Fiction

A man from the States rescues his brother from the Dusit Thani.

Jim is just getting the hang of the Bangkok bar scene when another philosopher appears with some well-meant advice...

There used to be a saying spoken by drunken men in dingy bars that the key difference between a Thai hooker and a hole in the ground was that a hole in the ground didn't leave you five hundred baht poorer. Of course it's a saying which, today, seems hopelessly out of fashion. Now the key difference is more likely to be that you're left anywhere between one to five thousand baht poorer (though this does vary according to the season).

The setting sun as a backdrop approach calls for something special.

Imagine you're a young backpacker and this is your first time in Bangkok. You have bravely left the familiar comfort of your guesthouse on Khao Sarn Road and gone across the city to Sukhumvit. You aren't sure why. A girl in the guesthouse advised against going there. It's a bad area she said. So next afternoon you went.

Smooth doe-eyed young Moroccan men . . .

. . . eviscerate his writing with our publisher raptor claws . . .

“Well, it’s a life sentence either way,” said a drinking buddy as I shared my news with him over a game of pool in a Sukhumvit bar.

I wake up in my 120 Baht room, a windowless box with with green colored tarpaulin on the floor sticky to me feet because of the dirt, the only furniture a metal frame supposed to be a bed with a thin dirty matrass on it. The sheets gray with age I had to put on the matrass myself - the petite receptionist lady who doubles as a cleaning girl was porbably pissed off I ignored her obvious advances when I checked in.

Old friends run into each other on Phuket.