Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (15 page)

“Motherfucking-Jesus-fucking-Christ,” I say much too loudly, yanking the curtains closed. Naked, I sit on the edge of the bed and dial the concierge.

“Yes, you too … Listen, what would be very helpful is if you could send someone into the gift shop.” I picked up the note on the night table. “Ina maybe? Fine, whoever, and pick out a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses for me—aviator style, very dark—and send them up as soon as possible. Just charge them to the room. Excellent, thank you.”

Lying by the hotel pool on a chaise under the shade of an umbrella with my new Ray-Bans, I am almost beginning to turn the corner.

And then, “Eh mate, this one taken?”

I move my eyes as little as possible, but he is hard to miss: middle-aged, beer-bellied, Australian. He doesn’t wait for a response. After he’s taken off the plaid terrycloth-lined top that matches his trunks and gotten comfortable, he reaches over to shake my hand.

“Jimbo Jackson,” he says, loud and proud.

From there everything pretty much goes to shit. For me. Because I’m not looking for a friend or playmate. Not one with a dick anyway.

But he is persistent.

And chatty.

“It’s love, mate. I’m in love.”

I don’t feel the declaration warrants a response. Jimbo has made it half a dozen times over the course of our forty-five-minute relationship.

So I do my best to ignore him and continue silently enjoying my breakfast. I don’t know what it’s called, just that it’s fruity and liquid and heavily alcoholic. And like everything else on the menu at the Pan Pacific Bangkok—the food, the décor, and especially the entertainment—it is a traditional Thai specialty.

“She is too,” Jimbo continues. “I mean it’s real. Really fuckin’ real. I mean she washes my feet before we make love.”

I chuckle. Barely. I don’t mean to. I know it will only encourage his pathetic filibustering, but I can’t help it.

“I know. Sweet, right? Thai women are different, mate. You’ll see. They know how to take care of their men. They enjoy it.”

I turn to look at Jimbo. Just for a second. So I can see if he’s fuckin’ kidding me. But lying back with his hands clasped behind his head and a big stupid smile on his face, Jimbo appears to be entirely sincere. The soft, hairless undersides of his snow-white arms are turning pink. I think about saying something.

I hear a splash and turn. The diving board is still bouncing. Beneath the surface of the water a girl flutters across the length of the pool. She surfaces at the shallow end just in front of my lounge. She is a local girl, eighteen or nineteen years old, and when she gets out of the water, her tiny white bikini is completely transparent. She twists her long dark hair, wringing out the water, and slips her feet into a pair of four-inch Lucite stilettos. I would like one of those, please. I nod at her and a slow smile spreads across her face.

As she walks toward me, I realize my eyes have been filming her—this scene—in slow motion. I am disappointed in myself. Such a cliché. Such an obvious choice. But then Bangkok itself is a cliché. I knew that and I came anyway. That was the point. So maybe I should stop fucking resisting and just enjoy fucking the cliché.

“You likey more?” the girl asks. She is standing so close to my chair that water from her still-dripping bathing suit is falling onto my belly. When I turn to look at her, my eyes are level with the crotch of her see-through bathing suit.

It takes until then to realize that the girl from the pool is the same girl who brought me my alcoholic breakfast drink. Just like all the waitresses and bar girls and dancers in Patpong, she is for sale—for an hour, for a night, for a week, or, like Jimbo’s girlfriend, for as long as she can keep her man in love with her. Thai women know how to treat their men.

I gently tug her wet ponytail so she has to bend down further. “I would like you,” I whisper hotly in her ear.

She takes my face in her tiny hands and turns my head to the side. “See barman. He make date,” she whispers, and then darts her soft, wet tongue inside my ear before walking away.

I see barman. He make date. It turns out, however, that Suchin, my girl of the see-through bikini, is very popular—kind of like the hottest restaurant in town. But with only one seat. And so, despite offering to triple her rate, I will still have to wait three days for my turn at her table. I can’t help but think that if this were Hollywood she’d be paying to screw me. But it’s not. And oddly enough, I find being on the other end of the fucked-up sexual power dynamic not only frustrating but kind of a turn-on. When in Bangkok, I guess.

At about four o’clock, two women of indeterminate age—forty? fifty?—wearing satin pants embroidered with birds and flowers and matching quilted satin jackets, lead a ragtag group of barely post-pubescent girls dressed in bikinis, halter tops, and miniskirts or ridiculous-looking disco dresses into the pool area and line them up as if they’re next in line for a firing squad. This is clearly a tourist-class outfit, so what are they doing
here
?

“It’s about fucking time,” says Roy, the man on the lounge to my left. I glean from the conversation that has taken place over me between Jimbo and Roy that Roy is from somewhere in Texas and has come to Bangkok on an all-inclusive sex tour booked for him by a travel agent in Dallas that specializes in such things (and that the Pan Pacific is not above participating). And in general, as things that are included go, the younger, the better.

I have tried to do as little talking as humanly possible—to project an air of “leave me the fuck alone.” Now, though, I am too curious. And if something worse than Roy and Jimbo and their conversation over my chaise is going to happen, I want to know now.

“Time for what?” I ask.

“The pussy parade,” Roy says and throws Jimbo a look that clearly says,
Where’d you find this hayseed?

Jimbo leans over and educates me patiently. “Those women are madams. The girls work for them. If you see one you like, you tell one of the madams and they make a date for you.”

“Does she chaperone too?”

They ignore my sarcasm because things are getting serious. One of the madams climbs on the diving board of the pool facing our lounges and yells, “Okay, who want pussy? Who want sucky dick? We got best girl. You want see? Come on.”

Then she gestures to the line of girls and they walk toward us.

“Lemme see your titties,” Roy says to the first girl. She is nowhere near eighteen. Not even close. The girl reaches up with one hand and pulls at the strings tied behind her neck. The two little triangles flop down and rest on her pale stomach. Her breasts are tiny—hardly worth covering at all. She has a mole on her left nipple.

Roy dismisses her with a wave of his hand. I’m sure I hear her sigh with relief. The next girl, who cannot be more than thirteen, moves to the foot of my chaise. With one pull at the strings on the side of her bikini bottoms, she is standing before me bare-assed. She has the figure of a ten-year-old boy and is completely smooth, hairless.

It occurs to me that, despite my leaving home long before having to endure the humiliating awkwardness of Willa’s transition into womanhood, I am still possessed of enough paternal instinct to feel healthy amounts of shame and disgust at being offered the services of a girl so young I cannot tell whether she has had her pubic hair removed or whether it simply has not yet taken root. Suddenly eighteen seems completely reasonable. Hell, even seventeen. Any hesitation I might have had about Suchin has been banished thanks to this pornographic middle school assembly. I lie back in my chaise feeling downright upstanding.

The girl knows instantly that I am not interested and ties her tiny string bikini bottoms back into place. The smile drops from her face. Nothing personal. She is just taking advantage of the second or two between sales pitches to rest her facial muscles. She steps to the left.

This is Roy’s fourth sex tour. He is full of advice.

“If you’re going to do parlors, you want the ones off Chi Cha-am. The girls are less experienced, but they’re a lot tighter. You won’t even want to fuck ’em in the ass. But you want to get there by three or four. They don’t have the endurance the girls in Patpong do.”

I am afraid to find out what Roy might mean by “less experienced”—that “the ones off Chit Ha-am” might in fact turn out to be daycare centers doubling as brothels—so, not having booked a “date” at the hotel for tonight, I head to Patpong in search of some empty but prurient adult deviance.

“You want fucking show? You want cheap beers? Hello, handsome man, welcome please.”

The man calling me handsome is small and jaundiced, feeble and asthmatic. I’ve been walking around Patpong for nearly an hour and either I’m going in circles or there is a species of sex show barkers that all look alike. I know I will go upstairs and participate or at least observe one of these fabled shows—I’m here, I have to—but I can’t decide which one. So I keep walking.

“You like pussy shoot balloon?” This is by far the most interesting pitch I’ve heard.

“Sure, I like pussy shoot balloon,” I say. The little man smiles and his teeth look like the cracked yellowed mah-jongg tiles my mother used to play with. I like him. And his teeth. He takes my arm and we walk into the bar, past the patrons, past the dancers, all the way to the back and up a set of narrow, steep stairs, at the top of which long strands of red and silver beads hang in a doorway.

“You have good time,” he says, pushing me toward the beads.

“How much?” I ask and reach for my wallet.

The man pushes harder. “Cheap. You pay after. You like. You have good time. Very good pussy show. Best in Patpong.”

There is nowhere to go but through the beads. So I go.

Call me crazy. Watching a woman smoke a cigarette with her vagina has never been real high on my list of fantasies. Certainly never made the top twenty. Or top fifty, for that matter. Okay, truth be told, the thought never even occurred to me. When I was at the studio, I once green-lit a Vietnam movie that used Bangkok as a stand-in for Hanoi and the director came back with lurid stories of “Ping-Pong shows.” At the time, the idea of a woman shooting little balls out of her vagina seemed exotic. At least to me. Ellen was less intrigued. Particularly when I suggested she give it a try.

But that was years ago—and in comparison with what I am seeing now, it was amateur night. Vaginal Olympics have clearly come a long way since then, I think, as I sit in the audience at Charlie’s, which turns out to be in fact one of Patpong’s most established sex show venues.

When I first arrive, the girl on stage is dancing—bored, expressionless, topless. Then, without any fanfare, she stops gyrating, pulls off her gold lamé bikini, and walks to the edge of the stage where an old lady, simultaneously shoveling rice noodles into her mouth and operating the boom box, hands her a cigarette. And a lighter.

After that the girl disappears. More or less. She lies down on her back, knees pulled into her chest, and becomes a disembodied vagina. Only when she reaches around, inserts the cigarette into her bald pussy, and, lighter in hand, uses her inch-long red thumbnail to flick the Bic and light the smoke do I remember that the pussy has a woman attached to it. And now her pussy is, it seems, puffing away. Of its own accord. It’s wild. In a
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
sort of way. It’s fascinating in much the same way I found some of the more complicated exhibits at the science museum where I once took Willa to be. I tilt my head to one side and then the other, trying to get a better view of the mechanism. I fully expect to see strings or a carefully hidden set of hydraulics, or maybe a tiny little man—a Tom Thumb-sized version of the chain-smoking, mah-jongg-toothed guy who brought me here.

Fascinating, but not the kind of thing you want to fuck. I wonder if it’s just me. I look at the men sitting at the tables around me, trying to see if I can spot a single erection in the group. But it’s dark and many of the patrons seem to be preoccupied with the waitresses who—topless but wearing numbered badges so they can be identified—wander through the audience trying to negotiate “dates” for the night.

After the girl finishes smoking the cigarette with her vagina, she plucks it, like a flower, from between her lips and the bidding begins. The winner will get to keep the cigarette. Even smoke it if he so chooses. After that the girl pulls on her bottoms, slaps on her badge, and walks off the stage. She is replaced by another girl who squats as if she is going to use the toilet but instead pops the top off a Sharpie. She shoves it into her cunt with all the eroticism of a mechanic inserting a dipstick, and then uses it and her vagina to draw a portrait of one of the drunker, richer patrons in the audience. When she is done, it looks a lot like Baby Huey. He pays a hundred dollars for it. The next girl peels a banana with her pussy. The one after that opens a Coke bottle. And for the finale, the last girl lies on her back, reaches two fingers up in there, and yanks out a string of razor blades that must be three feet long.

After that the show is over. No balloon. I am slightly disappointed, but the truth is I’ve had enough of watching underage women use their twats as substitutes for household gadgets.

The mah-jongg guy is waiting for me outside the beads.

“Good pussy show, yeah? What I tell you?”

“There was no balloon,” I say, trying to sound more annoyed than I am.

“What? No balloon?” He does a terrible job of acting shocked and appalled.

“No. No balloon.”

“She do cigarette in pussy?”

“Yes,” I nod. “She did the cigarette in the pussy.”

He slaps me on the back and winks. “That a good one. You like?”

I shrug.

He looks at the dirty tiled floor for a while. I think I am supposed to think he is deep in thought.

“You want private pussy balloon show?” he says, raising his index finger. I think I am supposed to believe this thought has just occurred to him.

“Maybe another time,” I say.

“You want date?” He winks again.

“Just the check, thanks,” I say, sounding irritated. Because I am.