Sway At The Stiletto 2017

Last night at Pattaya's Stiletto A Go-Go the ladyboys painted their faces for the evening rush. I ordered a beer and asked the veteran mama-san about a star employee. The dragon lady said Lil Vee was in Germany and pointed a long fingernail at a svelte teen sheathed in a shimmering silver dress.

"That's her younger sister. Her name is Ae."

The mama-san modded and Ae swung off the stool with serpentine sleath. She sat on the stool and I breathed the scent of seduction against which I was defenseless. Ae slithered against me and toyed with coal-black tress.

"I remember you with Vee."

That was five years ago.

Ae had been 15.

She was almost twenty now.

I wanted you then and want you now."

Her lilting tongue preached pleasure to non-believers.

She wore nothing under the shiny second skin. Her hardness rode my thigh in time to the Thai pop music. A thick gold necklace swayed across her flat chest. Her cousin Vee had been a goddess. Ae was the universe. She whispered a number in my ear. "You get paid."

I fell from the stars.

Ae read my face. She smiled with the wicked eternity of youth and said, "I have a customer like look through hole. No see no hear. He pay. Watch. You can do?"

"Hell, yes."

Her left hand unbuttoned my jeans.

The Stiletto A Go-Go was very open-minded. Ae turned to a fat man and pointed up. He waddled across the floor and climbed the stairs. The mama-san closed a curtain around us.

"He like look down."

Obviously Ae had never asked why. The money killed any curiosity. She dropped to her knees. I didn't look up.

The fat man might have been above us, but I was in heaven below as was everyone in the Last Babylon from time to time.

The Last Babylon 2007

Walking Street was crowded with drunken marines, dok thongs, Englishmen on Ecstasy, tattooed go-go girls, shouting Arabs, Amazonian transvestites, and wide-eyed Chinese tourists. These diverse groups threaded through the gauntlet of dueling music from various beer bars and discos. The heat drove everyone insane and alcohol was behind the wheel. The collective madness left me in the dust and I realized vengeance was better suited for the Bible. All I really wanted was a cold beer.

The opening of final chapter of LOVE YOU LONG TIME dedicated to my cousin David Barry

THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD by Peter Nolan Smith

Two weeks after my arrest by the Thai Cyper-Crime Unit in 2008 I was drinking at Donovan's Sports Bar on Pattya's Sai 3. Most of the clientele was watching a golf match, while I concentrated on drinking a vodka-tonic. Golf meant nothing to me.

After Tiger Woods birdied a hole, the TV went to commercial break. Conversations of a normal nature resumed between the drinkers.

An oil worker complained that his new girlfriend slept most of the day.

His friends said that their girlfriends suffered from a similar somnalepsy.

The oil worker hailed from Texas. He was overweight and bald.

"And when she wakes up, she eats like an escapee from a concentration camp, then watches Thai soap operas before dropping into a coma."

"Same with me." His two friends were also dumbfounded by the malaise.

"Sleeping 20 hours a day has to be a disease."

"I'm just glad that it wasn't infectious."

Donovan's owner had a 4-handicap. To the oil worker this skill was genius and he asked Steve, if he had any idea why their girlfriends slept like the dead.

"I don't have a girlfriend." Steve was the smartest man in the bar. His Thai waitresses understood more English than they let on and he changed the subject. "Think Tiger Woods will play the Hong Kong Open?"

The golfers bailed after another drink. Their tee-off at Khao Kheo Golf Course was scheduled for 9. I paid my bill. Steve forestalled my departure with an offer of another vodka-tonic. He knew my story. The police might not have thrown me in jail, but their geek shut down my website. I couldn't leave the country until my trial. My money was very tight.

I accepted his buy-back with gracious humility.

Steve and I discussed Eli Manning's Scramble in the Super Bowl, which gave the Giants the win.

"In the regular season he would have been whistled dead. Caught in the grass. Then again rules are made to be broken by the refs in the Superbowl. They had a lot riding on the game." Steve felt that the only people who can fix games were the officials.

"The secondary stopped playing defense to watch him get his." I believed that the NFL officials were also on the fix.

"Never stop playing until you hear the whistle."

We clinked glasses and I asked about his bachelor status.

"I don't have a girlfriend, because I hear too many stories from my customers about theirs."

"I won't ever tell you about winning the Worst Girlfriend of the Year in 2001."

Bee had left me for an Italian five times in two months. I wanted her to go. She just couldn't say good-bye. She was stuck in my life like gum in hair. She had to be cut out in the end.

"Thanks, my head filled with enough unhappy endings to write a soap opera, but I have a question. Why you think Thai girls sleep so much?"

His question echoed off an unspoken affair whose mysteries defied his rational mind. I speak Thai. I know bar girls on a platonic level. They tell stories about 'customers'. Some of them might be true.

"The most obvious answer is the one no one wants to believe."

"Which is?"

"You try spending a night with a drunken farang sucking down beers and tequila like the Taliban were at the city gates. I promise you that you would be a little slow to get out of bed."

"But that's not the real answer, is it?" Steve wasn't accepting the easy way out.

"No, their sleeping sickness is either pretend or a reaction to having to spend so much time with a farang. Faking sleep keeps a farang off them. Not many people have a fantasy about sex with a sleeping woman. The second option is that they are so freaked by being with a farang that they wrap sleep around them like a blanket. You have to think of it like astronaut in suspended animation for inter-planetary travel only Thai girls sleep after they've landed on Mars. They have no interest in the Martians."

"You mean us?"

"Did you ever see BOB CAROL TED AND ALICE. Ann Margret sleeps throughout her affair with Jack Nicholson. Why? Because she didn't want to be there. So what do you do when your girlfriend sleeps?"

"I certainly don't wake her." The peace during their slumber was priceless.

"Let sleeping dogs lie."

"As long you're in bed for when they wake up."

We clinked glasses again and another drink was pushing my budget, but I ordered it anyway.

Mam was already asleep. She was so cute under the sheets. She was safe and so was I. Tomorrow morning was another story.