Cowboy Girls

I haven’t been getting out much lately. In fact, I haven’t been to Soi Cowboy or Nana Plaza for weeks. Amm called me yesterday to ask me why I had not been to see her lately. She told me that she thinks about me all the time and that she misses me. Bless her. Me and Amm have sexual relations sometimes for which I pay. I don’t want to but she makes me.

When she called me she said, “Why you don’t come to see me anymore. What happened with you and me?”

Amm is a dancer in a Soi Cowboy go-go bar and a prostitute. A very pretty prostitute, it has to be said but that is what she is. I am one of her customers, a fairly regular customer admittedly but that is what I am, her client.

There is no “you and me” in this relationship and of course, she knows it and I know it.

The fact that we both know the score does not stop us both playing the game however and enjoying the pretence. Sometimes I pay her barfine and we go out somewhere. Sometimes I just call her and she pays her own barfine for which I reimburse her and she comes to meet me. It’s not very romantic. That’s probably why we pretend it’s something more or different than just paid sex. But that’s all it is.

When we are together she behaves like my date, my girlfriend. It’s nice. Amm is not my Mia Noi or my girlfriend but she provides me with the GFE. The Girlfriend Experience. That’s how it is and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Now my mate Terry has got things all confused and has lost the plot a bit. He is about to do something that he will probably live to regret. Terry is sixty years old and has fallen in love with a twenty five year old Soi Cowboy showgirl. She speaks very patchy English but nonetheless Terry insists that he is in love with her and that she is equally in love with him. Yeah right, excuse my cynicism. On New Years Eve, he informed his Australian wife of some twenty odd years that their marriage was now over and she should book herself onto the next available flight back to Melbourne while he gets it on with Miss No-knickers from Soi Cowboy. I can’t help but think that this is not a good idea and I have conveyed my views to Terry. However, he is not listening and I think he thinks I am jealous.

It has taken approximately ten months for Thailand to destroy this man’s marriage and probably with it the prospect of a happy and comfortable retirement in Australia. He sees this as no great loss. His wife is understandably devastated. She is not thinking of the divorce pay-off and the selling off of property at the moment although I’m sure that will come later. All she wants right now, is not to lose her husband. The prospect of losing him to a third world stripper must be almost unbearable. 

Terry’s original plan was a simple but good one as far as I could tell. He already had a few bob in the bank having worked for years in the oil industry. Having the intelligence to realize that he was not getting any younger he decided to go to work overseas for the last few years of his career thereby pocketing as much lolly as possible before retiring to Australia, financially set for the rest of his life. He had worked successfully before on projects in Indonesia and Malaysia so he had experience of life as a moneyed expat but clearly as it turned out, he was not prepared for what Thailand is renowned for.

It was February 2007 when Terry came to Thailand to work. First he came on his own, found a suitable apartment and his Australian wife followed on a few weeks later. I have known Terry for the best part of twelve years so for the two of us to partake of Bangkok’s nightlife together in those first few weeks was inevitable. One of the first places I took him to was Soi Cowboy and one of the first girls to pick him up was Mem, the lady who is now at the centre of this particular drama.

There were others but Terry would pick them up and put them down again. He shagged a few of them but he always went back to Mem the showgirl. I talked to him about this situation several months ago when I could see a regular pattern developing. I advised him to give it up because I thought it looked dangerous. Let’s face it there’s plenty of totty in Bangkok, right? He rather pathetically confessed to me, “I can’t. I love her.” For f@#k sake, what’s love got to do with it (thank you Tina)? I felt like slapping him. I didn’t because he probably would have slapped me back.

Maybe I should change my handle from ‘Union Hill’ to ‘Moral High Ground’.

Union Hill

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