Bangkok Knights (28 page)

I felt Sunantha take my hand, and I experienced a flash of
irritation. After a moment I gently disengaged myself. “It’s too hot,” I said,
feeling like a bastard when her face tightened with hurt and she turned away.

The big orange buses stood shimmering in the exhaust fumes
which rose from their idling motors. Rank upon rank of torture machines,
chromed grills grinning, waited to be stuffed with happy funseekers fleeing the
city.
Pai tee oh,
the Thais called it — tooling around having fun, that
is to say. Extravagantly decorated with bright enamel colors and chrome trim,
these magical machines were in the business of gleaming and glinting in the
morning sun, promising sweet memories of distant places and good times to come.
That was how it was supposed to be, anyway — how it was supposed to grab you.

Already I could hear the pounding jungle sounds of the big
conga drums young Thais traditionally traveled with. Drums and castanets and,
sometimes, guitars. They’d start up before getting on the bus, keep the jam
session going till they got to where they were going, and then keep it up till
it was time to leave for home again. A locus of group identity and audible
assurance everybody was having a good time. Very audible. Convention just about
demanded it. The young men would keep the beat going in shifts, while both
girls and guys would periodically rally around the drummer to dance. The rhythm
could in fact be hypnotic, intoxicating, especially if it was accompanied by
regular infusions of Mekhong whiskey.

In the early morning in the middle of a heat wave with a
hangover, though, the effect was different. It was driving me crazy. I was
teetering on the edge of sanity, while Sunantha was gabbling in excited Thai to
some kids in the seat behind us, and I was promising myself I’d get off this
nightmare express and take a taxi home when the bus pulled out and we were on
our way. I thought about throwing myself from the moving vehicle, but the
impulse passed and I sank back into despair.

I think I will betray Sunantha if I ask this girl to
come sit with me in this place where only an hour ago Sunantha sat. But maybe
if I ask her to come back up to the Sugar Hut and drink a cold drink with me it
will be okay, because that is my place and not Sunantha’ s. Then I think of
V.D. and I think I must use a condom. I don t like thinking about V.D. and I
don t like using a condom. What would Sunantha do if I got VD.? Jesus. And now
there’s AIDS; what would I do if I got AIDS and gave it to Sunantha ? I´d
pretty well have to marry her, wouldn’t I?

Now I see the girl is getting impatient; she does not
want to float around in this inner tube all day and why doesn’t this stupid
farang, this Western ninny, stop making eyes and writing in his little book? He
should come down here and talk to me and take me to his hotel and fuck me and
give me money. Maybe he’s on holiday from his big job in the U.S.A. and will
stay here for a week and we will come here every day and play in the water and
he will drink beer on the beach and I won’t have to go sit in the bar trying to
make strangers come in and buy drinks. Then when he goes away he will give me a
beautiful present maybe some gold chains and some more money and I will get Bon
the cashier to write nice love-letters for me, not thirty-baht ones but the fifty-bahl
ones that are two pages long and tell him the times I think of him everyday and
ask him when is he coming back. And he will come back next year and ask me to
marry him and I will go to live in the U.SA. and I will have two maids and two
cars and I won t have to talk to strange men if I don’t want to. Or maybe he’s
from Switzerland. Lek at the Caligula Club says Switzerland is very beautiful.
Maybe he will buy me that nice dress Lek and I were looking at yesterday. It
was only 300 baht.

The noise level on the bus was amazing.

The driver had some Thai rock ‘n’ roll going full tilt on
the stereo, while at the same time the drums and castanets were jamming away at
the back. There was something in the Thai national character, I reflected, that
led them to crave noise. Anything that was supposed to be
sanuk,
‘fun’,
was defined by its vehicle of noise. I guessed we had to be having a ball,
then. I looked at Sunantha, and saw she was falling asleep. Noise? What noise?
she seemed to be saying. She and I lived in different worlds, I thought, not
for the first time. Our life together would be a constant grinding of cultural
gears.

Behind us and across the aisle were a gaggle of teen-age
girls. Very pretty girls, excited and happy. Unfortunately. Their lively
chatter was a significant part of the general bedlam which imprisoned me.
‘Lively chatter’ doesn’t quite do it—it sounded as though somebody had just
tossed a grenade into an aviary, or maybe even bombed the whole goddamed zoo.
Their ringleader, a doe-eyed cutie-pie with bangs and dimples, was twice as
happy and twice as excited as her nearest competitor. I was trying to find a
better simile than “like a distraught parrot” when I inadvertently slipped off
to sleep. I would’ve told you it was impossible, but I definitely dozed off for
a few moments.

He can be a homosexual, can he? Why is he all alone?
But he is looking at me and I can see he is interested in me. I think he has a
nice face, though maybe he is a little old. And he has a pretty big stomach,
but he looks strong and healthy. What is this ‘AIDS’ everyone is talking about?
You have to be a homosexual to have it, Lek says, and the men get all skinny
and tired-looking, and this man looks healthy and rich. Maybe his wife is dead
and he is lonely. Why doesn t he come down here to the water? Now I´m giving
him a big smile. Is he shy? He’s writing away in his book, maybe he is a
teacher. Do teachers in the U.S.A. make a lot of money? He looks very
intelligent and kind maybe I will go up and ask him if he will rub oil on me.
But he looks so serious and polite, how can I just go up and talk to him? Why
doesn’t he come down here to swim? Looking at me and writing in his book.

Writing in this book full of pointless thoughts and
very little punctuation, what Sunantha doesn’t know wont hurt her and
realistically speaking the chances of getting AIDS, especially if I use
condoms, is minimal, about the same I’ll bet as having a big shark come up and
eat me here in this beach chair.

I’d definitely been asleep, right up till when the
distraught parrot banged on the back of my seat and shrieked “You! You!”

My eyes opened to find a cellophane packet of something
that looked a lot like dried and pressed cowflaps being thrust at me.

”You eat! Good!
Aroil”

Sunantha said something to the Good Samaritan in Thai, and
she subsided into her seat, the object of much admiration on the part of her
companions — she’d baited the foreigner and lived.

Awake again, gritty-eyed with misery and fatigue, I said
to no one in particular, “My fucking balls are on fire.” Which was true.

“Why you say ‘fu-king’ so much today? It doesn’t sound
very good.” Sunantha sounded enough like my mother to piss me off some more. I
thought about having a cigarette, and became conscious of a piteous kind of
mewing which, it turned out, was coming from my lips.

“You sick?” asked Sunantha. “You want to stop bus?”

I couldn’t get back to sleep. I closed my eyes and
breathed in and out, deeply and regularly, counting odd numbers in and even
numbers out. I got up over a thousand nine hundred and fifty before we rolled
into Pattaya.

Just the fact of being off the bus and away from the drums
and the maddened jungle birds and having no knee under my chin was making me
feel much better. And there was the sea. Beautiful.

Pattaya Bay was calm, but further out I could see there
were whitecaps. Jomtien Beach, south and around the point, would be perfect; it
would be a fine day for sailing.

Aside from bargirls, Sunantha was about the only Thai
woman I knew who wasn’t all but heliophobic. Sunlight darkens the skin, and
dark skin is ugly, as any Thai will tell you. Pattaya Beach bargirls will
sunbathe, of course; they’ll play in the sun because they don’t care if polite
Thais think they’re ugly or not, and they know that Western men are attracted
to a good tan, so it’s good for business. Otherwise, however, it’s a rare Thai
lady who’ll expose herself to the sun except maybe at gunpoint Most of them
would just as soon have leprosy as a suntan.

Sunantha was different She’d told me again and again, up
in Bangkok, how she missed the sun and the sea, and how she loved it when her
skin turned dark, it made her feel so healthy and beautiful. Of course, I had
to wonder how much of this was for real, and how much was part of her plan to
weave the ties that bind.

On top of that, she was a good swimmer, she said. An
unusual accomplishment for a Thai lady. If it was true, I’d told myself. As it
turned out, though, Sunantha
could
swim, and that morning I rented an
eighteen-foot catamaran and we sailed out from Jomtien Beach towards the island of Koh Larn.

What I liked about catamarans was their easy speed, their
grace and ease of handling. Not wishing to alarm Sunantha, however, I’d
neglected to tell her my experience as a sailor had been limited mostly to
mono-hull dinghies. I had taken catamarans out a couple of times before, of
course. Never in exactly these conditions, mind you, but what the hell; a
sailboat is a sailboat, right?

Sunantha and I hung from our toes traps, leaning hard against
the wind as we flew along, one hull of the cat in the water, the other, our
perch, lifted in stylish defiance of the wind which sang in our sails. We flew,
we stormed, we shot from one swell to the next, creatures as much of the air as
of the water. With one hand I had the mainsheet hauled in tight, while with the
other hand on the tiller I worked the rudders, feeling for the perfect
synergism of wind and sea, coaxing the last bit of speed from our craft.

My hangover was a thing of the past, swept away in the
stream of briny exhilaration.

“I am
so freeel
” Sunantha’s joyous scream tore from
her lips and whipped back at me. She was grinning like an idiot, holding the
end of the jib-sheet across her straining thighs. She’d never looked more
beautiful.

We sheered diagonally down off one big swell, and I
suddenly had to let the mainsail out a touch and thrust the tiller over to
avoid plunging right into the base of the next wave, big as a house. The bow of
the far pontoon dug in ever so slightly, an abrupt tug merely hinting at the
awesome power hidden in those massive volumes of water as they swelled and
rolled. I’ll be darned, I thought; I’ll bet you could turn somersault with this
thing, no problem.

Hardly had this idea entered my mind when, skimming the water
like a gull, we crested another big one, skated down the far side, and plowed
right in with the starboard hull.

”This is lovely,
lovelyl”
Sunantha was yelling as,
with a casual disregard for her epiphanic delight and my seamanship both, we
were grabbed and hurled arse over teakettle into the sea.

Sunantha hollered in outrage, and I had a pretty clear
idea what was bothering her.

“It’s only jellyfish, for Chrissakes!” I screamed, my legs
and lower torso on fire. “Don’t for Chrissakes panic!”

In fact, she wasn’t for Chrissake panicking, as she
pointed out to me in fairly calm tones. “Jerryfish?” she asked. “You mean
maangaproonl
Are they dangerous?”

No, this kind wasn’t really dangerous. No more dangerous,
I’d bet, than her cut-rate mentholated talcum powder, I told her as we
clambered up on the lower hull.

We stood to hold on to the higher one.

“Are we okay?” she asked.

Fortunately, we hadn’t actually turned turtle; we were on
our side with the sails flat in the water. I uncleated the jib. “No problem,” I
said.

I was impressed and pleased at her
sang-froid.
Not
your typical Thai lady, in my experience. I told her we’d simply get the boat
righted, and it would be back to the beach for some nice noodles. Sure, and
cold coconuts, if she wanted. No problem. The stings would burn for a while,
but they would go away. No, there’d be no scars.

I hoped that’s all there would be to it, anyway. If we had
been in a dinghy, I would’ve had no misgivings whatever. This was a catamaran,
however, and I had never capsized a cat before. There was no centerboard to
stand on, for one thing, for leverage to roll the boat upright. But I could see
I’d better do something soon, because if the boat did go right over, with the
mast underneath us, we’d for sure never get it righted again. We would have to
wait for who knows how long, on a day like this, waiting for help. As we rose
and fell on the swell, I could see the beach a few miles distant, and the hills
around Sattaheep half obscured in the haze behind it.

But I didn’t want to pass on any of these reservations. If
Sunantha started to panic, things
would
be a mess.

”Does this happen often?” she asked in a matter-of-fact
but rather disappointed tone of voice. I got the feeling all exhilaration had
pretty well passed.

Oh, sure, I told her; all the time. No problem. I unlashed
a couple of spare ropes from the canvas deck and spliced them before going into
the water to tie the line around the mast. There were no more jellyfish, I was
pleased to report to Sunantha when she expressed concern for me.

Once back standing on the lower hull, rope around my
waist,
I threw myself back as far as I could, hoping my 190 pounds of
weight would be sufficient I repeated this maneuver again and
again, standing on tiptoe at the very edge of the hull before throwing

myself back in the attempt to gain maximum leverage.
Before long I was bruised and bleeding from rope-burns, at the same time I was
swearing profusely in two or more languages.