Bangkok Days Read online

  It is what latah ladies always say. The trance opens a sexual door through which all the mind's debris flows, and the mind of a Dayak grandmother and a white sex tourist in Bangkok are essentially the same.

  •

  I traveled around Malaysia, to Penang and Kuala Lumpur, always looking for doctors who would talk to me about latah.

  One night the doctor I was interviewing took me with his wife to the village of Kampung Kuantan, just outside Kuala Selangor, on the Selangor River. The couple were youngish ethnic Malays, conscientious Muslims, with an oddball, sultry charm heightened by their buttoned-down fashion sense; he had interned at Addenbrooks Hospital in Cambridge and spoke an English that was far too perfect by half. The river is narrow, running between jungles, and Malaysians came there to watch the famous synchronized fireflies, which they call kelip kelip. Indians punt you down the river on long boats, wielding their poles with suave expertise, and saying, "Look, fireflies," every time a firefly appears, which is every five seconds. The doctor and his wife lounged in our boat like figures from Renoir, except that there was no sun. I told them about latah in Sarawak, and they looked at each other in amusement.

  "You don't understand much about Asia," the doctor said. "You may have thought you saw something called latah, but you didn't."

  "You mean it was a show?"

  "Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean that Western medicine has identified it correctly. You have been reading Ronald Simons of the University of Wisconsin, have you not?"

  I stammered, "But he is the authority."

  "Not here he isn't. Here in Malaysia we do not all read Ronald Simons. Not at all. We do not necessarily think that latah even exists. We think that madness exists, though."

  "But those old ladies? You mean they are just mad."

  "Dayaks, my friends. It's another world."

  "Is it really another world?"

  But they were adamant. "We Malays," the wife said gravely, "would never behave like that." She lowered her voice. "Cock?"

  "Oh, Miriam, really."

  But what about koro? Koro is the delusion that your penis is being made to retract inside your body until it has disappeared altogether. It is disappearing-penis syndrome, and is related to "penis-theft syndrome" in some parts of Africa, in which men believe that their penis has been stolen through witchcraft. People were jailed for penis theft in Nigeria. A prison had even been stormed by penis-theft victims when one of the so-called witches had been held there. But everyone concerned still had his penis, of course.

  Koro existed all over Southeast Asia but was most famous in Malaysia. Singapore's infamous race riots in 1969 were reputed to have erupted when Malay men suspected Chinese influence in their disappearing penises.

  The doctor coughed politely.

  "That is all past and done with. There is absolutely no more koro in Malaysia, I can assure you. If there was I would have heard of it."

  "Isn't it illegal?" the wife asked.

  "It is," he said uncertainly.

  So, I thought, our cocks are safe from the Chinese. We punted on silently, the kelip kelip flickering on and off in synchronicity, and the subject of stolen and disappearing penises was quietly dropped.

  "Sir," the punter cried, "fireflies!"

  THE NIGHT WALKER

  Through a Bangkok monsoon I tracked down Dennis to a condo tower on Sukhumvit Soi 24, a street so long that you cannot walk the length of it and back in a single evening. He lived far down it, close to Seafood Town, where he liked to eat every evening, with his cane, his shades, and a high-culture paperback, immersed in an Asian crowd and surrounded by bubbling fish tanks, determinedly lost to the outside world.

  There was something of an Old Testament figure about him, even though he was always clean-shaven—or shaven, anyway. This establishment has a great sign slung across the street, so that you feel as if the street belongs to the restaurant and not the other way around. At night, the red letters Seafood burn across it, and I wondered what had drawn the dry Australian to such a touristy street. His building was studded with fairy lights and shone like a shabby Christmas tree. It was inhabited mostly by single men, alone with their fridges of Johnnie Walker and their Carrefour shopping bags, and through its papery walls you could hear the dismal sound of heavy metal.

  Dennis, too, was alone, in a three-room unit with almost no furniture, the kitchen filled with bottles and the front room converted into a watercolor studio. He seemed to prefer a shambolic setup, inside which he could sew together his paintings and his long reading sessions. A sober study in the Life Alone. His marriage seemed to have slipped away from him altogether, like a memory that cannot be reassembled after an irrevocable break with the past. He looked a little frailer, however. As we sat there, smoking and peering through a small window into the vegetation of the condo garden, I had the feeling that a switch had been thrown inside him, and that he had decided to make these rooms his final resting place.

  He took me down in the elevator, his cane tapping the floor like the feeler of a large beetle (an effect augmented by his supersized aviators), and I told him about the trip to Lundu, the latahs of the forest, and in an incident where Mrs. Suut jumped up and down on one leg and invoked the male anatomy. "Christ," he said, shaking his head. "Freud was right, wasn't he, mate?" I said I wouldn't go that far.

  "And look at you," he went on. "You're looking a bit seedy, Miss Lalant. What happened to your hair? Long, mate? You look like the Lord. You look like a seedy girl."

  Your appearance decays and you don't notice anything, and as it decays your effect on others changes. We went through the glass doors of the lobby and I saw my wild, matted hair in a reflection and I felt its weight touching the bottom of my neck. Curious. Why had I not cut it as I usually do?

  "The police will nick you," he said. "The Thai police hate hippies. They use cattle prods on them."

  "It's an urban myth, Dennis. No one's going to use a cattle prod on me because of my hair."

  "We'll see, mate."

  "How's Porntit?"

  "Ah, there's a story. And it's Porntip, not tit."

  "I never said it was tit."

  "You went along with it, mate."

  "I never called her Porntit. You did."

  "Not me. You all called her Porntit, not me. You were hearing what you wanted to hear."

  On the street the pedestrians walked in two orderly columns on either side. They were cowed by the heat, their faces custard-colored under the bombardment of neons. On the one hand, the massage parlors with their rows of shoes outside and their good-luck cats recall domesticity—and on the other, the fluorescent tubing forming a new kind of international English jolts the night walker's nervous system into a quiet anxiety. "Where am I?" he thinks. "And what kind of place is this? Is it mine or theirs?" With detachment, I watched Dennis tap his way down Soi 24 like Blind Pew in Treasure Island. He was off on an adventure, his nightly adventure one might say, and there was that vibrancy that is so touching in the nearly old when you see that the light in them has not yet died out and that they are willing to go on. We ate a lobster at Seafood Town, blinking in the brightness of its aerodrome dining hall, scorched by saucers of naam phrik plaa. His hand laid on the paper tablecloth twitching like a slug, the nails beveled by a salon girl. The skin of the old looks fragile and waxlike in a neon glare, as if suited only to the gentle forgiveness of daylight. Dennis looked around as he ate, and he told me that McGinnis had gone into the pineapple and mango juice export business, selling mostly to Russia and China.

  "He's still after the boys, though."

  "The boys?"

  "Oh, he's notorious. Didn't you know?"

  I asked where McGinnis was living, what his numbers were. One always wants to catch up with people.

  "No idea. Everyone's a nomad here."

  "And Farlo?"

  "I had Christmas with him. He's catering to one tourist a year. It seems to keep him fully occupied. The missus in England is suing him."
r />   "So life goes on."

  "That's the best thing about it."

  Then he added, "We're not like you. We're lifers."

  It was the way they thought of themselves, in a tone of superiority and doom. "It's urban Tahiti," I thought. "And these are the seedy English sailors who have washed up on her shores."

  They wanted to eat lotus, but when they finally tasted it, it made them uneasy. We walked along Soi 24. Past a Vishnu shrine with ceramic dancers inside it, their legs raised like Hindu can-can girls. They danced among elephants, horses, and gods. Rain flattened the street's dust and we sailed past the Impala Hotel, a spa called the Asia Herb Association, and the green neon of the Ariston Hotel, where Dennis liked to retreat for his after-dinner Sierra Tequila.

  Having climbed its steep steps, we came into the Big Ben bar, with a line of cherry leather seats and a strawberry telephone. The lobby was empty but for a lone Japanese man asleep in one of the armchairs, forming a landscape of complete male solitude uninterrupted by any female laughter. So this was how lifers liked to spend their evenings, inconsolable at a bar with only the sound of rain in the background, with Cinzano ashtrays at their fingertips. Dennis looked like a fixed horse on a carousel, shiny and pink, as if he should be moving to mechanized gypsy music.

  "It's a bloody awful place, isn't it?" he said, gesturing back toward the street, along which the usual soccer hooligans were winging their way with LBFMs on their arms. "But then again, it's better than any other place."

  "Better than Queensland in winter? Better than Paris?"

  "I can't talk about Paris, never been there. But better than Queensland, for Christ's sake."

  "So it's not so awful, Dennis."

  "Bloody hot, though."

  "You could give up the nightlife and settle down."

  "I can't give up the nightlife, mate. I can't give up the girls. If you give up the girls you're a dead man, aren't you?"

  "You could find a girl in Perth."

  "You're joking. A girl? No, a pensioner like me isn't finding anyone. Who would have me? That's the sad part. It's not very dignified, I know. I'm embarrassed. It's humiliating for a man my age—but it's better than being dead."

  He began to describe his days and nights. They were a relentless quest for intimacy in which intimacy played almost no part. And quest was the right word. He got up, he said, at midday and painted in his apartment, listening to classical music. Then he went down to the cyber café on Soi 4 to check his stocks and view the CNN website. In Bangkok it was imperative to have habits or you quickly went crazy. You were alone in the heat, in the Buddhist whirl, and you had no bearings to keep you straight. You were a sinking ship and you had to keep bailing yourself out. And, he admitted, you kept sinking anyway.

  He slept badly, he said. The AC kept him awake, and the air was suffocating at this time of year. What if he had a heart attack all alone in his little condo? He had nightmares about his wife. He passed his afternoons at the Marriott health club—a marvelous place, if I didn't know it. Best sauna in the city. It was popular with French perverts, whom he met convivially in the hot pool. He watched TV there for a while, then went down to the enormous Marriott bar for a Singapore Sling. It was retirement, you see, and there was nothing to do every day except inform oneself and pleasure oneself. Every day was the same. As dusk fell through the cathedral windows of the Marriott, he felt a rising gaiety, a mad exhilaration like the high of laughing gas.

  "Pathetic" might be an angry word to describe his nightly wandering down Sukhumvit Road, and he might say "pitiful" instead, but either way he was now one of those dirty old men. But then, the old had a choice that couldn't be avoided. They could choose dignity, neutrality, and asexuality, of course, but mostly that dignity was chosen for them. They didn't go for it of their own accord, because no one in their right mind would: you can't let go of life just like that. However decrepit, the living are never asexual, and I thought back to Mrs. Suut in the jungles of Borneo. What I saw in her was the suffering that sex imposes on the old, the ugly. Dukkha. That, Dennis said, was what Buddhist hookers understood even better than himself: suffering. They sensed that it came directly from pleasure.

  "I go to the corner of Sukhumvit," he said, "and stare at all the rich women buying silk handbags and ball gowns in Na Ra Ya, the chic store on that corner opposite the Botox clinic. They go from Skin Rejuvenation straight over to the Na Ra Ya to buy handbags. To each his vice, eh?"

  He never went to the massage parlors clustered around the end of Soi 24, with names like Bee, Happiness, and Body Treat. What he liked was to walk up and down this section of Sukhumvit as far as the junction with Asoke, where the Westin Hotel stands, off the beaten path, along stretches of sidewalk which are much less well lit than the nightlife areas farther south. It was a mysteriously enjoyable area for him, full of tight corners which he did not know how to navigate. It was made up of crannies where the flow of the city came to a standstill but in which there were women who seemed to move in a dimension all their own. By the Westin, he said, there was a curious line of fir trees next to the pedestrian walkover, and before them a line of stores where peddlers and street sellers had their blankets, and where people played chess and checkers late at night. The girls here were not the most beautiful, admittedly, they were the ones you walked by almost without noticing, who rarely made a gesture at you.

  It had taken him a while before he summoned up the courage to catch one of their eyes and linger behind the fir trees. He had his Thai phrases prepared. Gii baht short time? And here by the trees the rate was reasonable, and the answer would be Nung paan, one thousand. It was well known the old men were popular with the girls because they gave out quickly and were no trouble. He liked slipping his shaky hand into theirs, with a soft sweat exchanged, and winging off to the little by-the-hour hotel near Soi Cowboy. He enjoyed the sordidness of that place, the money, the formality, the way it was the same every time. He liked the way it was bare and simple, like a dance where you've memorized all the moves.

  He had a dry humor about it, since he had no illusions about himself, and I heard in his tone all the qualities of the aging john that few will sympathize with, but which I must sympathize with. You either think life is jolly, positive, and under control, or you don't. "I could never understand the attraction of having a prostitute," Michael Myers is supposed to have said to his friend Graham Greene, who was a well-known fan of them. "It's like paying someone to beat you at tennis." But sometimes one wants to be beaten at silly games, one wants to know the sweetness of loss.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  One night, soon after we had reestablished contact, McGinnis took me to a place on Ratchadaprisek Road called the White House, an entertainment complex whose main body is shaped like an Italian church. Spotted with sweat, dark patches on his shirt, his Loakes forsaken for open-toe sandals, McGinnis was nevertheless still quite well kempt for his age. On one of his breast pockets was a logo consisting of a garland of fruit and the circular legend Sino-Thai Fruit Ideas. He was clearly embarrassed by it, and explained it away at once. The company wasn't exactly his; it belonged to a Chinese friend who liked everyone to embody the team spirit. At least it didn't say "Everyone's a Leader" or "Together We Overcome." They paid his health insurance and he had a fair amount of time off to explore the parts of the pleasure industries so far untouched by his tireless odysseys. But I, for one, thought he looked changed, a little more drawn and hollowed-out, his eyes paler and more liquid, as if preparing to turn into oysters. To which he responded by saying, "You look the same, you little bitch! Younger, if anything. What are you on?"

  For miles, Ratchada is lined by multistorey massage parlors: Caesar's next to the Swissotel, or else the Emerald or the Nataree, places with imposing entrances alive with droplet chandeliers. Machines of pleasure, large and humming and comfortable. Here your pleasure is measured, processed, extinguished with clockwork efficiency and a dash of hospitality. Libido is simply visible. There is something utopian
about it, like something dreamed up by Charles Fourier in his ideal cities known as Phalansteries. All human needs catered for. "Is it possible," Cyril Connolly observed, "to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?" Yet sex, according to that unhappy Irish writer, was harmless. "No one was ever made wretched in a brothel. There need be nothing angst-forming about the sexual act. Yet a face seen in the tube can destroy our peace for the rest of the day—" Elsewhere, however, he expresses a more Christian mood: "As bees their sting, so the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer."

  One doesn't see such devastated faces here, in the clubs, the vast discos, the culs-de-sac of venues where the hipsters go. Ratchada is lit up like a city under aerial bombardment, because contemporary entertainment has something warlike about it, something of the frenzy of battle.

  Nightfall. The arc lamps of the construction sites flicker on. The waste lots are busy with soccer games and at the corners of the soi, beanpole girls in nightclub dresses wait for their boyfriends. Before going into the White House we sat for a while inside the bright neon box of Somboon Seafood, drinking Chinese tea and looking down from the second-floor windows. I liked the hesitant motions of lonely men walking through their own vacuums to get to a massage parlor, the way the green neons of the massage parlors themselves suddenly came on, as if remembering something. I admired this impersonality, because it was my sort of impersonality, and I was tired of churches in Europe, and brownstones and parks and stone beauty in general.