It can take a while before the motor of the night starts humming. It happens at random, it is not something that can be prepared for. You can be sizzling down the course of an uninteresting evening and before you know it you've been catapulted into a massive night, doing God knows what with God knows who. You may find yourself running from dogs, whores, the past, the police, the almighty, or yourself. On one outing in particular, the action didn't kick in until around one thirty in the morning when, while sauntering down the road big with drink, my friend Rudy and I were greeted by an angel, radiant in bar light.
“Do you think she's a whore?”
“She looks young and innocent, not that that can tell us much. Her friend certainly is.”
“Maybe she's showing her the ropes.”
“Fuck, it's not impossible. I guess we'll find it out, we're being sat next to them.”
“Balloon?”
Thus we conversed as we took our seats at the table next to theirs. The angel, adorned in a red crop top and a mini skirt, was acting shy after calling us over in the way that she did. Her companion, the old hand, was caked in countless strata of makeup and flouting her wares and couldn't be bothered to give a shit about anything that eventually went down that night. A few minutes rolled by and the angel still hadn’t spoken to us, so after a couple of balloons and a few swigs of beer I leaned over and asked her in her native tongue what she was drinking. Her earrings began to dance as she snapped her head toward me in surprise. She looked as if I'd levitated or pulled an elephant out of my ass. She pointed to a chair and I said the word for chair. She pointed to a table and I said the word for table. She pointed to her purse and I said the word for purse. Finally, she pointed to a bottle and I said the word for bottle.
“Wow,” she said, “You're fluent.”
The meat of our conversation consisted of an effort on my part to rustle up enough courage in her to talk to Rudy, whose blue eyes she had been salivating over since we had taken our seats. It turned out that she wasn't living in Bangkok, but was going to college elsewhere in the country and had been drifting aimlessly along Khao San Road without any idea of what she was doing. The lady of the evening next to her looked on with relative mirth, as did a newcomer, who had joined our party unannounced and for the most part unnoticed. She was shorter than the whore and dressed nothing like her, but she seemed to share the whore's indifference to the night's proceedings. Her face, set with lines hearkening back to long-fought battles of the past against sleep, kept watch in mild amusement. As the angel, whose name was Fern, finally began to calm down enough to have a relatively normal conversation with Rudy, I lit a cigarette and drank the world in. Someone in the bar next door started to vomit. Things were going along rather swimmingly, but the newcomer began to butt in before long, initiating a conversation which, unknown to me at the time, would prove to be the first in a series of events culminating in a cloud of despair with the rising of the sun. She spoke first of her past, and, having lived the lion’s share of her life in close proximity to the road, was not without anecdotes.
“Forty years of living here will teach you one thing;” she said, “The nights here are flavored with promise of something new: New experiences, lovers, and ways of being seem to lie just beyond the next bodega, waiting to be possessed. The course of reality is hardly ever as playful as this, and even the perpetual promise of difference can begin to make one weary.”
These were not her exact words, of course, but she demonstrated a reasonable enough command of English that I filled in the rest. She informed me that her name was Nook. Calculating the true number of her age didn't appeal to me in the slightest, so I deliberately ignored the number forty that she had thrown out and tried to occupy my mind with pleasant thoughts, as the possibility of a decent sleep rapidly extinguished itself from the night's prospects.
While sucking at her beer, she began to put the usual line of questions to me. What I was doing there and why. What I like about Thailand. How it's different than where I came from. Questions that I've long since gotten used to answering without an iota of mental exertion. I was offering up all of the old responses at her like a parrot when Rudy asked the trio what they had planned on getting into that night.
“Dancing! We want to go dancing!” he exclaimed.
At this, I began to lose heart. On most days I would rather hurl myself into oncoming traffic than dance recreationally.
“Will you come?” asked Nook, “Will you dancing with us?”
“No,” I replied, “I'm probably going home soon and I will certainly not dancing with anyone.”
I lit a smoke before resuming our conversation, happy to have stood my ground so resolutely with an opportunity for pussy staring me in the face. But in the glances that I received from Rudy the realization that, despite my declaration to the contrary, I would more than likely find myself gyrating before the night's end began to encroach upon my field of awareness and I began to despair when everybody elected to move camp and head to a bar down the road yonder.
The bar down the road had part of its back wall removed, revealing another bar within the first. The bouncer was strict on IDs.
“Passport, you have?” he asked, studying us with his flashlight.
We didn't have. I was thrilled, having nearly escaped the barbs of destiny, but he motioned us inside anyways after receiving an earful from the girls. We procured a healthy number of beers, set up a base for us to return to periodically, and began our shambling cadences with the other dancers in the darkness of the outer dance floor. I enjoyed dancing about as much as I usually do but I was quite pleased when Nook started to kiss me so I returned the gesture in kind. This went on for a moment before she smacked me away as if I were an insect. I scuttled back to our drinks in confusion, but she caught up to me and tried to get me to dance with her again. She succeeded, and the terrible cycle repeated itself continually until closing time. The coming together, the kiss, its return, the joy, the violence.
During the befuddled trips I made to where we kept the beer, I glimpsed the prostitute on patrol around the premises, schmoozing with various figures, appearing connected and cosmopolitan in her butterfly-like flits about the floor. She disappeared after the lights flashed on, and when it came our time to do the same, the two pairs that we comprised took far too long to part from one another. An absurd conversation about ice cream took place outside the bar, which ended with Nook, in her drunkenness, bellowing.
“Don't get ice cream with him, Fern!”
Rudy and I confided to each other about the strategic importance of splitting up, a priority held in common. Rudy and Fern eventually took off, while Nook and I embarked upon a tuk-tuk ride to her room, located somewhere west of the road. Hair and spirits flew wildly as we cooled ourselves in the breeze, buzzing through the sois in the earliest portion of the new day.
We embraced throughout the journey, doing our best to hold onto the last couple drops of the night. Remembering her actions while we had hobbled around on the dance floor, I reminded myself to stay sharp. Despite the resolution to exercise caution, I still hadn't reflected upon the stupidity of trying to fuck someone that you can't trust not to physically strike you. My cash consisted of a thousand baht bill, much too large to break, but I was miraculously able to pay the driver with pocket change. Fortune was kind to me then. We completed the last leg of our journey on foot and as it loomed before us out of the darkness, the outside of her building first appeared to be the end of a wayward boat, but I soon ascertained that it was something akin to a traditional Thai style house. I was surprised to find myself, however, being guided among doors that led to studio apartments not unlike my own.
Her room was polished and bright; the only sign of disarray was a mess of beauty products heaped onto a chest of drawers in the northeast corner. Neither the four unblemished walls nor the navy blue carpet suggested the trouble to come. The manner of her speech, however, began to alert me to the possibility of danger, as did the words with which she communicated her desires. I was intoxicated at this point, but I thought that I remembered talking with her in English for the majority of the evening. But, from around the time she was busy yelling about ice cream, I noticed that she had begun expressing her insanity exclusively in Thai. This had not been overly concerning at the time; I figured that she was probably just drunk. You will find that I am not an unreasonable man. A profound change in the way that she comported herself, however, seemed to accompany the change of tongue, and the last part of our encounter began like any visitation from demons would: with screams and the gnashing of teeth.
As soon as her door was locked she spun around and started barking out orders. I couldn't understand what she wanted me to do and this only served to compound her rage. Spittle flew from the corners of her lips in wild trajectories as her mouth strained to issue commands that could only go unheeded. I began to understand when she pointed to the bathroom and mimicked someone taking a shower. In an effort to salvage something of the schizophrenically romantic air, I asked her if she would be joining me and she shot me a look in response, which conveyed that this was certainly not in the cards. I asked her if she at least had a towel that I could use but I received a similar nonverbal denial.
I did undress then and there, and underneath the spigot I cogitated wildly upon her designs. I began to fear for a number of my organs. My eyes scanned all over the bathroom for evidence of funny business and for blunt objects with which to defend myself should the situation turn sour. I was startled when Lillith herself slithered her way into the water closet with me. She entered as naked as the day when she was plucked from her mother's cunt and her tan body displayed markings and tattoos which until this point had been concealed beneath her clothing. She performed her ablutions idly and failed to regard my fearful visage until she at last, in the hour's first utterances of English, began to weave the tale of her only child.
“My son,” she exclaimed with emotion, “he is a good man. I worry about he a lot.”
As she began to spin her yarn, I remained unsure if it would be prudent to relax. For all I was able to gather, she could have been enticing my sympathy only to wind me spider-like into a web of nefarious intent. I was at a loss for words.
“Your son will be fine, you have nothing to worry about.”
We cleaned ourselves in a shared moment of silence until more of her gibbering began to echo out into the empty room outside.
“If he want to be ladyboy, I don't know what can I do,” she said.
Well, I thought, what choice do you have? Would you stop loving him? Her heathen ramblings interrupted my thinking.
“I think I will love he no matter what he do. I will love he. I don't care what he decide. My son he is good and no one can take that from he. It don't matter if he woman or man, my son he is a good.”
“Yes,” I told her, “your son he is a good man. Do you have a towel?”
She opened the door and reached around to where a hook on the wall held the object of my desire, placed there before she joined me in the shower. She tossed it at me like a drunken pitcher and when I had wiped myself relatively clean she ordered me to clamber on into bed. She expressed this in her native tongue, not mine, and was frustrated by when I screwed up my face at her in perplexity, having lost all patience now.
“Bed, now!”
Understanding, I spread myself uneasily over the rock slab of her mattress, ready to initiate an exodus of this she-bear's cavern at the first sign of savagery. After a minute, the outpour of water from the showerhead ceased abruptly and the witch appeared naked and unyielding in the doorway, backlit by the lone fluorescent light bulb of her bathroom. She adorned herself in an old gown of pinkish cotton, which hid her tattoos and only served to highlight the contrast of our ages. After shooting a look of stern displeasure into my face she climbed into her bed and we writhed among the sheets like pythons on the feed.
We kissed for a few moments and unlike our earlier fits of romance on the dance floor, the return gestures of my mouth were not met with intermittent pelting. She pulled out my pale member hiding in the darkness of her sheets and inspected that rod as if she were an archeologist. She put me into her mouth and I finally began to calm down; surely I would soon be full to the hilt in the old crone's pussy. I offered an eyeless smile to the ceiling, confident that the next minute or two would find me heaving away in an effort to plug up the broad vacuum of her ancient cunt. Instead, my tiny eyes reeled out to the heavens upon registering an acute and ugly pain and I threw forth my teeth like a half-crazed mustang. I felt her molars graze against the indigo veins running along that pillar of flesh before they began chomping away with gusto. What I endured felt less like an act of fellatio than consumption. Crows feet bulged wild and dark upon my face as my eyes forcefully shut themselves. I whimpered like a newborn pup as a clownish grimace continued to etch itself into my facial features.
My hand pawed at her cunt in reprieve, cleaving apart the lips in the solemn rhythm of a ghost dance. She was wet and responsive, a glimmer of hope. Yes, I thought, if only I could trade one gaping maw for another, toothless and smooth and presumably pink in a bothered state, all would be well. No dice. She struck my hand away and silent tears began to well up in my eyes, causing my vision to blur. Desperate, I began fidgeting with her nipples as one would the dials of a ham radio and received another strike. In anguish, I grabbed her bed sheets by the fistful and resisted the urge to howl out in pain. Initiating a last ditch effort to escape this torture, I directed my attention to the world beyond her balcony, where the birds had begun their preludes to the day, and scanned a starless sky for Gainesboro evidence of the coming sunrise. I spied my clothes, heaped in a pile next to the window, and thoughts of the unbridled day on approach flooded my consciousness. Mental images of the coming workday began to materialize: classrooms, words hastily scribbled across blackboards, marks given and received. I decided that the time had come for this circus to end.
I sat up in her bed and swatted her mouth away from what was left of my penis to see how she would enjoy a taste of her own medicine. A hand held to her jaw and a fiery, bewildered stare of her eyes into mine confirmed to me that she hadn't expected such equity.
“Let me get my clothes,” I said, “I'm leaving.”
At first she was wordless and tried to double down on her efforts to consume my ravaged organ. I grabbed her by the back of her hair and pulled her away.
“No, you don't understand. It's too late for all of this. I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm going home.”
She tried to push me back down.
“No,” was all she managed to say.
I could only giggle at how shocked she seemed to be. I pushed myself back up.
“Yes. I'm going to get dressed and you're going to let me out of here. We're done. I don't know what you think this is, but it's over.”
She pushed me down again and, upon rising a second time like Lazarus, I conjured up the most evil, drunken, wild-eyed face that I could and shot it hard into her eyes.
“Get the fuck off of me and let me get dressed. Now.”
She climbed off of me and I wasted no time in putting my clothes on, gathering my things, and demanding her to escort me out of the building immediately. In the meantime she had started crying and whimpering like a hound dog starved for attention and this only made the violence of the previous hours more confusing. As we reached the front door she tugged at my arm and the water works began in earnest.
“Don't go,” she wailed, “please come back, one more chance. Give me one more chance.”
I withdrew my arm in disgust as if she were a leper or a cockroach.
“It's too late for that,” I told her, “I'm going to try and forget that any of this ever happened. You should do the same.”
With a flash of her key card the door was open and I stepped briskly out into Bangkok's quietest hour. I refused to look back, but I did savor the sound of her caterwauling for as long as possible before we passed out of earshot of one another.
I'd like to report that my exit marked the end of the night's mad carnival but I am unfortunately unable to do so. In times of solitude such as this I would usually be worried about the stray dogs that seem to materialize in my path without fail but in the ten minutes that I shuffled around the old city offering intermittent shouts of “That bitch” and “what teeth” into the greying vault above, my rage must have been detectable to all of the lords creatures awake at this hour, as the only canines about kindly removed themselves from my trajectory. I was a witness only to their hind parts, caked in evidence of old bowel movements, as they padded off into more fruitful sois elsewhere in the Old City area.
At last I found a soul willing to ferry me across the sprawling capital in a taxicab. In confusion, he punctuated our snakelike meanderings through the freeways with cries of “I don't know the position! I don't know the position!” I wanted to tell him that I too did not know the position, as I was not a taxi driver. However, in an attempt to get myself home as soon as possible, I limited my speech to the issuing of directions. I can blame only myself for the wrong turns that he took before the heavenward ascent of the towers marking my residence became visible on the horizon. Upon my graceless return, I popped a Trazodone and, throwing the fridge wildly open, fastened one last frightful cocktail out of it's contents. Swigging away without thirst, I saluted the new day, which had by all accounts broken, and laying down at last began to enter into a familiar darkness without boundary.
Daniel Nichols is a confused soul living in Thailand and actively preaching the gospel of Waste throughout the greater Bangkok metropolitan area. When he's not teaching conversational English, Dan likes to take pictures and read old books. He plans to pen critical essays on whatever he deems worthy of writing about and if he gets creative enough, he might dabble in the realm of fiction.
