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We met Rana and Erhan for breakfast downstairs at the Maxx Hotel and they said, let’s go to the Weekend Market! Since that was where we were going, I couldn’t say no. The experience with them was dreadful. Erhan knew only three things in English: the numbers; the phrase “What is your final price?”; and “too expensive”, and he used them interchangeably. He never bought anything, and it took him about 30 minutes to leave each seller, which inevitably resulted in the seller meeting the ridiculously low number Erhan gave him and Erhan still not buying the thing. We bought lots of orchid bulbs and a marionette. I had an ovaltine shake. They had everything from rare animals to putatively rare antiques. Lots of Osama Bin Laden shirts for young punks to purchase, the way America revels in Charles Manson. After two hours we were done and left them. We walked to the Skytrain, passing an impressive array of lepers, clubfooted men, gangrene sufferers, and burn victims. And dogs with bloody balls. Lots of them. I don’t know what it is about Thailand, but all the dogs of both sexes seemed to have bleeding genitalia. We took the Skytrain to the Jim Thompson House, a lovely teak home and gardens that an American expat made after he founded his silk empire in the 1950′s and before he disappeared mysteriously in 1967. We went to a noodle shop and made the mistake of ordering our food “not too spicy, just medium.” In Thai, that translates to “hotter than drinking straight habanero sauce”. Dilek and I were on fire. We each ordered ice-drinks pictured on the menu. One was bright green and the other was bright pink. The green one tasted like bubble gum. The pink one tasted like very concentrated bubble gum.
Then we went to Lumphini Park. People were paddling in paddle boats. Others were lifting weights. Others were watching Elif to see if she was watching them lift weights. Sikhs were jogging in their pants and turbans. It was 105 degrees outside. We slept under a tree. I said, let’s go back to the hotel to swim, and then we can go to Patpong. They thought it was a great idea, especially the first part.
Back at the hotel we bumped into Rana and Erhan, who wanted to come to Patpong with us. Fine with me; I’d feel safer going with the mountain that is Erhan than just with the molehill that is Cos. The taxi dropped us off at Soi 1, and the second we stepped out of the car, people were coming up to Cos and Erhan (not me) and asking them if they wanted a woman. Down the entire Soi, women were standing in packs, and it was shocking: they were wearing dresses and makeup, and they looked grrrreat. Thai women were much more attractive than I’d expected, and it felt nervewracking for me to be suddenly so attractive to so many beautiful women. I’d expected drugged-and-beaten-looking whores like in NYC, or boyish stickfigure 13-year-olds like they say Bangkok has, but instead I find myself in the wetdream sequence in Fellini’s 8 1/2. Which one do I want? How could I ever choose? We walked to the end and found the sidestreets with more specialized tastes – mostly gay – and at the main avenue which the Soi led into (Thanon Sukhumvit), there was a night bazaar. We saw a Sizzler Steakhouse and Erhan and Rana and Cos went to eat there. Dilek, Elif and I (the cool ones) ate Korean food. We reconvened on the street and I saw a man selling fried bugs from a pushcart. He had maggots, cockroaches, grasshoppers, and frogs. I’d eaten frogs in Florida so I ordered a goodie bag of a mix of the first three. I hadn’t learned the Thai numbers yet and he said what was probably 15 baht. I misheard him as 50 ($1.10). He was very happy. Nobody else wanted to share in my quarry. I started with a maggot, which was a mistake, as it was the chewiest of the three. The grasshoppers were my favorite, as they had the most texture and their legs poked the insides of my cheeks in unexpected places. I later grew to like the maggots.
I wanted to go to a sex show in a larger place, as I’d heard that the massage parlors were creep joints and that the smaller shows were fine until you wanted to leave – then some large bouncers would demand a sort of “exit tax.” King’s Castle had a chain of three places on Soi 1&2 and Pussy Galore was on Soi 2, but I was looking for Supergirls, which was recommended, and I couldn’t find it yet. Elif’s stomach was hurting and she wanted to sit down, so we took the logical choice and went into a gogo bar. They had no cover but their beers were an outrageous 90 baht ($2.05) apiece, which I guess was your entertainment charge. There was a small stage in the middle of the room. Surrounding it on all four sides was a bar with high chairs, at which we sat. Cos and Dilek sat against the back wall. The show consisted of about a dozen girls dancing in colored underwear. Some had implants. This was not the Bangkok I’d heard about…or was it? Every so often, one of them would get nude and dance a little and put her clothes back on. Across from us was a man being rubbed down by three of these girls. Some would disappear into the back room. I realized that this was an indoor version of what we were seeing outside. We decided to drink up and leave. Then a dancer takes an interest in me. She comes over and slithers down. She smiles. I smile. She makes her second and third fingers in a V and flickers her tongue between them in what is obviously some international sign language for cunnilingus. I look at Elif. Elif says, “Go with it.” I smile back to the woman and mimic her gesture. I feel like I am Woody Allen having fun with Diane Keaton in “Sleeper.” The woman then takes my head and pushes it down into her lap. She holds it there. I realize that I have to do something in order to get my head back. I kiss her left thigh with an exaggerated smacking sound. She releases my head. She smiles. I smile. I look at Elif. It is getting time to leave. The bartender, a stern middle-aged woman, walks out from behind the bar and goes behind me. The dancer, still smiling, makes the international cunnilingus gesture again. Before I can postulate what more could she want, she pulls open her panties with her left hand, pulls down my head with her right, and now the bartender-who-is-now-a-madam is forcing my upper back down from behind. I have laid down with some skanks in my time but there is no way I am going to eat out this woman. I play dead for a second and pull my head back, smile, and take my drink back to Dilek and Cos. Elif gets the check. The bill is for 480 baht. We leave 500. The bartender wants more. We say the tip’s on there. We walk quickly out the door. Rana discovers her purse has been opened but everything’s still inside.
We’re out on the street again. I want to find Supergirls. I want to see a show but do not want to fulfill the aims of 20th century theater by tearing down the 4th wall. A tout walks over to us and Elif, feeling better, inexplicably starts to flirt with him. What would you like to see, he asks. We have everything. Elif teases him. Will I learn a lot? Will I be better in bed? Will I be able to shoot ping pong balls across a room for my husband? Yes, yes, and yes! Then Elif says we’ll eat and come back. The tout doesn’t buy it. The tout starts to get upset. Not angry; nobody gets angry; but whiny. Why you lie to me? He asks? I tell him, you should know by now not to trust a woman. The tout pauses and laughs heartily. We finally escape. Nobody else approaches us but in front of all the doors along Soi 2 there they are, hawking their wares, carrying laminated menus of performances that you will see inside. All the shows are the same. I am glad. People come to Patpong for one of two reasons – to put something into a woman or to see something shoot out of a woman – and I am definitely here for the latter.
We find Supergirls, finally. It should have been easy, but it was at the end of Soi 2. In front were men and women dressed in Superman capes, red white and blue with an S emblazoned on the chests. This looks like the place for me. We’re going in. Erhan has heard enough and is taking Rana home. See ya! Forget to write!
Supergirls is less impressive inside. It’s kindof small. The first act is a woman with chopsticks. She tosses rings all over the stage. She squats on the chopsticks until they are satisfactorily inside her. She then manages to pick up the rings, one at a time, with said chopsticks, and deposit each ring around a whiskey bottle. I am impressed. The next girl descends from the ceiling into a large champagne-glass bathtub and wiggles around in the bubble bath. It is quite boring, but by now a Laotian prostitute has come over to our table to talk to us. She flirts with me. I have learned my lesson. She flirts with Elif. She has learned her lesson. She guesses all of our ages. She gets all of ours correct except guesses Cos as being younger than he is. She calls Cos Papa. She senses that we do not want to fuck her. We do not want to see her naked. She is soggy and her belly is hanging out. But we do want to talk. We learn that she is 28 years old and has a 6-year-old boy in Vientiane. She does not like working here very much. It took her three days to give birth. She gave birth by C-section. The scar was a mammoth one, and it ran vertically down below her underwear, which she started to open for us to show how long it was but I believed it ran down there. Dilek fell in love with her and gave her a dollar. I gave her a dollar. She was very nice, but about halfway through I started to lose interest, for at the end of the bar was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. This woman was about 18, maybe 20. She was one of the dozen or so women on the planet who have a perfect face as well as a perfect body. She undressed. I thought that maybe that was her show, that all she would do would be to dance around, or maybe hang out and take the stage. Her presence in the room was like Selma Hayek in “From Dusk To Dawn” – Selma wriggled with the snake, but, as Woody Allen says, 80% of her success was in just showing up.
The most beautiful woman in the world took the stage. Someone taped balloons on the poles on the stage and gave balloons out to some audience members. Elif said, “God, she’s beautiful.” The woman lied on her back and spread her legs. She inserted a tube into herself. She put a dart into the end of the tube. The dart looked like a small new year’s party favor with a long point stuck into the end. She took aim with fierce determination and squeezed her legs and the dart shot out and popped a balloon. She had no trouble with the first six balloons or so but as the balloons thinned out she started missing. There was no question of whether she would be allowed to give up, or that she would give up. She concentrated and kept shooting. The darts were starting to fall short. Finally she finished the balloons on the stage. Now she started on the ones in the audience. I covered my head. Elif held her balloon way out in front of her. The woman finished her act. I gave her a dollar as well. We gave a few cents to a friend of the Laotian so she wouldn’t feel left out either. The Laotian took one last look at Elif and felt her face, lovingly stroking her cheekbones. She asked what the Thai cop had asked the day before: “How you get so beautiful?” We told her she was beautiful too and went home.
