Part One, Chapter 1

The night I kept thinking about, the night I guess I fell in love with Poon, we were down on Phuket shooting pool. She was over there with her ass up, trying to line up a shot in the two feet between the table and wall. I was at the bar and the woman behind was noticeably past her prime (and it probably wasn’t much of one) but not far enough yet to slap on a spangled bikini, lay back on a stage two doors down and start shooting blow darts out her business end.

The guys at the other table were in their vacation uniforms, looking like they’d beat you up over football. Midlife crises waiting to happen. Lounging near the other tables, a murderer’s row of tuk-tuk and motorbike taxi drivers. More garish, magic Buddha medallions than you could shake an accident report at, if the police here ever did anything but collect bribes. I decided to be on my best behavior; they probably knew all kind of secret Asian secrets and shit–at any rate, the odds of the cops caring too much if I somehow managed to get my ass drug into a dark alley seemed pretty low. I would take the first opportunity I could to praise the king, and tip generously.

The rest of the vacationers were getting showered and changed; ready, when the sun was just a bad memory, to wash over this ancestral sleaze in a tsunami of cash that the real one had only been able to keep back for a couple of months.

The guys at the next table poked Poon with their cues every couple of seconds, and she kept poking the wall with hers. There were four too many of those in this room. Tables, I mean. Or dudes. Hell, maybe the problem was the walls. Anyway, Poon thought it was hilarious.

“Rick,” Poon said, trying to catch her breath. “Rick, I-” and she was doubled over. “It your turn. I can’–” and she went into that squat: feet flat on the ground, ass down on the heels. Amazed me every time I saw people doing it. Can’t believe they use the turlit like that. I mean toilet. Ruptured my ACL, damn near, when I tried to do it once.

“Nah, I’m having too much fun watching you.”

“Okay,” a couple more giggles. “Okay. But you must to go over deah, for catch the ball, okay?”

“Shiiit, Poon.” I kept slipping into Midwest lately, probably out of boredom. Would be saying “might could” and “fixin’” before too long. “You better not skip that off the table and break somethin. Look around here–I’m outnumbered, and they know secret Asian fighting techniques and shit.”

“Okay, okay. I need beeah.”

I turned around to check on Roadweary, wearing her Tiger Beer minidress like she’d lost a bet. She wasn’t what you’d call fat if you weren’t Asian, but the tiger’s paw, where it stepped out of the orange disc in the logo, had gotten rolled up in the waistband of her panties on account of a little loose skin there. This part of the gutter, that implied a C-section scar.

She and another girl, dressed identically, commingled their sulk and stink (Mango Despair by Very Wang, perfumer of the stars of Patpong), getting ready to set up in the chairs on the patio out on the corner and crank up the siren–”Hellloooo Haaansooome Maaaaan”–to snag whatever besotted whitey hadn’t already rented his tang for the night.

I finally got the beers and handed a bottle to Poon. She took a swig that made my eyes water and lined up her shot again. I watched from the bar, smiling I guess, but it felt like a twisted kind of leering grimmace. The kind of look I imagine you’d have on your face if you were watching a donkey mount a woman, and you were kind of enjoying it, but passing a kidney stone at the same time nonetheless. That’s about when I started noticing my stomach.

Meanwhile, Poon had somehow managed to sink a ball and was looking at me, her face all twisted up, whooping and gasping for breath, and I thought, “Just don’t tell me you love me,” and my stomach started burning in earnest. Part of it was I didn’t want it to happen. I mean, the cliché of it all–as if there’s anything for any of us, especially here, but cliché–it was too much to bear. At least it wasn’t–not wanting her to fall in love with me, or thinking she was about to–because she was Thai and I was white. She just seemed like the type, was all. She was certainly the type I usually wound up with, for a couple incendiary months, spending twice as many recovering when it all fell apart. It had happened before, is the point. A couple times, awhile ago. I was pretty sure I didn’t want it, but that’s what I say before every cigarette, 50 times a day, so I don’t really believe much of anything I say.

I looked for the chalk, glanced back at the bar. Sour Times was still there, still sullen, a look on her face like contempt, for Poon working too hard, for me being so obviously charmed, for everything here. Looks like this made it all the harder just to be a man with a woman on vacation, out for a couple drinks and a game of pool. You were never just out for a couple drinks and a game of pool on vacation–not here anyway, when you were a white man with a Thai woman. I knew that, but during the day, when we fought through the tailors and touts to the beach, where there were families–real vacationers, bona fide–I could forget it. I’d toss myself into the waves and come up coughing and laughing. Poon said I looked like a kid. I told her I felt about 10. I was happy when I was 10, so I’d take it.

I was trying and failing not to think about this as I zeroed in on the tip of my cue. I blew the shot.

“That’s your fault,” I said to Poon.

“Nah, man.” The accent; I’d marry the accent itself. “You wuuhse than me, man.” She took the ball and started lining it up all over the place, even though I hadn’t scratched. She caught the side of the ball and it barely moved, and she gave me a cartoonish, sneaky, sideways look, lips pursed, and started moving the ball again.

“Shit,” I said, more county fair in there than I’d thought possible any more.

“You’re cheating,” I said. It was true. She’d taken another shot, whiffed, and the ball had wound up on the short side of the table again. She started moving it around freely, looking for a good shot. The steely concentration turned out to be all effort at controlling, again, the guffaws. When I said this, they sputtered on out of her anyway.

“No, this is ThaiLAAAND. We play Thai rues. I have free shot.”

“Why?”

“Because you Bak Oo-an.”

“Eh?”

“Because you fat. So I get a free shot.”

“I should smack your ass for that,” which only made her purse her lips again, arch her eyebrows and bend over, waving it around at me. I thought: “This is three kinds of yes right now.” I said: “sheeit” but it still had a little too much tractor pull in it. I took a drink of beer. Every swallow burned more than the last. Maybe I was dehydrated. Maybe it was the parson, my inner Calvinist, the poison the Midwest had left in my well when I thought I’d put it to rout.

“Why don’t we go get oysters?” I said to Poon a little later.

“Oysters? You like oysters?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You want big boom-boom tonigh?” coquettish and sleazy.

“I want a nice lawn and good-looking little kid playing around on it,” I thought and, terrified that it had presented itself to me like that, said, “Yeah, but I dunno who with.” Who with. Language barrier making me lazy.

“AhEEa,” she said. “Fuck off,” more or less. So I smacked her ass and she grunted “yeah,” and told me to do it again.

###

So we finished up the game and started maundering through this whitest of the white people’s Thailand Lands. I was sure that something about all this vacationers’ euphoria was doing this thing to my stomach and probably shouldn’t have been. I dunno. The nearest I could figure was I wanted to feel something good, not have a good time. That is, not have the good time that everyone else was having. Why the hell I was here, then, was anyone’s guess. Lack of imagination, I suppose.

When Poon was funny like she was in there–and hell, that was pretty often–I wanted to laugh at her antics, but that half felt like I was trying too hard to sell everyone on our couple’s act. All the more ridiculous, that, because everyone would assume I’d rented her from some bar or another anyway, regardless. That went double for whiteys, that assumption. Triple for white girls, or else they’d assume I had a thing they’d like as not call  “Yellow Fever,” a concept that resided next door to their belief in their own post-racist openmindedness. But I couldn’t blame them: it’s easier than dieting.

For her part, Poon was well aware of all this and had to hear about it every time we walked out of her apartment. Stagnant canal, meat on sticks, 7-11, fake 7-11, stray dogs and kids, hair shops, video shops, rank market, moldy concrete, fish stink, drooping vegetables and meals ready to eat. Then the bank of motorbike drivers outside the optometrist’s who never seemed to do anything but get drunk and chuckle and holler out to her to ask if I had a big cock, how big it was and how it felt. She’d explained it to me once, what they were saying, when I was too far away to entertain the Hekylls and Jekylls with my reaction. I took comfort in knowing that someday the enchanted tattoos and Buddha medallions would lead them screaming, headlights off, drunk on moonshine and magic, headfirst into one of the green buses that never stop for anybody. For the meantime, I pointed out to her that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything, anyway.

“They probably know all kinds of secret Asian secrets and shit,” I’d said. “And I’ve never even been in a fight. Why don’t we take the long way around next time?”

But she wasn’t having it; she wasn’t easily intimidated, this one, and wouldn’t let them win. Most of the time. Defiance and resignation alternated in her in a Brownian churn. She was used to that treatment anyway: there had been a few foreigners, mostly white people, to her apartment. Owned a bar in Patpong, Poon did, and talked to anybody and had a couple foreign boyfriends before. Normal stuff anywhere else. But she’d been tabbed. It wound up getting her an apartment full of furniture and appliances, though: every time somebody needed money, they’d come to her and she’d give them a better deal than the pawn shop. Then they’d leave, speculating about how many foreign cocks she’d had to take to get all that scratch while blowing most of what she’d given them on lottery tickets and cheap whiskey.

“You know a good place for oysters? Plastic chairs, right?”

“Right. I think there’s a place up here. I can’ remember. It’s been so loooong time. Ooh!”

“What?”

“I want to go to Suzy Wong. Remember, the other one we saw las nigh?”

“Oh. Really? Now?”

“Yeah, man. Why not?”

“Uh. I dunno. Sure, why not?”

My stomach ratcheted things up. It was something like that Seoul fire chicken crossed with bad fish, constipation and regret.  Kinda pissed me off, too: five beers and three shots of Jack into the night, I shoulda been approaching bulletproof.

As we passed a couple go-go bars on one of the stripper alleys leading off of the main street, she grabbed my hand and threaded her fingers through mine. Maybe she wanted the legitimacy as much as I did, but then all the girls did that. Held hands, I mean. Anyway, I held her hand and figured at least some of the burning had to do with guilt. Guilt for what? Well, there would always be something. The parson and my mother. In this case on this night, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “for treating her like a bar girl who didn’t charge me.” It made me feel really lousy. Once again: Thailand. I’m sure, in Manhattan or London or nearly anywhere else, two people meet, get up ons like inmates for a few days, have a little time in the sun, then separate again, and it’s a happy–maybe a little bittersweet–memory. But here . . . hell, it would’ve been easier on me if I was paying her. For one thing, leaving would be less complicated. Whenever it was time to do that. But it would be time to do that; I didn’t question that, boyo, until it was two or three months too late. That’s how I wound up in the mess I wound up in, but then I’m getting ahead of myself. As is my wont.

###

There was this one day when we were talking about girls, white boys and men in Thailand, marriages both sham and otherwise and so on. I’d asked her if she thought she’d get a house, or at least a new buffalo, out of me.

“Me? Noooo, man. Why you think I wanna married you?”

“Alright,” I said. “But I wasn’t talking about me, necessarily. Just in general.”

“Why I’m want to married? Beside, I can’ married you. You way too crazy for me, man.”

“I’m crazy? What about you?”

“Yeah, shuah. Maybe you and me the same crazy. That’s no good, man. Besides, why I want to married?”

“I dunno. Lotta people do it sooner or later. For a ticket out of Thailand? Didn’t you say you hate Thailand?”

“Shuah, sometahm. Not alway. Besides, I know about young farang. Everybody say, ‘You should not to go with young farang. They say they luuuf you, but then they just gone. They don’t even give you any money.’”

“That’s a terrible way to look at it. About the money, I mean.”

“I don’t think lie dat, but I think is trooo about you just gone someday and, anyway, money alway impotant thing. I’m not rich, man. But you gonna leave me some day. I don’t want this to happen to me, man. You can’ tell me where you going nek. Why I’m want to married with you?”

“Let me show you,”

Then fucking, etc.

Afterwards, she was still unconvinced.

“I don’t have to married you to get that.”

“Good point. Wanna go get something to eat?”

Anyway, the Suzy Wong’s wasn’t as good as the one in Bangkok was back then, but they delivered on the promise out front, of “Ass-Smaking Fun.” Well, mostly this tranny inside, funny as all hell, did that. She was easily the most beautiful woman of the bunch, including those shaking what their mothers not their doctors had given them. I even though about taking her along with us, but passed it up. Even aside from the stomach, my list was crowded enough already.

So we wound up down some alley looking at a heaping platter of oysters. I didn’t know if I was up to it, but hell, maybe they’d do their trick. And it reminded me of the first time I had oysters, every time did, and that was a good time. So there was that. Maybe not the best choice, with the stomach. But, like I say, I thought maybe I could use an aphrodisiac. This burning, it was probably psychosomatic, and there’s nothing like a good fuck for putting a nice, meaty void in the middle of your head. Things were heading that way, anyway. It was a fight-or-fuck night is what I mean. Not that this was an either/or proposition with people like us, but tonight, I might just stir shit up for an excuse to go back to the A/C and the hotel early. Given half the chance, she’d see every dawn from some ultra locals-only restaurant out back of someone’s house, together with all the unbooked talent from the local clubs, the taxi drivers and drinking-hut owners, everyone passing around several bottles and two dozen plates all together, without stopping. She could out-drink me easily and was more than happy to leave me slumped in a corner until she was damned good and ready to leave. By then, she would be manic, about to hump a palm tree smooth, while I’d have whiskeydick and just want to sleep. The next day, as her hangover improved, so would her embroidery of this event and the sharpness of her attacks on my libido and her insistence that all I really wanted to do was go whoring.  Sometimes she’d manage to get herself worked up for real about that. I’d already learned the hard way that it didn’t do me any good at all to point out that we weren’t married–that we weren’t even, formally, boyfriend and girlfriend–so I’d just have to smoke through it or storm out, and the latter was a touch too dramatic for my tastes. Besides, after awhile, she’d need a nap. Then I could go out whoring.

Wokka wokka.

I watched her start chatting up one of the waittresses, and remembered how we’d wound up down here together in the first place. Another drunk fight. I’d pressed her too hard once, when she wouldn’t accept even the cost of the groceries she’d been cooking up and feeding me, on how she could afford to skip work when she wanted to, and then on what she really did. She accused me of calling her a bar girl. I said it all seemed suspicious to me, then made a motion that was supposed to say “okay, I’m dropping it” but looked like I was waving at her apartment. Impeccably neat and well-furnished as it was, it was still a 200-square-foot cinderblock cell without windows.

“Yeah? This? I look rich to you, man? Come on, man. Maybe you should go to a hotew.”

“Maybe you’re right. Look, I’m just trying to help out, is all. I don’t want to get you in trouble, or take advantage or . . . something.”

“Come on, man. I’m grown up. I can take care mysel. You must to worry about yoo-orsel. I’m not ak you for money. I’m take care of you, give you food, make shuah you get home sef–remember how we met? You just stupid, let stupid guy take your money. I pick you up off steet and bring you heah. Why you want to call me bah girl now?”

“Goddammit, I didn’t call you a–fuck it, why should I put up with this?”

“Put up with wha? You want to go, just go, man.” It went downhill, then uphill, the accent.

Somehow it wound up with angry sex, fucking with clenched teeth.

Later on, I was surprised, given my type, that I’d never done that before. A couple hours after that fight, waiting for my gumbo to arrive at a cajun place I’d stumbled across earlier, the world turned at the slightest angle to me. It felt like I’d just realized I was drunk, but I hadn’t had a drink for nearly two hours. At that time in my life, that was as close to sober as I got.

“Why don’t you come down to Phuket with me?” I said.

“No.” Not even a moment’s pause.

“Why not?”

“Because you baBAbaba.”

“Huh?”

“Crazy.”

“I’m crazy?” Look who’s talking.” Her face split slowly into a grin I hadn’t thought she had.

“But good boom-boom, nah?”

“Boom-boom. Jesus.” Now I was the one grinning.

“Good, nah? Come aLOT, nah?” sing-songy, like talking to a kid. She was damn near leaning down to talk to Little Rick. That was her nickname, only it came out “Litten Rick” on account of the accent, you know. He responded. She noticed. I ate the gumbo in about three mouthfuls and threw money at the waitress on the way to the cab. We couldn’t make it home; we just ducked into someplace louder and more crowded and took over the bathroom. I notched another first, crossed another thing off my list. She agreed to come to Phuket.

Now she was laughing with her entire torso again.

“She say–” and she stopped to rattle off something in the direction of the counter, where two middle-aged women had now joined in the conversation, before they all broke out in laughs and this long, drawn out hoot that sounded, for all the world, like an Arkansas pig call crossed with something you’d hear on “Showtime at the Apollo.”

“She say she think it too many oyster, tell me I must to be careful or I wear out my hoy–”

“Yer what?”

“Hoy. My . . . pusseee, you know, in Thai we call hoy, same like oyster, because–”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

“She making joke, say if I have too much hoy now, I not have any hoy lef later–” and she spluttered off, spraying me with pussy–er, oyster juice and chili sauce when one of the women here, all looking and waiting to see my reaction, muttered something about her shouting the word “hoy” all down the alley. I mean, it was an oyster restaurant. But nobody laughs like that at oysters.

“Shit” I said, all John Deere and shit, “I’m the one who’s got to be worried.”

“Yes, right, thass what I tell them, but they mai belee me, say you look like too young man.”

So I looked at them and shrugged and nodded and they all started chuckling away. This trip, I’d said to myself before I came, was going to be a real one–full of adventure and exotic locales. Or at least a second-class cruise down the Mekong and some sightseeing. But no rent-a-hoy for me. I’d score some vacationer tang if I couldn’t pick up a local legitimately.

Then I’d gone and insisted a taxi driver find me an after-hours ping-pong show and wound up drugged, mugged and dumped in an alleyway near Poon’s bar. She’d taken pity on me, I’d woken up terrified in her room, surrounded by stuffed animals and the smell of her illegal cooking–she made rent by selling it around the apartment block–and bolted as soon as I could get my pants on.

Then I’d gone and called her back, half convinced she was some kind of fever dream of legitimacy. Whatever that meant. Legitimacy, I mean. But I was nearing the end of my appetite for squalor, that was for sure. Maybe that was the burning, or part of it. Either way, I mean: giving in to Suzy Wong’s tonight, or leaving before we drank ourselves into a foursome, either one could be doing this to me. But turning my back on the squalor? That felt like a betrayal, the same as quitting smoking always did. It had done a lot for me, and here I go and repay it by trying to get clean. At least Poon seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. Or used to. But the squalor wasn’t what I wanted anymore.

So what did I want? Some good-hearted woman to come by and make me a better man?

Yes I did.

“Shit,” I thought to myself. All Wal-Mart and fried Snickers.