Who's that girl?

I hate to leave Phuket, and I especially hate to trade The Rock for Bangkok, but with a new son and a pampered wife it is becoming harder and harder to play the starving artist. So last week I flew up to the capital for some meetings. The trip was uneventful; most of the time I spent enjoying the excellent room service in the Dusit Thani Hotel, but on one memorable evening the Nation’s editorial staff took me out for a night on the town.

We went from bar to bar, shouting out our journalists’ war stories over the terrible din of bad music, smoking too much and fighting over the checks, until we got to a place called Safari on Patpong. We entered this bar at random, and I wasn’t expecting it to be any different from the others, but ten feet inside the door I stopped as if I’d walked into a wall.

There is a camera trick in the film industry called DOZI, or “Dolly-Out-Zoom-In”. The effect of this cheap bit of cinema theatrics is that the subject remains the same size in the frame while the background drops away at great speed. Favored by Hitchcock and Spielberg, it is an easy way to grab the viewer’s attention and inform him that something important is happening. The moment I walked into Safari my eyes did a DOZI, and the subject in my personal view-finder, as everything else faded to black, was a woman dancing on the bar. Her name was Neung.

When I first knew her, many years ago, Neung was a cashier at a typical Thai snooker parlour on Phuket, and by “typical” I mean that the women who worked there did simply that; any attempts to make dates with clients were frowned on by management as they would have diverted the players from games that often had sizable wagers riding on them. I had known Neung in this capacity for about six months when, on the first of May, the management threw a party to celebrate her 18th birthday. I attended for the free food.

I have not always been the happily married, self-rightous, puritanical cynic who writes this column, and through a series of maneuvers too intricate to chronicle here, I ended up taking Neung home after the party. By a series of even more intricate maneuvers, I ended up spending the night with her, and through maneuvers so intricate that only women seem to understand them, by morning I was deeply, hopelessy, fall-down-dead in love with the girl.

She moved into my house the next day, and I was so enthralled that it was two months before I noticed, as I caught our reflection in a shop window, what a ridiculous couple we made. I was twice her size and twice her age; with me she looked like a faery princess in the clutches of an ogre. But even this revelation didn’t dampen my love, and all through that rainy season I continued to float around Phuket in a soft golden haze. But like the song says, young girls dey do get weary, and Neung she did get weary of me. On October 10 I found out that the evenings Neung claimed were spent in adult education classes were actually being spent with a 23-year-old unemployed waiter from Milan named Luca.

I confronted Neung, she admitted it was true and apologized, I indulged in some grandiose male posturing that included putting my fist through the bedroom door and then I stormed out of the house. When I came home she and her things were gone, and until the moment when my heart stopped just inside the door at Safari, I hadn’t seen her since. We had lived together for only five months and ten days, but Neung was the third and last of the Great Loves Of My Life, and the scars that cross the knuckles of my right hand are a daily reminder of her.

And there she was, dressed in lacy white panties with a white tube-top pulled down around her waist to reveal little white heart-shaped stickers covering her nipples, staring into the mirrored walls and gyrating like a coffee grinder to “Lambada”. Her face was set in that bland lack of expression that Thais affect for their ID card photos, but she was just as I remembered her: the same pouting mouth, pageboy haircut and uneven eyebrows. A sub-editor pulled me to a booth, and I couldn’t feel my feet as I crossed the room. I sat on the sticky vinyl cushion and lit a cigarette with shaky hands and tried to catch Neung’s eye, all the time wondering what I would say to her.

And then the music changed, and in the pause between songs she spoke to the girl next to her, and when I heard her voice I knew it wasn’t Neung. I realized at the same moment that it could never have been Neung, since she would be almost matronly now and the girl I was looking at was obviously still in her teens. My editor said something and my relief was so great that I responded with a long, vulgar anecdote which nobody at the table could hear over the music.

If you’ve read this column before, you already know where I’m going with this. That girl wasn’t my Neung, but every woman, girl or boy who dances on a bar, sits behind the glass wall or haunts the footpaths in Lumpuni Park has an ex-boyfriend, husband, father or brother out here in the real world who would feel that same spinning dropsy, that same sickening crunch in the guts that I felt upon witnessing her degradation.

She may not have been my Neung, but she sure as hell was somebody’s Neung. They’re all somebody’s Neung.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.