So there we were. Smashed in Bangkok. Again. Bruce narrowed an eye even further, if that were possible, and said, "Let's go for a massage. I know a place that gives a great soapie."
"Oh Jesus, Bruce, not Annie's again. Anyway, I'm hammered. It's late. It's what - 4am? Everything will shut. I am so way past all this. I'm going back to the hotel," said Stuart.
"One more, one more," said the grimy faced urchin (who claimed she was twelve) to Stuart as she restocked the trays with pink and yellow disks. "I beat you, I beat you good mistah. You not so smart, but I like you!" Stuart, having been out-thunked six consecutive times, knew that he had met someone more than his intellectual match and that at this point, going back to the hotel and throwing up the toilet was the better part of valor. And that Connect-4 was way too complicated for him and that he was going to sell his chess textbooks the minute he got back to Hong Kong. He picked up his plastic cup and drained the last of his sour gin-tonic. He patted the disappointed girl on her head and said goodbye with a 50baht note.
That left Bruce and E@L. Again. Stuart was always crashing early (well, relatively early).
But it was hardly a minute, or hardly another futile move in Connect-4 against the determined-to-win street savant, before a revived Stuart was back. He was escorting a large green dress which contained a goodly proportion of, but certainly not all, the body of a hair-braided freelancer from Africa. Stuart could barely contain his glee. The street kid stared at Stuart like he was yet another inconstant lover.
We invited her to sit down at the small tables on one of the remaining fold-up chairs. Her face was a soft, shiny velvet-black. She was very pretty, thick-lipped, not so broad a nose and her forehead sloped back roundly into the back-cut braid, but her tits were enormous and overflowing in the too tight dress, her belly bulged out (not that we are slim, eh E@L?) and her butt ballooned out the back.
'Mo-anie' shrugged and spoke softly in a strong African accent when we asked some polite questions about herself (28, Sierra Leone, no kids), and then about her preferences in film (which was her favorite Harry Potter?) and politics (red shirts, yellow shirts?). Eventually she realized we were just drunk funny-guys all taking the piss, mildly enough and in good fun, but still there was no tricks to turn here. She excused herself and hustled off, rather shaken by the experience if he movement of her large bubble-butt was anything to judge by.
"Massage!" said Bruce. He called for
chek bin khrup and Nit, our young waitress for these early mornings libations at the yellow trolley-bar (which would be folded up neatly into itself and wheeled away in a few hours - assembled and open 6 till 6) brought over a scribbled reckoning. Bruce paid. "It'll all work out over the weekend."
We scuttled the 12(?8,?16) year-old girl off with an initial offering of 50baht, but she pointed out that Bruce owed her another 10baht each for the five games he had insisted on gambling against her and lost. She had won at least half our Connect-4 games. She left with 100baht, probably enough to live on for three days, or for her mother to go gambling with.
Amazing kid. Sharp mind. Good at Connect-4.
"Imagine what she could have done with her life if she had ever gone to school," mused Bruce.
"Or been born in another country," E@L countered. (Frackin' social conscience, E@L's Achilles testicle.)
"Like Sierra Leone," double-whammed Stuart.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Everything's shut, Bruce. Nothing will be open. Stuart is right," E@L said. Indeed the whole strip was much quieter than just 45 minutes before when we had first sat down at the street bar.
"We need maaaSSSSAAAAaaaaaage!" cried Bruce.
"And
I know where we can get a fuck at 4;15 in this god-forsaken megalopolis!" He may have thrown a few extra "ol" and "al" syllables into that last word.
He led the charge across the legendary shifting pavers of Sukhomvit, over the legs of stacked-away stalls, of chairs at other temp bars and those of sleeping soi-dogs. We turned the all-too familiar corner where the fried locusts stall had been two hours earlier. The Nana clubs and bars were supposed to be closed by now. Even the trolley for the best hamburger in town was packed away and gone.
"I know a place," he said. "Open 24 hrs, but don't tell the police. You'll wake them." Ho ho. Bruce always had some new snippet of knowledge of the local debauchery scene to amaze us with, and a joke to follow.
Stuart, earlier adamant that he been heading for bed, was with us E@L realized, however his energy was fading fast after the fun of bringing the exotic hooker to our little table. We waved to the last of girls who called out to us from bars that were obviously shutting up shop and dodged the crotch grabs of the last of the
katooeys still manning(!) the front of the Nana Hotel. After a few short blocks of the typical Bangkok shops (tailor, laundry, foot massage) stepping up and down at pavement and road, Bruce unexpectedly turned down a soi to the left. We had expected to go right, didn't know there was anything to the left.
"If this placed is closed, I'm heading straight back," complained Stuart. "Seriously, I'm fucking tired."
At the entrance to the soi, Bruce hesitated at first. "This is the one" he said, unconvincingly. "C'mon mate, nearly there." We walked slowly to the end of the soi, where it progressively became darker as we moved out of the street-lights and glowing signs on Soi 4 and moved behind the rear of the taller buildings on the left. Finally, maybe two hundred meters in, we made out the low rise block on the right side that E@L guessed Bruce was looking for. On the very last verandah a dim, solitary red light hung in front of a door and it silhouetted a row of pot-plants. "Here," said Bruce, quickening. We stepped up. It was dark but not dark enough to miss the four-foot high electric sign with a plastic sign and curly fruit-loop Thai script on it and, tellingly, the outline of a naked lady in a bath-tub. But the sign was up on the verandah behind the plants, turned off. The place looked closed up. Bruce shrugged and walked up to the door confidently. "It's always open. The locals know about it," he said.
A knock, a wait, the sound of foot-steps. A look. A female face. "You wann massagee? Welcome!"
The welcome lady, maybe a kind fifty, maybe a harsh twenty-five, hard to tell in the dim light, was wearing a light-colored evening gown with a low-cut top. She gave Bruce some directions which he hardly needed as he was already on his way up the stairs. We walked up on worn red(? - also hard to tell) carpets to the third floor, behind him. There was a bar directly in front of us as we reached the top. It was almost pitch dark in here as well, but with the blue-tint of ultraviolet lights that reflected from the mirrors behind bottles of spirit (Mekhong, SongSam, Johnny Walker Red, cheap but expensive gin and vodka) and liqueurs (two of them, both Baileys) and empty beer bottles (Heineken, Tiger, Chang). The strange light made the dandruff on our dark t-shirts light up, our teeth glow and our eyes go smokey, but didn't really help illuminate much around. We could just make out large-hewn, darkly lacquered wooden stools at the bar. As our eyes adjusted, down at the far end we made out the form of a person in a brown uniformed leaning forward on one of the seats, his peaked cap on the bar, his head on his cap and his arms outstretched around them both and a half full/empty bottle of Johnny Red. Bruce and E@L raised eyebrows at each and gave a silent high five! There WAS a sleeping policeman here!
The lady who looked up over her reading-glasses from behind the bar where she was toting up large pile of thousand baht notes, a lip-balanced cigarette wavering in her now-smiling face, greeted Bruce as an old friend. After a soft catch-up chat in pigeon-Thai, Bruce introduced us to Mrs Samathinporn or something like that, or not like that, and ordered more gin-tonics. Stuart's face dropped. He really did not want more alcohol. But the tonic in our gins lit up, electric in the blue light and Stuart took a long sip. And then Bruce asked something that sounded like "Is the bowl still open?"
"Of course, Mistah Brut."
She smiled warmly(?) at Bruce and put out her cigarette. She made a phone call that needed only a single number and then screeched rapidly into the handset. We heard a sudden loud scurrying behind the walls, like mice playing basketball, like girls putting on high heels.
"Solly, take time, girls rest, watch TV." Practice Connect-4, thought E@L.
To the right of the bar, at the end of the room, the wall flickered into light. This wall was in fact made of two full-height glass windows that looked into into another room that was where the fluorescent globes were coming awake. There were three rows of stepped seats, up against the three walls in the room, all painted white and with cushions and stuffed toys on them. The cause of that scurrying sound became obvious as fifteen, maybe twenty, girls walked in quickly from an adjoining room and took their places in a well-understood arrangement.
"The fishbowl," said Bruce.
Mrs Somethingporn led the three of us over.
Several of the girls were looking out towards us through the glass walls. Some were waving, some adjusting their low-cut dresses even lower to their push-up bras and some smiling falsely as if they were listening to a bad joke, but some sleepy-eyed ones were quite sullen and had just plonked themselves down. E@L noted that the welcome lady was sitting there as well, unambiguously older in the harsher light. Many of them appeared stunningly beautiful, but it was well after 4am and Bruce, Stuart and E@L had been drinking since
lunch (oops) dinner.
"Is OK," said the bar-lady to reassure Stuart and E@L, as we must have looked uncomfortable, "they cannot see you." E@L, even now and having been back a few times, has no idea if she was lying or not. "Take you time. You look, you look. Take two lady Mistah Brut? Very pretty tonight.
"Girl this side of room," she explained to Stuart and E@L, "are model, very beautiful, 2500baht. One and half hour massage, you very clean. Girl this side, very pretty also, special price, 1700baht. Take two for massage, only 3000baht.
"Please take a look. Very new girls. All very new."
Bruce smiled. Stuart blanched. E@L wondered where the hell they got the idea for this!
~~~~~~~~~~
Harem, Thomas Rowlandson, 1812.
Caged Prostitutes in Japan, 1890-1900 via Flickr~~~~~~~~~~
All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
Ecclesiastes 1, 8-10. ~250BCE.
E@L
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