A Week Of Serious Drinking*

On Friday evening after work, EvilD called EvilK, E@L, and Bruce and asked if they wanted to go out for drinks...

~~~~~~~~

They went to Lan Kwai Fong and drank a few Carlsbergs and jello-vodka-shots on the street corner there. 

Soon it was 1am and LKF was closing down, so they took a taxi to Wanchai, particularly The Wanch, where a criminally awful band was playing. They drank a few Old Speckled Hens, which was on tap, and they pretended to fit in with the awkward Lamma locals. 

When the band finished, E@L suggested Mes Amis, a slightly classier place. There they switched to G&Ts until E@L was kicked out for knocking over half the dance floor with his bouncy bouncy interpretation of Fatboy Slim classic. 

Right there, right then, they all moved on to one of eight girly bars on Lockart Rd for a laugh or seven, and shared few $250 ladies’ drinks with the girls and bar staff. Bruce grabbed E@L's Charisma Card before he paid for those18 tequila shots for the three women on his arm, and they exited hastily though the heavy red curtain, Bruce with luminous lipstick marks on the front of his jeans.

When the bars and clubs started to shut down around 3am, EvilD said he knew a place where you could get beer - it was where the band from Amazonia goes after their gig. E@L discussed the Hendrix chord with Sammy, the best and shortest lead guitarist in Hong Kong (and Singapore one week a month).

Soon the sun came up to separate the sheep from the goats, which they all toasted with another jug of margaritas! 

By 7am the early openers were there for the working girls coming back from their long-times, and for diehards like EvilD, EvilK, E@L and Bruce. With Guinness being on tap, they were well supplied with calories. 

They kept drinking like this all Saturday; in Wanchai Irish pubs to watch AFL by themselves, and EPL jammed in a crowd, and to cocktail bars to watch potential tai-tais cadge drinks, and by Saturday evening you could find them dancing on the bar at Carnegies. EvilK suggested some shots of absinthe, which triggered a series of most welcome hallucinations, such as: They were sober enough to have more shots...

Saturday night and Sunday morning were more of the same, right through to Sunday lunch when it was High Tea at the Filipina Bars. They stumbled down various stairs to basement level bars like Uranus II, where off-duty maids went to dance in front of mirrors until their 9pm curfews. A few other expats they knew were there on the pick-up, so a few rounds were shouted until one by one those expats paired off with an amah in time for a quickie before their girl had to get back and cook 5 different suppers for 5 different people, and darn the underpants of the incontinent uncles, then grab a bowl of cold rice before unrolling her blanket under the kitchen table for her 2hr kip, or to wake up in a king-size bed with her boss and his wife. 

There was another EPL game Sunday evening so the crew headed to back the Irish bar on the corner where several ladyboys accosted them briefly, and Bruce nodded a shy greeting to the ugliest one. Guinness and Kilkenny were on tap. Sharpeners. Lovely. 

Sunday night, once the game was over, they moved to Joe Bananas where the manager greeted EvilD with a huge hug and an insistence that they all have a free bottle of Jack Daniels for the night! Still dancing and sweating it out on the crowded floor at 4am, trying not to spill their JD (third bottle) and diet coke on the floor, they shook themselves to the duff duff beat from the DJ’s extensive collection of duff duff music. 

Monday was a holiday, so they had no cause to stop partying, and the cycle repeated itself. Beer here, G&T’s there, with EvilD scoring free shots for them at Dusk ’Til Dawn. Bouncers were high-fiving and fist bumping EvilD, EvilK and Bruce as E@L looked on in awe at how popular his friends were with the staff, the bands, and working girls everywhere they went. So it continued right through until the next morning. 

They were too far gone for work on Tuesday, so they all called in sick and stayed out drinking still at various bars. 

Wednesday was the same, with a variety of vodkas at a new bar that EvilD remembered, down by the cop-shop, which brought them past Crazy Camel, where Western girls in bikini tops and cut-off jeans danced on the bar and poured free tequila shots into the mouths of customers who, like the crew here did repeatedly, leaned their heads back over the grog-sticky bar.

By Thursday, E@L was feeling a little squeamish, so he said the EvilD, “How about we get a packet of peanuts and some chips?”

EvilD was furious! “What? Listen! Did I invite you out for dinner or to have a drink?!”

~~~~~~~~~~

Punchline stolen from another joke, but the rest is a compendium of something close to a previous reality, which may, or may not, have included the person who was

E@L

~~~~~~~~~~

* Recommended: Hallucinatory, magic unrealism.

Calculus

[NB: First written in July 2012. I was either in Sienna just recovering from my heart attack, or in Hamburg staying with friends right after that, waiting to be allowed to fly long distance again. This was amongst some (I think) unpublished rambles I found in Evernote while tidying up. . Maybe I used some of it in other posts, but I can't find evidence of that right now (and the swimming pool is beckoning). Some attitudes to life from that time are probably not well placed in a post "#metoo" context. Another one or two old unposteds to come, I hope.]

~~~~~~~~

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong -- acting the part of a good man or of a bad.
Schopenhauer.

~~~~~~~~

I'm not suddenly getting philosophical. I've alway been struggling to understand how a knowledge of philosophy can influence my actions (preferably for the better). It's more than just remembering which philosopher said what (and not a chance of me remembering anything correctly), but it's also the implementation of their philosophy into my life. Perhaps I mean the moral code (whatever that means - and epistemology is also an issue) they offer, suggest or demand. Perhaps I am referring to The Meaning Of Life, or perhaps my reasoning leads to that just because there is no god, and no meaning, and one needn't be polite and scrape the mud off one's shoes before entering another's sanctum.

However, in our second by second existence, life moves too fast. Often it is not until after a situation has passed that I realise an opportunity to make a philosophical decision has passed. Sigh. So rather than being proactive, my philosophical thoughts tend therefore to be post hoc, and I end the day contemplating my failures, and kicking myself for such moral recidivism, after the event. I look back at the muddy footprints and hang my head.

Essentially I see myself as a good man who occasionally plays the bad, and then agonises about it in the pub afterwards. Well sometimes I don't agonise, sometimes I tell everyone how brilliant it was, but that's not the real me. Really.

Writing a blog, a public diary, gives you a chance to examine yourself and your life, to lay it all out in public to incomplete strangers (I feel like I know you, all four of you - hey I do know three of you!), which is what I have been doing in many of my posts, whether you've noticed it or not.

And, now, writing after I've recently had a momentously memorable memento mori moment and was mere millimeters of coronary artery lumen from being no more, well, that is most likely to push a ruminative soul into thinking fuzzily about the otherwise petty matters of life and death, right and wrong, love and sex, and Woody Allen movies in general.

~~~~~~~

Am I lying when I write in my blog? I do try to be honest in essence, even when I am making things up, because it's the general mood underlying the exploits of the composite character that is Bruce that I most wish to convey. The tendency to anger, frustration, and recrimination when you are aware that you (or others, usually the others!) are violating codes that you once held as immutable, but now see as arbitrary. These are out there forever at least until the heat death of the universe, or until something better than the Internet comes along, whichever comes first, so it's too late to go back now.

Not that anyone in the future will give a flying rat's arse. There are already way too many physical books in the universe, let alone all this electronic verbiage. Who would bother? No-one reads the old plays of Voltaire any more, even though these were the basis of his fan base when he was alive (I heard this on podcast - fuck reading them). It cheers me to think this in a way. Because he didn't write Candide until he was 65, and here I am 55 and done fuck all.

~~~~~~~

"The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates

That old chestnut. The Unexamined Life - great name for a blog! Do you think about what you are about to do, what you end up doing, what you have done? More than just wondering what a certain hero might have done in a certain situation - what would Bryan Boytano, Jesus Christ, Tyler Durden, Atticus Finch, Timothy Leary, or Calvin/Hobbes do - are there any hesitation any more, any second thoughts? I wonder about my friends sometimes: Have they just given up on thinking about these issues. Am I Robinson Crusoe here? Was I right in doing that, was the outcome for the best? Primum non nocere? Was anyone watching? Is my reputation (hah!) tarnished? If you answer Yes to any of these questions, Press 1.

I don't necessarily approve of certain behaviours that humans get up to given the chance, though I groan at certain excesses, I don't condemn them out of hand and obviously I don't shy from the milder ones either. I just like to think about them. And sigh. And wonder. And take a Xanax if sleep won't come.

Bad is relative. I'm sorry, but it is.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Utilitarianism used to attract me. Simple rules: maximise pleasure and minimise pain, and not just personally but universally. If it doesn't hurt anyone and you are having a ball, why not? Or it does good and you won't injure yourself, (the other way round) why not? I think that utilitarianism is attractive because of my previous employment as a fetal deformity hunter-killer. Hunger Games with an ultrasound probe. For the best it was, Skywalker. The ostensible justification, to minimise suffering and grief, reduce the overall pain and infirmity in the world. The hidden agenda: save precious resources, defend hospital budgets, doctor's time, preclude those expensive surgeries to keep fixing things. (I am only half serious here.) Protect parents from unnecessary grief and diminished freedom or whatever you want to call looking a disabled child, or at least give parents the information to make an slightly less ill-informed decision.

There are so many "push the old man in front of the train to save five young lives" situations in medical ethics. After a while it gets to you. No, that's wrong. After a while it doesn't get to you any more.

[Don't misunderstand though, I am completely pro-choice and my old job - I still justify it this way - was to provide full and accurate information so that, if necessary, a genuine informed choice could be made.]

~~~~~~

So I am still happy with that part of my history, mostly. But in the rest of my life, now that these justifications are no longer required every evening as I look in the mirror? I am no longer convinced that the narrow moral calculus of Utilitarianism offers the most realistic way to live, despite its persistence into the present time, such with Peter Singer's tit-for-tat stance on how we should live in a practical, real world.

Kant, not that I understand much of this stuff, whoah, nothing really except this: he proposed a matrix of moral action. One was the Categorical Imperative which - I blur like sotong over this - means something like - whatever should be done when a certain situation arises, must be able to become a universal law: it must be done every time, for everyone, everywhere. (Categorical as in "complete" - I categorically deny those allegations.)

But who or what has the power to define what should be done? God? The Bible? Allah, The Q'uran? Calvin & Hobbes? Kant, being a good Christian, said God.

Are there any universal imperatives, however? Thou shalt not kill? -- Except in war, except in prison, except in self-defence. Not universal then.

Thou shalt not wear thy shoes in the house. Thou shalt not get a rub and tug. Thou shalt not take a girl (or whatever) home from the 4FoWs or Nana Plaza. Thou shalt not push in the train queue or overcharge for a taxi ride. Thou shalt not have sex with family members, or animals. Thou shalt maintain marital fidelity.

Believe it not, almost all of the dilemmas mentioned are taboo in one culture, but not in others. For example, the Targaryens marry siblings in order to keep the blood-line of The Dragon pure. Hey.

Kant also makes the point that it is the act itself which is under consideration for being a categorical imperative. The act of pushing of the old man in front of the train, not the resulting saving of other lives. (That would by the hypothetical imperative, I believe.) So killing, while always wrong, is not always wrong.

While I at once preferred Nietzsche's modification of Kant's CI - you should only do what you would do if you had to do it again, that is, if you had to live your life over again to bring you to the exact same point of decision making. Would you do it over and over again in a Groundhog Day scenario? We know what Phil Conner did. He kept modifying his behaviour until he got it right, and eventually managed to shag Rita. If that is what you consider a successful or ethical life, then there you go. (I'm no longer sure this works for me: Andy MacDowell has aged a lot since then. Those teeth, too?)

And if I was a superman, beyond good and evil, and god was dead, then I could easily and consistently commit an act that those who share my cultural capital (all the benefits that my upbringing in my society and culture has given me) would consider to be wrong, because my will dictates it. I want to do it, and I can do it because I am better man than you. Seig Heil! So maybe not taking it that far.

There are then relativities to Kantian categories - they are not universal, or imperative after all. The utilitarian equation is not straight forward arithmetic. The numbers are weighted. What if, instead of pushing an old man in front of a train to save five young people, you have to push a your girlfriend in front of the engine in order to save five Nazis?

I am not satisfied with Nietzsche or any of the rationalists now, because even when I can see in advance the decision points that are going to arise and I know what I should do according to my reasoning, what I would want to do if it came to this again and again, but I can't stop myself from transgressing.

I am merely the mahout of reason on a untrained elephant of will (desire, urge, emotion).

My elephant is bigger and stronger than me. Rationalizing is what most of the time we consider reasoning: Yeh, that's where I wanted to go anyway, because... *see utilitarianism, above. That rider/elephant metaphor is an old one, but recently reinvented in some books I just read; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Happiness Myth. Which is partly where this discussion originates, that and Michael Sandel's Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do. Light reading.

~~~~~~~~~

Why do I (or Bruce) go Orchard Towers or to Soi Cowboy, or to Kings Cross for that matter, when I know I'll feel bad after going there, for a dozen reasons previously described elsewhere in this blog? Why do I throw my conscience out the window when physical gratification is on offer for a price? The answer is, I try not to any more. And I don't mean any less either - OK, yes I do, I mean less. Not everyone is (i.e. me), wants to be (i.e. me), or can be (i.e. me again) in a sexually satisfying relationship. OK, not everyone cheats in one of those unsatisfying relationship but, in unrelated news, not everyone is happy with their lives (and the utilitarians would say get the fuck out of there - or get out of there and fuck). And when the social pressure is somewhat relaxed thanks to certain cultural differences (real or imagined) in certain parts of the world where concepts such as marital fidelity are not so important, or perhaps more correctly, where infidelity not so disastrously unexpected - every HK Chinese wife expects her man to have his little wife in Shenzen, and her job is to look after the kids, not give BJs all the time - and peer pressure (elephants follow each other) is high, the sprit is willing but the flesh is tumescent.

~~~~~~~~

So I am talking about looking at what you do and what you have done, analysing and judging it: is this the way you want to have spent your life? Is this the way you want to be remembered? When you look back, are you proud of everything? Could you survive a parliamentary enquiry?

Is this how I anticipated living when I was back in Australia? Aren't there better things for me to do with the limited time I have? And this limitedness is feeling particularly real - as I was so unpleasantly reminded a few weeks ago at the top of the San Gimignano tower in Tuscany when that elephant seemed to be standing on my chest.

Short answer: I have no idea. I balance pleasure with slightly less pleasure, I balance the exploitation of women with the exploitation inherent in my needing to pay for sexual release (not that the money I pay all goes to the person I just screwed) due to urges I have no control over. I balance my guilt at this with the knowledge that my abstinence is not going to change anything; I balance rampant gadget greed with charity; I balance visiting prostitutes with masturbation. Elsewhere in life I balance little white lies with truth; I balance my privacy and my frequent isolation (work travel or angina attacks in Italy) with friendships and Facebook; I balance my atheism with the belief that people are usually good whether they follow a religion or not; I balance the awareness that I am not perfect with the frequent confirmations I see that there a hell of a lot of people out there doing a hell of a lot worse or more outrageous things than I would ever consider.

~~~~~~~

"It’s only human nature!”
"Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this earth to rise above!”

~~~~~~~

I thrash it out, but I do not despair that the answers don't come as easily as the questions. I relax. I shrug. I do what I can. I try makes others smile. I try to enjoy myself. I try to explain it to

E@L

The Truth of The Beauty of A Bloom Is That It Fades

In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai.

Kata, Phuket, after midnight...


Late decision in the tuk-tuk back from Patong: he would go back to the Luv-You Bar again after all. He asked the driver to drop him off at the bottom of the strip near his Kata Beach hotel (the hotel that wasn’t the hotel he thought he was making his booking at, but hey, it was a rushed job, for a spontaneous mid-week golf holiday [being single rocks] and the hotel was just next-door to the other). This meant three nights in a row now he would be talking to Noo. He knows the Rule of Three, hey fuck he wrote the rule, but he was powerless to stop himself (which is what the Ro3 is all about). It was late for this part of Phuket Island, about 1am, and he didn't really expect her to be still there, to have waited for him, even though she said she would. But if she was there, and not bar-fined, he would take her to his room for another 4am session. He wanted to hold her again, to look into her eyes as they made love. Maybe he could make her cum this time.

He could grab a few hours kip before his airport taxi came at 7am. He would sleep all weekend.

She was there, he saw her at the back, in one of the small yellow lounge chairs near the billiard table where he had played ten indifferent games of pool with her, or with Gap, the bar-manager who punched the air every-time Bruce made an error - it’s cultural, not rude, he had reasoned. She was squeezed in the chair with a Thai man about, how can you really tell, 30. He looked, let’s not kid, like a Thai hit-man - long-hair, deep eyes, thin lips, sprouts of a goatee, sun-lined face, and a dark shirt, in jeans and with shiny black boots. She did not notice Bruce as he stepped up to the bar, she was talking and laughing with the Thai man, yep, her boyfriend obviously, the one she said she didn’t have on the previous two nights. He paused. He tried to stop himself moving forward, to halt completely. He should have left quietly before she saw him, but what may have been merely tragedy slipped into farce when he found he could not leave and, despite a flash of awareness of his breaking all the laws he often had admonished others about, approached her chair.

Hoping against the hollow sense of his own human frailty, against everything he thought he knew well enough to overcome, his head spinning with the Thai music from the karaoke-player, he stepped closer, small steps. Eventually her eyes looked away from the man she was cuddling, they unglazed (she liked rum shooters) long enough for her to see him. She must have been trying to place him and then, presumably it clicked and she stood up, a bit shaky, from the chair from the hit-man, paused for balance, and then came towards him. He took her all in: triangular face, petite, a loosely crocheted top over a pink bra, belt-sized jeans shorts, bronzed skin (getting fairer, she hoped, with that skin bleacher she was shooting up each night in the bathroom) and he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn away away. And his face froze just below a smile and he said, Hello, and kicking himself later he added, I just came to say goodbye…

Which is not what he had really intended to say at all. The boyfriend, professionally slippery, had already slipped away, and Bruce saw too that no-one else in the bar was looking at him (he would imagine their bursts of laughter when he tried to sleep later), but their faces were down, away, focussed on other, suddenly fascinating, things.

Noo came right up to Bruce and put her arms around his neck and looked up. A very sad, what-have-I-done face, a look somewhere between feigned apology and feigned pity, a look that said I thought you were one of the ones who wouldn't fall in love, who only pretend to believe when I pretended to like you, but I was wrong (Beware The Ro3!), and she asked him to buy her a rum shooter. Pathetically, he nodded and indicated he would also have a beer he didn't want or need, and, here’s the kicker, he said again, I just came back to say goodbye.

I'm going back to Hong Kong tomorrow, he said and she looked even sadder as she saw 3000Baht slipping away with more plastic surgery and her boyfriend's motorbike repairs held off in the distance still, and she pouted her lower lip. Which must have done something inside her mouth because she slowly unwound her hands from his neck to tighten the stud in her tongue and she smiled, against the flow of Little Miss All-Forlorn, as she did this. But his confused mind was made up, probably, and he would leave now, now that all his dignity was shredded and burnt in offerings at the bar’s small shrine. He took his beer, drank most of the bitter razor-blades quickly, called for the check-bin, paid, then placed a 100baht note tenderly into her bra, making sure it was right against the nipple (he wondered later if those firm breasts were genuine, or part of a job-lot with the silicone nose-bridge she was so proud of), and he kissed her cheek again (it struck him that she hadn’t kissed him properly - only pecks - on the lips in all their time together) and somehow, not through courage, not through reason, almost accidentally, he managed to leave.

He cursed himself audibly for being the cliché he always mocked as he walked down the strip, crushed a 20Baht rose underfoot and, neither sober nor drunk but flushed and giddy, turned left at the quiet road to kick at stones and cans along the footpath and to fend off the occasional katoey on a scooter for the half-K back to his wrong hotel.

E@L

Moral Philosophy

"Look at the creep with the tattoos. What is he, Russian Mafia?"

"Probably."

"She's going to go with him if I don't make a move. Get your hands of her tits you arsehole."

"Don't tell me, tell him! Make your move for Christ's sake. I want to finish this beer and go back and see if Plan B is still there."

"The chubby Burmese? You like her?"

"She has a cute face."

"Whatever. I'm getting to know too much about you. Here she comes. Shut the fuck up now."

"Just pay the bar-fine, she has to go with you."

"You think I should? She's gorgeous. But, you know, will I respect myself in the morning?"

"I won't respect you if you don't take her, isn't that enough? Pay the bar-fine! Rescue her from the evil Russian white slaver. It's the moral thing to do."

"Hmm. I can feel a categorical imperative rising in my trousers."

"Do your duty, Superman. To deny your will to power is to deny yourself."

"Thanks Nietzche."

"Go you stupid Kant. Take the woman home!"

~~~~~~


E@L

Famous

"I've been chatting with people here and there and I keep hearing things about people sleeping with celebrities. Rock stars, movie stars, recently deceased authors. Sleeping with famous people, I don't know. Maybe before they were famous is ok. Even, like, well-known people is a bit creepy if you ask me. Most of the people I've slept with, hell, even I don't know their names," says Bruce.

E@L

Orchard Rd, Evening Street Scene

Bruce sucks up his ice-blended coffee on Orchard Rd, runs the mouthful of sweet crystals around for a taste, swallows. The Coffee Bean and Tea-Leaf. Not his favorite coffee shop, but OK, it passes, and it's convenient for an hour or two of quiet contemplation before things start, before he finds some dinner, before he kick on across the road to the 4FoW. A Spinelli (San Francisco’s best) Spin would suit him better, the ice is finer, the coffee less bitter, but outlets seem few and far between these days. He makes a mental note to Google their locations.

The table has a nice vantage of the footpath. Young Singaporean girls in their ultra-short jean, inside pockets visible, their white singlets and push-up bras, chatting with friends, briskly gesticulating, walking fast. And those ambling ones, generic Asians, maybe even in a cheong-sam, a tight skirt, nothing ostentatious, and a tight top, an LV handbag and a lean hungry look. And so slim, narrow waist, trim buttocks (as they say, there's a Latin term for this), thin thighs.

Bruce loves this town. Old man, single, financially secure so long as his job lasts. Lecher. Typical nomad, it's his new word for 'expat'. Is it merely because they are slimmer that he finds these girls so attractive? Discuss.

It is after work on Wednesday and evening is hanging around like these hookers, it's half-light, it's a half-real world. He feels sticky and warm, man we’re in the tropics, and so welcomes how the ice-coffee cools the inside of his body, at least as far it can get down into his throat. Every now and then when he has cold drinks like this his oesophagus goes into a spasm, as it does now. The drink is too cold. He pauses from drinking, it's sitting - just - there. And he waits, sighs. A central chest pain. Another heart attack? He can’t belch, his stomach is unavailable. Then the mucosa warms the ice, melts, his body heat, and the constriction eases, the ice-coffee slips past. GORD. Is there no health problem he doesn’t have?

Birds, the feathered ones, in the many plane trees (not fruit tree, there is no orchard here anymore), have begun their evening chirping, and slowly, as it builds up to a 76 trombones effect without him noticing, their combined song has become a roar. It covers the bursts of traffic that flow according to the traffic light’s rhythms. Maybe not throat-singing Ferraris and Maseratis, let them scream, let them roar. White noise. He has one of his several thousand unread books in his hand and he is not reading it carefully.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

A person is beside him. Her presence sudden, blue sparks, ozone, she's here to hunt him down, that's all she does.

He looks up at her and sees the thin ridge of angular cheeks, smile showing small teeth constrained in expensive wire, bright green eyes and a line of mascara going up at the outer edge to emphasis her exotic face, as if she needed that. She is one of those women who had been walking in front of him, parading past several times, up and back in the previous half-hour.

She had at last caught his eye, his Nordic blue, hers emerald green, held his gaze past that special time, into the who's going to be the first to break zone, and then smiled at him, the killer. However he had been lost in reverie, not in his book, but somewhere else, even further away than Cloud Atlas. Some place where a tightness in the chest from ice-choke didn't mean impending death, myocardial infarction, spilled coffee and an unpaid bill. He had hardly been aware that he had been making eye contact, and every working girl looks at him like that anyway, like he was target demographic. He was now looking away, into a nowhere, but she didn’t notice that he was more than day-dreaming, he was willing himself to stay alive. She only saw a man. With a wallet and a sex-drive. Or perhaps she saw more. Probably not.

"I can join you?" she asks. Slim, in a dark green, eye-matching, body-hugging top, white skirt, tight.

”I'm sorry?" The background bird chirping, he didn't hear. "Of course, of course,” he says, ever the gentleman. He shuffles his chair back and nudges the table so that she can slip past the pole onto the chair opposite him. It doesn't have to slipped far, there is not much to her body.

And soon the banalities are out of the way. The special massage price, so cheap, how come?

"Tomorrow, I go back Hanoi. Need have some money." The implication is that she hasn't been making much. Good English, pleasant GFE personality, nicely faked sincerity. He is surprised, genuinely.

"Why do you not have so much money? Such a pretty lady!"

"It very quiet, too many girls. And I spend my money on my plane ticket, need always to be work. Work, work. Go to home and come back only three month after. And," she tapped at her mouth, "my teeth is expensive."

"You should marry someone here. A dentist maybe."

"Yes, yes," she urges. He seems to have pressed a button. "I need husband for come here. Get visa for many entry."

"Well you would need that, I guess. So many entries," smiles Bruce.

"If can get marriage with local man, can get visa. Ten thousand dollars."

"What is ten thousand dollar?"

"For husband. We pay ten thousand dollars for Singapore man get marry."

"You pay the man ten thousand dollars if he marries you?" Bruce immediately thinks of E@L as a likely candidate for an arrangement such as this.

"Yes, he get money. And girl get visa."

Bruce drums the table with his empty coffee container. This too, is hard to swallow. He texts E@L.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The evening is advancing quickly enough, no hurry. E@L was otherwise engaged anyway. She knew of a Thai place, we wonder where, for dinner. She ate slowly, noodles, picking sprouts form her braces. She is not in a rush now. Her flight is early in the next morning, one customer tonight - Bruce - and that's enough. And they stand to move away, collect their stuff, her LV, his man-bag with iPad, and walk across the road to the Hilton where he is staying as usual.

"You have condom?" she asks before they get too far from a 7/11.

"Me? Why? Don't you have a condom, surely you can claim it on your tax!"

She smiles, gets the joke. "We cannot carry condom. Working girl on the streets cannot carry a condom. Police. You know this, I am sure."

"No, not at all. Really? Why not?"

"Police can make arrest against you if you have a condom. For being prostitute. It illegal for girl to work on streets, so we don't carry condom."

Bruce shrugs, impressed. He's never thought of that - why would he? - and it makes sense. There are so many of these details in the world, where the devil lies in wait. Have a condom, must be a prostitute. No condom, must be a charity worker seeking donations.

"You don't have condom?" she asks again.

"Yes, yes, I have several in my room. The hotel supplies them," he lies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Within two weeks of this mythical incident not having taken place, the immigration department cracked down on these marriage scams - she wasn't joking about the $10k. And then, later, local newspapers talked of the aggressive tactic of streetwalkers on Orchard Rd.)

Laws To Penalise Sham Marriages. Today Online.

"... Pointing to the increasing number of sham marriages - from four to five cases a year in the past five years to 12 cases this year - Second Minister for Home Affairs S Iswaran said this is a "significant rise" and is "probably symptomatic of a larger trend".
"So we want to introduce new laws to send a strong deterrent message to individuals who contemplate entering MOCs (marriages of convenience) for the purpose of obtaining an immigration facility such as Permanent Residency, long-term passes and visas," he told the House.
But, while there is a "desire for vigorous enforcement" in clear cases of marriages of convenience, he cautioned against unfairly penalising genuine marriages.
Several Members of Parliament were concerned over how gratification could be proven.
..." [My emphasis]


~~~~~~~~~~~

Streetwalkers getting more blatant at Orchard Road. The NewPaper

"Foreign women touting sex services are no longer just operating around Orchard Towers.
They are now covering areas as far as Far East Shopping Mall.
The minute they spot a potential customer, usually a male tourist, they would approach them with offers of 'massage'.
Said one expat: "It’s like running a gauntlet. If you make the mistake of looking at them, they’ll be all over you in seconds."
[My emphasis]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anywhere up to eight years ago, walk anywhere from the Marriott to corner of Tanglin Rd, and E@L would be given the look, sometimes a question. Then it went quiet for a few years, or perhaps he didn't walk there as often as a resident, but yeah, as this hypothetical and nowhere near 100% true story suggests, it might be "on the rise" again in the areas not immediately adjacent to the 4FoW.

E@L


(E@L knows the birds aren't in the plane trees, but the other ones. Larches? Elms? Jesus, E@L knows fuck all about treeology. And those trees are down further anyway, by Paragon.)

The Bruce Bits, etc...

I am currently trawling through my old blog (again), as well is this one, looking for bits and pieces I can cobble together - not necessarily into anything coherent or internally consistent - something about Bruce, and/or taxis, and/or the Mouse, and/or Kopi, and/or hotel breakfasts and toast...

~~~~~~~~~~

There are maybe 700 posts and perhaps 250,000 words over there place (approaching 2 milllion hits btw) and with the 740 post here, god knows how many words.

There must be something I can do with it all (as people have been saying for years) rather burn my few remaining hours over something new that is not taking the shape I want it to.

I will need to redo a great deal of the earlier risqué E@L stuff retrospectively as Bruce stories, to give a semblance of character continuity.

Plot? Don't make me laugh.

Watch this space. (If I don't run out of steam...)

~~~~~~~~~~~

Do you think I should I should charge you guys for the effort I am taking to do this, as Dick Headley does, or let it run free amongst the wolves on the internet marketplace, as Mercer Machine does?

E@L

"My Boyfriend The Sex Tourist."

Something of a stereotype breaker - at least as far as the "trafficking" situation of some of the working girls in places that cater to mostly westerners is concerned.



At least you can see that not every bar-girl in Bangkok has been dragged off the farm by marauding snakeheads and chained to their beds in a cardboard dungeon. Well, yes, no, not every bar-girl...

via

~~~~~~~~~

It would be an interesting exercise to study the expectations, feelings and motivations of these boyfriends in more depth (say, to the bottom of three bottles of Hennessy) and in a less stereotypical way... If that is, um, like, possible. Nah.

~~~~~~~~~

Bruce of course has had some experience of less salubrious working conditions...

~~~~~~~~~

It is depressing and frustrating to wander the streets by yourself in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, browsing in the shopping malls or checking out the temples. You are old, fat, bald, generally unattractive. You are wearing cargo shorts, a loose shirt or tee, and sandals. You know that everyone in the world is making the assumption that you a sex tourist.

It is even more depressing and frustrating when you admit to yourself that this is exactly what you are.
Bruce (in a more contemplative mood than we are used to.)

~~~~~~~~~

Gustave Flaubert, the man who was able to look so profoundly and convincingly into a woman's heart, was a completely sleazy sex-tourist on his trips to Egypt, reveling in his debauchery... Not that this is any form of excuse...

E@L

Say It Right In Thai

E@L has a book of this title in the desk in front of him. Nothing to do with the previous post.

Without wishing to bore you with the maudlin regrets of a superficial, middle-aged, single man, he wishes to bore you with the maudlin regrets of a superficial, middle-aged, single man. Don't say you weren't warned.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Say it right? Say it RIGHT?

E@L can never say anything right to women in whatever language of love you suggest. Thai, English, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog or Hindi. He is completely hopeless at preventing his hopes of love from being dashed on the rocky shores of lust whenever he opens his stupid mouth. Which is why he never gets to fuck can seduce the women (should there be any) he might wish to.

Even with all silver-tongued the advice from that super-experienced chat-up man, our Bruce, he does not succeed. Because, as when packing his bags for a trip, he gets all anxious and leaves something out, or brings the wrong item. "I find you very attractive, enjoy your company and would like to get know you (or 'your body' - optional) better," as advised by Bruce, somehow comes out of his mouth as, "Let's fuck like they do on the Discovery Channel," with gestures and body language to support the unintended effect - of a blank look of terror, followed quickly by drink over the head and either a kick to the scrotum or a standard dose of pepper-spray to the conjunctiva to finish E@L off.

When E@L approaches a lady and is feeling romantic, it's stand back and avoid the shrapnel as his improvised seductive devices explode. Lines like that might be OK when you are in midst of each of each other and unmaking the bed (or couch, or kitchen table), but in a bar at 7pm with someone you've just met? In all likelihood, nope.

Say it right? E@L? Blurt it right out, more like.

So the conversations people like E@L might prefer to implement, after having made fools of themselves time and time again in legitimate circumstances, becomes more appropriate to the expectations of their intended female companions when augmented by the alluring soft plonk of a ping-pong ball falling into a glass, to the crisp slap of a mock-truncheon on various glutei maximi, to the just-audible hiss of a body slithering up-side down on a chrome pole, to the alluring perfume of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes.

When these things turn his thoughts to thoughts of love, out pops the perfect Thai phrase, finally. Here are words that exactly express his feelings and carry no offence, quite the opposite. As the purloined letters of Cyrano De Bergerac did for Christian and Roxanne, these words will have the lady swooning her loins into his loins...

"เท่าไหร่ดีบาร์คืออะไร? Charisma Card(tm) ok, krup?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Getting married at 19? Don't do it if you are contemplating getting divorced 20 years later. They'll remake Swingers all about you. You've never done the dating thing as a kid, and now you'll never scale-up enough chat-up skills before it gets too late for you, you'll never shrink to the right kind of small talk, you'll never polish away the rough edges of your wannabe smooth lines.

You'll be paying someone else to do the polishing instead when and if you make it to E@L's age.

E@L.




* How much is the bar fine?

* OK they weren't "stolen" as such, but purloined is a great word and needs to be used more often, though with proper syntax whenever possible.

Jaded

The bright lights and big... um, bright lights of Soi Cowboy wash over Bruce now, like some much water off so much duck. Bangkok, OMG not again. Way skinny girls wearing not enough (if anything at all) given the settings of the air-con. They have to cuddle their bronzed bodies, so unforgivingly hard and unforgivably toned, they have push themselves right up against Bruce to borrow some of his body's substantial calorific storage.

Ah, dear. The breasts on these girls are so small and sitting up way too high, their nipples too prominent and stiff. And what the hell is wrong with that girl's KNEES? So knobbly, eh?

Jaded. Sigh. Shrug. Meh.

So hard to be impressed these days, so hard to be moved, so hard to be bothered. Same same, only more-so. Really, shouldn't there be more than just ... this?



Bruce is listening...? No?

Well, no-one has come up up with a good answer yet so Bruce will just have to shrug and bare bear it, and buy the not-quite naked girl sitting next to him (knee-high boots are clothes, right?) another 'tequila' before she "go dance now" and he'll pretend to watch the TV while she pretends that what she her and her two colleagues are doing on stage could, in anyone's vocabulary, be called 'dancing'.

E@L

Knocking The Top Off

Bruce tells E@L he had a massage, sans happy ending in Chiang Mai! WTF? It was his frackin' BIRTHDAY - thank you Facebook! - but after his rhythmical back slaps and neck pinch, nothing. He gets dressed, walks out in a huff, determined to do better.

Tromps down the street to the least likely to be honest place, in the dark heart of Loi Kroh Road, where a short, dumpy but nice personality mamasan calls out to invite him in for a "massage". She points down to a shanty room at the back of what was once (like last week) a travel agency judging by the posters of Dubrovnic on the walls.

"You wan massage? 60 minute, 90 minute, oil, Thai, foot massage."

"No, no," he says. "I want a happy ending, forget the massage. I want a blow-job or a chuck-wow. Already had a massage."

She looks at him for a second, doesn't ask him to repeat the request, but leads him by the hand inside. They go past uninterested, bored girls playing with eye-make in mirrors or plucking at a bit of guava peel caught in a tooth-gap, all too unenthusiastic and unattractive to get a job elsewhere; they don't even look up.

"Special service, for you," whipsers mamasan. "But we take our time. No rush, have 60 minutes of massage time."

60 minutes was not required.

~~~~~~~~~~~

At Club "Paradise". The usual. Reliable, predictable, professional, nice and friendly.

As the other girl was showering, one was re-energizing her skin with moisturizer (so many showers in a day) and looking benignly on Bruce as he pulled up his underwear.

"I like your cock," she says, unexpectedly wistful.

Bruce looks up at her as she stands on the other side of the bed, briskly working the cheap lotion into her small breast and thin rib-cage, looking at his package, her facial expression completely neutral: she is stating a fact, neither praising, nor criticizing.

"It's not too long."

Pause.

What do you say after that? Thanks? Yes, so I've heard?

He can't confirm her opinion as, thanks to his his belly, except for an occasional glimpse in these mirrors as it disappeared inside her and her colleague's anatomy, he hasn't seen it for years.

"Too long can hurt. Yours nice."

Nice to know, Bruce supposes.

~~~~~~~~~~~

When Bruce told us this, we completely cracked up... People in the pub, the waitresses, the bar-staff all looked at us. Crazy ang mohs.

E@L

The Fishbowl

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

Typical Thailand Story - Bruce again!

Hi E@L

I have to tell you something. The reason I haven't written for so long is that I have been in Thailand ever since forever and something has happened, well two things actually.

Firstly I have fallen deeply and madly in love. She is a lovely woman... well, she's a not technically woman at the moment. Almost is. She certainly acts like one, the walk, the coquettish smile, despite her deep voice and immense hands and feet. Adams apple too, you know the drill. Like I said, she's sort of almost a woman at the moment and you wouldn't know she's not, not when look at her through the eyes of love as I do, apart from the anatomical stuff I just mentioned, or if you read the gender thing on her ID card, which the concierge at my hotel seems to find so amusing. (She must be a popular girl, because he already knew her name.) She comes up really cute in an LBD (and out of one too, so long as she keeps a towel draped across you know where). She is so shy! It is cute. She hasn't got any bosoms yet but when the hormones I am buying for her kick in, whoah, eh?

And there's the jewelry I pay for, she looks great in it with her LBD, though I haven't seen her wearing that diamond bracelet recently, maybe she has misplaced it... Her Thai brother (obviously a close family as they kiss a lot) has a new motorbike, maybe she dropped it from the back of that. And it is so sad, her father needs another operation, his fourth in the past few weeks, and there are those new tyres for the village buffalo, etc... The drama never seems to stop up there in Isaan (or did she say Laos?) so I chipped in a coupla thousand dollars for those emergencies too. Funny, I thought she said she was an orphan when I first met her, when I she was writhing under all that wax in the BDSM bar.

She will be a real woman when she has the chop: I can't wait. I have been storing up on KY for those first tender moments. Some very good hospitals for that sort "aesthetic" surgery here in Bangkok by gum! At the moment though, it is pure love, platonic and profound. I do get a bit worried that she is still sleeping with about 400 older German and Australian men, men who don't seem as sensitive to her emotional needs as I do. But she is pulling in heaps of money I guess, so who cares, right? She says she doesn't get "paid" much, and I am not sure where those meagre earnings go but sometimes she has this white powdery crystalline stuff under her nostrils and she acts a bit weird, but I doubt that has anything to do with it.

~~~~~~~~~~

The second thing is that I have decided to go through the change with her. Who needs penises, right? Half the world gets on without them already. Why shouldn't my lady and I get rid of ours? ...

We've decided that I should go first. She said she'd wait for me up in Isaan. Or was it Laos?

regards

Bruce.

Nan -- With The Lot II

E@L was kidnapped today. Taken from the Chiang Mai airport, whisked off in a dark van by a person who spoke no English, and driven for hours into places unknown.

"Are we going to my hotel?" asked E@L. "Le Meridien in Chiang Mai. I have booked on the internet for tonight until next Friday."

The driver looked confused. "No go Chiang Mai. Tonight I go witchew Nan."

Nan. That was the name of the hospital E@L was to do the demo at tomorrow.

"But tonight I stay Chiang Mai hotel, right"

"No, no. I take you Nan." It is a very long 'a' in Nan: Naaaaaaahn.

We had been driving for two hours already, which is why E@L thought he had better check.

"Nan is, tree, tree… tree tousant kilometer. Take [he held up three fingers] four hours more to drive. You go Nan two day, Chiang Mai I drive you Friday."

Shit. For some reason, E@L had done this trip's accommodation booking himself, online. That means he had to pay in advance. Shit. He had no idea that Nan Hospital was not in Chiang Mai. That there was actually an entire province, 200km (not 3000) from Chiang Mai, called Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn.

E@L had confirmed with the Thai team about the trip twice, to makes sure there'd been no schedule changes. Yes, you can book, schedule no change. But no-one mentioned that Naaaaaaaahn was a separate place, distinct from Chiang Mai and that a separate hotel booking had to be made.

Shit. Why had E@L decided this one time to book himself and not just turn up, expecting everything to have been done for him? Mainly because they normally put him up in a shit hotel (the Imperial Pei) when he goes to Chiang Mai (which is rarely).

So he's gone searching online for nice deals at better establishments - like maybe a Lanna Villa somewhere, or maybe there'd be a special at a top-line hotel, seeing as how the Thailand Tourist Industry is a basket case at the moment. And there was. The lady who organizes his Thai trips could not get a better corporate rate than the on-line rate for the classy new Le Meridien in the heart of town, so she said he could book it himself. She neglected to tell him that he'd only need it from Friday, not from Wednesday.

Shit. Amazing drive though, over three mountain ranges. Fantastic scenery. Village tribes in hovels, kids playing by the side of the road, water-buffalo being driven up paths, terraced crops on the hillsides, wild jungle in several national parks, waterfalls,… As mentioned, it is about 200km as the crow flies, but more like 350km by road. Long and Very Winding Road. And it was lock to lock for the entire freaking trip across those mountains. E@L tried to sleep but was getting tossed awake at every corner. Sleep would have helped him not see the danger at each glance where his driver cut across the double yellow lines or overtook slower vehicles on the approach to a blind corner or a crest. And going as fast as he could, of course. Eventually, as they were coming into yet another blind hair-pin bend at speed and the driver pulled out across double yellow lines to overtake about 40 yards before the corner, E@L had to cry out: "No, no, pull back! Please, stop trying to kill me, OK?"

"OK, solly," the driver said, and from there on in he went like a grandmother going to church on Sunday. It took nearly six hours.

p.s. The hotel in Nan is shit.

(...but it has free Internet.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I swear to doG I am going to die on one of these business trips. I've told you before. Check the old blog. Forget the immense cardiovascular risk factors, strokes, heart-attacks and prostate cancer.

E@L has his date with destiny as a passenger in a Datsun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Something to tide you over. From The Chronicles of Bruce)

Bruce finished his burger, licked his lips and scrunched up the burger-juice-filled paper to place it in the ash-tray.

Remember ash-trays? Remember cigarettes?

"True story," he said. Immediately I went into disbelief mode. It must have showed. "I kid you not." And he put on this butter-wouldn't-melt look which was quite hilarious on someone with his school-of-hard-knocks appearance. Big shoulders and arms to match his belly, a huge red head with no hair and a bristly goatee and moustache on his acne-pocked face. His thick fingers hardly seem long enough to wrap around the stubbie holder of Beer Chang, but he had already put two down while nibbling on his burger.

"OK" I said, "the hamburger story, let's hear it."

"Righto," he laughed and wet his whistle. "You know Soi Cowboy, right? You're not a total beginner here, right?"

I nodded. I knew it. I fingered the label on my coaster.

"Here's the set-up: This is a few years ago, before I was living here. We had this work do in Bangkok, training, marketing, whatever. We'd been at it in the conference room all day, so then we moved on and had few beers and some Thai nosh at Cabbages and Condoms , you know it? Soi 16, not bad grub if it's your first time in Thailand, not too pricky. Know what I mean?

"Prik is chili, isn’t it?" I half-guessed, the bulge of a Thai phrase-book in my pocket.

"Correct. Full points. And afterwards, we put the most of the ladies into a couple of tuk-tuks, while the boys and I, plus one or two of the more… adventurous, or maybe broad-minded is what I mean to say… anyway two of the ladies from the company joined us, and we crossed over the road to Asok and went to Cowboy to check out the show at Long Gun. We stayed there a while, watched the banana popping show and the lesbian show… The girls thought it was hilarious, but tame. It could be pretty gross for some I guess, but not as bad as it used to be at over the road there at Nana, pre-Thaksin. But these ladies they thought it was a tame! They wanted to see some real on-stage fucking. I swear to God, women, I'll never understand 'em. I had to take the girls to a gay-boy show next night, see some real action, but that's another story.

"Anyway, it was getting late and no bird in the bar had really taken my fancy. I suppose I was in one of those moods, you know how it is. You can get so over the whole girlie bar racket, right? Some of the other lads had hooked with a bar-girl each and had already headed off to some short-time hotel, or maybe they'd risked the 1000Bht surcharge for a guest at the hotel, I don't know.

"There were four of us left, the two company ladies, and one other guy - we called him L-G (or Algie, like from that Oscar Wilde, some play...) We called him that because it was his idea to come to Long-Gun tonight, as it's his favorite place - obviously it was, because he knew the girls' names and he had already picked up his favorite, a girl called Pim, he'd taken her out a few times before. Actually there were five of us, counting her. And then there was me, with no lady… We were walking along the Cowboy strip up to Soi23 past all the theme bars to find a taxi when L-G noticed a hamburger stand right at the end. There was a girl buying a burger there. She was in normal clothes, a bit suggestive, but not in the uniform of one of the bars on the strip.

"I said - They looked good.

" - The hamburgers or the girls? Long-Gun asked me and everybody laughed.

"I said - I meant the burgers.

"So he said to me - Why didn’t you get one?

" - Burger? I asked.

"He said - No, the girl! There's one right there for you, and you can share the burger with her as well. It's a bargain!

"This pretty girl, she was a stunner actually, had paid and was just collecting her burger and turning to walk away when Long Gun approached her. I swear to God he said, - My friend is very shy, he would like to take you home tonight. Indicating to me. She stopped, looked at me for a second and smiled, and then she nodded!

"Well as you can imagine I was very embarrassed, but I got over it. We got in the taxi together with her still eating her burger. We went back to my hotel, I paid the excess and she stayed the night. And she was brilliant in bed. I kid you not, some of the best sex I've ever had. Just a random girl who happened to be standing at a burger stand. And she was lovely and polite, and had this perfect body. It was amazing."

Bruce was rubbing his chin and staring out over my shoulder.

"Did you get her name, her number?" I asked him. "Did you ever go with her again?"

He gradually focused back on to me. "No, of course not. I wouldn't want to have her number, I might be tempted to call her. That's not how I operate. I'm not like L-G. Gotta keep a distance. Variety keeps you safe. You never know, otherwise I might fall in love with one of them. And that'd be the fucking end of me, wouldn’t it?" He laughed and knocked back the last third of the beer.

"Bloody L-G, you know he married that bloody hooker, Pim. Stupid fuck-wit. She took for a grand ride alright. But that's another story, too...

" 'Nother one, love!" he called to the fierce-eyed waitress who was upset because Bruce could never seem to recollect her name.

E@L

With The Lot

Bruce had an added exaggerated loll to what had once been called his "unfortunate" gait this evening. Four hours in the car yesterday morning, an afternoon on the vinyl seat in the cop-shop's backroom, cheap sheets in the hotel last night and no talcum to lubricate the creases (it had been a rough and spontaneous trip to Buriram to bail a mate out of prison), then another fours hours in the car back to Bangkok, to deliver the chastened mate off to his non-too pleased wife, and then through the traffic jams to his own apartment off Wireless Rd. Sweat rash, flaring around his tackle. "Out of action" until this settles down. In his immuno-suppressed condition he was susceptible to such hazards. He made his way slowly to the pharmacy on Sukhomvit Rd just up from the Marriott where Pei, the lovely attendant, found some of the appropriate cream - part hydrocortisone, to take away the itching, and part mycolytic to kill any fungal spores - in fact the base cream probably did most of the hard work.

Pei was big-boned girl for a Thai, well-fed with it, though she presented an amazing, classically beautiful face that kept drawing your eyes back to it: the gentle line of her nose, her full lips, her huge almond eyes and those not-too-high cheekbones. To the Thai men however she was too brown-skinned and hence working class. In a westerner like Bruce's opinion, she should get an eating disorder or hit the horse and become a cat-walk model. She should be selling magazine covers, instead she was selling people like Bruce lotions to rub on their balls.

Bruce usually picked up his medications - a wide range we won't discuss here - from small shops like this. Girls like Pei and the splendidly grumpy pharmacist Boochit (Bruce's called him Bullshit) made the effort of topping up his prescriptions a pleasant chore.

He came around the corner into Soi 4 slowly, past the fried cockroach and locust stands, gingerly stepped down to the road to avoid a herd (two) of baby elephants on the footpath and waddled eventually to the entrance to the infamous Nana Entertainment Plaza. He looked in briefly, saw the gaudy sign of Pharaohs and thought back to the pre-Thaksin days when all sorts of things counted as "entertainment" and how the shows were now a poor shadow of their previous shadowy hyperbole.

He had a sour stomach from the food in Buriram. There were locust stalls there too - this was not just a Nana phenomenon to shock gullible tourists - but the hot and sour Isaan soup he'd had for early lunch had sat there for hours. He needed a western food fix.

The small stall stands squarely at the Plaza entrance. You have to walk past it to go in, but Bruce was not wasting him time tonight as he couldn't take a girl (or two) home with this broad purple rash (it looked like a bruise in the dim light of his bathroom) all around his arse.

Minn was a short girl, as chubby as Pei, but with a square puffy face and not at all attractive - except when she smiled. Any slight joke would break her face in half with immense perfectly aligned teeth in a captivating and contagious smile. Bruce gave her a wink, and she recognized him at the rear of the solid contingent of European men around the front of her stand.

"Sawaddee na klhup, khun Minn," he wai-ed to her. Her hands were full of utensils so she could only continue her brightest of smiles. She had on a yellow 'We Love The King' polo-shirt under her grey apron.

"Sawadee kaaa, khun Bruthe, she said as she flipped three burgers over on her hotplate.

She arranged another bun to toast at the side of the hotplate, pulled up a patty and dropped into a small puddle of fresh oil, cracked an egg into a ring and laid some bacon down. The usual for Mr Bruthe.

"Best burgers in town," said Bruce to the big fella in front/next to him who had noticed the special attention given to him by the short-order chef and was staring blatantly. "You live here, or are you a tourist?"

In a soft Aussie accent the embarrassed man replied, "Live in Singapore, come here one week a month. For work… Look didn't mean to stare, just that... well, your Thai is very good."

"Yeah, this is the place for burgers in Bangkok. Fuck McDonalds and Burger King, eh? I been living here since 2003. All my mates we... if we are in this part of town, we always come here for a burger. You're an Aussie too, eh?" asked Bruce.

The other man nodded. His 70Bht burger was delivered wrapped into a tight triangle of butcher's paper with a perfect one-third of it exposed, just begging to be chomped into.

"Certainly looks good," said the man as he admired its tidy presentation - lettuce, onion, tomato, beef patty, squirt of mustard, squirt of tomato sauce, fry-toasted bun, neatly tucked into the white paper which was folded in such a way as to hold any juices.

"Come over to the bar here, grab a beer to wash that down," said Bruce. "If you got time."

"Yeah, I've got time."

"Wanna tell you story. True story. What's your name, lad?"

The man, no longer a lad, had dripped some juice from his first bite of burger onto his goatee where it eventually fell onto the striped t-shirt stretched over his protuberant stomach, and it joined a stain from his lunch, or breakfast, or yestrerday's dinner... "My mates call me The Expat at Large," he said. "Please to meet you…?"

"Bruce," he said. "You can call me Bruce…"

"Like the sketch in Monty Python," laughed

E@L

The Best Policy

From The True Chronicles of Bruce.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Nong had small teeth, short teeth. Memorably short. Very little distance from the biting edge to the gums. What had she worn them down chewing on, Bruce wondered?

Still, he admitted to himself, she was very pretty. With sparkling dark eyes, long wavy hair worn loose, smooth dark skin and soft high cheekbones above a captivating set of dimples*, she carried her still excellently proportioned Thai body with an erotically charged casual ease. But she was not so young anymore. On closer inspection, her muscle tone was more mellowed than the other girls, her tummy a few centimetres too loose now after several pregnancies. She no longer had the saleable hard-body of her youth. She admitted to being 32. She admitted to having only couple of long-term boyfriends from overseas. But she was not available to the customers like Bruce on a daily basis any more: she was now the mama-san of this small beer-bar at the far north end of Pattaya beach.

In this capacity she stood in for Louis, the French manager of the bar, who only came in for one or two beers around 10pm to check on the nights meagre takings. Nong sorted the girls out, made sure they were healthy and ready to work, made sure they were fed, encouraged, prettified; she checked their lists of fines and credits for Louis to later tabulate against what they still owed him for rent and for personal cash loans; she made sure they called out "Hello, welcome!" to all the potential customers passing on the way from the Dusit Resort to the nearby stand to grab a tuk-tuk or taxi along Beach Rd to Walking Street...

The beer-bar Nong was running was one of a pair in the open space at the bottom floor of a Japanese club (Susie). The provenance of this old place was uncertain as was the choice of the three elaborate Roman style columns** which bore the weight across the front of the building. They could not have been selected by owners of the Japanese club, surely not. One hoped that they pre-dated the refitting of the place as bars and were in keeping with its original use. Maybe a small hotel was once here? A bank?

Each beer-bar had its drinking area at the opposite end of the space to the other. They were run as separate businesses, managed by different people and the girls had a fierce but not quite serious rivalry. The bars were mirror images of each other, architecturally reflected at the central pillar and the door at the back of the bars which led to Club Susie. Around that door of dark-glass were lighted signs in green, red and pink curly Japanese script***, presumably inviting entry and promising all sorts of Nipponese thrills in the discreet "karaoke" rooms upstairs. Several shelves of ambiguously Japanese trinkets, like Hello Kitty dolls, flanked the door. Buddhist prayer flags and winds chimes danced in the slight on-shore breeze of evening out by the front of the bar, under red and green striped eaves. Both of the drinking bars were decorated with large yellow and black diamond tiles. There were chrome-framed mirrors behind the glass shelves which held bottles of Galliano, Midori , Vermouth, Cointreau, Cognac, Johnny Walker (Red and Black) whiskey, and of course Tequila, the bar-hostess's standard short drink. Several show-bottles of twisted glass sported colored fluid that tempted no-one, not the most desperare hard-case. The mirrors reflected harshly back into the customer area all the bright fluorescent tubes and the red colored snake-lights, as well as the mirrors of the equally garish opposite bar. It was not a visually quiet place.

Business? It was quiet in that sense. Bruce was the lone, early customer. He sat and watched the sunset from his red vinyl stool, trying to drink slowly to avoid a sour Thai stomach which would be the eventual result if he continued his preferred Pattaya diet of Chang beer and chili noodles for too many days at a stretch. He turned and hunched his heavy frame forward stretching the blue Hawaiian shirt Ooh had chosen for him in the market yesterday, and leant over the bar to see what the girls were doing. Noi was writing in her diary, practising English. Ooh had been trying out some new makeup style to go with her denim shirt, one which pinched her small breasts into something approaching a cleavage, but had paused to send a txt message. It failed to go. She had no credit on her phone-card. She complained to Bruce: "I owe seben towsend baht, my phone calls!" Bruce shrugged. He was giving her 500Baht for each day she spent with him already. What more could he do? He would buy her a present on the last day. Or maybe a present for her baby in Bangkok.

Mama-san Nong had been seated on a white plastic chairs at one of the marble dining tables, writing something silently for a while. She pushed back the chair and moved gracefully to behind the bar and placed herself in front of Bruce. She wore a conservative black halter top which left some inches of her slightly flabby belly exposed above her grey pants. She smiled a well practiced genuine smile at him. Those short teeth. "Kha Bruce, can you hep me with write letter my terak in London."

Bruce smiled back and put his beer holder down.

"Of course. What have you written so far?" he asked.

She seemed a little embarrassed at the short letter that had taken her so much time to compose on the table. "My dahling, my terak. I miss you. I love you." She looked up and said, "That is all I heb so far. You must hep me, hokay." She handed the letter across to him.

Bruce dropped his chin to his chest in order to hide his amazement and amusement as he read. After a silent spasm shook his shoulders he looked up, took a deep breath, cocked his head and said, in a mock-serious tone, "And DO you love him?"

Nong's falsely genuine smile disappeared and what seemed to be a real expression came into her face. She pursed her mouth slightly like she was trying to hold back a laugh. Her brilliant eyes flashed at Bruce, sending waves of understanding and communion into his, and her cute dimples rapidly deepened. She was eternally beautiful at this moment, even though her teeth were nearly worn away, even though her tummy was not so taught, even though she was mightily old at 32. She looked at him without guile or pretence. When she spoke to him, he was certain she was being honest. He had never heard a Thai girl speak so truthfully.

"I love his money," she said.

~~~~~~~~~~

* Bruce was a sucker for dimples.

** I'm picking them as Composite Order.

*** Hiragana script is the curly one.

E@L

Shagging in Public

Here's a meme that should score some hits...

~~~~~~~~~~~

It was confession time this morning. A friend of mine who is no longer famous admitted to having shagged by the Singapore River late last night, near the multi-colored bridge not far from Gallery Hotel. I pressed her for details (natch! I'm always thinking of you guys!) Not just oral; full sex. With a friend, she modified, not some random guy. She seemed to think herself quite the outrageous tart...

"I once had a shag on a public bench in a park, surrounded by squawking swans," I casually countered, placing a coffee sachet in the new (2nd hand) Philips Senseo. I was in my late 30s at the time, hardly the over-hormonized youth, but still capable of outrageous acts...*

Her chin dropped. "Oh my god, really?"

E@L you wild action-adventure hero! I didn't mention that it was nighttime and I was petrified and drunk at the time and that the swans were more likely ducks or geese (I couldn't tell in the dark) that had been trying to sleep until our shenanigans disturbed them.

I had to drag the two of us into a park in order to gain some privacy, as afforded by the nocturnal conditions, for my partner (the sexual aggressor in the situation) seemed intent that it would be neither here nor there if we should do it outside the nightclub on the footpath, in the lights of the traffic streaming down Main St. Maybe she thought the pulsing lights meant we were still on a disco-floor, one of her other preferences for deeply intimate contact.

I decided that 'there', at the side of a billabong, in a nearby park, under some coolibah trees possibly, rather than 'here' on the street would be the safest bet for not getting arrested for public indecency and interfering with protected wildlife. I found a bench just out of the street-light, and a few ducks, geese and/or swans scampered away from us. In the fevered breathing and fretful searching among disheveled clothing (it is freaking cold in country Australia at night, this was not a nekkid thing) we managed somehow expose the appropriate regions of engorged flesh sufficiently to unite them briefly for some awkward but cathartic grunting...

Another safe bet would be to find a condom, but in the struggle to achieve our physical unification, one of the aggrieved bloody swans took it! (Not really, but wouldn't it be funny if...?)

~~~~~~~~~~~

I press the blue light on the coffee machine and a shot of espresso moistens the bottom of my cup. I seem to recall that the bench-top conflagration didn't last quite as long as it took me to prepare this nice coffee.

I seem to recall also that the lady in question sort of came to her senses (omni animale sunt embarrassed post public coitus) at this point, and horrified at what had happened (again) started off at an exceedingly brisk pace in search of her hotel, in which direction she knew not, with E@L following up the rear shouting directions and apologies for allowing himself to be raped by her (again)...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I retire to my room, feeling a mixture of smugness and shame, and commence this blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

So where, gentil reader, have you "done it?"

E@L

* (I'm not counting the semi-public performances of horrific indecency perpetrated by Bruce and the myriad others who write under the E@L pseudonym that have occurred behind the velvet drapes of certain clubs in Wanchai (HK), not to mention Manila, Phuket, Hanoi, Kiaoshung, Beijing, etc...)