Toujours Siam

21 years ago I sold a 5-FSI1 Round Brilliant Diamond to a woman from Florida. She was purchasing the ring for her mother. When asked to ship the present to Miami Beach via Fedex, my boss refused to accommodate the woman's request, fearing the diamond might get lost in transit. The customer was driven to tears by his harsh manner and his son, Richie Boy, berated his 62 year-old father for his intransigence. The sale was on the line. My commish was $4000. Manny finally relented after several hours, cursing us out and saying once the woman left the exchange, "You guys are soft as shit. She was only crying to get her way. Women are good that way."

Manny's harsh assessment was the direct descendant of Cato's famous quote, "When a woman weeps, she is setting traps with her tears."

I had seen enough women cry to know both Manny and Cato were right, but decided to celebrate the sale with a trip around the world. I had read an advertisement in the Sunday NY Times from PanExpress Travel.

$1350 for flights from JFK to LA to Honolulu to Biak to Bali then travel by train to Jakarta and fly to Sumatra across the Malacca Straits to Malaysia to catch a train to Thailand and then up into Nepal for a trek in the Himalayas before straight-lining through Paris and London to New York.

"How long you going for?" Richie Boy asked a week prior to my departure.

"Five to six months." I was planning on writing a book on pornography in LA. It was based on my cousin Sherri's life in film. She had starred in over 2000 XXX movies. Every male in America knew her name.

"There's no way your job going to be here when you get back." Richie Boy and I went back to my years as a doorman at a punk disco on West 62nd Street. Our friendship of twenty years meant nothing on 47th Street. He had a business to run.

"I wouldn't expect it to be." The title of my novel was NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD. It was bound for the NY Times bestseller list. I'd never have to work as a wage slave again.

I sublet my apartment to a Swedish male nurse. Scandinavians were very dependable and my profit on the sublet was $300/month. I bought a Rough Guide book for South East Asia on the way to JFK. The Lonely Planet travel books said that a backpacker could live on $10/day. My budget was $40/day. The money from my subleasee was my beer budget. The guidebooks said beer was cheap out East.

And they weren't wrong.

I bought big bottles of beer for everyone on the route. I celebrated St. Patrick's Day in Bali with a marching Legong band. Dawn on the rim of Mt. Bromo. Smoking pot on the shores of Sumatra's Lake Toba. Drinking whiskey with Chinese whores in Malaysia. The entire trip had been an eye-opener and I boarded a train north for Thailand opposite Penang in Georgetown. A German woman was my company. We were just friends headed for the fabled beaches of Koh Samui.

Palm trees, white sands, and gin=clear water.

Ilsa and I got off the train in Surathani around midnight. The last ferry had left the harbor 30 minutes earlier. Most of the backpackers were sleeping on the pier. Ilsa and I taxied off to a hotel.

$20/night for an aircon room with TV.

A host of beautiful bargirls greeted my entrance to the lobby with cries of 'hey, handsome'. They sounded like they really meant it and I abandoned Ilsa who wanted to catch the dawn ferry to Koh Samui.

"I'm just going to have a beer." I was 38. My wallet was filled with baht. Three of the girls looked like Suzie Wong. I went upstairs with one of them. Her name was Porn. We stayed together five days. She actually cried when I finally headed over to Koh Samui.

Thailand really was a paradise and I'm there now.

A quick trip to see my wife, Mem, and our son, Fenway. I just asked her if I was handsome.

"Sure, you handsome, like your son." She loves her kids and me some of the time. Mostly when I'm here, even if it's for a short time, because Richie Boy and Manny are waiting in New York. For all their talk I always have my job and Thailand is always paradise.

The Thai word for Eden is sa-wan. Of course na-lok is the word for hell. And I've been in hell here too, but not today.