The Naked Tourist Read online

  A blond family listened intently. Colonic irrigation? The wife pulled a face.

  “I would do it,” her spouse said loudly.

  So would I, I thought lazily. It was a vile prospect, but I would do it in Bangkok. The barriers of shame were beautifully lowered in this country. Besides, I had been thinking of something to clean out my digestive system before entering a place—Papua—where the diet would be radically raw and primitive.

  “Having your teeth done is bad enough,” I offered. “But come to think of it, I haven’t been to the doctor in eleven years, either.”

  “Eleven years?” they cried in unison.

  “I never have any money,” I protested. “One hundred and forty dollars just to get some flu medication?”

  “You can get it here for eight dollars,” Joel said, indicating that he and his girlfriend had done just that. “We stock up every year. In California they’re trying to ban Sudafed in pharmacies because meth labs use it. So we all have to suffer. We get our meds in Malaysia and here. The only things you can’t get over the counter are heart drugs and the more powerful sleeping pills.”

  After the last filling for the day, I took a cab to the Landmark Plaza, my face puffed up like a football, and had yet more espressos in the ground-floor café that looks out onto the busiest part of Sukhumvit Road. I was thinking over the coffee-irrigation thing. Why not? If I could get the teeth done, why not the intestines as well?

  It was raining again, and a thousand transparent umbrellas battled through sidewalks choked with food stalls, whores, multilingual neons, tangled cables, and the dripping vaults of the Skytrain. Everywhere on Sukhumvit, half-finished glass-and-steel towers soar above construction lots. Palms wilt within ever-sprouting clouds of steam. In the monsoon gloom, a gigantic image of a female face rose into the sky, only her left eye illuminated by a suspended construction crew. Blind wanipok, street buskers, played through traffic fumes, screaming over electric mandolins. An old Muslim gent in a woolly hat trotted by with two hookers from the nearby Nana Complex on his way to the infamous Grace Hotel on Soi 3. An elephant waddled past with a four-foot minder. Nobody bats an eyelid at such things. Inside, the Landmark was all corporate sleekness, the escalators filled with women in business suits on their way to various air-conditioned offices.

  The fourth floor was mostly taken up by a furniture store, its showroom piled with extravagant bridal beds and armoires. Behind this lay the G2B or Green To Balance clinic, a short wall of glass hiding a cramped office. I looked around a little apprehensively. Was it a legitimate clinic? In Bangkok, it would not be an unlikely scenario if G2B turned out to be a brothel. I went in nonetheless and was quickly greeted by an eloquent Indian doctor in a white coat, with the largest earlobes I had ever seen.

  “Did you make an appointment?” he said, in a thick German accent. “Dr. Eddy Betterman,” he added, shaking the hand. “Ja, come in.”

  German? It was enough for the word just to float through the mind.

  We sat and discussed the treatments that G2B offered.

  “Integrated is the coming trend in medicine,” Eddy said confidently as I perused the brochure. “Yes, integrated. We are an integrated medicine clinic. Western, Chinese, Thai, psychological. We call it Marvelous Integrated Medicine.”

  He leaned forward, gulped from a glass of water, and looked very carefully at my skin, my hands, my hair.

  “Are you sick and tired?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Then what you need is a Person-Centered Diagnosis. Here we do a sophisticated blood analysis to determine what needs to be done. We’ll blow up images of your blood and project it onto this TV monitor here.”

  “I am going to Papua,” I said. “And I thought I could get sort of cleaned up here first. Detoxed. I need to be fit.”

  “Ah, Papua you say? Well, you will need to get your blood very clean for that. You will have to get the hepatitis shots, too.”

  “Can you see if my blood is—ah—strong?”

  The prices were very reasonable, I was there, and I had nothing to do for the afternoon, so I signed on for a Live Blood Analysis. Meanwhile, I scoured their brochure. There was Chelation Therapy, an herbal sauna and ozone bath called G2B Steam, Lymphatic Activating, Ultrasound-Herbal Oil Massage, colon cleansing, acupressure, and a “foot spa.” There was a one-day cleansing spa with colonic irrigation, which might well be the best option for the following day. But first we had to do the blood. A medical nymph took the sample, murmuring, “Are you pain?” While he smeared it onto a microscope plate, Eddy explained how it was he had come to open a practice in Bangkok.

  “I started in India with Ayurvedic. But because of the violence in Sri Lanka I lost a lot of patients, so in 2000 I came to Bangkok and looked around for an alternative site. I saw that a lot of Westerners were traveling to Bangkok to get unconventional treatments, because they are sick of the treatments they are getting back home. Here, they can try something innovative, something new. They can experiment. Bangkok is so unregulated compared to the West. They’re a little scared at first, then they get quickly hooked on all the possibilities.”

  It had been a struggle, Eddy said, to get his own idea of treatment. But Eastern intuition could indeed be married to Western technology. You had to know where the fine border between the two lay.

  “And now, we have a lot of German equipment. Our colonic irrigator is Canadian. It only uses gravity, very gentle, so there are no unpleasant accidents!”

  Laughing in the detached medical way (teeth barely bared), he turned on the monitor attached to the microscope, and there was my blood. Eddy could now see “every crystal” in the blood, its pH level, its “texture.” Living in America, it was likely that I ate too much acid food and not enough alkaline. I had blood type O, a type that derived straight from the jungle, thousands of years of fighting elephants, etc., so I needed “a lot of exercise.” But all in all, he cried, it was beautiful blood. No crystals, perfectly pure.

  “You have a baby’s blood! Look at this, nurse. Have you ever seen such nice blood?”

  The nurses came over and admired. They wore purple dresses decorated with gold grape cluster motifs, like air stewardesses.

  “But you still need to do a colonic irrigation, I’m afraid.”

  He drew a swift diagram of the colon on a notepad and explained to me how it all worked. The colon was shaped like a serpent; inside its crooks waste collected and produced eventual disorders. Only a radical flush could clear it all out.

  “You drink milk?” he suddenly asked. “Well, you cannot. Alcohol? You cannot.” We made an appointment for the following morning for the one-day colonic spa option.

  Eight a.m. at G2B: the new arrival is wrapped in a tiny kimono and led to a treatment room covered with tourist posters of the Greek island of Mykonos. The technical irrigation team, alas, was three young girls. The machine was labeled Whirlpool and was made in Malaysia, not Canada. Thai cabaret music on the sound system—a lone piano in a large hall. The girls peeled off my kimono with such delicacy that I hardly noticed its departure. Dr. Eddy stuck his head in for a second and cried, “Internal beauty, remember!” The girls giggled. One of them held a rectal tube. “You lie down now!”

  As this appliance was thrust into me, the lead technician asked me what I thought of her two assistants. “They beautiful, no?”

  Internal beauty is a difficult concept to grasp, made easier, perhaps, by having beautiful girls ram tubes into your ass. Having three girls ram a tube into your ass turns out to be the easiest thing in the world. You are forced to surrender unconditionally. I looked up at the images of Mykonos. Warm coffee was now flowing into my insides, gently pushed by the Whirlpool machine with the gurgling sound of a hookah. The girls joked around, taking turns holding the tube. A superficial calm descended. The irrigation takes patience and serenity. Gradually, you begin to lose control of your own intestines: it is like a bout of scientifically controlled diarrhea. I began to sweat copiously.
“You pain?” they kept asking. “I no pain.” Above, the white windmills of Mykonos blazed against blue skies. They had seen much irrigational sodomy, I supposed. The girls then exited the room for a moment, giggling anew, and left me sweating on the gurney with the Whirlpool gurgling and my innards rotating slowly like a man in a jet fighter spinning out of control. When they returned, they pushed the hose in a little farther and I felt hot coffee escaping in a sudden rush. “Oh dear, oh dear,” they began crying, and I heard the Thai word for doctor.

  It was too late. The gastric Chernobyl was in motion. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. It was as if the entire contents of my insides were being liberated from the straitjacket of shame and a lifetime of overindulgence. There was a gasp from the girls. The inundation was sudden and unstoppable. There was panic. They raced back and forth with paper towels, shrieking in a calm Thai sort of way, and the Whirlpool chugged a little faster, more ominously. The cascade, however, threatened to flood the corridor outside and immediate evacuation was necessary. They apologized and wai’ed. “We back soon. No worry.”

  An hour later, the crisis contained, they took me by the hand to the Ozone Treatment room. One of the nurses was called Elena. She had trained in Rome. In no time we were chattering away in Italian as she opened a wooden contraption with a head-sized hole cut into its upper lid. The ozone treatment lasted an hour and was something like a vertical steam bath, but with the threat of mysterious rays bombarding the skin.

  “Oh, I loved Rome,” Elena was saying, filing her nails. “All those churches.”

  Afterward, a massage in a small room with a single bulb that changed from blue to red. A poster on the wall showed a fork of violent lightning and the word “Energy!” Outside, visible through one-way windows, young couples tried out the voluptuous Chinese bridal beds in the furniture showroom. I asked the masseuse what her name was.

  “Um,” she said, walking on my spine.

  “Um, me pain now.”

  “You no pain. Um no pain. You like energy?”

  Dr. Eddy saw me out.

  “It’s a fine feeling, isn’t it? You feel lighter, ten years younger. You should do an irrigation every year.”

  “I feel strange, Dr. Eddy.”

  “How is that, sir?”

  “I don’t know. Aroused.”

  He laughed nervously, handing me his card for future reference. “Welcome to Bangkok.”

  To my surprise, I found that it was already night. What else was there to do but walk over to Nana Complex?

  On Sukhumvit, leaf-green awnings spread the light of a tropical forest in the middle of the night. Behind them the new but unfinished towers looked like the ruins of an ancient city, if the ancient city happened to be downtown Dayton, Ohio. The American hotel chains dominate the skyline, Hiltons, Marriotts, Sheratons, and Westins, whose opulent lobbies and bars are the city’s upmarket social spaces. As in downtown Dayton, there are almost no Americans on the streets; it’s an American city with no Americans, American torpor replaced by the lecherous vitality of the Asian metropolis. A cunning mix-and-match carried off with charming insolence.

  In the Nana Complex on Soi 2, a sex mall gives you themed experiences: girls in orthopedic strapped boots in the Mandarin; the obvious in Schoolgirl; the northern rice farmers in Rainbow and Rosemary dancing on tables to northern pop, the men virtually lost in a seething stew of female energy. A Thai woman once explained to me, “Up north, they do nothing for six months of the year but party, sleep, and fuck. In Bangkok, they spend their six months off between rice harvests partying, sleeping, and fucking. Except here they get paid to do it.” A new law forces the bars to close at two a.m., so the Nana girls disgorge at that hour into the parking lot of the Nana Hotel, which also has its own pickup club next to the ground-floor coffee shop. They sit on the cars eating satay sticks, singing away. Available beauty organizing its own commerce legally. I met a friend and his wife at Mandarin, and we went to eat on the street.

  Bangkok has the best street food on earth, but what is striking about this literally movable and archaic feast is that it is always sandwiched between the corporate towers of isolating whereverness. It is a survival of nomadic food-on-the-go amid a static Western urbanism imagined by gloomy architects who could never envisage people down on the streets below enjoying themselves. The Western architect, after all, never considers such things for a second; they are irrelevant. If Thai Buddhists are urged to live in the present moment, savoring the principle of sanuk, or “fun,” then Bangkok street food is the ultimate proof that they are determined to do so and that nothing—not even the ghastly laws of contemporary “architecture”—can get in the way of sanuk’s insidious flow. Thus does improvised food unravel the very premise of the Wherever city, and just in the nick of time. I have often thought that such food, sweeping like a delectable tide of odors and textures on a thousand castors throughout the night, could save even American or European cities from their puritanical and overregulated frigidity. Biting into a stewed pig leg or grilled squid long after midnight on the sidewalk tables of Sukhumvit’s little soi, you cannot help but reflect that this elemental pleasure would be illegal virtually anywhere in the West. Here almost anything in the organic world can be skewered on bamboo sticks—Thais call snack food khong khlob khio, something you can “bite and chew.” These glistening sticks seem to line entire streets under billows of peppered steam: cuttlefish, buffalo meatballs, squid, shark, shelled eggs, wontons, and probably, in some neighborhoods, grilled crickets. On some streets you can find vats of boiled flower juice, chrysanthemum, roselle, and pikul, herbal shots served in plastic bags. For dessert, Soi 38 is the place; the vendors serve mango and sticky rice, the mangoes buttery and without fiber, dark gold in color, and ripe all the way through.

  A Bangkok night is roomy and easily improvised, as you might imagine the nights of Rome in the dolce vita ’50s—charmingly provincial and casually sophisticated at the same time. There is very little posing or self-consciousness. There are lounges, garden restaurants, superb hotel bars, clubs, night markets, places in the soi off Silom with cushions strewn on the sidewalk. We moved to Q Bar, which was once in Saigon. The Saigon owner, New Yorker David Jacobson, now lives here, having been expelled from Vietnam under obscure circumstances. Q Bar is two floors of farang men and Thai girls—some professionals, some not. With his cropped gray hair and loopy glasses, Jacobson looks like every cliché of a Bangkok expat that you might have concocted in your mind. On an outside terrace we were served vodka-infused blueberry Jell-Os by Thai models in snow-white wigs.

  “Ironically, there’s an American fear of Bangkok,” Jacobson was saying, though not, one assumes, from personal experience. “The men downstairs are mostly European. Americans want to go to Hawaii and stay inside a lifeless fortress. They think about a city like this more than they actually come here. Maybe, in a weird way, the sex here threatens them as much as the fear of being blown up by Al Qaeda cells. Suddenly it’s available. All the fantasizing and neurosis and sex-obsessed sadomasochistic hassle in America disappear.” For Thais, I had heard it said many times, it was like an itch that had to be scratched, not a religious drama with penalties. Was the allure of Bangkok that here hetero men could for a week or so live like gay men? Go out every night and get laid. Prowl, trawl, “get trade.” The old could come back to life—old men, anyway.

  Behind us, an ancient American sat haggling with five girls, a negotiation carried on in passive-aggressive undertones and sudden hand gestures.

  “Six?” the old codger hissed. “Six?”

  The girls smiled like small toy Buddhas. “You no good man, you no wa’ shag?”

  Here money was openly used as a sexual commodity, with both humanizing and dehumanizing effects. We moved on to another place, called Bed Supperclub. The waitresses were dressed as nurses and the waiters as doctors, with stethoscopes hanging around their necks. Clients lay on couches or castored beds while the nurses took orders from lovely European youth of both sexes.
I was beginning to feel unhinged. Available beauty does not lose its awe, and the Western ego melts very easily, like dirty snow.

  Somewhere around five a.m. I found myself driving around the city in a cab, not quite knowing where I was going. One can wander around a city this large without a plan, even in a cab, since a three-hour cab ride rarely costs more than about $10. The city is famously a “jungle” of the asphalt variety, but we too infrequently take up the invitation to treat it like one. The forests of towers, the intertwining paths like trails, the human fauna—out of the night, glittering kathoey in face paint stepped off the curbs toward the car, signaling their offers—they looked like the spectacularly decorated Papuan tribesmen so lovingly photographed by Irving Penn in his book Passage. In Thailand, boys have the legal right to wear skirts at school and the derogatory “faggot” is rarely heard on the street. Male dandyism is unexceptional; indeed, it is widely admired. A Buddhist can be reincarnated as either sex, and there is in the air a taste of fluidity, of sliding joys, that reaches back obscurely into a metaphysics that a Westerner can only glimpse.

  It is this intangible quality that pervades the metropolis and makes it into a Wherever that is, paradoxically, a place unlike any other. Nowhere else would this mad jumble of architectural pastiche styles be enjoyable. In Vegas, for example, it makes you want to weep. But Thais love the style they call satai Roman, what we would call Neoclassical (the Caesar’s Palace variety, not the Palladian). The city is sprinkled with gilded putti somersaulting in canary-yellow fountains, Greek pediments encrusted with iridescent ceramics, neonlit architraves, ceremonial scallops, and fluted Corinthian columns with the foliage modified to a lotus. Cornwel-Smith suggests that this love of classical reference is a way of tapping into the prestige that Greece and Rome enjoy even in the Far East as symbols of order, civility, wealth, philosophy, discipline, culture, and ethics: “the entire classical idyll, though perhaps not democracy.” He adds, “Upwardly mobile nations go classical to give them an impression of matching the big powers, which also used it as a stamp of ownership in their colonies.” It was, in fact, the first international style of whereverdom, as Calcutta had shown. As the Oriental showed, too—for old Bangkok has many long, low storefronts decked out in the Sino-Portuguese classical style that was established by Portuguese traders in Malacca centuries ago and that worked its way across Asia over time.