Bangkok Knights (4 page)

Upon arrival, his buddies left him to erect his defenses
and went to sleep off the flight. After a couple of days, they realized that no
one had heard from Sid since, and no one had seen him around his usual haunts.
So they went up to his room at the Posie Hotel to investigate. Sid answered the
door wrapped in a bath towel; the curtains were drawn and the place was in
gloom. He was alone. He muttered at them to come in, and then shuffled back to
his bed, climbed in and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He looked distinctly
petulant.

As he told it, he’d no sooner moved into the Posie and
unpacked his Maginot Line when a kamikaze mosquito of no small nerve had dived
in through it all, found Sid in the shower, and had bitten him in the most
unfortunate place possible, from his point of view at that time. And it seemed
there were sound medical grounds for his aversion to mosquitoes after all,
because the one daring solo attack had caused a delicate part of his anatomy to
swell magnificently and become quite gruesomely discolored.

“What’s there to do then?” he’d lamented. “Who’s going to
believe it’s only a mosquito bite?”

It does not reflect well on Sid, and we should never speak
ill of the dead, but his friends had to report that he actually pouted, at this,
and sank even deeper into his sulk. This was not the holiday he’d worked and
sweated for. When they sought to console him by suggesting, kind of mirthfully,
that there was a funny side to the story, Sid went so far as to grind his teeth
and roll his eyes fearsomely, at the same time suggesting in immoderate words
they go seek their fun elsewhere.

“It was like a judgment,” Stack remarked.

“What? The mosquito bite?”

“Maybe that too; but I mean Sid’s death. If you looked at
his anxiety quotient, he’d been middle-aged from back about the time he was
weaned onto bottle feeding. When you think about it, he devoted his life mostly
to trying to ensure he’d live long enough to enjoy it some day. That’s how he
could quit smoking, quit eating breakfasts, work in the Sandbox for five years
and all the rest of it — he was deferring his pleasures, just like he was
deferring marriage and a family. Deny yourself now, so you can enjoy things
later.”

What Stack said was just so. Sid had been sacrificing a
good chunk of his youth to provide for his later years, it’s true. More
remarkably, however, he didn’t even know what he was looking forward to
enjoying when he got there.

He had to have his nest-egg, there was no doubt, and he
had to be healthy enough to enjoy it when he finally got it First, it had been
$80,000 he’d been aiming at. He’d planned to quit as soon as he reached this
target, move to some more congenial clime, and settle down. So he saved his
eighty grand. Then he decided what it was he really needed was $120,000. You’d
ask him why, and he’d just look a little blank and say: “You can’t do anything
with $80,000; you really need $120,000.” But
why?
Hedidn’tknow. But he
did save $120,000. Did he then shake the sand out of his boots and move to Thailand? He did not. He decided to shoot for $200,000. When it came right down to it,
however, it didn’t matter if he had $200,000 or $2,000,000; it was all the same
thing — he didn’t have the foggiest idea why he needed it in the first place.
But as long as he was bitching and binding and aiming at his next savings
target and coming out to Thailand on the occasional carouse he didn’t have to
think too much about what it all meant

“It was security,” said Stack. “That’s what it was all
about. He wanted security for when he was too old to work.”

Security? I told Stack how just the week before we’d
gotten together for a drink, and Sid had wanted to talk about his new plan.

He’d decided the best thing he could do would be to come
to live in Bangkok and buy a bar. “You say he knew what he was doing? And that
it was security he was after? Buy a bar. He might as well have told me he
planned to take his nest-egg and set fire to it, or maybe give it to a passing
tout to invest for him.”

Stack allowed as how I had a point, and he’d buy me a last
drink in recognition of my astute grasp of the human condition.

The joint we were in was closing, so we made tracks to
Boon Doc’s for a nightcap. The place was pretty well empty, an inspiration to
all would-be Bangkok bar owners. We were greeted by B ig Toy, the barmaid that
night and the agent of Sid’s untimely demise.

As Thai women go, you could say Big Toy was gigantic, and
the sobriquet was to distinguish her from her colleague Dinky Toy, a rather
smaller specimen who worked at the same establishment. Dinky Toy was at the
other end of the bar, wearing black tights under a black skirt and looking less
than happy.

We bought Big Toy a drink and had her send another one
down to Dinky Toy. I proposed a toast to Sid.

Both of these ladies had been riding in the
tuk-tuk
with
Sid when the unfortunate incident occurred. They’d been out shopping and were
on their way back to his hotel for a drink before dinner. Dinky Toy was on
Sid’s knee, and Big Toy was on the seat beside them — a pretty tight fit, since
Sid himself was no pygmy. Not bothering to slow down, the
tuk-tuk
driver
made an abrupt 90-degree turn into the little laneway leading to the Posie
Hotel. Obeying some impulse that linked her cosmically with the kamikaze
mosquito, Big Toy chose just that moment to lean over and give Sid a big hug,
perhaps meaning to thank him again for his largess on their shopping trip. The
various forces involved, both physical and metaphysical, combined to overturn
the
tuk-tuk
at speed, right on the outside of the corner.

I guess Sid never had a chance to see the humor in it all.
The last earthly thing he would’ve noticed was the sky being darkened by a
large falling body, that body being named Toy. He wasn’t really crushed, in the
clinical sense of the word, but his neck was broken and he was dead —just about
as dead as a Saturday night in Riyadh. Crushed to death by a falling bargirl,
as his friends would forever after have it.

And Dinky Toy was more than somewhat annoyed with her
friend; the smaller lady had had serious designs on Sid. In fact, she’d had
some idea he and she were to have been married. At least that’s what she told
the police and the people at the Posie Hotel when she tried to claim the
contents of Sid’s safety-deposit box. It’s true, anyway, that she’d been seeing
Sid during his holidays, not to mention writing to him in the Sandbox
faithfully for the better part of a year, expressing what was undoubtedly a
very real affection for him.

Whatever else she might have had in common with Sid,
however, she was
not
one to defer her gratifications. Big Toy told us
Dinky Toy had, in the past months, pawned all her jewelry and borrowed money
from everyone she knew, spending and gambling away the proceeds with abandon.
Why not? Enjoy it while you can; it had looked as though the future was going
to take care of itself quite nicely, and the notion of being Mrs. Siddiqi had
been very much in her mind.

And now look. She was so fed up she was even hinting she
shouldn’t have to pay Big Toy back the money she’d borrowed. After all, her
hopes for the future, her security, had been most unkindly crushed to death
right at the height of his earning power, and who was responsible? After all.

But Big Toy was unrepentant “Dinky Toy never think of the
future, really. She should be more like Sid — work, work; save, save. You don’t
know what trouble tomorrow bring.”

Stack and I nodded at this timely observation, and thought
deeply about Life and about how the bar was closing and how the next morning
there were jobs to go to.

Dinky Toy finally came over and gave us a quiet “Hello”.
There seemed to be something on her mind. After a couple of moments of hard
thinking on it, she came up with an exasperated expression and said to us: “Why
couldn’t Sid be more careful?” She punched Stack in the shoulder, not too hard,
and then she grabbed Big Toy in a clinch and did some sobbing.

Big Toy was patting her and saying “There, there” or some
such thing in Thai, and we could see they were well on the way to becoming
buddies again, so we got out of there and went home.

Bill ‘Billboard’ Cockburn (pronounced ‘coe-burn’) was a
legend in his own time. This was the first occasion, however, we’d seen him in
the flesh. So to speak.

Billboard was up on stage at Manny’ s Fresh Market, and
that part of his anatomy which had earned him his moniker was aimed in our
general direction as he took a bow. There was a message scrawled across his
buttocks.

BADMAN’S       FREE
HOI

BAR
     
SAT.

“What does
hoi
mean?” asked Bob. Bob Slocum was
Eddie’s friend from Pittsburgh, and he’d taken his first trip to Bangkok in celebration of his recent divorce.

“Clams,” said Eddie. “One of its meanings is ‘clams’. It’s
other meaning is also clams, but those items are what you call your ‘bearded
clams’.”

Just looking at Billboard’s message, it wasn’t clear which
variety was free on Saturday.

Manny’s Market was a standard version of the ‘upstairs
bars’ that attract so much foreign currency to the fair city of Bangkok. The place reminded you of an arena, with lots of seating around the central bar,
which itself surrounded a large, brightly-lit rectangular stage. Much smaller
rooms with discreet access were available for customers who wished to indulge
in their own private shows. The stock-in-trade of this establishment was a
sizable herd of exceedingly comely and very young upcountry girls. These
employees removed all their clothes and most of their inhibitions as well, and
pranced about together in rough time to popular tunes of the day, giggling and
goosing one another. ‘Dancing’, is how the management described it.

The show was attended by a crowd of sleek tourists, men
and women both, who affected various degrees of shocked interest and disbelief.
There was also a sprinkling of local roues. Tourists and locals alike sat
drinking and being sat upon by more young girls, some of whom were dressed in
skimpy wraps of gauzy material against the cold of the air-conditioning. Others
were covered in nothing but goose bumps. Bob had one of each - one in gauze,
one in goose bumps — perched on his knees; they were warbling “Cola! You buy me
co-la!” He seemed to favor the one on his right knee, a vivacious thing with
dimples all over the place. Neither Eddie nor I had just arrived in Bangkok, and we were not buying colas; we were not so popular.

For fear that sophisticated audiences would tire of
non-stop jumping up and down by large numbers of naked girls, the program
included ‘shows’ — a variety of edifying performances which punctuated the
fleshly stampede at half-hour intervals. For starters, there was the ‘ping-pong
girl’, the ‘bananagirl’, and the ‘blowgun girl’. The latter individual knew
things about trick shooting Annie Oakley had never thought of, and, at a range
of fifteen feet could explode balloons held by very impressed customers, never
once putting out an eye by accident. There was a lady who for the price of a
cola would squat down and inscribe a personalized marker-pen message on a sheet
of paper without using her hands. Two already clean and rosy girls got into a
shallow basin and gave each other baths and things. Then you had the ‘cigarette
girl’, who flirted with new kinds of cancer, and the lady who could open beer
bottles by means most novel, in most people’s experience. You found it hard to
imagine anyone would ever knowingly take this particular artiste into a private
room unless, maybe, he needed a bottle opener.

Finally, just in case you’d forgotten what it was all
about, basically, there was the ‘live show’ proper; this was announced by a
lovely little gamine, pretty staightforwardly, as the ‘fucking show’.

Normally, I believe, you would’ve expected the act to
include a rather reluctant young Thai male who, after some amount of
workmanlike encouragement from his fair partner, would probably manage to poke
and smirk his way through a series of athletic maneuvers culminating in a
shamefaced withdrawal, privates grabbed in a towel and hurried away from the
public eye.

This night, however, our attention was drawn to the stage
by a sudden startled murmur from the audience. A middle-aged Western man had
appeared in the lights. This was unusual, to say the least—one did
not
see
Westerners on the stage of a sexotic bar in Bangkok. Especially when they were
completely nude. Completely nude and not at all abashed on that account. Even more
especially when he sported an arse as wide as a billboard and carried a belly
that would’ve made the whereabouts of his feet a mystery, if he hadn’t taken it
in faith they were still there on the ends of his legs. Sandy-haired,
clean-shaven, he had a figure and a manner that declared him to be a creature
of prodigious appetites.

Far from being abashed, this arresting figure sauntered to
center stage with all the confidence of Ronald Reagan about to address a
meeting of the D. A.R. At the same time, he managed to convey the swashbuckling
6clat of an Errol Flynn — you could almost hear the rattle of sword and the
jingle of spurs, even though, of course, he wore no sword or spurs or anything
else either.

He stood there in the spotlight, entirely self-possessed,
not even at a loss as to what to do wi th his hands. You felt nothing would
ever nonplus this perfect master—not even the two Western ladies who were
sitting right at ringside, across from us. One was blonde, the other brunette,
each of them attractive examples of womanhood bloomed in its mid-30’s or
thereabouts. They were intent on our living legend; strangely, though, they
were not goggling in wonderment, the way the others were. There was something
clinical in their calm smiles and steady gazes. Maybe they were pretending to
be sociologists, I thought.