Travels (18 page)

Because he spoke Thai, Ed talked with the manager at the window and second-guessed our decisions. Apparently certain choices among the girls were not desirable; I never did figure it out.

The whole business of standing at the mirror was very bizarre. It was a little too much like the slave trade or the auction block or outright prostitution for my taste. Yet nobody was treating it that way. There wasn’t any sordid, sinful feeling; it was exactly like a massage parlor, sort of healthy and straightforward. I retired with my girl to a fully tiled room that had a low circular tub sunk into the floor. The girl made a bucket of suds, put a little hot water into the tub, and got me to sit in it. She scrubbed me with a rough brush, which was nice in a masochistic way, and gestured for me to lie on my stomach. Then she took off all her clothes, soaped her body, lay down on my back, and writhed with the soap.

I had a few problems with this. For one thing, I didn’t fit in the tub: my legs hung over the edge. So when she lay on top of me it was extremely painful on my shins. Also, because my back was arched, we
didn’t have good contact; she kept giggling and trying to push me into a better position, but there just wasn’t room in the tub. Then soap got up my nose and I began to cough.

We decided to call it a day. She rinsed me down, and I dried myself and got dressed and headed back upstairs.

“How was that?” Ed said. “Wasn’t that unbelievable?”

“Unforgettable,” I agreed.

Peter showed up, and we were off again, Ed with a peculiar gleam in his eye. He was building up to something. “A whorehouse?” he asked.

“I dunno,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

Peter made noncommittal noises.

“Just a look,” Ed said. He was showing us the town; he was the resident expert; he didn’t want to stop this wild ride.

“Okay, just a look.”

But the mood in the car was declining. My shins still hurt from the slippery massage, though I’d never admit to the others that I’d anything but unalloyed delight. Peter was saying nothing at all, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window. We were getting into that funny territory that men can share in A Night on the Town, or Chasing the Broads. A situation that says much more about the men being together than about any broads. What was happening, at 2:00 a.m. on a muggy Bangkok night, was that nobody was willing to be the first to quit.

But Ed, our guide, took the silence to mean we were bored with his itinerary thus far. He perceived us as especially jaded, requiring a special stimulus.

“I know what,” he said, snapping his fingers. “A
child
whorehouse!”

“Ed,” I said, “wouldn’t just a regular whorehouse be adequate?”

“No, no, no. A
child
whorehouse, absolutely. Listen, this place is
incredible
, you
have
to see it.”

And off we drove in the steamy night.

I’m thinking of Justine in
The Alexandria Quartet
, exotic episodes in exotic foreign countries.

Peter still stares out the window. I’m noticing the epaulets on his shirt again. I say to him, “Have you ever seen a child whorehouse?”

“Not personally,” he says. Very cool.

Bancroft pulls up a back alley into one of the indistinguishable gray concrete structures of Bangkok. There is a guard, and a central courtyard. In the courtyard are parking stalls, with curtains in front of each stall.

“That’s for the cars; you pull the curtain so people can’t read the license numbers,” Ed says. “Politicians, really important people come to this place. Wait here.”

He jumps out of the car, is gone. Moments later he is back.

“Okay, it’s all right.”

We go up a broad flight of stairs from the street. Then into what looks like a single large apartment. A long hallway, with doors opening off each side.

“We’ll just see what they have here tonight,” Ed says. We are led down the hallway to the first door.

Inside, a room draped with gaudy Indian fabric, pinks and reds. Harsh lighting. Sitting on pillows in the room, watching television, women with crude, heavy makeup. They don’t look like children to me.

“Pretty old,” Peter says, grinning at Ed. Needling him.

“Old! Christ!
Ancient!
” Ed says something quickly in Thai to the man beside him.

“I wonder how old they actually are?” Peter says. Now he has his reporter’s voice, his correspondent’s voice. So-and-so many women, such-and-such an average age.

We go down the hall to another door. Another room draped with cheap cloth. Women in negligees, bra and panties, garter belts. The bordello effect is spoiled by the fact that some of them are cooking food in a corner of the room. These girls are somewhat younger.

The man looks at us, questioning.

“I don’t know
what
this guy is thinking of,” Ed says. “The last time I was here, it was with”—he names a distinguished person—“and they had seven- and eight-year-olds here. Really. Extraordinary.”

We go farther down the corridor, to still another room. Every time I move down the corridor, I feel more claustrophobic. There are funny smells here, masked by incense. The corridor is getting narrower all the time. Short women stand in the corridor, clustering around us, trying to get us to choose them instead of the women in the rooms. In their dirty underwear, their garish makeup, they pluck at us, tug at us. When they smile, they have missing teeth.

“Ah,
here’s
the room,” Ed says.

The door opens. We see a handful of prepubescent girls. They look ten or eleven. Their eyes are dark and smudged. Their postures are coy; they strut and throw glances over their shoulders. One girl walks unsteadily in high heels too big for her.

“What do you say, guys?” Ed says. He’s grinning with excitement.

I just want to get out of there. I don’t care if they think I’m effeminate, I don’t care what they think. I just want to get away from these poor children and these reeking corridors with people pulling at me, touching me, little fingers reaching up for me. “Mister … mister …”

“I think I’ll pass,” I say. “I’m a little tired.”

“Hey, you don’t see what you like, we can keep looking.”

“No, I’m tired. Really. I’ll wait for you outside.”

“Okay. Suit yourself.” Ed looks at Peter. “Peter?”

This is another classic moment from Night on the Town. One guy has just crumped out, he’s tired or guilty or thinking of the wife or whatever, and now let’s see which way the rest of the evening is going to go. Are you in or out?

Peter says, “I want a cigarette. I’ll wait outside, too.”

“You guys,” Ed says, shaking his head, disappointed in us. “You don’t know what you’re missing here.”

“I’ll have to take that chance,” Peter says.

Peter and I go outside and sit on the bumper of Ed’s car and smoke cigarettes and talk about what has happened in our lives in the ten years since we have last seen each other. We suddenly have this camaraderie, because it is the middle of the night and we are tired and we have both decided to pass on the child prostitutes and we want to make sure the other guy doesn’t think we’re chicken or something. We have a really nice conversation, and then Ed reappears.

“You guys. You really missed it. There was some quite extraordinary material there.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Okay, what do you say we stop at a coffee shop? See what girls are around? Huh?”

We plead exhaustion. Ed says he doesn’t feel we’ve had a good enough night. We assure him we have. We manage to get back to Davis’s house. I walk into my bedroom with my head down so as not to be higher than the Buddha and I fall immediately asleep.

The next night I went to dinner at the house of a man who ran an advertising agency in Bangkok. He was an Australian known for his cooking; everyone coveted an invitation to his meals.

Before dinner, someone unrolled a Thai stick of marijuana, made a joint, and passed it around. Some guests smoked it; others didn’t. I smoked some. How could you go to Thailand and not have Thai grass?

When the joint came around, I had some more.

“Better be careful,” Davis said. “That stuff is strong.”

“Hey, don’t worry,” I said. “I’m from L.A.”

Davis shrugged. I had a couple of vodkas before dinner, too. I was feeling pretty good, sitting around, talking to people. In fact, I was glad
to be feeling so good, because for a couple of days I had been having this undercurrent of feeling that I was
far from home
. Meaning that I was overextended, lonely, stretched a little far, having more anxieties about my new experiences than I was admitting to myself.

But then, when we got up to go to the dinner table, I realized that I had misjudged my consumption. I was very high. I was even having a little trouble coordinating things. Oh well, I thought, I’ll be okay when we sit down again. I’ll be okay once I eat something.

We sat at the table, and there was an Indian woman, the wife of a diplomat, on my left. A Thai advertising account executive on my right. The food was passed around; the conversation was very pleasant.

And then, suddenly, I began to see gray. The gray got darker. And then I was blind.

It was odd. I could hear the conversation, and the clink of silverware around me, but I was completely blind.

The Indian woman asked me to pass something.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is going to sound funny, but I’m blind.”

She laughed delightfully. “You are so amusing.”

“No, seriously. I’m blind.”

“You mean you can’t see?”

“No. I can’t.”

“How extraordinary. I wonder why?”

I was wondering that myself. “I don’t know.”

“Do you suppose it was something you ate?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you see me now?”

“No. Still blind.”

“I wonder what we should do,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The host was notified. Plans were made. Everyone seemed to be treating this as a normal occurrence. I thought, Have other people been blind in this house before? Next I felt myself carried by several people upstairs to the second floor, and put on a bed in an air-conditioned bedroom.

Some time went by. I opened my eyes. I couldn’t see anything.

For the first time I began to worry. It had been okay to be blind for a while, but it wasn’t going away. I wondered what time it was, and felt my watch with my hand. Was this going to be a permanent condition? Was I going to have to get a Braille watch? What kind of room was I in?

Some more time went by. Someone touched my shoulder. I looked
over and saw an elderly Thai woman smiling at me. She gave me a glass of water, giggled, and went away. After a while, she came back. By then I could see all right, but I felt terrible. After that I went to sleep. Much later Davis came up, clucked his tongue, and drove me home.

In the morning I told Davis that I wasn’t going to go sightseeing, I was just going to take it easy, maybe sit in his garden by the pool. Read a book. Get over the strangeness of things.

“Good idea,” he said. “Just keep an eye out. The gardener saw a cobra in the garden last week.”

Davis announced that we were going upcountry for a couple of days. He had to check on sales for the pharmaceutical company he worked for. Prescription drugs were legally sold over the counter in Thailand at that time, and all the international drug companies treated Thailand as a major market.

The countryside was flat and green and beautiful. We stayed in Chinese hotels and had a wonderful time. Finally we got to Ayutthaya. Davis said he was going to check his stores, see how they were doing. “But there’s a large open market around the corner,” he said. “Big upcountry market. Have a look, you’ll find it interesting.”

I went around the corner.

The market was enormous, almost an acre. It was entirely covered by white sheets to block the sun. A beautiful, vast open space, it was filled with everything from produce to clothing. I wandered around, looking at what people were selling. The sheets were so low I had to duck my head, but it was a fascinating market and I was glad to see it.

Because of my height, I caused a considerable commotion. The upcountry people stopped and stared. And, in common with most Asian people, they laughed. The laughter began in scattered places here and there, but it grew, swelling to fill the entire open market. They were all laughing at me, pointing and laughing. I smiled back, good-naturedly. I knew they didn’t mean anything. It was just an expression of embarrassment.

The laughing continued. It became a roar in my ears, like an ocean wave. People were dashing off to get their friends. The whole town was running to get a look at me. The laughter built. Now there were four or five hundred people laughing. I was on display. Everywhere I saw open mouths, laughing. Finally I looked down at the ground and saw, at my
feet, an old Thai woman rolling on the ground, clutching her stomach in hysterics, she was laughing so hard. Her body blocked me; I couldn’t step over her.

I looked around and thought, What an interesting experience. Here is a chance to see how it feels to have five hundred people laughing at you. How does it feel?

And I suddenly thought,
I hate it
. And I turned and walked quickly away.

I went back to the shop where I had left Davis. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Knew they’d get a kick out of you,” he said.

“Jesus Christ.”

“They don’t mean anything.”

“I know,” I said. “But still.”

The Thais are famously good-natured. They are called the Danes of Asia, because of their easy dispositions. A favorite expression,
Mai pen rai
, means—more or less—“Never mind,” and is invoked to resolve all sorts of disappointments and upsets. I frequently remarked on the wonderful quality of the Thai character, so different from what I was accustomed to at home.

One day in Bangkok, in a taxi going back to Davis’s house, I saw a Thai woman and a European woman in their separate cars, trying to pass each other in the narrow road. They were both leaning out of their cars, having a screaming argument. Nobody was saying “
Mai pen rai
.”