The monsoons coincide with low season in Pattaya. Hotels offer special rates and the bargirls call everyone ‘sexy’. This season was shaping to be lower than a snake's belly. The government's repression of the 'red-shirts' and the global economic downswing had rewritten the Thai Tourist Board's projection.
"Thailand not have farang." Mam was happy. I was here with her. Fenway was happy too. My son had his father to carry him around the soi. He was a busy boy.
The guesthouses in Jomtien were in a dire predicament. Bar girls were fleeing Pattaya for the Issan Plateau. Better to work in the family rice paddy, then settle down with an 80 year-old retiree on a limited pension. At least until high season comes back in November. I'd be back in New York within a week. I had a family to feed and so did everyone else.
The desperation on the go-go girls’ faces was a cruel mirror of hard times. I stayed close to home, for any venture farther afield was like running a gauntlet of lust. Every girl sang the same chorus “Take me home.”
My good friend Sam Royalle was recovering from a long ailment. I couldn't follow the treatment. It seemed like one step forward and another two back. Anytime I mentioned diet, the English art director protested, "What you expect me to eat? Thai food?"
It was good enough for 60 million Thais. Few of them were overweight. Mam was only 49 kilos. When we first met, she had been 41. Her family thought she looked healthy. To me she was more than cute.
"Let's go out on Saturday. “Sam Royalle liked go-gos. We drank shots of tequila. He conversed with people despite 110 dB levels. The naked girls were listless on the poles. It was an ordeal, but he needed the company. We had been friends almost 20 years and a long-standing friend is expected to accompany his mate to go-go bars.
Mam gave her blessing.
"Sam take care you. You take care Sam." Her spies covered Walking Street. Their network had agents on every soi. I was a good boy. I met Sam at What's Up a Go Go. Several girls knew my name. We drank beer. Two bottles. The owner of Heaven bought us tequila. He had run a pimp bar in East St. Louis. He was most men's hero.
65 and running a go-go bar.
"Any girl you want. No bar fine." He offered as my birthday present. I had turned 58 the previous week. I thanked Paddy for his generosity, but refused about twenty nubile dancers before midnight. I told them the same story.
“Mai mii keng leng.”
“I can give you power.”
They promised a trip to heaven or hell. I wasn’t interested in either destination after ten beers and deserted my bar stool at Heaven Above a Go Go, telling Sam Royalle that i was going to the bathroom. Three naked girls were on his lap. He wouldn't notice my absence.
The air on Soi Diamond was strangely cool. The wind carried the threat of rain and I walked to 2nd Road rather than be tempted by another drink on Walking Street.
Two transvestites grabbed my arms at the top of the alley. They towered over me in their heels. One hand dipped into my back pocket. I could feel her fingernails grasping my wallet. It only had 500 baht, but all my ATM and credit cards. My struggle to break free was futile, until the pickpocket yelped with pain.
“Pai loi.” The voice belonged to Jamie Parker. We were friends from New York. He could never go back. Crimes against the state have a long statute of limitation. Two years older he carried the menace of the killer. Eleven years hard time. It was no act. "Get fucking lost."
“We go. Come back too.” The taller TV sneered with a helium alto.
“Good luck then.” Jamie stood his ground and the girls strode off to find easier prey. Handing back my wallet, he coughed with a hack. This didn’t come from smoking cigarettes. “Thought you could use a little help.”
“Those girls were tough.” Bruises would color my arms tomorrow. The indentation from their nails would fade faster. “What happened to you?”
Jamie’s body was perennially thin. Drugs and diet, but his face was gaunt and Panda black circles masked his eyes.
“I look that bad?” He stared at his reflection in the 7/11 window.
“You look that bad.” Ja-bah bad. The cheap speed was addictive and I went to the ATM. “You need some money?”
“A thousand wouldn’t hurt, but it isn’t for what you think.”
“Jamie, you can do what you want with it.” After dark any money you give a friend you have to consider as a gift. I pulled out a purple note. Richie Boy, my boss at the diamond exchange, had Western Unioned $300 this morning. It was going fast. “You’re an adult.”
“I don’t feel like it.” He stuck the bill in his jeans pocket. “Mind if I walk with you a bit?”
“I’m just going to get my bike.” The eyes of a passing policeman convicted Jamie of several crimes. “Let me give you a ride somewhere.”
“Yeah, there’s too much light here.” He lowered his head like someone might be following him. I fought the temptation to look over my shoulder. We drove to 3rd Road. His body wavered like a wraith on back. I checked the rear mirrors every ten seconds. No one was there. At the Buffalo Bar I ordered him a beer and waved for the girls to leave us alone.
“Man, it’s been a hard month.” He sat on the stool as if he had been on his feet for days. “But you don’t want to hear about it.”
My mother had prayed for God to send her second son an avocation to join the cloth. I refused the priesthood after hearing Led Zeppelin’s first LP in 1969, but she had been right. I would have made a good priest or at least a confessor. Everyone liked to tell me their secrets. Even more so after two beers.
Jamie drank both in less than a minute.
“I’m all ears.”
“You ever hear of Ice?” He whispered the word with worship.
“Crystal Meth.” The drug had hit the fly-over of America hard. The cops had cracked down on traditional drugs and the dealers synthesize a smokeable speed from ephedrine, the basic ingredient for over-the-counter cough medicines. The substance was equally available in Thailand.
“That’s the one. The Nazis used to give chocolate bars laced with the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots.” Jamie was a vast abyss of useless knowledge. “Kept them flying for days.”
“And you started smoking it here?” Drugs are readily available in Thailand, although opium, heroin, grass have been supplanted by ja bah and ice thanks to the repressive interdiction of the Thai Police and DEA.
“With Ort.” He shrugged to indicate his complete surrender.
“Ort?” I knew Ort from Soi 6. I hadn’t seen her since her boyfriend left her for a transvestite. The little vixen wanted to be my geek. I had refused with deep regret. Ort was very sexy. ”How you run into Ort?”
“She was dancing at Paris A Go-Go. Told me to meet her after work. We went back to her place. A little furnished studio. Bed, TV, AC. She asked if I minded if she smoked some ice. You know me. Anyone can do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else.” Jamie’s heroin addiction had stolen his youth. Cocaine took away his edge as a comedian. His taking up with speed in his 50s could be a show-stopper. “Don’t look at me like you were a Parole Officer who discovered a bad blood test. You’re no angel.”
“You’re right.” I had disappointed Nancy Reagan too many times by saying ‘yes’, instead of no’ to throw any rocks without hearing the sound of breaking windows in my own house of glass, but I tried my best to avoid drugs in Thailand.
“And you’re right too.” Prison here was worse than any of Jamie’s stateside time. “I knew it was dangerous, but did it anyway.”
“And how was it?” Jamie didn’t need a lecture and I was curious. About ice and Ort.
“Ice is nothing. No rush. Shooting speedballs is a thousand times better for a high.”
“So what the attraction?”
“Sex.” Jamie spoke low, which was a little strange in a bar where every girl was looking for a date. “I thought she wanted me only to buy some ice. 1000 baht. But once we had a few pipes, she said she was hot and asked if I minded if she took off her clothes. Another bowl and mine was off. A day later and we were still at it.”
A binge. “How many days?”
“3-4. I took Cialis to keep up my strength.” Speed and Cialis were tough on the heart, however Jamie was tough enough to survive hardcore XXX games. “And then another 4 days and we had sex the entire time. I had to stop because my skin wore off. Ort wasn’t happy and started screaming for it. It was like being with a nymphomaniac. A tyranny of sex. I told her I was going to the ATM. I didn’t go back.”
“How much money you spend?”
“About 15000 baht and lost about 5 kilos.”
“Cheaper than Jenny Craig’s or Weight-Watchers.”
“I don’t have the weight to lose like you.”
A loss of five kilos would put me close to the fighting weight of my early 40s. “And you didn’t go back?”
“Don’t trust myself. It’s not the Ice. it’s the sex, the ice, the lying in bed with nowhere to go but here.” He drank his beer with a thirst to quench another demon. “Sawan.”
“Heaven.” I was impressed Jamie knew the Thai word for paradise.
“A little hell too, which we both like.”
“Without sin, there is no pleasure.” I loosely quoted Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealistic film director. “So now what?”
“I changed my SIM card # and started clean again.” He ordered another beer. They were going down smooth. “Not 100%, but close enough. Another few days and I’ll be back on top of the world.”
“More like top of the heap in this town.”
“As long as it’s a foot higher than anyone else, you see the stars.” Jamie had a way with words, which slurred after our tenth beer.
He stayed at my house for several days before changing apartments. I got a call from him the other day. He’s running promo events for bars and restaurants during the low season. The next is an erotic hot dog eating contest at TiggleBitties Tavern.
Ort had called several times asking where is Jamie. I told her out-of-town. She invited me over her place. I said I was busy. She said she was thinking about me and thanks to Jamie I knew why. I don’t answer her calls anymore. Like Jamie I’m too weak to skate on thin ice.
That's why I stay home most night. I want to live forever. At least until I’m in my 80s.
At that age everything is fair game.
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