The Long Island Pool Queen

Drinking in the dead artist’s street of Soi 33 is not everyone’s cup of tea, it has to be said. You have to be careful that your bill is not excessively padded and some would say that the drinks are overpriced. Some would say that the girls are overpriced too and some would say that some of the girls may be getting towards the end of their career. Also, a fifteen hundred baht barfine sounds horrific when compared to the five or six hundred baht you are asked to pay in Nana or Cowboy. But then again, nobody’s holding a gun to your head. The sheer numbers amaze me. There are always more girls.

Some leave, others take their place. Sometimes they are young and fresh from the farm. Sometimes they are not so young but have enough of a window of opportunity left to make a few bob before Mother Nature slams the sash down. Some just didn’t get out in time and some were perfectly respectable women a week ago who just woke up to the fact that there is a more lucrative alternative to working 100 hours a week in a Nike factory for a hundred bucks a month. Occasionally you hear tell of finding a diamond in the rough on Soi 33. The truth is though, there is a lot of rough.

Bee is one of those women who has worked on Soi 33 for years. I think I first met her in Christie’s half a lifetime ago. She has worked in half the bars in the street now. She is what I call a ‘whip cracker’. She’s the one who shakes your beer bottle if she thinks you are not drinking fast enough and says, ‘one more?’. She’s the one who demands that you buy her a lady drink every five minutes. She’s the one that you have to put firmly in her place from time to time or she’ll rob you blind. Well, me and my mate Terry, were in party mood. We had plucked a couple of dancers out of a Soi Cowboy go-go bar and brought them along to Soi 33. Don’t ask me why but I think we both like the idea that we know what we are getting with Cowboy girls. Never mind the not insignificant bar fine price differential. We settled down in one of the bars and who should pop up to take our drinks order but the evergreen Bee. She recognized me straight away and included a drink for herself with practically every round we ordered.

Terry is not much of a beer drinker so he and his bird were knocking back Long Island Ice Tea just like it was Ice Tea without the Long Island. Bee had helped herself to more than a few of these throughout the proceedings and so had some of the other girls but Terry and I were in full party swing and didn’t really care. The evening had moved pleasantly on and both Terry and I had plans which directly involved the dancing girls we had come in with. So surveying the little plastic beaker that held all the drinks chits, Terry turned to me and asked if I knew how much the bill should be. I didn’t but I would have been happy with anything up to about seven thousand baht. Terry concurred so we ordered one more round and asked for the bill. The drinks came along with the total bill which was a little over six thousand baht. Terry and I were happy to split it and leave with our take-ways from Cowboy. Everything up to this point was fine.

It was now that Bee stepped up to complicate matters. She had shipped a good few cocktails at our expense and should have just accepted the money and let us leave. But no, she had to confuse the issue. Now Bee is not a bad pool player. I already knew that from the days when she used to work at Christies. Now, she had to lay down a stupid challenge to play me three games of pool before we left. If she won, I would buy her and her girls one more round of cocktails and if I won, she would reduce the bill by two thousand baht. Like an idiot, I accepted the challenge. While we played the first rack, Bee asked me for another drink. I told her I thought we were playing pool for drinks but she couldn’t see the correlation. This should have been a clear signal but I ignored the warning lights. I eventually won by two frames to one in spite of Bee changing the rules arbitrarily and attempting to cheat at every opportunity. It was then that things became very Thai. Having lost the challenge Bee then ordered up another round of cocktails for her and her friends and handed me the bill. A further two thousand baht.

Naturally I declined to pay.

I already knew that there was no way we were going to get a two thousand baht reduction on the original bill for me winning but I certainly had not signed up to pay for another round for the entire staff. We paid our original six thousand baht and Terry left with his Cowboy girl. If I had had any sense, I would have left at the same time but somehow, I got involved in a dispute about the ‘outstanding’ two thousand baht. Bee had now slumped onto a couch next to the bar and was either pretending to be or was in fact as drunk as a monkey. Bee had lost the facts surrounding the present circumstances in an alcoholic haze and they would probably be lost forever. The matter had now been taken up by the cashier and I seemed to be the one who was causing all the trouble. I sat down and calmly asked to see the boss. At that moment Bee threw up all over herself and the couch she was reclining on and a bunch of girls rushed to her assistance armed with towels and buckets.

In the ensuing confusion, my Cowboy girl and I slipped quietly out of the door, unnoticed. Soi 33, don’t go there without your sense of humour.

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