Bangkok Days Page 18

  More common, therefore, was the certificate issued by the American Embassy called an F-180, the Death of an American Abroad. Dozens had been filed in recent years, most of them insurance frauds. The most notorious was the case of the Kongsiri, a wealthy Thai couple who emigrated to the U.S., returned to Thailand with a generous policy, then faked her death to claim it. The embassy rarely checked the authenticity of death certificates, which were quite easy to procure in Thailand with a timely propina. The city's detective agencies spent a lot of their time following up these fraudulent certificates. (In later years I visited the charming and elusive Byron Bales at his seaside home in Ban Krut, five hours south of Bangkok. He confirmed these details.)

  There was a moment when I had to look over at Dennis. When it came down to it, I knew nothing about him whatsoever. It was in the nature of the city that one didn't delve too deeply into a man's background, and even less into a woman's. Surfaces were all, and surfaces had to be tranquil, inviolate. His left eye twitched and he smiled. He knew all about these stories: Bangkok lore.

  "The Kongsiri were a Bales case. There's a wonderful book called Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins where you can read all about it. The wife went back to the States by herself, remarried her husband and became, in effect, his second wife. It worked. But then the husband got greedy and decided to pull the stunt in reverse, with himself as the deceased. So they went back to Thailand to do it again. Alas for him, he was spotted at Bangkok airport after his own demise. It gave a whole new meaning to the idea of reincarnation."

  When I had lost all my emergency hotline numbers, I nudged my benefactor and Dennis lost no time in extricating us. He was so drunk he had to stagger through the buffet room on the arm of a waiter, and as we passed under the Sistine dome he began to drool onto his shirt. "It's terrible," he muttered as I dabbed him clean. "The muscles in the jaw just go, like elastic bands."

  •

  We walked aimlessly along Sukhumvit, near Soi 2, then the Landmark, past old haunts that never seemed old. I was going to walk him home to Soi 24, but I could tell there was a reluctance to get to that dismal, claustrophobic destination. There was a queer atmosphere on the street. Military trucks shot by in the direction of Ploenchit. Crowds of protesters caused traffic jams. Near Soi 11 some undercover cops stopped a car with two kathoey transvestites. With the police was an enraged Dutchman who had obviously just been robbed in a seedy hotel by the kathoey, perhaps posing as Amazonian women. The cops spread-eagled the trannies on the tarmac with guns to their heads while the Dutch wallet was retrieved. The language was too fast; I couldn't catch what the undercovers were hissing at the kathoey, but Dennis said, "They're telling them they're worthless scum." No one could have guessed that by the end of the year 2006, Thailand would be ruled by a military junta, an event largely ignored by the Western media, even though the signs were all around us then. Societies are like large tanks of nervous fish. The exile, because he is alert to the tiniest dislocation in his circumambient atmosphere, is sometimes aware of such developments before the locals, who so pride themselves on a suave familiarity with their own culture. Dennis was an antenna of this sort. He knew what was what, and there was a quality of dread in his voice at times. The brilliant shops, the confluence of races, the pursuit of pleasure—they could all be swept away, as indeed they so often were in history. Where was the city through which Petronius's Giton flashed like a minnow? Dennis often said to me that Bangkok reminded him of an ancient Roman city, at least as we imagine them to have been. Cities of polytheistic lust. Nothing, he added, could be further removed from the cities of Anglophonia, which were based not on a love of pleasure but on a worship of power.

  "Personally," Dennis said as we reached Soi 24, "I have always hated clean cities. Cities should be as dirty as possible. Dirt is the sign that they are healthy. Not trash—that's something else. We don't want pizza cartons and Big Mac wrappers everywhere. That's obscene. No, I mean decayed fruit and swill and pig bones and spittle. I'm okay with that. General all round sputum. Give me Naples over San Diego any day. Give me Bangkok over any British or American or Australian shithole any day. You know who we are? We're the rancorous old lady standing behind the lace curtain calling the police because we see someone having it off in his own bedroom. Think of how sentimental it is. We're mental masturbators without a right hand."

  TEA WITH SISTER JOAN

  Speaking of pleasures of the body and mind, it was about this time that I introduced myself to Father Joe Maier. It was not because I needed to meet anyone new but because I was simply growing curious about the part of Bangkok in which I was living. Maier ran a Catholic mission in the Klong Tuey slums, and when I looked on a map I saw that his mission was not far from my house on Soi 51, though socially they were worlds apart. Kitty, for example, had never heard of the neighborhood where Maier lived, which in Thai is called Jet sip rai. If you asked cabdrivers on the tonier end of Sukhumvit to take you to Jet sip rai they would sometimes blankly refuse, shaking their heads in a certain way which seemed to imply that the words themselves encouraged mugging, mutilation, and worse.

  I was invited to a party one night at Father Joe's house. Jet sip rai lay on the far side of the Klong Tuey walls, and I rode there on a hired motorbike. The gate by the railway track had an English sign: welcome. It was touching when you considered that not a single tourist had ever been there. It was four o'clock, and Father Joe wanted to show me the peculiar forest that lay near his mission, hemmed in by the wall. And of course it was the same place I had been long before with McGinnis.

  Father Joe met me at Jet sip rai with his assistant John Purdoe, a New Yorker. It was a study in contrasts. Purdoe was delicate of build, with a shaved head, quiet and warm. Father Joe was large of girth, in a Hawaiian shirt, motile with a bustling, restless, up-for-a-lark intelligence and delicate pale skin as quietly intimidating as scholarly parchment. And it's rare that one is intimidated by a man's skin. He talked loud, however. In Thai, English, Lanna. He spoke them all. Like a Pied Piper, children swarmed around him, tugging at him, demanding things, beseeching in the way that only small children can. They had AIDS.

  "You look like a tourist," he said very loudly (slight Chicago Irish brogue?). "A tourist from Bangkok, I'd say. Wouldn't you, John?"

  For there are two cities when seen from the perspective of Jet sip rai. Klong Tuey and Bangkok.

  After the kids had been shooed back into the Catholic hospital, the three of us went for a short drive in Father Joe's car. The windshield was emblazoned with the word sanctity. We got out at the edge of the forest and began walking with long, purposeful strides. One shouldn't look aimless in a place like this. A dirt road ran alongside the Klong Tuey wall and to one side of it was the forest. Gangplanks led back into the jungle, which is to say into dark and leafy confusion. And there were rivers of trash that had curves and banks, mountains of garbage where half-naked men stood in the dawn light covered in "five Buddha" tattoos.

  At a clearing, a small mob of skeletons came pouring out of the trees, begging for money. They were unafraid of our whiteness, or of the authority of a priest. It was a bizarre ambush. There was nothing in their eyes; the motor reactions of their limbs were unhinged, so that they walked like epileptics. Their backs and chests were tattooed with "nine crowns" motifs, magic Buddhist talismans.

  It was obvious that Father Joe kept them alive in some sense; he provided a steady trickle of small handouts. For a moment the mood was tense as the demands became slightly threatening. Father Joe went on tiptoes to make himself fractionally taller and spread out two large hands filled with twenty-baht notes. The mob grabbed at them and Purdoe whispered in my ear, "I think we should get out at this point. It's getting a little weird." But it also struck me that Father Joe's almsgiving—the actual danger of it—was a sign of his character that went well beyond piety or duty. There was a look of love in his face.

  Farther into the forest, there were paths made of compacted rubbish, glass, and cardboard, paths
beaten down by bloody bare feet which had left their traces on it. At the bases of the trees stood sinister red shrines packed with votive candles and Barbie dolls and playing cards. Where the dead are, there are shrines, even if they are nailed together by addicts.

  We came to a clearing, and Father Joe mopped his brow with a handkerchief. It was almost a hundred degrees and airless. He seemed happy with the giving away of money, the dispersal of the desperadoes, and the fact that they hadn't followed us with meaner intentions. It was a calculated risk every time he came here, unprotected and padded with cash, but I suppose they knew he would give it all away anyway. For Father Joe, it was just another day of love. A "ride on the wild side of mercy," as he calls it.

  "Well," he said, smiling, the freckles on his forehead shining through beads of sweat, "shall we go to the party?"

  •

  Father Joe's house lies at the back of the Catholic mission, which is removed from the streets of Jet sip rai by a series of metal barriers and walls. It is funded by Canadian and American patrons at some cost, and is finished with solid stone and teak. To get there one has to walk through the school and the hospital, and since it was still light I could see the AIDS wards where a group of visiting Mormons based in Bangkok were playing Thai pop songs to the patients, making them clap along. I went up and had a look, immediately stiffening with anti-Mormon rage. It was certainly an incongruous sight, the apple-faced young Americans brimming with animal vigor, and speaking perfect Thai, belting out songs to a roomful of emaciated AIDS victims who looked on with a stunned admiration that could not quite decide on an appropriate reaction. A couple of the Catholic administrators looked on as well, exchanging mildly skeptical glances. It must have had something to do with the funding system. After a song, one of the boy singers held up his hands and said in beautifully supple Thai, "Okay, folks, we came to tell you all about the Lord Jesus. If you liked our songs, hopefully you'll like our message!"

  So we went up to the roof, where a mountain of diapers donated by an American company lay waiting to be claimed, and where lovely small children—the AIDS orphans—spun like tops through the corridors, wai-ing respectfully to us as they passed. On the ground floor, the classrooms were lit up and there were classes for little girls in the classical dance form known as khon. Purdoe told me that one or two of them had been bought for cash by the mission from sex traders in Pattaya, but that in general the sex trade was not the source of the problems they had to address: it was mostly drugs. Bar girls in Bangkok came mainly from the north, whereas most of the women they took in here were local, and most of them were not prostitutes. Nevertheless, Father Joe had gone down to Pattaya to buy those two girls. They had a special importance for him.

  •

  The main room of his house was opened to the sky by large sliding French windows. An exquisite statue of the Virgin Mary, probably antique Italian, stood on a rosewood table near the stairs, surrounded by candles. There was a Thai buffet, piles of mortadella, and marinated olives. Magnums of Yellow Tail wine stood on the tables, where frail nuns and aid workers devoured plates of spiced peanuts.

  I have never known any priests in my life, not since I was a child, so I was not sure what to expect in a priest's house. Especially a priest's house in Bangkok. But in a single moment all my memories of my own Jesuit schools came back, and above all the slick energy that certain kinds of hedonistic and cultured Catholic priests have. And how, for that matter, can you be truly cultured and not hedonistic? The question is only where the more tortured Catholic consciousness fits into this. Christianity is not exactly famed for its good living.

  Father Joe seemed to believe that the world has not been created in order to be ignored. He liked to do a kind of conga dance with his young Thai volunteers, a glass of wine in one hand and a drug-addiction report sheet in the other. He whirled around his large, pretty room with his burnished red Irish cheeks and formidable width, and it was moving because you could sense that he had staked everything on his adopted life here. There was no going back. He had come to Bangkok in the sixties, the typical idealistic priest, and had lived with hill tribes in the north of the country, learning Lanna dialects, before coming to the port slum where the mazes of wooden houses were often swept by immense fires and the government seemed to be waging war on its own people. He built his own house, living for years in a field by the port wall. But where did his jollity come from? Father Joe threw grapes into his mouth, cocking his head back. The summer-grass eyes sharply assessed everyone present, making rapid notes to themselves. The social workers present talked about the yaa baa and sii qun roi in the slums. Finally Father Joe rolled back on his own sofa, took a large swipe at his wine, and seemed to consider the social complexities of getting stoned on ground-up mosquito coils.

  "In 2003 the Thaksin government launched a crusade against yaa baa across the country. It was probably the most violent antidrug crusade on earth while it lasted. Thousands of people were gunned down by the security forces—literally thousands. But most of the factories are now across the border in Myanmar, so there was little chance of stopping it. It's like any trade: put Third World producers in with affluent middle-class consumers and you have a perpetual bonanza. The logic is unstoppable."

  I sat on a sofa next to an Australian nun called Sister Joan who ran a shelter for homeless children deep inside the Klong Tuey slums. She lived there alone, with a computer, a radio set, and precious little else. What a strange life, I thought, half admiringly. It was a voluntary crucifixion of sorts, a canceling out of one's own self and its petty ambitions. But she was the merriest person I had met in years, and there was high intelligence there, too. She explained to me that she had spent all week fathoming the Thai verb "to embezzle." It was one of the most useful verbs in Jet sip rai, with hundreds of subtleties to master.

  On the table in front of us was a Red Bull can with a burned tinge to the metal and a straw popping out of the top hole. Had it been left there to stimulate pertinent conversations or simply forgotten after a previous night's conviviality? No, said Sister Joan: earlier in the evening Father Joe's assistant had been talking to the volunteers about new drugs. And one of those drugs was 505. Five-oh-five, she explained, was made from paint thinner with a popular glue called 3-K.

  "It looks like molasses," she went on. "You put it in Red Bull cans and sniff it."

  "Really? Have you done it?"

  "Well, I had a whiff."

  The smile was shy, but by no means prudish.

  "When you are done here," she went on, "why don't you come home with me and I'll show you how I live in Klong Tuey? I've been here for years as well. Father Joe and I must be two of a kind."

  As Father Joe flipped sides of beef on the outdoor barbecue, I asked him if he had come to Bangkok out of an urge to discover a family for himself. It was another way of asking if love had been the driving need behind his migration to the most dismal part of what was then an unknown city.

  "Love is the source of everything we do, I would say. Even if we are not aware of it. Bangkok, for me, was a way to find it, if that's what you are asking."

  "It is," I said.

  •

  Sister Joan and I went down a path in the shadow of the port wall, to the far side of which arc lamps and welding crews lit up the acres of containers. On the other side of the track, shelters rose from the jungle. People came out of the long grass to ask for money, apologetic as lepers, and Sister Joan dropped them hundred-baht notes as we slipped past. Old mango trees, spreading far around themselves, were tied up with assortments of ropes and cables, and under them the motorbikes and hammocks were lined up in a shade which during the day must have made the sun almost bearable.

  The houses were crammed close together so that sometimes one almost had to turn one's body sideways to slip between them. In her denim skirt and sturdy sandals, Sister Joan looked like a small tank from behind, and the flashlight continued its comforting swing. "On patrol," I thought. And I speak as a lapsed Catholi
c. Everywhere she appeared she was greeted in familiar terms. Planks ran between the shacks now, the mud below a sea of syringes and trash. Through the glassless windows we could peer into little alien worlds. In one house a man bred fighting cocks. There was a deer skull with fully grown antlers pinned to one of its vertical beams. The owner sat in a corner, brooding until the flashlight stirred him and he blinked. The animals were kept in wicker cages partially covered with pieces of deer skin. We stopped and Sister Joan reached up to caress a bundle of severed chicken claws nailed to a post. Above it stood a Virgin mounted on a crenellated pedestal.

  Her house stood on one of these alleys. We went into a small, neatly arranged room that served as a living room for an elderly lady living by herself. I felt at once its gripping sadness. On a corkboard I noticed a list of Thai phrases written next to their English equivalents: "to embezzle," of course, "to pay the debt," "masseur needed." There was a simple shelf of books: A People's Guide to the Breviary, Cheryl Benard's Veiled Courage, that kind of thing. Photographs of nieces and nephews, cliffs and billabongs left behind, a beach, a faded couple who must be the parents. A life telescoped into a single room, which is what happens at the end. And yet the house was full of signs of courageous activity. A computer, files, spectacles, dictionaries, for the missionaries had to speak fluent Thai. It was a hub of purposeful activity, of quiet organization and intensity. And Sister Joan herself was the very antithesis of sadness.

  I forget what we talked about. The slums, the tough-luck stories, the broken families. I asked her about Australia, because I am always curious as to how a person leaves behind a homeland and adopts another—I have done the same thing my whole adult life. But, as with Father Joe, I had not reckoned on the quality of love which must have surrounded her in this place, making it "home." A mutual dependency, too, a reciprocal need. More vulgarly, because I am not a nun, I felt acutely sorry for Sister Joan, who would soon be lying upstairs in the heart of Bangkok reading A People's Guide to the Breviary while half a million foreign men partied the night away around her. But Sister Joan probably felt sorry for me as well.