Bangkok Knights (26 page)

“As luck would have it, however, the very doctor who got
to look at Yeow’s handiwork also had a patient who had been pestering him for a
sex-change operation. The doc figured this was as good a time as any to grant
this gay blade his fondest wish, so he called him up and told him to come right
away and bring his dick with him. I believe that was the first penis transplant
in history.”

“Did it work?” said Bernard.

“I don’t know for sure. You can’t always believe what you
read in the papers, but a couple of weeks after the operation I read an
interview where the salesman said he was as happy as could be, and that it
worked as good as the old one, maybe better, and was his wife ever going to be
pleased.”

“What? You mean he actually went back to his wife?”

“Naw. I guess he wanted to, but she went to jail, and I
read he was murdered by a girlfriend sometime before she got out.”

Now that Eddie had related this astonishing tale, I did
remember reading about it, and I recalled that’s the way it all happened, if
you could believe the papers. And this was that very lady in the flesh. Yeow.

I had to go out to make a few phone-calls, and when I got
back I found Eddie dicing with the cashier for drinks, and Bernard standing all
alone at the bar. What’s this, I wondered; has Eddie scared him off Thai
womanhood altogether? But such was not in fact the case.

”I’m waiting for Yeow,” Bernard told me. “She’s changing
into her street clothes now. You know, she speaks pretty good English. I’m
taking her to Pattaya Beach tomorrow.”

Yeow came out all legs and gleaming teeth and sweetness,
dressed in a short flame-red silk dress. She looked smashing, and Bernard
slipped a possessive arm around her waist, beaming proudly.

After they had left, Bernard’s first girlfriend of the
evening came over, craving still more cola. She looked at me sadly and said,
“Your friend, he muttah-fry.”

What could I say? It was true.

Eddie had left off dicing with the cashier, which was just
as well because the cashier probably couldn’t have drunk any more anyway.

“Bernard the Blind Golfer,” I said. “How many times did he
say he’d been married?”

“Three times,” Eddie replied. “Funny how it turned out
tonight, wasn’t it? With Bernard, I mean. Kind of makes you think.”

“It’s unbelievable. The woman behind the story of that
first transplant — here, working at Shaky Jake’s. And then Bernard actually
takes her out!”

Eddie stared at me, eyebrows raised to the extent I had to
think he was signaling surprise. “You mean you believed me?” he said.

“You’re telling me it was malarkey?”

“The story was accurate in every detail but one — the lady
in question was not Yeow.”

“But why...?”

“Hey. I just wanted to make it more interesting for him,
add a little spice. After all, the poor guy’s just escaped a bona fide
ball-buster, the third time in a row, and this is his first trip to Bangkok. He deserves a bit of excitement

“I just hope he won’t be too disappointed if he learns the
truth.”

It had just turned Happy Hour when I got to Boon Doc’s.
There were two new faces at the bar, as well as a couple of the regulars.
Pretty normal for a Monday evening, except for one thing: there were girls
draped about the joint like a collection of Salvador Dali watches and spoons,
the way they clung to the contours of their various places of rest. It was as
though someone had said, “I’ve got a hundred bucks, here, for the best study in
languor, so go to it.” Keow, sprawled over there, looked as though she might
ooze right off her seat and onto the floor under the table. Noi the new
waitress was collapsed on the far end of the bar, face hidden in her arms,
great mane of glossy black hair spilling over the counter.

It turned out Big Toy, the cashier, had had a birthday
party the night before, an occasion which had coincided with a visitation from
a squad of U.S. sailors up from Pattaya. One thing led to another, I was told,
and before you knew it the ladies, normally almost teetotal, had shown those
young tars a thing or two about sailing three sheets to the wind. And now their
ships had passed in the night, and they had hangovers, never mind it was Happy
Hour and there were customers who could’ ve used the sprightly company of
winsome young creatures such as these specimens were known to have been in
times past.

Big Toy was sitting at the cash, just about awake; she had
half a bottle of Kratingdaeng stimulant cocktail within easy reach and a shot
glass of tequila with salt and lime on the side. Dinky Toy was behind the bar
polishing a glass, again and again.

Leary was there; his booming voice had hit me as soon as I
had come in the door: “The older we get, the wiser we’re supposed to get. Gosh.
That’s
right.
And the wiser we get, the fewer hangovers we get, okay?
Well, that’s just wrong. What is true is this: the older we get, the more the
gosh-darned hangovers hurt, so fear of pain can accomplish what your wisdom may
not.”

Leary could make this sort of thing sound really deep—like
a law of nature, even. It didn’ t hurt that he had a voice that would’ ve made
Moses sit up straight.

Always the heretic, Eddie Alder felt he had to offer a
different version of The Way Things Are. “A hangover,” he said, “is actually
the same as sticking your tongue on a doorknob.”

This pronouncement was greeted with a loud silence. Being
from Alabama, originally, and having spent the better part of his adult life in
Southeast Asia, you couldn’t expect Leary to know about tongues on doorknobs.
In fact, no one at the bar, aside from myself, had any idea what Eddie was
talking about. He and I were the only ones out of the lot who had spent our
boyhoods enjoying proper North American winters. Eddie had to explain.

“When you’re a kid in upstate New York, the first winter
you grow up to the point your rosy little cheeks reach doorknob level, you are
subjected to a rite of passage more gruesome than ritual circumcision, more
painful than tribal tattooing.

“One cold day an older kid comes along and says, “You
should stick your tongue on that doorknob.” Reasonably enough, you ask him
“Why?” He tells you because then your tongue will stick to it, and this will be
an interesting experience.

“Well, so it is; it’s just one of many interesting yet
very painful experiences life has in store for you. For your tongue really does
stick to the freezing metal. And even at that early age before most of us have
learned a lot about public embarrassment, you have to feel kind of silly,
particularly since you can count on an appreciative audience congregating
pretty well as soon as you’ve uttered your first “Aughk!”

“Before you know it there’s talk of boiling water and
scissors and all kinds of other helpful suggestions, not to mention a certain
amount of unkind laughter. Effective ripostes are all but unavailable to the
victim, as well, what with this doorknob in your mouth.”

Eddie was right, and his account brought back vivid
memories of glistening snow crunching underfoot, of rosy faces and of seeing
your breath rise in clouds into the crystal clear air, of excruciating pain and
humiliation.

Hot water would probably be the answer, actually, but I
reckon if you just hang in there for awhile without losing your poise, your
body heat would eventually loosen the bond between you and the door. As far as
I know, however — and as Eddie agreed — no one had ever waited that long. What
generally happens is that the victim, either out of panic or else terminal
embarrassment, finally tears himself away from the door, breaking free at the
cost of a thick layer of skin from his tongue. And, wow, does it ever hurt.

“You’re kidding,” said one of the new faces, a tool pusher
on leave from some oilrig offshore Indonesia. “You made this up.” He made a
disgusted face, as if to say “I’m from Missouri, and you can’t fool me,” though
his accent told you right away he was a Texan.

“I’m not kidding,” Eddie replied. “In fact, you can almost
count on somebody else in the crowd of little onlookers trying it, himself,
within minutes — though usually on another doorknob, because this one’s got an
icky flap of skin already adhering to it.”

“Anyway, you’ve lost me,” said the other new face, a
dealer in tropical fish from Salt Lake City. “I thought you were going to tell
us the secret of hangovers.”

“Yeah,” added the tool pusher. “But any dude who would
stand there and talk this kind of crap isn’t going to know shit from shingles,
I figure.”

The Texan from Missouri’s attitude left something to be
desired; even Leary, normally the most unflappable of men, raised an eyebrow.
Eddie, however, remained to all appearances unperturbed.

”That’s right,” he continued, “I was talking about
hangovers. The really funny thing is, you seem compelled to do it again and
again for at least three years running. It’s as though each time winter comes
along, you remember that first amazing experience, and you can’t believe it
actually happened that way. It seems completely ridiculous. So you do it again,
and you find it did happen that way, after all.

“After two or three seasons, of course, you yourself
graduate to initiating younger tots into the Mysteries.

“So, you see, it’s like hangovers. Basically, you know
it’s a stupid thing to do, to drink too much, but it seems so much fun and so
innocuous at the time, and maybe all your associates seem to feel it’s a fine
idea, so you go ahead and booze your brains out. It’s only when you wake up that
you find, to your surprise and acute distress, that you have poisoned yourself
once again.”

You could see he hadn’t convinced them; everybody wasn’t
saying things like, “Oh, yeah; now I see.” In fact, they were staring at him a
bit blankly, and not saying anything at all.

Eddie looked at me for support, and I said I could
personally vouch for the accuracy in every detail of what he had related.

“When was the last time you performed this little trick?”
asked the fish man suspiciously. The tool pusher snickered in a nasty sort of
way.

No doubt caught up in the warmth of beery camaraderie and
shared experience, Eddie revealed something he said he’d never admitted to
anyone before: “I was nineteen years old, and working on a construction gang in
Vermont. I’ d told my buddies more or less what I’ve just told you, but they
wouldn’t believe me. I said try it, then. They wouldn’t. A while later, when I
was alone, / tried it. It was like some kind of weird compulsion. And it
worked.

“Dinky Toy!” bellowed Leary. “Put a doorknob in the
friggin’ freezer for Eddie, here. Gosh! This I’ve gotta see.”

Dinky Toy hadn’t really been following Eddie’s exposition,
and she didn’t know what all the laughter was about. She assumed a ‘doorknob’
had to be some kind of fancy mixed drink, and she asked Leary how to fix it.

Thinking fast as
he scanned the bottles on the wall behind the bar, the fish man created a
brand-new cocktail right on the spot a token, he said, of his admiration for
Eddie’s very entertaining story. The ‘Doorknob’, he told Dinky Toy, was
composed of equal parts fine Kentucky bourbon, for good old-fashioned common
sense, Camp Coffee, to keep you alert, and Curacao, just to make it taste
better. You should stir it with ice, he said—don’t shake, for fear of rattling
its brains. Finally, you top it off with a nice gob of vanilla ice cream, to
soothe the tongue. Oh, yeah, and you had to add enough of the liquid
ingredients to fill a large highball glass, otherwise the booze would be
overpowered by the ice cream. “Now, you can bring one of these for our Mend
Eddie,” he told her, “and have a drink yourself.”

Eddie, demonstrating he was still the little Eddie his
mother had known and loved even when he came home with his tongue bleeding,
actually drank the concoction. With gusto. Truth to tell, you had to suspect he
would stick his tongue on a doorknob today, if you gave him half a chance.
Maybe that’s why he had to move to the tropics, to get away from temptation.

The girls had revived somewhat, by this time. Big Toy had
poured another tequila, but the others were content to sip away at soft drinks,
being on the whole faster learners than us menfolk.

Eddie, I had to notice, was doing a fair amount of
cuddling with Noi, the new waitress. You could bet that if his wife Lek were to
get wind of these carryings-on, Eddie would think being stuck to a doorknob was
pretty good times, by comparison.

Meanwhile the tool pusher was boozing the way offshore
oilmen in Bangkok will booze. At the same time he was noticing some of the
finer points of Dinky Toy’s carriage and general manner, and he was buying her
colas just about as fast as he was buying himself beer. You could see they’d
taken quite a shine to each other, all in all.

I guess it was Eddie’s night for confessions, and perhaps
his moves on Noi were in anticipation of some hangover to come, because next
thing he was telling us how hangovers tended to make him very amorously
inclined. ‘Horny’, is what he called it. This struck a responsive chord in the
assembly which freezing doorknobs had not. It quickly became evident that Eddie
had pointed to what might well be a universal experience, if a sample
population of four was anything to go by.

”So why is it? When I come up with a real hangover — I
mean about a fifty-megaton number — I always feel horny as hell?”

“Same with me,” said Leary. “And I used to wonder about
it, too. Then somebody told me why: it’s instinct, or genes, or something.”

“Jeans?” said the tool pusher. “Naw, it’s miniskirts.” He
was gazing over the bar in admiration at Dinky Toy’s undeniably fetching
attire.

“No, no—friggin’
genes.
You know deep down inside
your gosh-darned cells you’re going to die any minute, and your body’s trying
to tell you to spread your seed quick, like, before it’s too late. That’s the
survival of the species. Some kind of instinct, you know; stronger than
hangovers.”