Bangkok Days Read online

  When I crossed paths with acquaintances in Bangkok I was always surprised at how unsurprised they seemed, how unconcerned when presented with the coincidence of running into each other in an arbitrary place. Fancy meeting you here on Thong Lor! Not a bit of it. Farlo shrugged and shook my hand as if we had parted from each other the night before after a card game. It was as if we were all trapped together in the same compound for life and therefore there was nothing surprising at all about colliding on Thong Lor. It was in the order of things.

  "Where you going, lad?"

  "Just wandering."

  "Ay, wandering, eh? Just out for a wee wander, eh?"

  He cackled and nudged me as he was wont to do. The nudge said, "I know what ye're after!"

  "No, really," I said. "I am wandering up Thong Lor. I have a house nearby. I've been sick. In hospital. I'm making myself better."

  His eyes blazed up. "In hos-pital?"

  "I had a brush with epiglottitis."

  "Ay? Epicenter? Stomach cancer?"

  I had no idea what he was talking about. But now I took in more deliberately the insane vibrancy of the eye and the shaking of the right hand. So he was back on the bottle.

  "Throat problems," I said.

  "Ay, ay, throats. Can't stand them meself."

  He looked wildly around the street. Nearby there was a large white gate with the word Exotica scrawled across it in imposing letters. Guttering orange fires marked out the soup stalls where the workers huddled with powdered hands.

  He lifted a finger toward that curved word.

  "I was on my way—it's one of me favorite bars."

  In all my dozens of excursions through Thong Lor I had never noticed it.

  "Exotica?"

  "Ay, the Exotica club."

  Perhaps it had been built overnight the week before, a fairy castle shaped like a Byzantine church. We walked through the scrolled iron gates and down a long driveway with a high wall. Inside niches, baroque putti played their fiddles on one leg. Eggshell domes rose into the night, supported by Corinthian columns. Was Farlo sure it was not a colonial library? And was it really one of his favorite bars?

  "Ay, come here every week. Especially Wednesday night."

  He turned and placed a hand on my arm for a moment, but then failed to say anything. He looked quite happy, however. His wife had just given birth to yet another baby up in Samlot.

  Exotica beckoned. These places often have an air of Grand Guignol, a style that inscrutable Japanese gentlemen appear to prefer. There was a large, expansive plate-glass door upon which were stenciled two images of Johnnie Walker—who else? Next to it stood a gold-plated menu, like that of a high-end restaurant. Doormen in peaked hats came forward to comfort and reassure us, gloved hands raised to orchestrate our measly and timid desires. Have no fear, they seemed to cry, you are in capable hands here!

  We flicked through the menu. It announced "Thai Supermodel Special!" Prices were marked to the right.

  "A wonder," said Farlo. "It's like buying crab at the market."

  "Wednesday-night special," the gloved ones were saying, whisking us inside. "Half-price till nine."

  We were not dressed up, but in Bangkok it rarely matters. Behind tinted windows, Exotica offered a large room with a horseshoe bar and a raised orchestra platform, upon which was assembled a Thai jazz band of incredible antiquity, old men in ribbon ties greased to the gills, stroking their basses and trumpets. There was a Japanese party at the far side of the bar, and behind them a frolicksome staircase rose to a velvet landing, along whose wall was ranged a series of Edwardian-style lithographs depicting the female silhouette in varying positions of suggestive repose. Bodies like luxury motorcars, like Alfa Romeos which have just been waxed by subordinates. Inside the lounge, the women were in pale-blue slit-leg togas, as is usually the case, but Farlo seemed averse to their approaches. He didn't necessarily come here for the togas, and they were expensive for a man who entertained no more than two tourists a year at his eco-retreat. No, he was here for a different kick, which might merely have been the horseshoe bar and the geriatric jazz band. Or the sight of the staircase opposite us, up which clients with cocktail glasses climbed in slow motion.

  I asked him how the business in Cambodia was going and how his own middle age was progressing.

  "Oh, fine, fine. I am liking middle age. No one looks to me for anything. I go tae poker games with the lads; I lose and they congratulate me for it. I have a toorist this year, picked him up at the bar in the Sheraton. An American. He said he wanted to go deer hunting with the Khmer Rouge, so I obliged him."

  "I am surprised to see you in Bangkok. I thought you only came here once in a while."

  "Are you kidding? I have to prospect for clients. It's only three hours from the border, and she has all the rich arseholes I need. I am hunting for Singaporeans these days. I am trying to lure them with tales of rampant tigers."

  "Do you have rampant tigers up there?"

  He shook a sad head. "Never seen one. I think the land mines have blown them all up."

  "Ah, the land mines."

  I knew there was a reason no one went to Farlo's lodge.

  "I heard someone say, I think it was McGinnis, that the area around Samlot is the most heavily mined area on planet Earth."

  "Ay, but it's dead pretty."

  "Farlo, have you ever considered moving your lodge somewhere else?"

  "That McGinnis is a lying basstard. It's nae the most heavily mined area on planet Earth. That would be the DMZ in Korea."

  He snarled as he downed a dainty Mai Tai. The bargain Wednesday-night supermodels had appeared and were closing in on us. It was a spectacle seen in a hundred Bangkok bars at a certain time of the night: a small crowd of gorgeous, improbably robed supermodels converging with vampiric desperation upon a couple of dingy, badly dressed farang patrons in stained shirts and sandals who are more interested in their argument and in their drinks than they are in the relentless pincer movements of Beauty. The ugly foreigners are spoiled by a superfluity of beauty, made obtuse by this gratuitous superabundance.

  "Yes," I said, "but it must deter ordinary holidaymakers."

  "Listen, I dinnae give a shit about ordinary holidaymakers. I'm looking for special souls. Those who'll appreciate my vision. My place is difficult. That's the charm. I could've made it in the Sooth of France for fuck's sake, but I dinnae. I made it somewhere nice and fucked up. That's the whole point. I put it there because of the land mines, nae in spite of them. You should hear them go off in the morning. It's a grand sound. Like champagne corks."

  And he popped a finger out of his cheek.

  "I expect they just sound like land mines, Mickey."

  "Nay, they sound like champagne corks."

  We drank away. The place filled up and soon it was a scene. Some of the little Japanese salarymen began dancing with the discounted supermodels, who spoke their language. A disco ball started turning above us, and our faces were picked up by moving spotlights. Farlo seemed to deflate a little. Did he really come here on a regular basis? No one recognized him. But then only money and youth get recognized. At a certain point, complete anonymity overtakes us, and people—not just women—look right through us as if we don't exist.

  We respond with instinctive bitterness to this loss of visibility, but we also recognize the first taste of our future extinction, and we accept it. There will be no reprieve from now on. But Bangkok is a city which in this instance does, after all, offer a brief reprieve. It comes via a simple gesture, which Farlo now executed. The invisible man raises a finger, one could call it the Finger of Assent, which indicates that after long prevarication and weighing up of the available options, he has decided to become financially available for the sexual act. This single gesture suddenly makes the anonymous man highly visible, and within a few seconds he has returned to the field of play upon which his antics, his desires, his neuroses, and his dubious tastes are all once again invested with the vitality, the fraudulent importa
nce, of his youth. He finds himself returned to life, and his detestable anonymity evaporates all around him.

  Farlo did just this, and before my eyes he came back to life. The pallor fell away from him, he got up and propelled himself by means of a mysterious inner spring toward the staircase, where a woman in a blue tunic waited for him—the two of them were speaking in semaphore, and the digital gesture had been recognized instantly. He had become visible again in the realm of sex, which so cleverly imitates the realm of love. He turned to watch me walking toward the door, and as I paid the bill, which I couldn't really afford, he shot me a wink which confirmed that we were now moving in different dimensions. I pushed myself through the swinging Johnnie Walkers and back down to Thong Lor, subtly bewildered and amused.

  That curving, duplicitous street was lit up by signs strung along the tenements, of half-naked women forty feet wide calling our attention to the real estate market. I thought back to the Edwardian lithographs on the wall by the stairs, the women's torsos shaped like cellos, and the green chandelier which had lit up Farlo's bald head as he rose to the heavens with a woman on either side of him. Green? Who would fabricate a green chandelier? And I added to myself, "He's like a rabbit disappearing back into its hat." I walked back up to Sukhumvit and bought a pineapple, then walked home past the Wells School, where a pack of stray dogs attacked me in the dark.

  IN SEARCH OF ANOTHER PAST

  Just southeast of Thong Lor lies the neighborhood of On Nut, a sprawling no-man's-land where the servants and chauffeurs who service the Thong Lor palaces have their lodgings. Early in the morning you see these darker-skinned armies of help disembarking from the windowless buses which roar down Sukhumvit Road all the way from On Nut. They look like a slightly different race and in them I recognized the staff of our house on Soi 51, wide and copper-hued, wearing pro-Thaksin T-shirts that winter to remind the upper middle classes for whom they worked that they, at least, were in favor of the flamboyant crook who showered them with government favors.

  As they poured down the leafy soi where their employers' mansions stood, they sometimes raised two fingers to me in a V sign. It was a proletarian code for "Thaksin Number Two," for the prime minister was listed in the second position on the national ballot sheets and that flashed sign was a defiant insubordination toward their enlightened masters. The latter would often say, at luxurious parties in luxurious gardens, and speaking in English so that the proles hovering nearby with the trays of canapés and champagne flutes wouldn't understand them, "You know, the ordinary people are so appallingly stupid. Thaksin gives them money and government assistance and they all adore him." And I would think, "You mean, they're dumb for taking the money instead of knowing their place in your fête champêtre, where they're paid a dollar a day?" And because they all lived in On Nut, which was convenient for the buses down Sukhumvit, the masters themselves rarely ventured into On Nut unless they had to buy a Christmas tree at the giant Tesco there, or make a foray to the equally giant Carrefour which had opened nearby in recent years. But I of course began to walk there frequently when I was tired of Thong Lor.

  It's a long walk to On Nut, but you pass through places like Ekkamai, where the great bus station stands and where a number of secretive streets turn themselves into pleasure gardens at night. Sukhumvit turns quiet and brooding after Thong Lor, more Thai, and its exhausting, repetitively asphalt nature comes to the fore. Small hardware stores alternate with showrooms, bathroom equipment outlets, and pharmacies. At night the sidewalks look black, like flows of lava, and halfway to Ekkamai you pass a massive head with a spiked crown, a Greek titan of some kind who announces the Coliseum Club—he is holding a tankard of beer.

  "Tartarin," wrote Joseph Roth in his travel book about France, The White Cities, "found Marseilles more perplexing than Africa," and this was why. For elsewhere Roth writes something delicate as he explores "the white cities" of southern France: "I won't live to see the beautiful world in which every individual can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a future as I sit in the Place de l'Horloge in Avignon and see all the races in the world shine in the features of a policeman, a beggar, a waiter."

  I thought of that as I hobbled down Sukhumvit beyond Ekkamai and entered the edges of On Nut, where the hypermarkets are alive at dusk, their acres of floor space shining with waxed grapefruits and mango clones, the avenues around them bursting with neon. The feeling of anonymity is intense, but the faces possess the same possibility that Roth saw in Avignon seventy years ago. All is hurly-burly, motion, greed for life, exacerbation, cynical wonder, eloquent haste, precipitation toward nothing.

  By the On Nut station there was a long wall and revolving ads for Titus watches that I had seen that month all over the city: Fun Without Reasons. From there I could walk slowly up to Soi 79 and the Sukhumvit Garden City. The side streets on the way were cramped and hard, but down one of them one can find an old school called Saint Michael's, now a kindergarten for the upper middle classes, with a geometric glass dome and a colonnaded rotunda with Corinthian capitals. Dead trees all around, old Thai houses and spirit houses, a fishing tackle shop at the corner of 77 1/2, the old TOT telecommunications building peeling in relentless humidity. Saint Michael's, in particular, is one of Bangkok's more mysterious edifices, for there is such a wide discrepancy between its architecture and its function. It looks like a Masonic temple, an observatory, a bombastic hospital, and its grounds swarm with black butterflies. Standing at the end of this cul-de-sac, I would wait for the dome to revolve, to part and reveal a giant gun or antenna. One thinks: What was this forty years ago, fifty years ago, sixty? Were there jungles all around? Gigantic takian trees of forgotten forests?

  The largest street in On Nut is Soi 77. You can walk for miles down Soi 77 without knowing where you are. The ground floors of the tenements are filled with courtyard markets swarming with plastic and bright things, with basil and cilantro. I sometimes looked in those crowds for our maids and groundsmen, because this was where they doubtless shopped, and near Soi 7 and 77 I thought I saw them making their way to the Wat Mahabute temple which sits there alongside a dark canal. Half-familiar faces among a multitude, tensed in an act of homage.

  The Mahabute, after all, is the most famous place in On Nut and occupies in the imagination of the Bangkok working class an incomparable place as the site of Thailand's most famous and gruesome ghost story, that of the female spirit Mae Nak. On Soi 7, the supernatural suddenly erupts, taking the accidental pilgrim back to a past which can only be remembered with the greatest difficulty.

  •

  If Bangkok has renounced her past, physically destroying it in the process, it is the supernatural which holds her to it again. There are shrines in the city which are so intense, so passionate, that they bend time backward and bend us with it. They are irresistible for this reason, and they remind us that faith is not merely an entering into superstition, into a landscape of fear, but a longing for the dead, for the past.

  The Mae Nak shrine is draped with khanom garlands, submerged in incense smoke. Into the canal that runs beside it pilgrims liberate the eels and fish which they buy as karma-improving offerings from vendors nearby. It is lovely to watch them kneel by the water's edge and pop open the plastic bags containing the animals, then watch them swim away—the latter startled, probably, and confused by their sudden good fortune. For a few baht you are given a devotional package to dispose of while you are in the temple: a card with a stamp-sized gold leaf, an incense stick, orchids, yellow candles, and mangos. The shrine itself is piled high with toys, diapers, candies, shampoo bottles, model fire engines, teddy bears, lipstick, and at its center is a gold figure of Mae Nak, its skin -like surface softened by constant applications of oil. Devotees kneel before this figure, then gingerly approach to apply small patches of gold leaf to it. A television set, turned on around the clock, faces her, bathing the gold leaf face with electronic light, though it is not clear why Mae Nang needs to watch TV.
/>   More than twenty films have been made of Mae Nak's story, as well as a major opera by the Thai composer Surwong. Believers claim that she is buried in the wat, though they are not sure where. And though Mae Nak is supposed to have been a real person, no one knows quite which part of the mid-nineteenth century can claim her. Some say that she lived during the reign of Rama IV (1851–1868), others that she died during that of Rama V (1868–1910). Mae Nak, the daughter of a village chief in this suburb of Bangkok (it would have been farmland around 1850) falls in love with a commoner named Nai Maak, whom her father despises. Overcoming all obstacles, she manages to marry. Nai Maak, however, is then conscripted into the army and is forced to leave. While he is away, the teenage girl dies during childbirth, and her unborn baby perishes with her. When Nai Maak returns from his military service, the ghost of Mae Nak is there to greet him, weaving a supernatural illusion around their destroyed family life. The illusion is shattered only when one day Nai Maak sees his wife reach for a fallen mango on the earth beneath their house by passing her hands through the floorboards.

  It's a theme common to Asian folktales: the dead wife who greets her returning husband as if she were alive, reminding Westerners of the ghost sequences in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, or the first tale in Kobayashi's Kwaidan, in which an impoverished samurai's wife, abandoned by her social-climbing husband for a great lady, haunts the house they once shared. Mae Nak also haunts her husband, pursuing him with a mix of desperate love and vengeful jealousy until her spirit and that of her dead child are finally laid to rest by a Buddhist holy man. Nai Maak had taken refuge in the Mahabute temple in what is now On Nut, and the harrying ghost had followed him there. In some versions it is the venerated Somdej Phra Puttajan of Thonburi who seizes Mae Nak's tormented spirit, seals it in a ceramic pot, and throws it into a river.

  But Mae Nak sightings do not stop there; she is seen all over Bangkok by the faithful, and it is widely believed by those who play the lotteries that she is an infallible guide to success. The temple is full of fortune-tellers and lottery hopefuls who crowd around the two sacred wax-spotted takian trees there, searching for mystic signs that will point to combinations of numbers. Come here on the day before the national lottery is drawn and you will be unable to get in. The takians (Hopea odorata) are mobbed, their surfaces smoothed by dried latex which has oozed out of a hundred cracks in the bark, and it is by rubbing this arboreal surface that lottery aspirants hope to be informed of winning numbers by Lady Takian, the female spirit who inhabits takian trees.