The Artist

Michael had been a fairly successful artist in the States, enough so that when he finally got tired of the atelier scene he could sell his entire body of work, some 300 paintings and drawings, to a prestigious Los Angeles gallery and begin to travel the world. Michael was very interested in "primal peoples", and so he spent a year on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, a year with the Masai in Kenya, and a few months with some Aborigines in the Australian outback. Finally, somehow, he ended up in a small bungalow outside of Kata Beach, married to an illiterate woman he had met in a bar, father of a baby girl, flat out of money, and an expert on things Thai.

In the US Michael's canvasses had been geometric abstractions, but after several years of living with "primal peoples" he began to paint very large, very lurid, realistic portraits of the more bizarre people to be found in Baan Kata. One canvas, six feet tall, showed a transvestite exposing his/her penis, another showed the bloody head of a young man who had died in a terrible motorcycle accident. There were amorous apes and rabid dogs and plates of fried insects and grotesquely proportioned prostitutes, all of them rendered with loving care and great skill on enormous canvasses.

Of course, the few tourists who may purchase fine art on Phuket want to have something they can roll up and take home in their suitcase, and they prefer a nice beach landscape, with slender coconut palms arching over the blue water, or something with peaceful water buffalo and bamboo. Michael painted constantly, and exhibited on the walls of all the bars and restaurants that would have him, but still he sold almost nothing.

Then one day salvation seemed to arrive on his doorstep in the person of a well-dressed young Thai man. The visitor said that he'd heard about Michael's art, and could he see an example? Michael unrolled a few of his canvases, the young man examined them with great interest and then made Michael a business proposition. He was, said the young man, a building contractor currently constructing two Buddhist temples. He was looking for an artist to paint the religious murals inside these temples, and he thought Michael was just the man for the job. The project would entail about a year's work for Michael, he said, and quite handsome payment.

Michael was overjoyed. Finally, he thought, someone who appreciates my unique vision. The young man took Michael to see one of the construction sites, and walked Michael through the sacred precincts to point out out where the various murals would go. He returned to Michael's bungalow several times, often bringing along a bottle of whisky and sometimes staying late into the night. He brought little gifts of food and toys for Michael's daughter, and Michael began to refer to the young man, only half in jest, as "my patron".

One night, as they sat in Michael's living room drinking whisky, the young man said that it was time for him to be honest with Michael. His real job, he said, was moving large amounts of heroin into Phuket, and because foreign tourists were hesitant about buying drugs from locals, he wanted Michael to sell his product. He would pay Michael well, he said, and Michael would have lots of free heroin.

"Wait a minute," said Michael, "I'm not a junkie!"

"Sure you are," said Michael's patron. "Just look at you. You're an American, you're very thin, you're an artist, and you're living in a shack with an ex-bargirl. Of course you're a junkie."

Michael tried to convince the young man, then finally just tried to throw him out. But the young man wasn't leaving. He pulled a pistol out of the waistband of his pants and laid it on the coffee table. "Look," he told Michael, "Now that you know this about me, you really have to work for me. Otherwise, I'll have to kill you and sell your wife and daughter into the brothels."

Michael excused himself for a moment, saying he needed to talk it over with his wife. He went into the bedroom, woke his sleeping wife and daughter, and with them jumped out of the bedroom window. They ran to Patong Beach, stayed the night at a friend's house, and in the morning Michael borrowed 15,000 baht to get his family up to Bangkok.

It was not at all easy to get his wife and baby to the US, since the baby had never been registered with the embassy and the wife had no birth certificate or ID card and spoke Thai with a very thick Lao accent. Despite his expertise as an amateur anthropologist, Michael had never had any idea that his wife wasn't Thai.

He was very lucky that both the Thai and US governments are staffed, in general, by people who are by nature generous, and so he eventually got his family out of Thailand. He is now teaching life drawing at a junior college in Idaho. His oeuvre of Asian paintings was left behind on Kata Beach, rolled up in tubes in his bungalow. Nobody knows what became of them. They had been priced at up to 75,000 baht each.

Some cynics have suggested that the young man who precipitated Michael's departure was in fact a relative of his wife. It was well known that she was looking forward to seeing America, because in Thailand a Lao ex-bargirl will always be treated like a Lao ex-bargirl, especially in some scruffy little village full of primal people. Even if she couldn't read or write, she was a very resourceful lady. There are some things you don't learn from books.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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