Noun, Verb, Kimchi: Part 4

Written by Clayton Foster

Bangkok is a city of stories.  If you don’t have a story on arrival, wait five minutes.  The city will be sure to bestow one upon you.

Take Irish Jimmy, whose heavily weathered skin illustrated the severity of his 40 or so years on the planet.  Jimmy has stories.  Jimmy is (I’m tempted to say “was”, but let’s be optimistic) a “drug traveller“.   A drug traveller wanders the world sampling regional narcotics for his or her own edification, I learned this after Jimmy invited himself to sit down next to me in bar.  Jimmy has done so almost exclusively for over two decades.  Around half of his tattoos he can only dimly remember getting, some not at all, including the large scar that runs from the top corner of his forehead down to the opposite side of his jaw.  He maintains a philosophical approach to life, along with the kind of paranoid genius that is borne from mixing natural intellect with a try-it-and-see approach to chemicals. 

Jimmy doesn’t appear elsewhere in this particular story, which occurred last year on my way from Auckland to Seoul, but he neatly represents my feelings towards Bangkok: dirty and mysterious, coarse but spiritual, at times brutally beaten down and yet always ready for fun, endlessly optimistic.  Now, it seems, Bangkok needs that optimism more than ever; I’ll try in this story to do service to the city that is difficult not to love, albeit a rough, grainy-film-stock kind of love.

Jimmy and I parted ways after our first and only drink, myself feeling a mixture of relief and regret.  I figured that he would be the most interesting encounter I would have that night.  Bangkok, the sly devil, has a way of proving you wrong about these things.

Midnight struck, which meant that the firm hand of central Bangkok’s curfew was busy sweeping party-goers out onto the street. Nightlife in Bangkok is one of the quintessential “you have to see it for yourself” things.  You know those medieval depictions of Hell with the multitudes crushed together in various states of wild contortion?  It’s like that except that everyone is loving it, and there’s more neon.  Dante’s Inferno as interpreted by Dr Seuss.

Disaster.  Somewhere since the beginning of the night, my money had somehow evaporated into the thick Bangkok heat.  Rookie mistake.  Taxis are cheap, but I was an hour’s drive away from my hostel.  Walking home through the twisting alleys didn’t strike me as an attractive option, and I had no real idea of which way to set out anyway. 

A line of taxi and tuk-tuk drivers declined my meagre offerings of leftover cash; some even seemed offended.  Eventually, towards the end of the line, a taxi driver put his arm around me and smiled.  He had, he told me, a proposition, a real good deal, man.  He was a youngish guy, clean cut, dazzling white teeth.  Sure man, he said, he could take me home, no worries man, of course man.  I just needed to do something for him.

When he explained this real good deal, I sighed.  I had heard it perhaps fifty or a hundred times since my arrival.  All I had to do was to go to a massage parlour.  That’s all.  Easy, man.

No, I said.  I didn’t have any interest in massage parlours – no judgements, just not my scene.  Besides, his pitch had a fatal flaw:  I had no money.

It’s not like that, he said.  All I needed to do was go in, sit for five minutes, leave.

I hadn’t many options.  All I needed to do was sit in a massage parlour for 5 minutes?  Yes.  And not buy anything?  Yes.  It’s easy, man.  Where was the parlour?  Somewhere, man, don’t worry about it.  On the way to the hostel, man.  I paused.  Would he come in with me?  My new friend laughed.  Sure man, if it makes you feel better.

I noticed first that we were driving away from the bright lights, the only part of the city, or country, with which I was familiar at that point.  Skyscrapers shrank and then retreated into the darkness, streetlights became sparse and randomly placed, the commercial buildings turned into warehouses, then into smaller warehouses, then into nondescript structures with boards over their windows.  The streets narrowed from six lanes to four to two and then to a strange sort of 1.5.  Solitary old men sitting on the side of the road replaced the partygoers, staring grimly at us as we drove by.

I was quiet.  Not so much scared; I’ve found that in such moments I become numb, idle curiosity replacing fear.  It’s not bravery, it’s a defence mechanism, like a hand that loses feeling when you rest it on a hotplate; the hand is still burning when you’re looking in the other way.  Even so, I was aware of certain odds that were rising with each corner turned, each flicking streetlight that seemed to dim as we passed.  Hey, bad things happen to travellers.  I’ve never seen Hostel, but I’ve read the Wikipedia plot summary.

My friend in the driver’s seat, on the other hand, could barely stop talking.  His name was Sammy, a native of a village north of Bangkok.  He worked and saved money and sent it back.  He showed me photos of his three girls, “Hard work, man, three girls and a wife.  I like coming to Bangkok“.  I asked him if he ever visited the parlours.  He laughed hard, then was silent for a few seconds, then said, “No, man, of course not“.

We turned a final corner.  We had been driving for about 45 minutes, the city lights were long gone.  On the street, there was one low, grey building with a single light on outside it.

The lack of signs unsettled me the most.  In Bangkok, at any given hour, walking in any given direction for any given amount of time, you’re likely to walk past at least a dozen brightly lit neon signs, bent into suggestive shapes with appropriately provocative nouns and adjectives in giddy triplicate: Girls! Girls! Girls!  or Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!  Massage parlours in Bangkok are like pie shops in Te Awamutu: there’ll be ten on the same street, and they’ll all be booming with business.  Even on a morning stroll, you’ll see more than one door burst open, a deliriously happy, slightly overweight, badly sunburned middle-aged white guy fall out, one or two or three girls on his arms, everyone shrieking in rapture at the whole goddamned merriment of it all.

Not here, though.  No signs.  One defiant light.  There were no other cars, and my backpacking tenet of trying to avoid as many other Westerners as possible (admittedly tough in Thailand) gave way to an unexpected yearning to see another white face, even if they were as confused and as lost as me.  I didn’t even want to go to a massage parlour, any massage parlour, least of all one that looks like it was co-leased by Norman Bates.

It was raining, that misty kind of rain, catching in the orange phosphorescence like dry ice at a Spinal Tap gig.  Underneath the lamp were two or three old Thai men, and another two or three young ones.  The old men were sitting in beach chairs, wearing hats, unbothered by the rain.  The younger men wore cargo shorts, wifebeater singlets and some gnarly looking tatts.  None of them spoke as they watched me exiting the taxi and following the driver to a completely unmarked door.  I smiled at the men, and it’s one of the only times I remember smiling at a Thai and not having it returned tenfold.

Sammy knocked heavily on the door, his knuckles booming against the steel.  I looked at him, but he didn’t return my glance.  His wide toothy smile had tightened itself shut, losing its lips in the process.  He wasn’t looking at the other Thai men, and he wasn’t looking at me.  He looked like a man who wasn’t looking forward to what he was about to do.

My hand was on the stovetop, and I was starting to smell smoke.

NEXT: Sweet-talking Your Way Out Of A Foreign Pimp’s Arm Around Your Shoulder: The Lonely Planet chapter they forgot to write.