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About a year later I was hanging out with an extremely wealthy Japanese guy called Min. Min was a wiry framed fellow who wore glasses and had the gestures and body language of a film mogul. He loved hanging out on the Soi Cowboy and flaunting anything which went against the Japanese tradition. In fact his mother was Korean and he'd been raised as a Christian. He had some intriguingly unusual views of what Christianity meant, but this is neither the time or the place to go into them. His father was the head of some major corporation and due to wealth and, its companion, power, Min seemed to be like a godfather figure to a number of the other Japanese that I saw hanging out on the Cowboy around 93-94. To tell the truth I think a number of these Japs were living off him. Min had enough clout to have got me into the most Japanese-o-centric bar on Thaniya Plaza.

But he thought these bars were a complete waste of time. There was nothing remotely exciting to him about a few servile women who you could go off for a quick blow job within a special room and then come back to finish your drink and Sukiyaki. He tended to talk about Thai women as if they were just a couple of notches down the evolutionary ladder yet felt sure he wanted to marry one. A man of many contradictions, he made every woman he slept with have an AIDS test before-hand. If, then, after having slept with her he would decide whether she was going to be one of the women he had lined up for marriage. He had about five women stashed in hotel rooms in different parts of Bangkok all of whom were part of a well paid short-list. He paid for them to build houses upcountry or buy their dad cars. When he had decided he definitely didn't want to marry one of them, though, he'd just fuck her off without so much as a golden handshake.

Min's newest love interest was a girl who had been working a few weeks at the Tilac called Neeow. It was easy to see what he saw in her. Neeow had the kind of looks that would put any movie star to shame. Probably the most strikingly beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. Not stupid either. But there was some dark shit going on with her and I never knew exactly what it was but she had more aliases than even she could remember. I found some things about her much later that were very odd indeed. Ironically, or maybe typically, despite that beauty she wore a cover all one piece black and white bikini when dancing and looked about as comfortable in the bar as Adolf Hitler might in downtown Tel Aviv. She didn't so much dance in the bar as stand there chatting to her friends trying to pretend she was somewhere else. Min had been a saviour to her. He just paid up front for her not to have to dance for weeks on end.

Min's only problem with barfines was that he thought they were too cheap. He'd sometimes pay half a dozen barfines in a bar and then move on after about ten minutes. I was once with him when he virtually closed down King's Castle 1 on Patpong. He did have a ruthless streak though. Despite the fact the money meant nothing he wouldn't pay for any woman that he did not think was beautiful. If one of these women asked him why he didn't pay for her while barfining the other seventy five percent of women around her he'd say quite matter-of-factly "Sorry. But you're ugly. I don't like you." I tried pulling him up on this but he just said "Why should I pay for an ugly woman."

"You don't have to pay. You just don't have to tell her like that."

"Why not. She is ugly. She must know it. She must see it every time she looks in the mirror"

Min and Neeow made a great couple. He had a knack for giving money away to beautiful women and she had a knack for taking it. He told me once that he was thinking of ditching all the other women in favour of Neeow. But, for some absurd reason, he wanted to know what I thought of her. I said that I didn't really know her. And he said he wanted me to hang out with them one evening so I could cast my expert eye over her behaviour. I said I wasn't sure.

"We'll go bowling." He said.

"Bowling?" I said

"Yes bowling. I have my own balls."

"I don't doubt it."

"We'll take Neeow and maybe a couple of other girls." "Just a couple?"

"I want you to take a look at her. See what you think she's like. I think she likes money a bit too much but that's not a bad thing."

"To me that would be a bad thing."

"Money's not important. You've never had money but I know. Money is nothing. It's what happens after you've got money that counts." "Tell you what, just deposit a couple of hundred thousand dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name. Then I'll know what you're talking about."

Min laughed as if I was joking and, with a fag lodged between his teeth in a manner that might have been more appropriate had he been smoking a cigar, he waved over one of the mamasans. The mamasans at Tilac all came when he waved because he gave them cash to do what they normally did for free. Most of the mamasans at Tilac had always been rude to me, with me being a Rubbish Farang and all. It seemed to sit ill with them that they had to feign politeness with me now.

Min wrote down a trio of numbers on the back of our chit and handed it to the hovering lady and slipped her five hundred baht for it to be done. She came back few minutes later all apologetic saying that one of the girls he had sketched the number of wasn't in tonight. "Mai pen rai." He said and waved her away giving her another hundred baht for her to go and fetch him a packet of cigarettes. "I think you like this girl. Very nice girl. Pretty. Sweet. I like her a lot. A good girl."

"Who?"

"You'll see. You'll see"

"I'll see what?"

Neeow came out looking beautiful and sure of herself. She had that look of a woman who has claimed a man and his cash reserve. I wondered if she knew about Min's other stashed women. Maybe then she would have looked a little less confident.

Min said something to her I did not catch. "She's just coming." Said Neeow.

Bung walked out of the toilets. Her head hung demurely as she came and shook my hand. Her fingers were cool and damp. She met my eyes briefly before looking away. I thought, at the time, that this was going to be a difficult evening.

"I think you know each other." Said Min as if he had reunited old lovers.

"Yes. We've met a couple of times."

Bung said something to Neeow. Neeow smiled. If I'd been a wealthy man this was the point I'd have gone running and screaming in terror. Being worth almost nothing however I thought that the worst that could possibly happen was that they were going to eat my brain so I went with it.

After realising that none of us really knew where the nearest bowling alley was Min opted for the one at the Grace Hotel. This might have been awkward given that he had Ice, one of his prospective brides, holed up in a room upstairs. But Ice felt a debt of gratitude to Min or his money and obeyed his order to stay put.