Bangkok Knights (25 page)

I had to go to Penang to look after a bit of business, and
I stuck around down there a couple of weeks to research some stories I had in
mind.

When I got back, I dropped in at the Cheri-Tone to find
Meow had left off teaching Nixon how to say handy stuff like ”Dubba loom eighty
bahf\
and had instead taken to drilling Trevor in the Thai language.

“Kuhn mee pyoo suay”,
said Trevor. “You have lovely
skin.”

“Kaeng mahkl”
Meow applauded. “Very good!” She was
simpering as though Trevor’s compliment had been a real one, and she was its
target And maybe that was the case after all, for Trevor was simpering a little
bit, himself.

I was told Trevor might really be serious about learning Thai. “They’ve been at it a week, now. If he’s not careful, she’ll have him reciting the
marriage vows before its over,” Eddie said.

“So it looks like he’s a goner?”

“They’ve kept pretty close to each other, these past
couple of weeks, all right—except for last weekend, that is. Lek and Meow are
still trying to get Trevor to spill it, where he was those two days.

“They’ve even made life a little rough for me, but I’ll
never tell. Not as long as Trevor keeps buying the drinks.”

At that Eddie raised his empty glass and waved it, not too
subdy, in Trevor’s direction.

“Have another, Eddie,” called good old Trev. “Just put it on
my bill.

“You, too,” he said to me.

“So where was he?” I asked quietly.

“At the beach with Dinky Toy.” Eddie’s lips didn’t even
move, though with his contempt for Meow’s linguistic talents, I don’t know why
he was afraid of her lip-reading English at a distance of twenty feet

“He’s been rolling around to Boon Doc’s of an evening, as
well, and spending some time with Dinky Toy in that booth down in back, maybe
practising Thai, who knows?

“What I do know, however, is this: if I was him, I’d go to
Manila next time. Less complicated. Healthier, too, chances are.”

After Trevor’s Thai lesson finished, he came over to shoot
the breeze for a few minutes. In spite of all the female company he’d been
enjoying this time out, he was saddened at having to return to Kuwait for yet one more tour of duty as a bachelor.

Meow and Lek tried to console him by promising to write
often. After all, this would afford Meow a good opportunity to practise the
English they were teaching her at A.U.A. Lek could help. And Trevor had given
Meow a beautiful set of English-language books and tapes as a going-away present.
And he’d promised he’d write. Meow was so happy.

We were happy Meow was happy, and it was thoughtful of
Eddie not to mention Dinky Toy’s similar state of joy, inspired by her new
dress and the promise of a letter as soon as Trevor got back to Kuwait

Back to minister to the automotive arteries of that desert
emirate — a worthy calling, but a lonely one for a single man with a somewhat
indiscriminate enthusiasm for the opposite sex. Back to engineer traffic and,
you had to imagine, to commune with his computer late into the nights, seeking
the specifications and exact whereabouts of his ideal mate.

Trevor was going back a bachelor still, true.
Nevertheless, he was not entirely the same man who had arrived some weeks
earlier, carrying his print-out and harboring illusions of life’s sweet
simplicity and the supreme power of reason. He was learning that existence
wasn’t always as amenable to rational planning as he’d believed. And he still
had his moustache, which further indicated a new maturity. Who knew how wise
he’d be, and what new lessons in life would present themselves for his further
edification next time he appeared in Bangkok — this time after
three
years
as a single man in Kuwait.

Eddie told me he had come up with a new theory. The world
is really nothing but a gigantic computer, and we are each of us little
programs being run in the Cosmic Consciousness, this consciousness being
probably new at the game and furthermore trying to operate without a manual.

“Yes,” he said, “Trevor is going to get married. A woman
is being duly chosen for him by the Cosmic Consciousness. All that time Trev
has spent with computers and correspondence might just as well have been
devoted to Space Invaders; his marriage is being selected by forces beyond his
ken. And the process is almost finished. The field of possibilities has been
narrowed down to a finite set, though exactly how it’s going to turn out not
even the Big C.C. knows as yet.”

For the time being, in any case, all was harmony at the
Cheri-Tone. There was a cheery snatch of some broken-hearted love song from
Lek, as she cleaned up in the kitchen. Meow was caressing her language books
and no doubt dreaming of long conversations to come. Even Nixon was chuckling
in what could’ve passed for a benign manner.

Trevor came back from a shopping trip, a litde later,
carrying among other things Thai language books and cassettes. Now, when he got
tired of communing with his computer on those long, lonely nights in Kuwait, he could hold conversations with his tape recorder, instead.

He also had a bottle of champagne.

“This is my last morning,” he said, only the merest hint
of a defensive note in his voice, in keeping with his new maturity and
self-assurance. “I know what I told you about champagne breakfasts, but I’ve
decided we’re to have one anyway.”

“Anyway?
Anywayl”
snorted Eddie. “’Anyway’, my eye.”

But Trevor didn’t get it.

Bernard Baxter was from Seattle, and he had been married
three times. He was recently separated from his third wife, and this trip to Bangkok was to celebrate. He’d never been to Thailand before, he told us. Thai women, in
his opinion, were on the whole the most beautiful he had ever seen. They were
so delicate, so graceful. So fine-boned, so smooth-skinned. So feminine.

“That’s what’s wrong with American women,” he said.
“They’re not feminine. All this so-called ‘feminism’, they should call it
anti-feminism.
They all want to wear the trousers and have hair on their legs, too. When
they’re with area/man, they can’t hack it, and the next thing out come the
claws and, whiz, it’s off with your balls. And your dick. Let’s all be equal,
they’ll tell you, and if I can’t have real
cojones,
then neither can
you. It’s all verbal, of course. They ‘re experts at it. My first wife could do
it with about three well-chosen words: snip, snip, snip.

“I’ve had three wives and they were all castrating
bitches. Over the years, I’ve lost more balls than a blind golfer.”

Bernard wasn’ t entirely sober, and this idea of a blind
golfer got him laughing so hard he choked on his beer. “But your Asian women —
that’s what it’s all about. Can’t get any more feminine than that.”

As if on cue, a striking specimen of this touted Thai
femininity appeared and without so much as a by-your-leave planted herself on
Bernard’s knee. “You muttah-fry?” she asked him, grinning impishly and
squirming deeper into his lap.

“Muttah-fry?” said Bernard. He hadn’t the faintest idea
what she was talking about. But if she
wanted
him to muttah-fry, then it
was clear from this whole manner he wanted to do it, or be it, or whatever it
was the admission “Yes, I muttah-fry” might entail.

She was lovely. Long jet-black hair fell straight down her
back to the dimples in her cheeks; she had flawless tawny skin and there was
lots of that in evidence, as was usually the case with dancers at Shaky Jake’s
Gogo Bar. Oh, yeah — Bernard was agreeable. And if, after all, she
didn’t
want
him to muttah-fry, then he wasn’t going to do it. Or be it, or whatever.

“I think you muttah-fry,” she stated, a note of censure in
her voice throwing Bernard into a mild panic.

“What’s she talking about? What—am I ‘mortified’; is that
what she means?” He looked at Eddie and me. “Okay, I guess I should be
mortified, when I think about it — what with a beautiful seventeen-year-old
girl on my lap, and me old enough to be her father and not feeling what you
would call at all paternal towards her. Yeah, okay; I’m mortified. In fact, my
daughter is
older
than her.”

He put his arms around the girl and nuzzled in the hollow
where her neck met her shoulder, just to show us how mortified he really was.
He breathed in so deeply it looked as though he was trying to inhale her,
dancing togs and all. “You buy me a cola,” she said, and he sneezed.

It was like the scent of blood in shark-infested waters:
no sooner had Bernard ordered a cola for the young lady than a couple more of
Shaky Jake’s prize fillies moved in, both of them showing signs of acute
thirst. No problem, he told them; there is cola enough for everyone.

Before you knew it, he was as popular as could be and,
thirst slaked for the time being, his covey of new-found friends returned to
the dissection of his character. The expression ‘muttah-fry’ recurred often, as
did some phase in Thai I couldn’t quite get —
tat Hang pet,
or something.

Eddie explained to him that ‘muttah-fry’ was actually
‘butterfly’, and that the ladies were accusing him of being inconstant: of
having a proclivity to flit from fragrant flower to fragrant young flower,
drinking deep of their nectar before screwing off and leaving them desolate.

The girls were giggling now, as the one on his knee made
snipping motions with her index and middle fingers.

“What’s this?” Bernard inquired.

“She says you’re hers, and if you play around, she’s going
to clip your wings.” The fragrant flower in question proceeded to snip more
graphically at Bernard’s nether regions, the better to illustrate Eddie’s
commentary. “Only she doesn’t mean your wings,” Eddie added.

“You’re kidding.” Bernard might have been trying to smile.

“Naw. Your Western women, they just do it with unkind
words and feminist cant; these little ladies, on the other hand, use more
tangible hardware. Like scissors. No anesthetic.”

Bernard winced. Reflexively he tried to cross his legs,
but this was pretty well impossible with the girl sitting on his lap.

“That’s right,” Eddie continued. “It’s kind of a
tradition, here in Thailand. Happens about ten times a year, on the average.
Nine times out of ten it’s some wife who reckons her husband’s playing around,
and she doesn’t like it. Normally, though, it’s just the penis that goes
missing; the ladies probably figure that’ll make it even more frustrating.”

Eddie had obviously made a serious study of this
phenomenon. Knowing what he did, then, you would’ve thought he’d want to be a
bit more discreet about certain of his extra-marital associations, given his
wife Lek’s regard for Thai tradition and culture in most other respects.

“Oh, no; ha, ha,” Bernard was saying. “I’m no butterfly;
not me. Far from it.” While he was sealing this pledge with a kiss, I asked
Eddie about that Thai phrase.

“Tat Hang pet”
he said. “Sure I know it — it’s
slang; it means ‘feeding the ducks’.”

’Feeding the ducks’, it turned out, was a popular
euphemism for the unauthorized removal of your husband’s or boyfriend’s private
parts. Eddie told us the expression was a fairly new one. “I’ve been told it
dates back a few years to when a young man and his wife were headed upcountry
together on a train. While the guy was having a snooze, his wife was having an
attack of pique, in the course of which she lopped his cock off. He woke up
somewhat distraught, and wanted to know where his penis was. Out the window, it
turned out, so he pulled the cord and the train stopped and pretty soon
everybody was looking for his missing part.

“As the story has it, somebody found it, but it was in a
duck’ s mouth, and the duck wasn’t about to relinquish such a tasty snack
without a chase, and it was a merry time had by all chasing the duck all around
the place while the amputee kept asking anybody who’d listen if the doctors
could sew it back on and the wife kept saying she didn’t care if they couldn’t.

“I don’t know how it all turned out eventually, but
chances are the duck emerged as the happiest one of the bunch.”

“With the possible exception of the wife,” said Bernard,
“if she was anything like my three exes. My God, what a story. And they
really
do this?” He was looking at his girlfriends with new respect.

“Listen, you see that girl over there? The skinny one with
the nice bottom; you see her? Tottering along in high heels, buns going in all
directions?” Eddie said.

If you asked me, that described about half a dozen
individuals within easy eyeshot, but Bernard said, “Yeah. Oh, yeah; she’s a
real beauty.”

“That she is,” Eddie agreed. “She did two years in prison
for a wee job of amateur surgery she performed on her husband.”

Now, this was news to me. What did Jake think he was
doing, anyway? By all means hire an ex-con, do a public service and all —
you’ve got my admiration. But hire a feeder of ducks to work your gogo bar? You
might just as well hire a firebug as night watchman in your fireworks factory,
or maybe a child molester to run your orphanage. Let’s spread this little
rumor, I thought, and watch the customers abandon this joint like the place was
on fire.

“You’re kidding,” I told Eddie.

”Don* t you remember that story?” he asked me. “The young
salesman? His wife found he had been keeping a couple of minor wives on the
side, and she whipped his dick off? Being a modern housewife and having no
ducks in the yard, she threw the thing into her electric blender and pureed it,
pretty well ending any realistic hopes of reattachment.”

“A trifle vindictive,” I suggested.

“Quite so,” Eddie agreed.

Bernard was staring at the alleged perpetrator in
horrified fascination. “What’s her name?” he asked Eddie.

“Her name? Why, it’s * Yeow’. Which is probably what her
husband said when he woke up without his dick, though he wouldn’t necessarily
have been addressing her when he said it.