The Barracks

I was button-holed by a girl in Karon yesterday, who told me that Phi Took was finally going to fix the clogged plumbing at the Barracks. One of the first bungalow complexes on Kata Beach, the Barracks is a long concrete shed with a tin roof, divided into twenty units of three rooms each. I lived there for eighteen months a long time ago, when I was still working in the First World and playing in the Third. There were only three other foreigners living there at that time, all of us ‘guests’ of one or the other of the bargirls who make up the permanent population of the Barracks. Most bars on Kata Beach offer the girls a roof over their heads and one meal a day in return for the bar fine tourists pay to take them out, and the Barracks is where they are housed, five to a unit, which isn’t as crowded as you might imagine, since most of these girls have few possessions and spend their nights out. So it was me and two Canadians named Wild Tom and King Kong (any foreigner with even the slightest fuzz of body hair gets this nickname in a smooth-skinned nation like Thailand) and an Italian, Dario.

Around us was a fluid community of up to a hundred girls, sort of a paradise for your average “Hey, mate, what time do the clinics open?” sex tourist, which suited the four of us just fine. I eventually moved out because my bathroom drain wouldn’t work properly, and after every shower I would find myself standing in three inches of water slicked with soap suds and the remains of my upstream neighbor’s last meal. I always knew when Phi Lin and her daughters had fish for dinner; because in the morning little limpid-eyed heads would be bobbing around my toes and staring up at me reproachfully. I bothered the landlady, Phi Took, about it for eighteen months before I got fed up and left, which is why the girl on Karon knew I’d be interested in the planned renovations.

So this morning I stationed myself on an upturned lard can in the shade, smokes and a beer at my elbow, to watch the ‘plumbers’. These turned out to be two of Phi Took’s nephews armed with a tiny crescent wrench, a cross-cut saw with no handle, and a rusty ten-pound sledge hammer. As I watched these two guys trying to figure out which end of the hammer they were supposed to hit the concrete with I started to reminisce, all the old sounds and sights and smells of the place triggering memories I hadn’t though of in ages. As the plumbers finally got down to work, I was lulled into a stupor by the heat and the steady “whop...whop...whop...” of the hammer’s mantra.

I usually don’t think about those times much, though they were happy enough in a mindless, irresponsible way. I was as unappealing and unwelcome a foreigner in those says as any sunburned, lecherous, money-flinging skirt-bandit draped over a bar anywhere in the Kingdom of Smiles. Nowadays, I prefer to think of myself, when I bother to do so, as the sort of out-of-town guest who speaks polite Thai, can converse knowledgeably on the Ramakien or the Dharma or Thai politics since 1932, the sort of foreigner that a respectable Thai woman isn’t embarrassed to be seen talking to in public.

Whether that’s an accurate self-portrait or not (many expats who know me and read this will laugh at it) is irrelevant, the point is that the flood of memories brought on by revisiting the Barracks washed up a raft of images, like snapshots on a roll of film you forgot to get developed until years after the events they chronicle, images of a younger, naughtier, snottier guy who went around using my name and wardrobe and even wore the same pair of glasses that I wear today. Most of the memories were accompanied by a lot of shuddering and cringing, and muttered “Oh, man, I didn’t really do that, did I?”

But a few of the memories were worth the effort of not falling asleep, lulled by the heat and flybuzz and thudding of hammer on cement. After a while I had to grudgingly admit that I owed something to that old gang at the Barracks; I learned a lot there, and no matter where the classroom is, every student owes his teachers a debt of gratitude. And maybe more so to those teachers who taught him things they themselves learned at the College of Hard Knocks. It was at the Barracks that I learned to cheat at cards, and how to clean a papaya without getting seeds and gunk everywhere. That’s where I learned most of the Thai profanities I know, and where I learned how to bargain.

I was drawn out of my reverie by the sound of cracking plastic. The plumbers has succeeded in uncovering the section of drainpipe that was clogged, and with one smack of the hammer had split the PVC pipe in two. The younger one pulled back the top of the pipe to reveal the clog, and the elder reached down with a whoop and lifted up what looked like five feet of black mooring rope. He tossed it at his partner, who danced out of the way with a few remarks that let me know what the rope was.

It was hair, countless millions of strands of long, black hair. Twenty years of Lek and Noi and Neung and Ying washing their hair every evening, putting on their make-up, picking out an outfit, saying a prayer and going out to work. Twenty years of Auntie Min’s Herbal Elixir For The Restoration of Female Regularity, or “Abortion In A Drum” as it was called in The Barracks. Twenty years of cheap food and cheap tobacco and cheap liquor and cheap men, all gone down the drain.

The plumbers threw the clog into the weeds, where it lay like a big black snake, and they began to repair the broken section of pipe. I had seen all I needed, and remembered more than I wanted. That’s the problem with archeology. We often dig up things best left buried.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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