Tahiti. If I'm beginning to enjoy myself in Bangkok, I'd better be careful what I wish for.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author. 

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