Six Little Stories

1. Picture Junkie

I'm at an elephant show with Chandee. I love elephants and I love elephant shows. So if you are my girlfriend we are probably going to go to an elephant show. The show is fun but Chandee isn't too animated. She's Thai. She's seen elephants before. So she's sort of sulking. Actually, I could have typed 'She's Thai so she's sort of sulking' but this story starts with elephants.

Anyway, after some elephant dancing and some elephant kazoo playing and some really cute baby elephants trying to imitate their mothers and basically getting in the way: the elephants go away and they bring out an ox pulling an ox cart. Boring. I mean what have we got here. It's a box with a yoke plus two wheels and an axle. The ox looks like he couldn't spell ox and watching him pull the cart is like watching grass grow. Boring. Normally, at this point in the narrative a reference would be made to the ox's thoughts: things like

"I can't believe I have to pull this stupid cart."

or

"I'd like to pull this cart over someone's head."

or

"Tomorrow someone is going to get an ox horn through his buttocks."

etc.

But trust me folks, this ox has never had an idea more complicated than:

"I have to take a monster huge dump!"

Anyway, an announcement is made. People in the audience can take an oxcart ride and it is a photo opportunity.

All of a sudden my Thai sulker is up and leaping down the stands, pushing Japs and Germans and Danes aside. Under the fence, across the paddock, and slams herself into the cart. She turns and looks back at me as they take her for a ride. Boring. I just don't get it. Were there no oxcarts in her village? She is smiling as if she just won the lottery. I go down to the fence and snap some pictures of her. Then I forget the whole thing.

A week later we are in Pattaya at the Pattaya Park Tower which has an observation deck on the 53 floor. She has me taking pictures of her at every window. She thinks that the view outside the window will be in the picture. I tried to explain that all that would be in the picture would be her posing in front of another window. But it was hopeless.

So I took picture, after picture, after picture, after expensive picture of her in front of windows. She was beaming. Let's see, where have I seen that smile before? Then it hits me. Back in Chiang Mai at the elephant show. The oxcart ride wasn't about being pulled in a cart by an ox. It was all about having her picture taken. She's a picture junkie.

2. Fluffing Up Cushions

I'm staying at a lovely guesthouse on a hill overlooking the huge Khao Laem reservoir near Sangkla Buri. It is very rural, and very quiet, and beautiful. It's a good place to go on the weekends to escape from the city, and to get your heart rate to come down. It is not unusual to see a Mercedes Benz automobile in the gravel parking lot of this nowhere place in Nowhereville.

It's my second afternoon there. I'm sitting in the sun and I'm sitting in the shade on the porch of my little cabin reading a book. My wet clothes from the previous days bamboo rafting trip are drying on the little trees and bushes. I haven't thought of a Bangkok woman or a Pattaya woman in days on this trekking trip. It's been days of politically correct trekking run by a young woman guide named Cheri out of Melbourne. To even think of a woman would get me in trouble. It would set off a man hating klaxon in her brain. She is young, and she is female, and she is a feminist from Australia so she knows everything; and I am just tourist male scum. It's been quiet. No one has been around and all the Viagra should be flushed out of my system. Then I start to notice young women.

There is one on the veranda fluffing up cushions. There are three on the stairs to the dock sweeping with brooms. There is one setting a table. There are two on the lawn doing something. It's an invasion. Suddenly there are young, shapely, fertile, teenage girls everywhere you look. It turns out that they are all high school girls and they have part time jobs at the hotel in the afternoons. Sweet Jesus.

Do I have to describe to any of the readers of this web site what Thai high school girls look like? And there is diversity. Some of these angels are so innocent they are trying to please their employer by fluffing up pillows expertly, and sweeping leaves off the walkway perfectly. With hips wider than their waists and budding breasts they are still on the cusp of womanhood. Others are a little more advanced: playing the 'look at the man and then look away' game. And then there are the wide hipped wonders staring their future and others full in the face. With slow movements, and slow heads, and slow eyes, and slow rears they are packed with sexual dynamite just waiting for someone to light the fuse. All of them have the yellow face paint known as thanakha: a Burmese marker of beauty. It startles the Western eyes and looks cosmetically disfiguring, but you can't talk them out of it, and who would want to tamper with the exotic package?

I had planned to spend the afternoon visiting the temple at Three Pagoda Pass. I don't.

3. DO NOT DISTURB

On my first trip to Pattaya I was booked into the Diamond Beach hotel for obvious reasons. It sits at the end of the cul de sac that comprises Soi Diamond and is probably the most ideally suited red light district hotel in the world. All you have to do at night is stand on the steps and hold up your wallet. Look out: female tsunami coming. Hilarious.

However, opinions can differ. On the way down in the bus I met an experienced monger from Chicago who turned me on to the A.A. Hotel on Soi 13. He took me there, helped me check in, and got me a discount. This was one of the luckiest things to happen to me in Thailand. The hotel is simply fabulous in every way, and a hidden gem. If you didn't know where to look you would walk right by the entrance. The only fly in the ointment is that the maids in the A.A. Hotel on Soi 13 in South Pattaya simply do not understand what the DO NOT DISTURB sign means when you hang it on your doorknob.

They either knock on the door and say something in muffled incomprehensible maid talk, or just start in with the master key routine and slamming the door up against the interior swing gate lock. I have tried looking disgusted, perplexed, smiling, and showing them the card and explaining the meaning of the words on the card. It's a waste of time. If their inventory sheets for my room show that a towel has to be delivered, or that the refrigerator is missing one of those little brown nutrition drink bottles: they are coming in. Think howitzer shell leaving the end of a gun. It can't be stopped. Think long time constipated elephant who suddenly lets loose. Forget about stopping it. Ponder the single and simple minded focus of the retarded. No dealing with it. And apparently, they either have X Ray vision or there are hidden cameras in my room: because they always come in when I am naked. Always. I am so spooked by this now in my second decade of staying at the A.A. Hotel that as soon as I am naked I listen for the maid at the door. I do not even lie down on the bed naked in the afternoon to take a nap. I lie down fully clothed.

I was once so disgusted that I jerked open the door naked and stood there. The maid pushed past me, put some drinks in the mini bar, and then left. You'd think they were delivering plutonium to the North Koreans. You would think they were delivering blood plasma to a member of the royal family. You could be forgiven for thinking that they are ex wartime resistance fighters sworn to die for the cause. I imagine that when their inventory sheets for my floor are finally complete, that they notify the King at Government House. Room 612 has his Milky Way bar, and his drinking water, and his Chang beer, and his potato chips.

The nation is safe.

4. Weird

I like a little foreplay sometimes. Unless it is some short term love off the street, I still cling to the dream. Maybe this girl will like me. Maybe we will have something in common. With the language barrier it is a little hard to get a conversation going. Props help. You show her some stuff you bought. She shows you pictures of her girlfriends (boring). You go through the Thai English Thai dictionaries together. Etc.

One day I thought it would be fun to have maps of the world and of Thailand. I could show her where I live and how I fly (get to) her country, and she could show me where she lives in Thailand. This would be fun. The perfect foreplay props. Where to buy them!?

Now I am walking down Sukhumvit trying to puzzle out how to find these goofy items without it becoming too much of a hassle. I don't really want to be taking taxis all over town. It's too hot (April). And as God is my witness there near the Landmark Hotel, right around the corner from my hotel, is a Thai guy sitting on the curb with two maps for sale. They are big and they are laminated. One is of the World. And one is of Thailand. I buy them. It is all he has for sale and it is all I want. I have never seen him before, now he will go home; and I will never see him again in any merchant incarnation again at this location. Apparently there is a Thai Tourism God that sometimes looks down on hot wandering foreigners and just lays everything out. Weird.

5. Nobel Prize

I'm staying at the Vientai Hotel one street over from Khao San Road in western Bangkok and I want to go to the Oriental Hotel. Geographically speaking they are very near each other. The Oriental is world famous, and Thai famous, and Bangkok famous. And any taxi driver will recognize the word Oriental no matter how badly mangled by a Dane, or a German, or an Aussie, or me. This will be easy.

Who said that? What brainless idiot who has obviously never been to the Kingdom even thought that? No, this won't be easy. It will be a fxxxing nightmare. A tedious, lengthy travail that will challenge all the laws of odds and credulity, and place maximum stress on the tourist who often has to ask himself:

"Am I having fun?"

I start out flagging down taxis in front of the Vientai hotel. Complete incomprehension. You would think I was asking to be taken to a crater on the back side of the moon. I'd have had better luck communicating my wishes if I went to dog and cat pounds and shouted through the cages. So I walk two blocks over to where there is a traffic circle with a lot of traffic. This should increase my odds.

Nada. Goose Egg, Nothing. Bupkus. Zero. I could walk to the hotel if I knew how to do the navigation, but no one in the taxi business ever heard of one of the world's most famous hotels in their neighborhood. Complete incomprehension. Not even a glimmer of linguistic light around which we could stagger, and point, and grin, and pantomime. I get an idea.

I go back to the Vientai hotel and have one of the feminine wonders behind the front desk write Oriental Hotel in Thai on a piece of paper. This was another little drama that I won't even go into in detail or my head will explode. Apparently, I was the first guest at the hotel to ever ask a front desk girl to write something on a piece a paper. But at least they played along for the crazy farang and wrote the address to the Oriental hotel on a scrap of paper. Back to the traffic circle.

I show the paper, and I show the paper, and I show the paper to taxi drivers. You'd think I was asking a dog to decipher the Rosetta Stone. None of the taxi drivers read Thai. Or they can not read Thai if a farang is holding the note. Ok, we'll never know why this did not work; just another maddening Thailand mystery for the tourist. But as in all things it is the result that counts. And the result is that having the address to my destination written in Thai by a Thai is apparently an idea of no value. In fact, it is becoming more and more clear that no idea of value in any of the other 190 countries in the world is going to work in Thailand. It is a good thing I am not trying to deliver a heart packed in dry ice for someone waiting at Bumrungrad hospital.

Then I get an idea so clever that I should receive the Nobel Prize for tourists. I go to a pharmacy and I buy a postcard that has a picture of the Oriental Hotel. The very first taxi driver takes me there.

6. It Was Awful

We have all read about these big, big massage parlors where a man can receive lots of pleasure from a beautiful woman. It is an obligatory trip for a western sex tourist. I went. It was awful. The place was in Bangkok and it was one of the big places. I went in the afternoon but there were at least 35 women to choose from. The manager told me all the wonderful things that would happen to me. It's a big production with a nice sexual payoff. It's a lot of money.

I pay. I'm in. I'm a player. Now I have to pick a girl. The problem is that I am short so I always want a short girl. Well, in the room the girls were in there was nothing to use as a point of reference. You really couldn't tell how tall the girls were. So I asked the manager to help me. I point to a place on my arm. He gets on the intercom and calls out a number.

And here she comes. I nearly have a coronary. I just nearly fxxxing go down like a tree on the spot from man shock. She is about four and half feet tall, shaped like an hourglass, and half Thai half Chinese. She is wearing a clinging transparent leopard skin dress, high heels, and nothing else. Her jet black hair is long. I haven't been near a woman like this in my entire life in the United States. If I cruised a hundred malls for a year in the United States I wouldn't spot a sex dream like this. She is every boy dream and every man dream every boy and every man has had in any country in the world since he was fourteen years old. You pick the country. New Zealand, Brazil, Nepal, Dubai, Canada, Germany; this is the sex dream every boy and man has been dreaming since the first erection. Following her down the hallway watching her naked rear twitch under the dress I am nearly catatonic.

So what happened? Nearly nothing. I didn't receive 95% of what I had been promised, or what I had paid for. And then she wanted a tip. She didn't get a tip. It turned out she was a man hating lesbian who wanted to talk about her Japanese girlfriend. I went out afterwards to complain and to get my money back. And guess what? Nobody was around. The manager was gone. The front desk lady was gone. And the formerly smiley girls didn't know me. I left.

A few things here:

1. First of all, these girls never pull this nonsense on their Thai clients because the Thai men don't take this crap and disrespect. We farangs are too nice and we aren't respected for it.

2. If I had a good time I would have gone back over and over. This simple business concept is beyond the Thais.

3. I probably will not go to one of these big production Thai bath houses again unless I get a good recommendation: preferably a particular girl. I would like to visit the bath houses in Pattaya on 2nd Road: but I need something more than a promise from a manager.

Addenda: And if I ever run into this fertility rite again I will probably pull money out of my pocket again. She and I are not equal. She knows it and I know it. God, just once in my life I would like to have that much power.

© Dana. All rights reserved by the author.