Bangkok Knights (10 page)

“But if the music’s loud enough, there’s no problem. You
can’t talk and you can’t think. It puts you into a kind of trance. Like drugs.”

Heaven preserve us from drugged trances, I agreed, and
swigged at my beer.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Ernest “They can’t even get from
their ‘home music center’ to the disco without a portable cocoon of noise —
have you noticed how many Walkman stereos there are around these days? If you
want to talk to one of these zombies you’ve got to use semaphore first, just so
they’ll lift an earphone and come out into the real world for a minute.”

Ernest was really on the boil. Over-wrought, you might
have said. By this time he was sweating beer almost faster than he could
replenish it

“Ernest,” I said gently, “if you want to talk about the
Crisis of Modem Civilization, then just imagine what the world would’ ve been
like if the Walkman hadn’t been invented, and for every Walkman we instead had
a ghetto-blaster. There would be your crisis.”

“Listen, there’s something seriously wrong,” he told me.
“It’s getting totally bizarre. Take the other afternoon, for example. I went to
meet someone in a gogo bar. He said I’d find him in the video section.

“There were two gogo platforms, each with half a dozen
girls working out to fifty-megaton music. Just behind one of the platforms
there were a number of booths equipped with headphones. There was a customer
installed in each booth, headphones on, staring at the video, utterly oblivious
to the dancers and the crashing music. Alienation? Stick intravenous drips in
their arms, put an endless tape loop on the video and they’d stay happily
mummified forever, swaddled in layer upon layer of noise and music and flashing
light.

“Then this guy I was meeting wanted to stay there and
talk.
Talk! You couldn’t hear yourself think. All the lights were flashing, and
the video was blinking away, and the girls.

A classic case of noise fatigue. My advice to Ernest was
to get out of Bangkok. I suggested he go down south and find himself a deserted
beach with palm trees and listen to the sea for a week or two.

I saw him again a few weeks later. He didn’t look much
like a man just back from a tropical idyll.

“There is no refuge,” he pronounced, seeking refuge in a
large glass of Singhabeer. “I’m a mess. I don’t belong in this world; I’m some
kind of anachronism.”

He had gone to Koh Nai Fun with his fiancee, Noi. “It was
a long bus-ride,” he said, “but not too uncomfortable, I suppose. We took the
ferry to Koh Samui and then a taxi to where we were to get a boat to the island of Nai Fun. The landing was in a picturesque little fishing village, and we sat
waiting for the boat under a cashew-nut tree. Through the coconut palms and the
red and yellow flowering shrubs along the road, the sun sparkled on the sea.
You could hear birds and surf and the sounds of children playing—balm for the
soul.

“Then a pick-up truck parked on front of us, and a
loudspeaker proceeded to blare advertisements for fish sauce. This went on for
a good twenty minutes.

“I couldn’t believe it; no one seemed to mind. How is it
there are fines for littering the pavements, and you can go to jail for
deliberately polluting the rivers, yet if someone wants to fill the public air
with aural rubbish, it’s no problem?

“Noi was looking her usual serene self. I asked her what
she
thought about the fish-sauce vendors. ‘Oh, Ernest,’ she tells me, ‘it was
making me think of my home in Lumphun and when I was a little girl. I miss my
home so much.’

”This racket is the stuff nostalgia is made of? I asked
myself. I didn’t understand. Then Noi told me how there were loudspeakers in
the middle of her village and how every morning at sunrise they’ d broadcast
the local news, the upcoming social calendar, messages from the temple, and so
forth. Everyone would rise with a warm sense of community, moving to their
daily chores through a common medium of noise.

“Maybe that’s what I’m missing,” said Ernest. “The early
conditioning.

“The boat finally came to take us away to Nai Fun. It was
a beautiful island. We got a fine bungalow for 40
baht
per night, and we
headed for their thatched dining pavilion as soon as we had unpacked and
showered.

“What a scene: towering coconut palms silhouetted against
the twilight, surf foaming on the white sand beach, nothing around but a few
thatched huts — no cars, no motorcycles, no discos. This was it—this is what we
had come in search of. My asylum. I turned to Noi. ‘Ernest,’ she said, ‘I
didn’t know the sea was going to be so noisy.’ Noisy? It’s true, there was a
lovely surf crashing up on the beach not too far from where we sat. ‘Is this
noise going to go on all night?’ She looked quite concerned.

“A number of other people had meanwhile come in to sit at
neighboring tables, and I was diverted from my intended panegyric to the
natural music of wind and sea.

“Two of the gentlemen were smoking some sweet-smelling
herb. They looked like castaways — skin burnt dark, shaggy hair bleached out by
sun and sea, dressed only in ragged shorts. Then, from an embroidered Shan
shoulder bag, one of them produced a thing of horror. It was a Walkman. But the
full enormity of the horror dawned only as I watched them proceed to wire up
two little speakers to the infernal thing. And those speakers were ‘little’
only in the sense of
lekphrik kee noo
_y
like those tiny
‘mouse-shit peppers’, the ones that can make Thai cuisine so interestingly
lethal. They
were powerful.

“Can you believe it? First they invent the Walkman so
people can go around turning their brains to putty without being being a public
nuisance. Then they sell speakers for them. Voila The ghetto-blaster’s been
reinvented.

”I could forget my apology to Noi for the surf; you
couldn’t hear the surf anymore. I thought of asking the castaways to turn the
thing off, but I looked around and everyone else was bobbing their heads and
snapping their fingers, and I didn’t think it would make me too popular. Even
Noi was giving a suspicious twitch or two in time to the beat.

“Dinner was
torn yam kung,
fresh fish and salad —
it was delicious, though I didn’t enjoy it.

“We turned in early, that first evening. If Noi hadn’t
done a lot of tossing and turning and complaining about the surf, I would’ve
found it very relaxing.

“My eyes popped open at first light. Noi was already
awake, eyes big and somewhat fearful as she looked at me. ‘What’s that noise?’
she asked. There was something besides the surf — something rather odd.
Whatever it was, it was swelling in volume and intensity; in fact, it seemed to
be rushing straight towards our little hut.

“Abruptly the noise reached an ungodly pitch and
stabilized just outside. At the same time my head cleared, and I realized what
it was. Cicadas. From time to time during our daily rambles, we would hear them
start up again, but never, at those other times, would there be anything like
that early-morning crescendo of buzzing and whining hysteria.

“After listening to this phenomenon over the next couple
of days, always at first light, I figured out what was happening. There was a
wooded hill right behind us, and the insects at the top of the hill would be
triggered first by the rising sun, the cicadas lower on the hill successively
joining in as the sun rose higher and higher out of the sea, till finally the
whole hill was in sunlight, the monster finding its full voice as it stopped
just outside our door.

“Noi was not particularly impressed by my clever bit of
deduction. Furthermore, it seemed that both surf and cicadas gave her a pain in
the neck. ‘I can’t sleep with all this noise, Ernest.’ How do you figure it?
This is the lady who could fall asleep under a tape-vendor’s stall in the
middle of a
tuk-tuk
rodeo. In Bangkok, she could do this; out there in
Nature she’s an insomniac.

“Anyway, we went to breakfast early that first morning and
found our head-banging castaways already hard at both the heavy-

metal rock and the herb. Enough was enough. A few
inquiries amongst the locals gave us directions to a deserted beach on the
other side of the island.

“After a fairly hot and grueling hike, carrying our lunch
and my snorkeling gear, we arrived at our new refuge. It looked as though it
had been landscaped by someone with tropical idylls in mind. Forested hills
plunged to a grove of lofty palms which ran the length of the beach; growing
out of the sand on the beach a parallel line of mangroves offered shade. The
clean white sand was undisturbed by human footprint. The water was calm and
clear, and I could see a reef a couple of hundred yards out ‘This is it*, I
thought ‘This is where we spend the rest of the holiday.’ Within the first fifteen
minutes we had scared up one gigantic lizard, a sea turtle, and a big red
jellyfish. An eagle wheeled high overhead. None of these items was amplified,
and none was naturally noisy enough to bother Noi. In fact, the only sounds
were some discreet observations from birds and monkeys back in the forest, an
occasional outburst from a chorus of cicadas, and the gentle lapping of the
water’s edge. It was heaven. Lying there in the sun, feeling my mind unclench
after all those months in Bangkok, I finally drifted off to sleep.

“’What the blazes is
that?
I said, suddenly awake,
heart pounding. ‘Oh, that’s Carabao.
Mai pen rai\
never mind. They’re my
favorite,’ Noi replied. Anchored off the reef was a little wooden fishing boat.
It had crept up while I slept, anchored, and then fired a broadside of rock’ n’
roll which suggested they had to be carrying speakers bigger than the boat
itself. It was incredible. After a few minutes, I decided to don snorkeling kit
and swim out to look for peace underwater. It was no good; I swear I could
still hear the bass vibrations twenty feet below the surface. I would’ve given
you $ 100 for a limpet mine. When I went back in to the beach, Noi was lying in
the sand, quite relaxed. ‘I wonder if they have the
new
Carabao album,’
she mused.

“Ever the optimist, I led us back again the next morning.
This time
two
fishing boats showed up, and we were treated to dueling
stereos: Carabao and, I think, Pink Royd blazing away at each other at
point-blank range. Maybe it’s a new method of killing fish.

”We had come all that way for peace and quiet, and I was
going to have peace and quiet if it were to be the death of us. The next day we
rented a tent, collected fishing lines and food, and were transported to a
little desert island some miles away, with promises our boatman would return in
three days’ time to pick us up.

“So there we were: Mr. and Mrs. Crusoe — marooned, at
least for a few days. Unspoiled? This island made Koh Nai Fun look like Hong Kong. Finally, I thought: peace.

“Then I heard reggae music. Was this a nightmare, I asked
myself? Or—much the same thing — was it another disco fishing boat? But no,
there was no boat. Okay, then, I’d finally flipped out. But no, Noi heard it
too. (Actually, she looked just a little pleased; she hadn’ t been altogether
happy with the idea of an utterly deserted island, to start with.)

“In the event, it turned out to be our castaways from the
first beach. They had arrived two days before in search of a fabled jungle
glade they had been told harbored mushrooms of unparalleled magical power. They
had pitched their tent somewhere, but now they couldn’t find it. Then, while
they were swimming, a monkey had made off with their money-belts, and they
found themselves entirely destitute, but for their Walkman, their tapes, and a
bag of batteries. A boat was coming to collect them in two days, and they didn’
t have even the wherewithal to pay their passage back to Nai Fun.

“Just to help them out, of course, I bought their Walkman.
I made them an offer they couldn’ t refuse. They let Noi choose three tapes, as
well, so I finally got my peace and quiet, while Noi had insulation against the
noises of nature. I tried laying out nightlines for fish using the speakers as
floats, but they didn’t work.

“During the next couple of days, the castaways would from
time to time come cringing, asking Noi if they could have a few minutes with
the headphones. The last day, after they had finally left, was
wonderful—everything I had dreamed of. Only it was one day, rather than the week
I’d really needed.

“We came back to Bangkok at the end of the holiday
weekend. We found we couldn’t get seats on the train or on the tour bus, so we
had to ride on those orange
thammada
buses — you know, the ones with the
non-stop drums and castanets and about three stereos going at the same time?”

”Good grief!” I said. “How on Earth did you survive that?
What is that trip, twelve hours?”

“Longer,” Ernest said. He smiled strangely and put a bag
up on the table. From it, he extracted a Walkman, complete with headphones. “I
used this.”

I was shocked. Ernest, with a
Walkmanl

“Here,” he said. “Put these on.”

I slipped the headphones on, and he started the tape.
Cicadas. Cicadas and surf. A quiet spell, and then some birdsong.

“The guy with the bungalow let me use his recorder.”

Ernest was meeting Noi at the Ambassador Hotel, and he had
to run. The last I saw of him, he was hailing a tuk-tuk. He was wearing the
headphones.

I ordered one more beer for the road, and asked the waiter
to turn the music up a little.

For their own avian reasons, the committee chose that moment
to call a plenary session to order.

“Mao laaohr”
cried Nixon with raucous glee, and he
did sound ‘drunk already’. “I’m not a crook! Wow!”

Assorted whoops, whistles, and shrieks of derision greeted
this pronouncement.