True Life Crime Stories

My friend Richard and I were swapping True Life Crime Stories yesterday. Richard started us off with one about having all his clothes not stolen, but replaced, in his suitcase on an Aeroflot flight. Replaced with Eastern Bloc goods, sock for sock, shirt for shirt, Levi’s for thin cotton trousers from Collective Factory Number Nine in Urkutzk, as if they thought he wouldn’t notice. And I told Richard about shooting snooker with Fabiane and Carlisle.

At the time I was working until midnight every day as the DJ on Phuket’s English language radio station. One night I got a call from Fabiane saying that he and Carlisle were shooting snooker in Phuket Town; why didn’t I join them after work? Personally, I don’t shoot snooker. We Americans play football on fields smaller than a snooker table. But I do like the atmosphere of the hall: the solid geometry of sticks and balls, the masculine symbolism of those same props. I like the air of ritual, guys chalking their cue for every shot, putting talc on their hands with the care of a matador suiting up. I told Fabiane that I’d join them after work.

Fabiane was from Luxembourg, or Tuscany, or at any rate someplace where they drink wine with breakfast. He had been living on Phuket for 10 years on what he had made off the auction of his grandfather’s stamp collection. Carlisle had an important job in a ship that surveyed for oil at sea. He spent 12 weeks in a floating condotel making grids up and down the coast of Japan, and six weeks running around Phuket in a T-shirt that said “I Just Want To Get It Wet!” He refused to learn a word of Thai, claiming that “The Empire was built by teaching the wogs to speak English.”

When I arrived at the address Fabiane had given me on the phone I noticed two things. First, we were the only farang in the room. Second, we were probably the only farang that had ever been in that room. This joint had no postcards on sale. What it did have was 10 tables, two waitresses, room-temperature Singha beer in bottles and about 30 nak laeng.

As I walked in Fabiane and Carlisle were having a loud drunken argument. They had decided to leave, having forgotten that they were supposed to wait for me, and go on to some place Carlisle knew about over by Poon Porn Road. They had asked for the bill, and in European fashion divided it up by who drank what and who shot how many balls, etc. But when the change came Fabiane grabbed it up, setting off a storm of anger in Carlisle that must have been stored in the family genes since 1066.

Carlisle was yelling “You bloody cheap frog!” and Fabiane was yelling something in French. As I got up to them Carlisle wrestled the two red notes from Fabiane’s grip, and marched around the table holding them up like he was in Madrid and these were the ears of the bull. That was when Fabiane made his grand, operatic gesture. “You sink A’hm cheap?” he cried. “Money means nussing to me! Ah zhow you now!” He took out his wallet and with a flourish he removed a purple bill. Every eye in the house was on him. Everything went into slow motion as Fabiane tore the bill in half, then in half again, and again and again, finally letting a blizzard of purple confetti fall through his fingers onto the felt.

Now, a purple note can represent a lot of things in this economy. It can be the food budget for a month for a family of four. It can be a few hours spent in the company of someone you find attractive. But aside from its value in the marketplace, the purple bill has one important feature: it bears a portrait of HM the King. On the list of the Ten Worst Things You Can Do When Visiting Thailand, defacing a portrait of the King is numbers one, two and three.

Fabiane made for the door without waiting for an ovation. Carlisle pursued, shouting schoolboy insults at Fabiane’s back, and suddenly I was alone in a room full of hard guys holding long wooden sticks.

I emptied my wallet onto the table, and bringing my hands up to the part in my hair, I wai-ed the King’s picture over the bar. Bobbing up and down like a ping-pong ball, I backed out the door wai-ing the furniture, the light fixtures, and the lizards on the wall. When I got out on the street I spotted Fabiane and Carlisle under a street light at the corner, still arguing. I had made four steps in their direction when I heard the door slam open behind me. Like a fool, I stopped and turned around. Through the door a shadow was moving, a shadow that congealed into the biggest, ugliest specimen of Thai manhood I’ve ever seen. As he bore down on me, this Godzilla-in-Levi’s said one word: “farang.”

A graduate student at UCLA once ran the scripts of five hundred American movies through a computer to see what the most frequently employed line of dialogue was. The computer told him it was “Let’s get out of here!” and that’s just what I shouted over my shoulder at Fabiane and Carlisle as I passed them going about Mach 4. I felt that warning satisfied the obligations of friendship, and I didn’t stop running until the people around me were speaking Malay.

“So what happened?” Richard asked me yesterday. “Did the nak laeng clobber Fabiane and Carlisle?”

“No,” I said. “It turns out he was just a tuk-tuk driver looking for a fare. He gave them a ride to Poon Porn Road, and charged them 200 Baht.”

“From downtown to Poon Porn Road for 200 Baht?” said Richard. “They were robbed.”

“Just another True Life Crime Story.”

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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