Date: 2012-05-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Travel; Bangkok; Stories; Travellers; Thailand; Tales; Expats
Description: Bangkok Filth scrapes away the grime and provides a glimpse inside the sometimes strange, sometimes deviant, always entertaining world of eccentrics and outsiders who have left it all behind and tried to start over in Thailand.

Bangkok Filth

The Freaks, Frauds and Failures
of the Expat Community
in Thailand

Ken Austin

SATORI BOOKS

Copyright © 2012 Ken Austin

All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyright may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means: electronic, graphic or mechanical, without the prior written authorization of the author. All characters in this book are fictional: any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Austin, Kenneth Robert, 1970–

Bangkok Filth: The Freaks, Frauds and Failures of the Expat Community in Thailand / Austin, Ken

First Kindle edition

ISBN 978-616-7707-02-0

Publisher

Ken Austin

Production Credits

Layout: Ken Austin

Cover design: Ken Austin (silhouette images provided by http://all-silhouettes.com)

Editor

Ken Austin

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

A Tale of Two Yanks

Mr. Overcompensation

The Meditation Retreat

The Drunk

Bangkok Filth

Christ in the Classroom

The Reverend

Carpen Rutledge

The Myths

Suicide Solution

Getting Settled in the Slums

Heading Home

The Transit Strike

Mazoonga

Musings on the Final Days

One Soul in Bangkok

Secrecy and Shame

Death of an Expat

Garvin the Meek

The Flood

Arse Wars

Bangkok Noir

The Embassy Thug

The Voyeur

Author Bio

A Tale of Two Yanks

Americans travelling or living abroad deal with more pre-conceived notions and unfair judgments than most other nationalities. An aggressive foreign policy and the most loathed president in recent memory are two reasons. And being the mightiest nation militarily, economically and technologically engenders a fair amount of envy and contempt. While somewhat of a stereotype, the image of the loud, obnoxious, over-weight oaf is perpetuated by enough of the country’s 300 million citizens that it has gained traction in the minds of many.

Perhaps I’ve been lucky during my time in Thailand. Very few of my colleagues from the U.S. have lived up to that oft-repeated caricature. On the contrary, most have been intelligent, thoughtful and content to fly under the radar without attracting attention.

However, it’s inevitable that on occasion a loud blundering yank will proudly occupy the role we have all come to expect. Sadly, those are the Americans that many remember while involved in temporary or fleeting situations such as vacationing in a foreign country.

Not one to stray from those classic portraits of the most memorable and repulsive individuals we meet in our journeys through life, here I present two classic examples in A Tale of Two Yanks (and let’s face it, a story about a pair of genial clods who are nothing but harmonious would hardly be interesting).

Yank Number One

Clayton and I started working at the university in Chiang Mai on the same day. I worked in the Department of Logic while he had been hired by the Romanian Language section, a bizarre kind of ersatz faculty set up to cream hugely inflated tuition from the parents of students who didn’t have the grades to get into any of the regular programs. Graduates could claim a degree from the well-respected institution and the university could slurp up the huge fees and plough them back into such things as inflated salaries and lavish, self-congratulatory awards ceremonies.

Because the Romanian language section was just getting started, there was little organization and only a handful of staff members. Though the focus was on teaching Romanian as a foreign language, many of the classes would utilize English language instruction and textbooks. English is the lingua franca of the academic world and one of the potential options for students graduating from the program was to go on to further study or one day become teachers.

Together with Clayton, who would supposedly organize the English language instruction, the faculty contracted out for extra instructors through the Department of Logic, which was conveniently located in the same building.

Clayton at first was garrulous and affable in that way that only yanks can be. Americans have a habit of coming on strong with personal information that others would wait months or years to reveal. Perhaps as a way to establish themselves in a new social setting or simply because that’s the way it’s done in their country.

He was obviously intelligent and saw things in much the same way as I did. His sarcastic contempt for the absurdities of Thailand was mixed with a resignation for living out his years in a place that allowed him the freedom to drift along with few worries.

Heavily over-weight, if not morbidly obese, he strode towards people in an aggressive and confrontational way. Even if his only intention was to strike up a good-natured discussion about some asinine behaviour that he had witnessed recently. His megaphone-loud voice added to the sense that he took up more space than his otherwise comical appearance necessitated.

He was a class A and shameless slob in the manner he dressed and it was hard not to come away with the impression that it was intentional. Dirty, tired old loafers/slippers that he never pulled completely onto his feet and instead walked around in with the heels mashed down in a scuffling desultory way. He shuffled into the building wearing soiled cut-off shorts and a rumpled shirt that was never tucked in. He would then change into a pair of trousers he kept in his office and on occasion even added a tie to round out the disjointed look. Greasy, stringy, thinning black/greying hair, that had that certain “off” appearance that comes from artificial colouring, was slicked back and revealed a healthy widow’s peak.

The left lens of his glasses was cracked and remained that way through the duration of his employment.

At the beginning of the term I was in touch with Clayton a fair amount as we discussed the way the course would be taught and the breakdown of points distribution. He alternated between wanting to put together a course that mattered and being frustrated by the strange directives from Thai management.

It was clear early on that he was a moody bastard. On some days he would almost blanch upon first greeting, as if he had been jarred out of some kind of early morning reverie. He would eagerly ask what was up in an almost deferential and accommodating way that didn’t sit right with what he had already revealed about his character. Nor did it feel appropriate considering the relatively equal positions we occupied and the fact that he was 15 years older than me.

More than that, it was simply perplexing in contrast to the times he appeared snarling and contemptuous. Not an uncommon feeling amongst expats who experience the cultural differences in Thailand but strange because he took it out on all those around him including the people who were ostensibly becoming his friends.

Abrasive Son-of-a-bitch

It quickly became apparent that Clayton thrived on confrontation to some degree. After years of living in Thailand, he still couldn’t let absurdities lie and promptly strode up to the sixth floor office looking to vent his frustration whenever another ridiculous request was made. If his loud, energetic entrances were a source of amusement or annoyance to most of the other foreigners, they were downright disturbing to the Thais. Like a hippo heading for the water at dusk, Clayton would storm towards whomever he was intent on accosting while speaking in a voice that was too loud by numerous decibels.

After only a few weeks, Clayton realized that the position he had accepted with the university was one of the worst in terms of earning potential. While the teachers working for the Department of Logic were offered plenty of extra courses at a high hourly rate, he was stuck with the base salary, which on its own was only enough to scrape by. This compounded his increasing frustration and alienation.

At about the same time, I discovered that Clayton had a pastime that apparently consumed most of his waking hours. He had a distinctive writing style that he used in e-mails: no capitalization and sloppy punctuation, grammar and spelling. He also had a unique and slightly strange e-mall address. It was a word in Thai that describes a person or creature forgotten or abandoned and which is intended to engender sympathy. The same writing style and a user name identical to his e-mail address showed up on a local discussion forum dedicated to living as an expat in various countries, including Thailand. There was no doubt it was Clayton.

I checked in on the forum on occasion and was interested to watch the surreal spectacle that was developing. Clayton was a regular, nay obsessive poster. He literally must have spent full work-weeks’ worth of posting online. His posts were of the challenging, argumentative sort. They further demonstrated that he was obviously an intelligent person but also that it was difficult for him to find others to converse with on a similar level. A lot of frustration came through and he inevitably ended up verbally dismantling anyone who decided to engage in debate.

He was rarely at the office now, with the exception of when he taught a class. On the occasion he did show up, I still had the opportunity to wander down to his office and discuss the same course we were teaching to different groups of students. Talk would inevitably turn to gossip regarding various other teachers we worked with. Clayton became animated and relaxed when ripping others and I shamelessly joined in.

I realized that there was something in his character that gained a sense of relief in the bizarre stories that were part of other people’s lives. Perhaps as a way to forget his own troubles or just because the human condition intrigued him so much. And he was fairly open about the litany of screw-ups that had plagued his own life. He talked about the alcoholism that dragged him down for years and how he had beat the addiction. Similarly, in his online rantings, he hinted at some form of abuse in his youth.

The fact that he needed to get at the intricacies and personal details that made up the lives of relative strangers while remaining slightly off limits himself, was confirmed when he told me he had worked as a 1-800 operator dispensing advice to people with relationship troubles. I wondered if the out-of-character and almost maudlin occasional references to his own personal failings were simply a way to get others to open up. In the process they would offer up more of their intimate secrets which fed his habit. I was once close to confiding in him regarding a problem that had exploded in my life but something made me hold back. Only a short time later, I was thankful that I had resisted and not offered up more fodder for his voyeurism.

Layers of Weirdness

Clayton was becoming more abrasive and it was obvious he didn’t care whether he sabotaged his job at the university. In fact, it was probably the best possible solution as it would free him from what was an unreasonable position and force him to seek opportunities elsewhere. Something he would be unlikely to do otherwise as he drifted along, the treatment of the Thai management fueling his indignation and justifying the hundreds of hours a month he spent insulting strangers in cyberspace. He left deadlines regarding exams to the last minute and his work was sloppy to the point of embarrassing. It was obvious that he just didn’t give a damn.

I had considered him a friend for much of the year that he worked at the university though there were always some niggling doubts. Despite whatever had brought him to his current place in life and regardless of what bullshit he may have endured, the one over-riding thought about him that I could no longer shake was that he was disingenuous.

The trials and fuck-ups of others were some kind of tonic in his otherwise bleak and empty life. He had found this one saving grace to somehow make the last years of life bearable; the freak show dramas of others as some kind of social experiment, to hover on the edges and suck out whatever bits and pieces nourished his damaged mind.

I’m sure he knew that I was aware of his alter ego on the discussion forum since we had talked about the website a few times. Yet I never broached the subject of his rabid posting and he never volunteered the information.

Throughout the year, he had at various times come into my classroom as I was teaching. It was to ostensibly inform me of some bit of info related to the course. He taught the same group of students at different times in the week and so he would greet them as he called me into the hallway. But usually he would simply blare into the class and approach me and then turn and lumber/strut towards the students and would start speaking at ear-splitting levels, an insane caricature of his normally extreme demeanor.

He would proceed to make inane comments directed at various students. What the hell was he trying to prove? I would look at him with an obvious perplexed expression as he left, yet he would pull the same stunt a few weeks later. This validated the sense that he simply got a kick out of trying to mess with people for no good reason other than to provide a hit to the fucked up workings of his corroded mind.

After Clayton left my classroom one day, I used the opportunity to get some feedback from the students regarding his behaviour. Did he always act and speak like this when he was teaching them? “Yes,” the answer came in unison. They claimed that this was, in fact, all that he did. A lesson-long rambling monologue as he played the role of what he thought a hip, world-weary university professor was all about. According to them, he rarely, if ever, referenced the course book that we were assigned to use.

End-Game

I still enjoyed talking with Clayton in his office but those instances were less frequent now. Finally, he seemed intent on driving me away completely. One day while I was in his office he launched into an attack on one of the other teachers who was a good friend of mine. The other teacher, Walter, had suffered a terrible family tragedy the year before but had been remarkably resilient and carried on. Clayton mocked the situation Walter had gone through. I was now convinced beyond any doubt that Clayton was a devious manipulator, probably hoping I would pass on the info which would then spark some twisted confrontation. I didn’t, of course. The incident only removed any remaining good feelings I had towards Clayton.

As the semester drew to a close, Clayton started hinting about making ultimatums to management. He either wanted some kind of raise and/or the opportunity to teach more classes or he would resign. However, he never had the chance to throw down the gauntlet.

There was a computer room that was off limits to everyone except teachers of the Department of Logic. Clayton disregarded the rule, however petty it was, and casually waltzed in one day and started preparing some documents using one of the computers. There had been some kind of security clampdown a few weeks previous due to some damaged machines that no one had fessed up to. They were in the process of making all the terminals password protected but hadn’t fully implemented the system yet. However, they were still keeping a close eye on things.

Clayton assumed the usual careless attitude would apply and nobody would notice him. When one of the senior teachers advised him he couldn’t continue using the computer he snapped and exploded at her. That signaled his end at the university. The Romanian studies program administrators advised him that he was being let go.

He finished up the semester and was gone. I didn’t witness the computer room incident and so can’t comment directly. But knowing the style of the management and the way foreigners are marginalized and treated as a necessary evil, I totally empathize with his outburst. I tried to offer my support but his sneering, abrasive side had taken full control and he wanted nothing to do with anyone connected to the university.

Clayton was an intelligent, conflicted, and as mentioned before, ultimately disingenuous and manipulative individual. I never saw him again.

Yank Number Two

A few weeks after Clayton departed I saw a rotund, disoriented foreigner lumbering around campus. Because of mannerisms and the way he held himself, I knew he was a yank. Overweight and bespectacled, he had a sickly white complexion that was as close to a jail-house pallor as you can get in a country where the sun shines almost 365 days a year.

A few weeks later, as the new semester was about to begin, I saw the oaf at the office. Perhaps because of the large number of homosexual Thai and foreign teachers already working there or maybe due to his initial manner, I got the distinct impression that he too was gay. Something about a physically unattractive and obese individual who is effeminate fills me with revulsion. I cursed the luck of having him as a colleague. Strangely, just as moments earlier he had a slight lilt to his voice and a mincing disposition, it disappeared in a flash and was replaced with a gruff exterior.

He possessed quite possibly the loudest and most grating voice I have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to. He could be standing mere inches away and bellowing as if for the benefit of ensuring all within range knew he was present.

On closer inspection, I saw that the pasty white skin of his face was pock marked with the scars of adolescent acne. He had a big rubbery pointed nose on which were perched a pair of coke bottle glasses. The physically unattractive mug was contrasted with a big set of perfectly aligned pearly white yank gnashers that were likely the result of expensive cosmetic dentistry. The contrast against his other pedestrian or repulsive features exaggerated the sense of phoniness.

He blundered about in a clumsy, oafish way, seemingly oblivious to others around him. Within a few days he was shamelessly walking through the front doors of the building in which we worked decked out in the sloppiest attire imaginable. The distinct sense I had was that he was completely lacking in any self-awareness. He apparently had no inkling of how those in his vicinity viewed him.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the most viscerally repugnant individual I had ever met. Still, I made an effort to be friendly and help direct him around the sprawling campus. There was no reason to create a dysfunctional work relationship.

Eerie Similarities

It was a few days before it struck me. After working with a collection of well-adjusted Americans who were as far from the stereotypes as possible, I had witnessed two remarkably similar walking clichés straight out of central casting within a three-week period.

Clayton; a fat, loud, balding, bespectacled slob completely lacking in self-awareness; a clod who would barge into rooms talking at the top of his lungs and walk towards people at an abnormal clip that created the sense he was about to lay a good-natured beating on them.

Yank number two, Gilbert, ...well, it was eerily uncanny how in appearance and manner he was nearly a clone of Clayton. The only difference was that Gilbert had a full head of hair. Give it time, I thought, as he was about twenty years younger than Clayton. A surreal apparition of Clayton in his early years.

Another strange similarity: in the first few days of chatting to Gilbert, he informed me that, like Clayton, he too had counselled troubled individuals as a 1-800 operator before becoming a teacher.

Amongst the other foreign teachers at the Department of Logic, Gilbert quickly established himself as careless and unprofessional. He handed in scrawled, nearly indecipherable and crumpled up papers when typed and accurate documents were the standard. Worse, despite his apparent lack of self-awareness, it all seemed like an affectation. As if he were playing the clichéd role of an intellectual so distracted by other weightier matters that he couldn’t be bothered to do a decent job.

The university environment is a good one, where you work unsupervised and have plenty of time for preparation and research. For some teachers not used to such a situation, it provides a relaxed atmosphere and the sense that you are trusted to get on with the task at hand. For others, like Gilbert, it sends them spiraling off on an irresponsible downward slide.

A few weeks after Gilbert started, his wife showed up on campus. She had supposedly been working at a school in Malaysia and was now ready to reunite with the creature she called her husband. She was surprisingly attractive and well adjusted and probably ten years younger than Gilbert.

She was slim and unassuming; the veritable opposite of Gilbert. Although attractive, she had a fairly mannish appearance with close cropped hair and little attention to dress or make-up. What she saw in Gilbert I’ll never know.

Desperately Seeking Attention

Together with his slobbish dress and work habits, the other trait that came blazing through in everything Gilbert did was a desperate need for recognition. Like many Americans, he made an early play to make himself known to everyone. The contrived “let’s be friends” approach is one that simply does not resonate with most non-Americans. Get to know people over time, arrange the odd get-together and after a few years look up and realize you have gotten to know someone you now value as a real friend? Of course. But the instant familiarity demanded by Gilbert and others of his ilk make a lot of people uneasy.

After his wife had been around for a week or so, Gilbert decided it was time for everyone to share in the joy of their existence. Out of nowhere, he slapped up a scrawled note in the teacher’s room advising everyone that they were welcome to come to his room for a party the coming Friday. One sentence stood out: “If you want anything to drink, bring it along.”

The cringe-worthy embarrassment for everyone was palpable. For everyone, that is, except those who had put up the invitation. If non-American Caucasians are unlikely to respond to such clumsy attempts at making connections so early after first introductions, then Thais are doubly so. The weirdness was really hard to fathom. “Come on over to my grungy room in the low-rent dive of a building near the campus. We can’t spring for a couple of 50 cent bottles of Coke so you’ll have to swing by the 7-eleven before you arrive. We’re a pair of groovy hipsters...you will leave stunned by our conversational abilities!”

My informal straw poll confirmed that exactly no one was overwhelmed with enough enthusiasm to attend the event. Gilbert seemed relatively subdued for the following week or two.

A few weeks later I saw him in the computer room and he started bellowing on about himself. He informed me that he was a “writer” and had “published” a book. I later did a quick online search and confirmed that he had indeed written a book though it was only available through the internet equivalent of a vanity publisher. Fair play to him for putting in the effort and churning out the words necessary.

But it all had the feel of someone playing at being a writer. He registered with a litany of websites devoted to novelist wannabes, informing all of his supposed prolific output. In short, he devoted as much time to putting pen to paper as he did to attending to the visuals and activities associated with bringing him the due recognition he felt he deserved.

And the recognition certainly wasn’t going to come from what he had actually written.

Sample passages from his books revealed not only a person who hadn’t a clue about such things as narrative or character development but someone who was also lacking a solid grasp of the English language. Amateurish malapropisms, such as using “affect” when it should have been “effect,” littered the horrid dross he had produced.

Inferiority Complex

His slipshod approach to teaching and the related paper work continued. He was designated the mid-term exam coordinator for one course we were working on together. He ignored the details about the mid-term that had been circulated to pupils at the beginning of the semester. One of the most common ways to guarantee complaints from students is to stray from the syllabus.

I saw Gilbert on the walkway outside the building one day, taking up the space of three normal people due to his size and way of moving. I stopped him to enquire about the mid-term exam problems. Literally within seconds he became defensive and started yelling at the top of his lungs.

“I’ve been teaching for 15 year and will not be dictated to!” An especially odd claim considering his age and mention of previous jobs. And it was just plain off the wall because of the over-reaction.

“Why are you yelling at me? I’m trying to help you. This is the kind of thing that will result in complaints from students which will cause problems for all of us. Believe me, you’re getting a reputation for being sloppy,” I said.

He claimed he had a naturally loud voice and offered up some more abuse. I called him a wacko and walked away to the sound of him yelling at me and threatening to “elevate this to your superiors.”

Raised in a Barn

During the time that Gilbert had been at the university, another revolting revelation came to light about his personal habits. One morning soon after he had arrived on the scene, I walked into the washroom on the 15th floor. As I turned into one of the toilet cubicles I nearly vomited as I was greeted with a toilet-bowl full of shit. I cursed at whichever careless fuck had left his excrement on display and found another stall to use. I chalked it up to some daydreaming slob and a momentary lapse in attention.

However, the next day the same sick individual had left his rancid calling card. And again the next day. I instantly assumed it was Gilbert. It matched his general way of doing things. I walked past him leaving the toilets on another day and sure enough, the deviant piece of filth had once again struck. This had never occurred before he had been hired, didn’t take place on days when he was absent and now I had come as close as possible to *gag* catching the turd in the act. For a person who craved recognition but couldn’t earn it through any form of talent or accomplishment, he sought it the way a three-year old does before toilet training.

I considered confronting him about his nasty little ritual but the likely farcical and futile outcome of such an attempt dissuaded me. Similarly, it’s almost impossible to confirm with others that something like this is occurring though I did have a word with one of the poor cleaners who had the task of cleaning up after this sicko. She verified that he was indeed the culprit. Many may even question why I include this vile information here. It’s only done to more accurately paint a picture of repugnance distilled into its purest essence. That was how I viewed Gilbert. True loathsome disgust as I had never known before.

In line with the bizarro world reality that existed at the university, it looked as though he had a long career ahead of him.

Mr. Overcompensation

I first met Mr. Overcompensation at a car show at a big convention hall in Chiang Mai. He was the friend of one of the other teachers I worked with. I didn’t know him as Mr. Overcompensation then. That came later. For the first part of this tale, I’ll use his real name: Lem Danzig. My first impression of Lem, which many others shared, was that he looked remarkably young for his age. He had an extremely smooth complexion and it appeared as though he rarely, if ever, had to shave. This is not uncommon amongst Asian men.

Despite possessing the usual whippet thinness of most Thais, he lacked the hard facial angles that many of the men have: a tautness of skin that results from such a lean appearance and gives an attractive sharpness to the features. It seemed that he was aware of this and it was an appearance that he was proud of, even mentioning to people that he took collagen injections to offset the effects of aging. I thought this mildly unusual but having resigned myself to never fully understanding Thais, I thought nothing more of it.

Lem was affable and it was easy to chat with him. I immediately noticed that he constantly steered any discussion towards talk of females. It was particularly evident that he wanted to demonstrate to others his prowess with women. He talked at length about the fact that he had two girlfriends on the go. Both of them were aware of the other, and to hear Lem describe it, they both considered him pretty hot stuff.

When I meet new people, I am as agreeable as possible in an effort to get a feel for the person’s worldview and some insight into their character. Short of slapping Lem on the back, I stroked his ego with kudos for being such an accomplished stud. Aside from praise for performance in battle or in competition, the sweetest kind of recognition from another man is recognition of sexual conquests.

Lem seemed spurred on by such a positive response and made certain to add that women such as the calibre he was capable of scoring were virtually off limits to foreigners such as myself. He said it in a good-natured way, almost an invitation to skip the early cumbersome stages of a developing friendship and advance to the harsh ribbing and competitive camaraderie that many male-to-male relationships are known for. It was impossible to take offense.

After that I saw Lem on occasion. Usually it was together with someone I call “the good-natured oaf,” the teacher who had introduced us. There was a bar at the end of the street from the school where we worked. On Saturdays after we had finished teaching we would convene there for a few drinks and some games of pool. Together with the alcohol and the presence of women, Lem always started in with the macho references. He liked to call women “bitches” which seemed puerile to me but elicited a positive if hollow response from many others.

The good-natured oaf, a chubby South African with limp blonde hair and a desperate need to be liked by others, always validated the talk and responded in kind. The two were “close” as I was informed by the good-natured oaf, something he took great pride in telling others.

Lem always seemed flummoxed when doing something physical such as shooting pool. His awkward, inept shots were truly horrible. Once, when he was driving us to a party at a restaurant, simple directions seemed to throw him for a loop. The oaf arranged for a weekly Parcheesi tournament at his flat and the prospect of doing some simple deductions and using logic as part of the game left Lem looking clueless. He made up for it with his smoking, drinking and sly innuendo about women. He guffawed heartily when any mention was made about whores, bitches etc.

One Saturday evening as the week came to a close, we gulped some beer at the pub down the road. The oaf, Baxter and I were sitting there at the outdoor patio and bantering as we drank. Baxter was a sinewy, older expat from Ireland who was a father figure to the oaf. The oaf was recounting some antics from the night before when they had been at the same location playing pool. As he was retelling some humorous episode from the previous night, a resident lady-boy sauntered by and entered the indoor restaurant and pub area. The oaf turned his attention to the repulsive looking transsexual and mentioned that Lem had been having a heart-to-heart chat with her the night before and had given her a hug. Now that he mentioned it, I had seen Lem giving her friendly hugs on a few other occasions. Somehow it didn’t jibe with all the “bitches” talk.

“That must have been like an optical illusion,” Baxter said with a hearty laugh.

My guts dropped.

I had to play at being incredulous. It seemed like the only thing to do.

“You’re having a laugh?”

There was no response from them other than raised eyebrows and upturned hands though the oaf seemed a bit perturbed that I had cottoned on so quickly. Just then, some of the others ambled up and so my questions were cut short.

Though there should have been be no good reason for it, the uneasy feeling persisted. Lem was a woman…or at least was born as a woman. Did he still have a cunt? Or some kind of prosthetic cock? Why should my thoughts instantly go to the clinical, mechanical aspects of his/her genitals or how he fucks? It’s intriguing, that’s why.

Years ago I stopped trying to assess the appropriateness of various thoughts and instead started following them to a place that generates more internal discussion and perhaps even enters that realm of finding truths.

Lem was set to arrive later that night and though I appeared as blasé as usual, I couldn’t wait to look at him through the fresh lens that Baxter had given me. Since that day I’ve wondered about Baxter’s supposedly innocuous comment. He was a taciturn sort that you knew had seen some things and come to his own honour code and way of looking at the world. He wanted me to know about Lem and to let it seem like a harmless slip. Somehow it seemed fair to him that I know.

I started thinking about the vast number of lesbians I had seen since my arrival in Thailand. It seemed to stretch belief that there were so many. Or perhaps it’s just a comment on how much fear exists in the west and how many people are forced to conceal their true sexual identity. Seeing butch dykes with their beautiful Thai girlfriends had become common since I had arrived a few years earlier. Some of the “toms” as the bull dykes are called here, are truly nasty looking individuals. Not only physically ugly women, but sneering, unpleasant individuals with confrontational dispositions.

In a society where roles are so defined, I wondered how many of these women exaggerate their behaviour and “look” because, well that’s what they are so they’ve got to play the part. The part is at times sad, amusing or just plain pathetic. Desperate attempts at overcompensation in public result in a laughable caricature that has an effect opposite to what they likely intend.

Thais in general are fairly restrained in public. Though the current generation is more open about showing their emotions, it is still not common for couples to kiss or show affection in public. The bull dykes however, are all over whatever tart they are accompanying in public; groping, kissing and dry humping them in buses, on the skytrain and on the streets. They shoot aggressive glares at anyone who dares to glance their way. It’s a massive exercise in overcompensation and frustrated rage at not being able to be a real man.

Observing this sameness in behaviour and dress had been a curious part of living in Thailand. It has also confirmed a belief I have long held. On the nurture/nature argument I had always thought that sexual preference was something ingrained at birth. The similar facial appearance of many of the Thai toms had confirmed that belief. Yes, aside from hairstyle and dress, there is a facial appearance, a similarity that is hard to articulate accurately. Their overall facial construction somehow looks the same when you encounter these pint-sized angry dykes.

Baxter’s revelation left me with no doubt regarding the truth. Those little niggling peculiarities all made sense now. Still, I was eager to see Lem now that I knew his secret. As he strolled in I didn’t see the amiable, kind individual I had come to know. Sadly, I was focused on dissecting the different parts of his appearance that would bring home such a prurient, shocking bit of reality. The ostensible nonchalance of the oaf on the subject was betrayed by his eagerness to fill me in on the details. It really was the type of information that created a compulsion to share.

The shape of Lem’s skull, the daintiness of his hands and his undeveloped flanks all brought the realization home even harder.

“It’s true isn’t it?” I said to the oaf.

“It absolutely is,” the oaf conceded, though he assured me that he simply thought of Lem as a “he.” “Ask him about it if you want,” the oaf said, “it’s no secret.”

Somehow I doubted I would ever broach the subject. I envisioned potential opening lines to such discussions:

“So…ya still got a cunt?”

or

“The oaf says yer a woman.”

Despite the fact that my social interactions with Lem were sporadic, I came to regret knowing his secret. It started occupying too much of my mind when I saw him. His glee at not being part of the half of humanity, that in his mind routinely deserved the scorn of the other half in the form of crude references, started to annoy me. My humouring him became another part of the whole surreal affair.

I noticed his (likely) drug affected voice for the first time. As lady-boys have a sickly nasal sounding voice from whatever drug cocktails they imbibe, so Lem’s artificially gruff voice had a peculiar timbre about it.

On a few occasions he exhibited an obvious need to show everyone that he could be a tough character if he had to be. Once, in a depressing spectacle, the oaf and Lem were fall-down drunk and engaged in some aggressive words with a bruiser who would have easily pounded them into the concrete. Luckily for them the bruiser walked away. Was Lem jacked up on testosterone?

The fact that I never asked him about his change while the oaf had no doubt informed him of my knowing, probably led Lem to have some suspicions about me. Likely he had faced his share of horseshit in his life and run into more than a few lowlifes willing to judge and degrade him based on his choices.

The image of those who have had gender reassignment operations as benign, noble people seems to be a popular one in western culture. A handful of Hollywood movies have reinforced this perception. But I’m guessing that much more realistic is a person seething with pent-up anger and a multitude of bizarre neuroses built on being jilted at birth.

I just wish I’d never known. Without being told, would the post-op penny have ever dropped?

Having been a natural shit disturber from birth, I have deviated and developed a whole multitude of my own warped idiosyncrasies. One of them is a desire to initiate social experiments. I just don’t care for people in the usual way. I know that it is far too easy to provoke unjust behaviour from people and use that as rationale for pushing the experiment to the final stages. Maybe I’m not even aware of this as it’s happening. That I may subconsciously want this reaction from others so as to free my mind of guilt and provide more fodder is another possibility.

I had to restrain myself with a monumental effort when I saw Lem sporting an attempt at a moustache that would embarrass a 12 year-old child. On a few occasions I gratuitously pushed minor disagreements with Mr. Overcompensation to a point where I could brace him and see how he handled confrontation.

Over time, circumstances changed and I rarely saw him or the oaf. The whole situation was relegated to the pile of surreal experiences that are part of an expat’s life in Thailand.

The Meditation Retreat

This tale highlights the danger of entering into conflict with other expats or tourists in a foreign country. A strange sense of disconnect afflicts many tourists while outside the familiar restrictions and standards of their home countries. For the average person, this may result in nothing more than a not-unpleasant feeling of anomie. For other, less stable individuals, the consequences can be more severe.

The beginning of the running rage video. People I pass momentarily on the road can quickly become part of a violent rage movie in my mind. It usually takes the form of the exact scenario which has just occurred in real-time, but then the person who walked into my line of vision in that instant does something in the rage movie. They slight me in some way. Insult me, mock me or throw some food in my face. To demonstrate how insane and out of control this tendency can be let me recount a recent episode.

I was walking in the supermarket recently when a small, shrieking child ran past me and almost collided with my legs. My annoyance flared and as the child and his father scurrying after him moved out of my line of vision and I carried on into another part of the store, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the child slamming into my legs. The father then confronted me, angry that I hadn’t moved out of the way in time. As this played out in my mind, adrenaline cut loose in me and I felt my upper body tense. The physical response, I should add, is not unpleasant. Then I was driving the emaciated little fuck into the concrete of the supermarket floor and hammering him into unconsciousness.

This type of thinking is extremely dangerous and ratchets up when there is stress in my life. For example, when I am not getting enough sleep, there is some friction in the workplace, or maybe some looming deadlines. I find myself focusing in one person in my life who I know doesn’t like me. Perhaps they are conniving to fuck me over. Or maybe that is the paranoia that goes along with this damaging mindset. But like the old saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you.” It becomes a very difficult situation to handle.

Just being aware of this reality is the first step to realizing that you have to do something about it or it will eat you alive.

In my last stay in Thailand, this thinking had taken over my mind almost completely. Violent rages would play out in my mind for a good portion of the day. How would I sink my mental fangs into an appropriate victim? Someone who would be slaughtered countless times in my mind in the most bloody and visceral way possible. I believe that the choice was based on real slights, and a real sense that the person in question did not like me.

One fat repugnant turd of a student came into my sights and announced loud and clear that he was worthy of destruction. Something about a fat, loathsome, arrogant individual turns my stomach like no other.

He taunted me over a period of a few weeks, taking the usual bad behaviour of students to a new level. Openly mocking me in class. Telling me to fuck off. The sneer on his face that said, “I know I can get away with this,” is what really enraged me.

I ended up throwing his backpack against the back wall of the classroom. The unusual heaviness of the bag and the dull thud as it hammered against the back wall a good eight metres away told me that I had fucked up in a real way. When I came back to myself and looked at his bag, it had come open to reveal a destroyed laptop computer.

The sneering little oaf had openly mocked me in class. Something that I had never experienced before. On the day in question, he gave me the finger, just like that. For no reason other than I told the class to quiet down just as we were getting ready to start. The sheer audacity of it. I calmly told him to leave. He sneered.

I told him more firmly to leave. Again, no movement. I barreled toward him, knocking desks out of the way (he was sitting in the sixth row). As I reached him, I took his bag and flung it with one hand. The adrenaline surging through me added a heaping of force I wouldn’t have used otherwise. The sheer joy at seeing stark raving terror on the fat puke’s face would provide some solace later on. But not now. As I looked at the wreckage, I instinctively knew that it was all over. At least at that private language centre.

He walked up to his shattered computer in a daze, disbelieving what had happened. He picked up the pieces and walked out of the classroom. He must have considered what happened in the hall after the surreal quality of the situation had worn off. He opened the door holding the cracked laptop, and told me that I would have to pay for the damage.

“Do what you gotta do!” I yelled as loud as I could.

Amazingly, the incident didn’t get me fired. And if I had played my cards differently, I could have weathered the storm and continued teaching at the language centre beyond the current contract. But I had no appetite for the arse-kissing and prostration that was being asked of me as a result of the explosion. I was ready to move on anyway.

Still, the incident scared me. Mainly because I had been aware of how much I was raging in my mind against the corpulent little hog. I saw myself throttling him that very morning as I walked to work. But even that self-awareness hadn’t been enough to control my rage.

I comforted myself with the thought that my subconscious mind always stepped in to save me. It knew that my time in Thailand was finished, and while I wasn’t consciously able to pull the plug and move on, my subconscious stepped in and did the work for me. The end result was that I returned to Chicago.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out exactly as planned. Despite going back to school and acquiring some very practical skills, few employers were willing to take a chance on me. This was compounded by my time in Thailand. Not only did few employers attach any value to EFL teaching in Thailand, but a huge number of jobs required a security clearance. Because I was unaware of this, I failed to secure the necessary documents from Thailand before leaving. Hence, no security clearance for me. A bleak winter of no money coming in and a desperate search for work, left the old paranoid violent thoughts thrumming through my mind.

One night as I was crossing the street in front of my apartment building, a pickup truck turning left into the street I was crossing, revved his engine and drove straight toward me, even though I had a walk signal. I snapped and launched a wad of spit through the open window and into the face of the piece of white trash behind the wheel. What is it with gutless wonders who think that pedestrians are some kind of easy mark? I ran alongside the creep and hurled abuse at him. Strangely, he didn’t speed off but absorbed the verbal thrashing I was laying on him. I found out why he was holding back; he threw his cup of hot coffee at me, hitting my arm. Because I was wearing a heavy jacket, there was no damage. Then, he finally did speed off.

However, I had the sense that this was not finished. I crossed the road and as I reached the other side, I bent down and picked up a heavy rock from a rock garden that was on the lawn of the Burger King that was on the corner. I kept walking.

As if on cue, the pickup truck rounded the corner and screeched to a halt in front of me. A sawed off little piece of white trash came flying out the driver’s door and came rushing toward me. About 5 foot 3, with a permed mullet, tight jeans and white high topped trainers, the 40-something year-old freak was a walking cliché straight out of 1983. If it weren’t for the circumstances, I would have burst out laughing at this unintentionally farcical individual.

However, this wasn’t a laughing matter. I was scared, and acted appropriately. I wound up and drove the rock into the guts of mullet-head at close range. A dull thud stopped the puke in his tracks and I ran back a few yards to observe the damage. The little freak now had the rock in his hand and was contemplating what to do. He momentarily wound up as if to return the missile. But I was standing in front of a row of cars that were waiting in line at the drive-thru window at the side of the Burger King.

We yelled at each other though surprisingly few people took any notice of our surreal little drama. The walking definition of retro-white trash reconsidered the situation, got in his truck and sped off. It’s a good bet that he had a criminal record and started considering the optics of what had just played out. It didn’t look too good for him and I had a pretty good shot at putting forth a self-defense narrative if the police got involved. Later I would get a great deal of satisfaction at having spat in the face of the little turd who thought he was going to get a laugh out of putting a fright into me. Then I had dropped the shithead with a rock to his guts.

But for the time being, I was scared. If I had hit him a few feet higher, I could easily have killed him. It wasn’t a small rock—it probably weighed a good three pounds. Yet, through all the explosive adrenaline rush and ensuing action, there was a conscious part of me orchestrating the whole thing. Yes, the narrative would have favoured me. Likely, I would have gotten away with killing him, though I would have damaged any prospect of a good job for the duration of the legal machinations and would have burned the last of my savings to the ground as I fought the charges.

Sure, I may have been somewhat justified. But the lack of any thoughts of self-preservation at that crucial moment when it all kicked off truly frightened me. The demons were still there ready to sabotage my attempts at reintegrating back into normal society. The videos were playing in my mind all day long as I was holed up in my dingy apartment searching for jobs online and trudging to the supermarket for supplies every day.

The wake-up call of the confrontation with the white-trash lunatic forced me to start thinking of ways to deal with this problem. It was clear that I was losing control of my mind. I had known for many years that the mind never rests. Not even when we are sleeping. The mind is still raging, running non-stop clips, turning our fears and neuroses into nightmares.

Meditation was the only way forward. I had practiced meditation for a few months many years previous, and I knew there was something to it. Daily practice is the only way to sustain benefits from meditation and so I determined to make it a part of my life. I downloaded every book imaginable on the topic and promptly started meditating for 30 minutes every day. No revelation came down on me, and no shocking effects made themselves apparent. But I kept at it and soon it was a routine that I rarely missed.

Seven months later, I decided that I would return to Thailand. The lack of job prospects and the sterile, depressing atmosphere of most of the major cities in my country were what did it for me. As soon as I was back in Bangkok, I started researching meditation retreats.

My criteria for selecting a meditation retreat were simple. I wanted as few other foreigners around as possible, and I didn’t want any hand-holding from the owners of the retreat or any resident monks. I wanted a peaceful location where I could spend most of the day meditating for a week or two. Ascetic conditions? Sure. I could handle sleeping on a mat on the floor for that amount of time. And I wanted at least some of the meals included in the price.

And hopefully the owners would allow me to have a chair in my room. I never could manage the lotus position with any degree of comfort and I wasn’t going to start trying now. But I wasn’t up for a series of strict lectures telling me exactly how I was supposed to meditate. I have no doubt that many more experienced meditators than myself could teach me a lot about technique. But I just wasn’t looking for that kind of experience. Perhaps a few wise old sages on hand who could answer my questions if I had any.

I had another important qualification for a meditation retreat—no insistence on a particular method, and no adherence to a certain philosophy or branch of Buddhism. In my brief research, I had noted that there were places that did make these demands upon their attendees. They held absolutely no appeal for me.

I settled on what sounded like a nice, inoppressive little hideout in the south of Thailand. I phoned the retreat using a number that appeared on the internet. The website did not belong to the retreat, but to some hipster who had gone to the trouble of posting details about a number of similar places. It was a good sign. Lack of desire to commercialize and spread the good word via the internet told me that they were about the speed I was looking for.

I hopped on a bus and five hours later landed in the dusty southern town near the retreat. I had a quick look around and a bite to eat. Then, following the instructions that appeared on the meditation retreat review website, I walked out of town, made a few turns onto dirt roads, and 20 minutes later arrived at the retreat. I liked it.

For someone who had always sought out dirty, inner-city nastiness as a way to feel real about life, this basic, Spartan looking set-up was appealing. A low-slung building in the semi-open architecture design that was common in this part of the world was in the middle of the compound. Around the central building were a number of basic looking bungalows. High grass and trees surrounded the retreat. In the distance was a lake and some hills. Serene shit.

I walked into the central structure and saw someone in a robe sitting at a chair drinking a beer. He was slugging it from the bottle. He turned and saw me watching him and motioned for me to sit down.

“I’d like to get a room for about four days.”

“Sure, what kind of set-up do you want? Air-conditioning or just a fan?”

“Ah, might as well give me a place with an air-conditioner.”

He reached inside his robes and pulled out a key. He tossed it to me across the table.

“You can run a tab and pay when you leave. You can get food from the kitchen over there,” he said as he motioned to a waist-high counter that opened into the kitchen. A handful of wooden tables were placed around the room. I saw an open room with mats on the floor. Must be for group sessions.

“OK, thanks.” I walked out toward the bungalows and checked the key fob for a number. I heard him belch as I walked away.

I found the bungalow and inserted the key. The door creaked open to reveal the interior. A bed with a mosquito net, a small wooden desk, a wooden chair, and a threadbare looking mat on the floor. The floor was pitted concrete. It was about what I expected. It would work. I put down my bag and lay down on the bed. Time for a nice nap to recover from the journey. I fastened the mosquito net to the clasps on the wall and was out before I could go over my reflections of this place.

I don’t know how long I slept, but it was dark when I was stirred out of my slumber by a din of voices. I had that queer feeling of disorientation and anticipation that you get when you are in a new place. I lay there and tried to discern the voices. They were young, I could tell from the timbre and pitch. Perhaps they were in the bungalow next to mine. I heard a few snatches of words: ”...the robed bastard...gonna do some meditating...hahahaha!” I detected an English accent.

I undid the mosquito net and swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat there coming to my senses. I felt that I should get the meditation practice going, but the voices would be a distraction. Perhaps they had just arrived and were getting settled into their bungalow. I slipped into my sandals and went outside to check out the new arrivals.

Indeed, they were in the bungalow next to mine. Three young men were sitting on the small veranda, the same as the one that fronted every bungalow. They went silent when they saw me. I noticed them throw quick glances at each other and exchange knowing looks. They sneered in unison as they once again turned their gazes toward me.

“How long have you been here?” one of the men from the group asked.

“I just arrived today. And you?” I asked.

He was bald—a shaved head—and wore a t-shirt with the union jack on it. He had some nasty looking white trash tattoos covering both his arms. While his words weren’t offensive, his tone of voice and the way he was glaring at me was off-putting. His accent and shirt told me that they were, of course, from the UK.

“Suppose you’re here for the meditation then, are you?” Shaved Head asked me. It sounded like a challenge more than a question. He turned and sneered at his “mates.”

“Well, yes. This is a meditation retreat. Isn’t that why everyone comes to stay here?”

“This is the cheapest place to stay in the area. That’s why we’re here. Not to do no meditating,” Shaved Head said and laughed. His mates joined him. One, a gaunt, sneering wretch looked like he was a recovering heroin addict. The other was a doughy, pasty white oaf with a head of lank, black hair. How he maintained his jailhouse pallor in this climate was a mystery.

“Right, well, enjoy yourselves then,” I said, and walked toward the main building. As long as they stayed quiet, I didn’t really care why they were staying here. I heard their guffaws recede into the distance.

I walked onto the cool cement floor of the building and sat down at one of the tables that was arranged near the opening that led into the kitchen. You could see the kitchen staff preparing food through the opening. They would set the orders on the ledge for someone to pick up and bring to the tables.

I noticed a sullen, overweight individual sitting at another table. I looked at him for a few moments, waiting for him to look up and give me that look two foreigners often exchange as an invitation to start talking in a new place. But he didn’t look up.

I got up and walked over to his table. “Mind if I join you?” I asked.

He glanced up bleary-eyed. It was like he was homing in on the distant sound that was my voice but couldn’t quite get there. I recognized that look; despair. It can hit with surprising ferocity when you live in a foreign country, especially if you are a moody bastard to begin with.

I didn’t wait for a response. I sat down and started looking at the menu on the table. I looked up without being too obvious about it, trying to get a sense of the person in front of me. Someone who just might be in need of a friend at the moment. He was large—big boned large, with that oafish, lumbering demeanor. He was somewhere else, obsessing over something that was probably not as serious as he thought it was.

“How long have you been here? I just got here a few hours ago myself,” I said.

He looked at me now for the first time. An intense, serious look. Troubled eyes, as if things could never be the same way again.

He exhaled. “I’m in trouble,” he said. “I must have arrived just before you did,” he continued. “I arrived with my Thai girlfriend. Those British guys came in about the same time as I did. I got a bad feeling from them right away. I checked into the bungalow with my girlfriend. And then we sat out front on the little veranda. That’s when those Brits started. They came over and stood in front of our veranda. Started talking to us polite at first. Asked us where we were from, all the usual stuff you ask when you meet someone. They thought it was pretty funny that we were here to meditate. I thought that was funny. After all, it is a meditation retreat, right?”

He settled back in his chair and took a breath. It was a relief for him that he had started to speak to someone. He breathed deeply. His despair now had a touch of anger to it. I looked into the dimly lit kitchen, hoping that someone would arrive and take my order. I had no idea what time it was.

“Then they started asking where we met each other. Made some really repellent insinuations. I finally told them to leave. The one with the shaved head, that’s when he said it. Said he would pay me to be with my girlfriend. I’m usually pretty calm, but that set me right off. I told them to get the hell away from us.”

I looked around for any sign of his girlfriend. He saw me looking and knew what I was thinking. The despair returned and he put a hand on the table as if to steady himself.

“But they had worked their nastiness. My girlfriend was very upset after the confrontation and she wanted to leave. She wanted to get out of here even after we had set aside the time and talked for weeks about coming here. Just like that. And she wanted to give up because these...Brit pieces of shit pushed my buttons!” He slammed his fist on the table. Tears of rage were in his eyes.

“She started packing her things, and she began walking back to the town to take the next bus back to Bangkok. I followed her out. I was pleading with her not to let them get to her. We would concentrate on the mediating. We would have a good, peaceful getaway. But she would have none of it. It was if she were ashamed of having anything to do with any foreigner. She kept going. I came back to the bungalow to get my things. I had no choice but to go with her. When I got back here all my money was gone.”

It was the Brits, of course. “Have you confronted them about it? It was definitely them? No other possibility?” I asked.

“No, not yet. This all just happened a few hours ago, just before it got dark. I’ve been sitting here ever since. I’ve been in a daze really. And no, no other possibilities. I’ve seen no one else here. I...I thought I was going to...”

“Don’t. Don’t even say it. We’ll get your money back. I’ll help you.”

He let out a deep sigh.

“My name’s Rackford. You can call me Rack for short,” he said as he thrust a meaty mitt out at me. “Amazing how the simple act of someone listening can make all the difference in the world. A few moments ago...nothing. I felt nothing. No, that’s not right. I felt the deepest sense of hopelessness I have ever felt in my life. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I still don’t completely. I have no idea where my girlfriend is. My phone is gone too. So I can’t contact her.”

“Let’s get something to eat first. It’s on me,” I said.

I managed to get the attention of someone working in the kitchen and they whipped together a good feed for us. I hadn’t eaten for hours and Rack was likely a healthy eater at the best of times.

We ate silently. Strange as it may sound, I liked the way Rack ate, especially for a big man. He didn’t lunge at the final scraps on the table. Perhaps it was because I was paying and had offered my help, but my sense was that it was genuine.

We hadn’t seen anyone else during the time that we were eating. The kitchen staff had silently cleaned up and left. Did they live in one of the bungalows? The man in the robe who greeted me when I arrived was also nowhere to be seen. And the Brits also were not around.

A few bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling of the roof cast a dim glow through the enclosure.

“What do you think we should do?” Rack asked me. “I guess the best thing is to go up to them and just ask them to give back my money. Appeal to their sense of decency.”

“No. Not with them. It won’t work. It would only give them a feeling of victory. I remember a few years ago, I had a problem in an apartment I was living in. Noise from the tenant above me. I also thought I would try the rational and straightforward approach. Looking back I can’t believe that I thought that. First, someone like that is the least likely to give a damn; proven by the fact that they demonstrated their self-serving behaviour in the first place. You give them a second chance and they laugh in your face. Or, more likely, they string you along and are laughing the whole time.” I picked up my empty water glass from the table and rolled it in my hands.

“Anyway, we’ve got to do something fast before these creeps leave,” I said.

The Brit who resembled a heroin addict strolled out of the night and into our line of vision. He was coming toward us. But alone. And he hadn’t yet seen us. He was looking down, lost in his thoughts, smirking to himself.

I was sitting in a chair with my back to the approaching Brit, but I was turned to watch him. Rack was sitting opposite me and looking straight at one of his tormentors as he approached. I moved my chair back slightly and the sound of scraping on the cement snapped Heroin Addict out of his reverie.

He stopped within seven feet of us and stared. The sneer had been wiped off his face. The thought hit me that they might have rifled my bungalow already.

“Hello lads,” Heroin Addict said. A semblance of the sneer was back. But he wasn’t in his element and he must have seen our recognition of this fact.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. I was abrupt. I thought of the arrogance of this little sycophant as he had urged on his leader back at the bungalow.

“Just looking for a bite to eat. Is it too late I suppose?” He was trying to act deferential now.

“Have a seat,” I said. I pushed out the other seat that was at the table. Heroin Addict cast a glance backward, and then looked back at us.

“Sit down,” I said with more conviction this time.

Heroin Addict licked his lips and tucked in his weak chin so tightly it was if his lips were on his neck.

“I think I might head back to my bungalow instead, but thanks for the...”

I bolted out of my chair. “Sit the fuck down!” I was pointing at the chair and hyperventilating.

Heroin Addict had a screwed-up, highly concerned look on his face. He slowly eased himself into the chair.

Rack and I stared at him as his eyes were pointed straight ahead without looking directly at either one of us. Looking at him closely, I understood why the he allied himself with Shaved Head. Heroin Addict was an emaciated wretch. His t-shirt hung on him loosely, his bony shoulders protruded and his cheeks were gaunt and drawn. Maybe he really was a heroin addict. He was making an effort to appear casual, but it wasn’t working. His hands were under the table and his arms were twitching.

I glanced under the table and saw him working the buttons on his mobile phone. I grabbed his bony wrist and pulled his arm up with the phone in his hand. I took the phone out of his hand and turned it off.

“He was calling for back-up,” I said. I put his phone in my pocket.

“Look, you went through my friend’s bungalow and took his money. Now, how are we going to get it back?” I asked Heroin Addict. I had posed the question to him, but I was also wondering myself exactly how we were going to pull this off. Though Rack was large, I had no idea if he could handle himself if things turned violent. But with Heroin Addict incapacitated, the odds would be a lot better for us.

Heroin Addict turned to look at me. “Listen, me and my mates may act like cunts on occasion. I know we do, but we didn’t go into your friend’s bungalow and take anything.”

“Don’t fuck with us,” I said. I took out his phone and slammed it onto the table. Then I picked it up, stood up and threw the phone onto the concrete floor. “Geez, ain’t that fun to fuck with someone’s belongings and cut them off from their friends and family. You took his phone too, fuckface. Now you don’t have a phone. So you insulted his girlfriend and watched with glee as she left and he followed, but it just so happens that you didn’t happen to go into his bungalow and take his money. Is that what you want us to believe, hey?”

Heroin Addict was looking away from me and working his closed mouth. He only had few options now. He could start shrieking and hope his mates came running. Or he could try to make a run for it.

“We’re going to go into the kitchen now,” I said. I stood up and put my hand on Heroin Addict’s pointed little shoulder. “Come on.” Rack rose. He had a set look on his face. He was up for whatever was to come. Heroin Addict didn’t move. “I said, ‘Come on.’”

He glanced to his side, as if he thought his friends would be there, ready to rescue him. The night was black and silent. I felt him tense under my hand. He let loose with a yell and started coming out of his seat. I wound up and drove my fist downward into his approaching chin. My punch glanced off what was a very small target but it was enough to send Heroin Addict to the ground. I looked around to see if anyone had heard the outburst.

Only silence, except for Rack’s exhalations. He was looking down at Heroin Addict passed out cold on the concrete floor. I could tell that he wanted to stomp the life out of him. I picked the limp Brit up by his hair and dragged him behind the kitchen. Rack followed. I looked for a door in the dark and found it, fumbled with the latch and got it open.

Rack turned on one of the lights and I looked around for something to gag the little freak with. A dirty apron lay on one of the counters. I wound it into a coil and tied it around Heroin Addict’s head so that the bulk of the smeared section was shoved in his mouth. Some lengths of twine had been tied into make-shift hooks for cooking utensils and hung from nails hammered into the walls. I took the twine down and used it to bind Heroin Addict’s hands behind his back. He convulsed slightly and pulled himself away from me just as I secured the knots.

I flipped him over so that he was on his back. Some semblance of consciousness was flickering into his eyes. He had a red mark on his chin where I had hit him. As he came to his senses, the confused look in his eyes turned to fear. I scanned the kitchen and located a large mortar and pestle. I picked up the pestle—it was large, must have been 10, 11 inches long with a solid heft. It was made out of burnished concrete.

I bent down and with my free hand lifted Heroin Addict’s right foot up as far in the air as it would go and then dropped it, winding up and bashing his ankle with the pestle as his foot dropped. A distinctive splintering sound cut through the humid kitchen air. A muffled shriek rose from Heroin Addict through the gag. He writhed in pain for a few minutes and then went silent.

“We can safely count him out of taking part in any violence that his mates will try when they find out what’s going on.”

I dragged Heroin Addict by his shattered ankle and put him against a wall and then covered him with some empty rice sacks that were lying nearby. I made sure that his face wasn’t covered so that he could still breathe.

“We can’t waste any time. His two friends will be wondering where he is.”

Rack hadn’t spoken since we disabled Heroin Addict. He was alert, doing what I asked of him and taking the initiative when necessary. He was tuned in to what we were doing. The pieces of shit who had stitched him up would pay severely for what they had done. One of the lessons that I had learned early in life was that people often go around fucking with complete strangers. With no regard for who they may be dealing with or what their victims may be capable of doing in response. If you fuck with someone, eventually they will fuck you back. And they will usually fuck you harder than you fucked them to begin with.

We turned off the light in the kitchen and went back out into the central enclosure. It would now be two on two when Rack and I confronted the remaining Brits, and we had the element of surprise. But I wanted to ensure that the destruction of the two pieces of filth would be even more lopsided. We walked slowly around the enclosure looking for makeshift weapons. The silence and lack of any security, even a sleeping fool kitted out in some kind of rent-a-cop uniform, was a bit strange. At the back of the enclosure, we found a shovel and a pick-axe. We took both of them. The shovel will do nicely I thought as I lifted it and tested the weight in a few slow-motion, half swings.

We skirted the perimeter of the compound until we came to the bungalow occupied by the Brits. Rack was still silent and focused on the task at hand. I moved to the back wall of the bungalow, which looked back into a field with high grass and trees. Because the bungalows were on stilts, our eyes were close to the level of where the feet of anyone inside would be. A few cracks in between the planks that made up the side of the little hut were big enough to look through. We placed the shovel and pickaxe under the bungalow and I took up a position and started to strain to see if anything was going on inside.

I couldn’t see any movement. I motioned Rack to stand next to me and look through the slats so that we could survey a larger section of the interior. I could smell the wood as I pressed my face up against the planks. It was silent and dark as death inside the bungalow. No one was inside or if there was, they were out cold on their beds.

I looked at Rack and waved my hand, indicating that he should follow me. I moved slowly around to the front of the bungalow and crept up the wooden stairs. I kept to the side of the stairs—something from some far off memory told me that stairs were less likely to creak if you kept to the sides. Rack followed behind me and his heft shattered my half-baked theory.

I cringed at the sound of the creaking stairs and stopped in front of the door. I turned and saw a silhouette of Shaved Head holding a length of pipe in his hand at the bottom of the stairs.

“Rack!” I shouted as the Brit wound up and swung at Rack who was still at the bottom of the steps. Like many large people, Rack could move deceptively fast. Rack had turned to see the lunging Brit and shot up the remaining three stairs so that he was next to me in front of the door to the bungalow. I grabbed the door knob and pushed inside the bungalow. Rack followed me in like a crazed ox.

“I’ll have you fucking cunts!” screamed the Brit. He surged towards the open door, ready to start swinging. I looked around for something to inflict some damage before he started bashing us. I picked up a small wooden stool. Holding it by the legs, I moved to the side of the door, pivoted and drove every ounce of power I had into swinging the flat surface of the stool seat directly into the Brit’s face as he barged into the bungalow. The sick sound of crushed bone and gristle momentarily cut through the night air as the Brit crumpled to the floor. I was horrified at the thought that I might have killed the piece of garbage. And where was the third Brit—the doughy oaf?

The Brit with the shaved head lay on the floor of the bungalow barely writhing. It was a good sign. He would live. Hopefully permanently damaged and scarred but still alive. Rack looked down on the destroyed face of his tormentor. He lifted up one of his mammoth legs and placed his foot onto the shattered face that was slick with blood. He slowly brought the full weight of his body down and at the same time reached up and put his hands on the low ceiling, using it as leverage to push down. The Brit started to flail and he emitted a horrible half shriek that was clotted and stifled by blood. This was too much. It was bordering on torture.

“Rack, you’ve got to let up,” I said. Through all the commotion and blood curdling shrieks, I was still conscious of the fact that there must be other people staying at the retreat. The longer we left the heroin addict in the kitchen, the more likely it was that someone would find him. Rack was still applying pressure and nearly shaking with rage and exertion as the horrid display from the Brit became more tortured.

“Rack! Rack!”

I grabbed the front of his shirt and pushed him away from the Brit.

“We’ve still got to clean up the mess that we’ve made,” I said.

Rack was hyperventilating and looking down at the Brit. The look on Rack’s face said that he wanted to finish the job.

I opened up a backpack that was on one of the beds. A few t-shirts, some shorts, and a couple pair of rancid socks were inside. I grabbed a union jack t-shirt and wrapped it around the smashed face of the Brit, gagging his shattered mouth. I used a sleeveless undershirt to bind his hands behind his back. I looked up at Rack from my position on the floor where I was kneeling next to the Brit. Rack was silhouetted against the window of the bungalow, thin strands of moonlight slicing through the spaces between the wooden shutters. He hadn’t spoken since we were in the restaurant.

“We’ve got to get rid of both this freak and Heroin Addict,” I said. “We have to find a spot somewhere near the retreat. But we can’t risk leaving them here unattended for very long.”

Rack moved forward, bent down and lifted up the Brit, throwing him on his back in a fireman’s carry. The sound of the Brit’s destroyed face slamming against the solid bulk of Rack’s back in a wet splat was sickening.

“Right. We’ll take him with us as we look for a good spot,” I said.

We went outside the bungalow and closed the door behind us. We stopped and surveyed the still night. Not a sound. No trace of anyone. Strange.

I went down the stairs of the bungalow and collected the shovel and the pick-axe where we had stashed them. That sick sense that things were about to break out into the open hit me. I moved toward the perimeter of the retreat where the smooth, well-trampled ground surrounding the bungalows gave way to tall elephant grass and trees. We moved through the grass and trees for about 30 metres until we came to a small clearing. Rack leaned over and dropped the Brit onto the ground. I threw the pick-axe to the side and used the spade to try the ground. The spade went in easily.

“I want you to get to work digging a hole here Rack. Make it as deep as possible in the time it takes me to bring the other one back here.”

It occurred to me that we had no idea what their names were. It was probably better that way. I also realized that although I was initially thankful that Shaved Head was still alive, there probably was no choice now but to take things to their sick conclusion.

I strode back toward the retreat compound. I cast a glance back and saw the large figure of Rack driving the shovel down into the ground with intense purpose. I moved through the bungalows as quickly as I could without attracting attention to myself. The doughy Brit had to be somewhere. If he was back at the bungalow, he had to have figured out that something was up. I slowed as I approached the bungalow where we had disabled Shaved Head. Only silence.

I kept going toward the central enclosure where we had left Heroin Addict in the kitchen. I stood still near the entrance to the enclosure and listened. No sounds. And no light coming from the kitchen. I walked around the back of the kitchen and opened the door. Some rustling sounds came from within. Heroin Addict was stirring. I turned on one of the lights and scanned the room. No one here but me and the Brit.

I flicked off the light and waited, letting my eyes become used to the dark. I crouched down and lifted up Heroin Addict, who was alternately limp and tensing on occasion. The shattered ankle had to be smarting. I hoisted him onto my shoulder in the same way that Rack had lifted up the much larger Shaved Head.

The realization struck me of how things were playing out in a much different way than I had anticipated when I decided to spend some time here. Would I ever get a chance to meditate? In a way, the single-minded focus that was necessary to take care of this nasty little business was a kind of meditation. I cleared my mind and pushed out any thoughts of how this might not be the best way to insert myself into a situation with a group of complete strangers.

I moved out into the common area of the central enclosure and again stood still for some time to get a sense of whether anyone was about. Still nothing. Heroin Addict was completely limp now and was so light that carrying him did not require much effort.

I moved at a fast clip, wanting to clear out of the area with bungalows as fast as possible. What time was it? Had an hour passed since our confrontation with Heroin Addict in the kitchen? Perhaps two? It was hard to tell exactly, but I thought that we still had four or five hours of darkness.

I approached Rack in the clearing. He was submerged up to his hips in the hole that he had been digging. Good progress. I laid Heroin Addict on the ground a few feet away from Shaved Head, ensuring that he could not see or communicate in any way with his incapacitated mate. Rack looked up at me with a blank look on his face and then went back to digging.

Shaved Head was moving on the ground with a renewed energy. Perhaps he had sensed what was going on. I walked around the other side of him so that I could look at his face. The sneering arrogance was gone, perhaps forever. His eyes were screaming for some kind of reprieve. He had nothing to lose. I had seen it before. A skilled piece of filth plies his self-serving machinations with no regard for those who get damaged. But when necessary they will turn on the desperate appeal to humanity in order to save themselves. Buried under all the pleading is a relentless desire to get back to a place where they can once again destroy others.

A voyeuristic curiosity was getting the better of me. What would Shaved Head have to say as he was watching this strange spectacle play out before his eyes?

“If you so much as raise your voice above a whisper, I will kick the life out of you before you can blink,” I said as I bent down to pull the makeshift gag out of the way to see what Shaved Head had to say. A person in a desperate situation has both the ability to say anything to save himself, or the potential to utter a rare kind of truth.

My fear that Shaved Head might start shrieking for help was unwarranted. He could barely muster the energy and muscle coordination to speak above the barest whisper.

“Give...give...,” said Shaved Head in a weak, barely audible croak.

“Give you what?” I asked.

“Give him...,” he said.

“Give who?” I pointed to Rack in the hole. “Him?”

Shaved Head nodded slowly.

“Give him what?”

“Your...your phone...” Shaved Head said as his eyes closed and he went silent again.

I put the gag back in place.

I turned to look at Rack. His shoulders were almost even with the top of the hole and the pile of dirt was growing bigger. Rack had stopped and was looking at me.

I ran back over in my mind what had happened over the last seven to eight hours, including the narrative that Rack had relayed to me. My phone? Why should I give him my phone? His phone had been stolen by the Brits, so why should I...

I stopped for a moment and thought about Rack’s girlfriend storming out of the retreat, crushed by the cruel things that the Brits had said to her. I had even fashioned an image in my mind about what she looked like. And then Rack discovering that his phone had been stolen and that he couldn’t contact her to see if she was OK.

I unholstered my phone from the case I kept clipped to my belt and I motioned to Rack.

“You should phone your girlfriend to see if she’s OK,” I said. I held out the phone to Rack who was standing still in the hole.

Rack slowly stuck out his hand and accepted the phone.

“I had her number programmed into my phone. I don’t think I’ve punched in the number since I saved it to my phone,” Rack said. He looked up at me with a plaintiff look. It seemed reasonable. I had numerous numbers saved in my phone of people I contacted on a regular basis. I wouldn’t be able to recite a single one of them if I had to.

Rack handed back my phone from the pit that he had already dug. He turned back to his task. Dull thunking sounds as he repeatedly drove the spade into the ground and launched the shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder onto the growing pile a few feet from the hole. I sat down on the ground between the two shattered Brits and contemplated this strange night as the rhythm of the digging lulled me into a reverie.

When you read all the literature about meditation, you could be forgiven for assuming that only normal, well-adjusted people do it. You get drawn into the meditation-speak and forget that this is you, with all your decades of strangeness piled on top of one another. The shifts, the constant evolving, the realization one day that you are no longer the person you were a few years ago.

You read the cautions about the fact that meditation can bring many good things but that it also may release fears into the open that you didn’t know you had. In my case, it was a cold hard dread about my own mortality. It also sharpened my ability to detect damaged, deviant individuals (or at least, convinced me that it had sharpened my ability in this regard) so that at the first inkling that I was in the presence of this type, my guts would fill with bile and I would do anything possible to get away from them.

With ease I could cover up my true feelings when forced to interact with such lowlifes. But gnawing away was always the knowledge that even being aware of the existence of their kind in a personal, face-to-face way made every bad thing in life seem all the more intolerable. While the meditation had been beneficial, it also made me aware in a visceral and painful way how much I loathed so many people in the world.

As I had become more and more involved in my daily practice, I also confronted the rankism that infected the world of meditation as it did every other subculture. Some went to lengths and took on affectations to prove that the long hours had taken them to a place which others could only imagine.

No doubt, there were some enlightened, serene fuckers who had done well to take those minutes and hours out of the day to rest the mind. When the effects of your daily meditation started to seep into the rest of your life, you knew that it was having the desired effect. But was it possible to burn away all regulating forces that helped to keep us human?

Something that had not previously been in the space surrounding the surreal, late-night frieze of which I was part, was now there. The collective aura that Rack and the Brits had unwittingly created together was different now than what it had been a few hours previous. And also different than anything I had experienced before.

I looked up and saw a form at the tree line at the edge of the clearing where we were. Rack must have sensed it too for the digging stopped. I breathed in slowly and noted the point at which my inhalation turned into an exhalation. It was a peaceful, almost awesome moment, the converging of energies.

I heard Rack grunt and saw him pawing his way up and out of the hole that must have been six-and-a-half feet deep by now. Strong, sure movements and he was suddenly out of the hole, panting and looking at the figure at the tree line. I lay down between the two Brits and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. I turned to look at Shaved Head, who was facing me. He had managed to turn himself around in the minutes during which I had been lost in thought. But he wasn’t moving now. In the black, I looked into his face and saw nothing. Behind me on the ground, and closest to Rack, was Heroin Addict. I slowly turned around so that I could see Heroin Addict, Rack, and the figure near the tree line.

The figure near the tree line started moving toward Rack. It was the doughy Brit, that was obvious. He was moving with intent, walking directly toward Rack. Rack stood still, silently sucking in large lungs full of air. He was holding the spade in his right hand. The doughy Brit came within three feet of Rack and started to raise his hand. In the black night with the moonlight casting Rack and the oaf into strange shadows, my first instinct was that the oaf was raising his arm in a Sieg Heil gesture. But he had something in his hand.

Rack lifted the spade and brought it down with both hands in a vicious pinwheeling arc towards the oaf’s head. As the spade crushed the oaf’s head, an explosion erupted from his outstretched hand. In that instant, as the two figures were illuminated in the light of the explosion, I saw a fine red mist spreading out in two directions. And then it was black again, and Rack stumbled back a few feet and plummeted into the grave that he had dug, unknowingly, for himself. The doughy Brit listed sideways and then fell with a horrible finality onto Heroin Addict. He must have landed on Heroin Addict’s head in just the right way, for there was a spasm from the addict and then he too was lifeless under the weight of his dead mate.

I got to my feet and stood surveying the wreckage. I dragged the doughy Brit by his feet toward the hole and with a last pull, launched him onto Rack and his final resting place. Heroin Addict went in next, and then, fittingly I thought, Shaved Head on top. Though Rack had done an admirable job of digging a reasonably deep hole in a short amount of time, with four corpses, it didn’t leave very much space to fill it in. I picked up the spade and started shoveling the dirt in from the pile. In less than twenty minutes, a mound was over the pit of death. This left a fair pile of dirt and so I proceeded to spread it out in the area as best I could.

The sun was just starting to peer over the horizon as I packed my things back at my bungalow and slipped out of the meditation retreat, and started the slow trek back to town.

The Drunk

One of the great appeals for the westerner living in Thailand, is that he can count on Thais not being able to size him up the way that other foreigners can. The presence of foreigners in Thailand for decades, the large expat community and the 10 million plus tourists to the country every year make this fact quite remarkable. But it is a testament to the certainty that many Thais want little to do with outsiders. To those Thais, foreigners are a curiosity, a necessary annoyance to help the country in a number of ways, and nothing more. After all these years, Thailand is still very much a closed society.

Many expats are just fine with the current state of Thai/foreign relations. This interaction level that ends at mild curiosity for the vast majority of Thais, allows expats in Thailand to glide happily under the radar, free from the instant judgments they can count on back home.

Walk into a roomful of unknown people in your home country and you start making instant judgments.

Mannerisms, clothes, body language, manner of speaking, even someone’s teeth. You size people up in a rapid-fire way without even knowing it. With a glance you can tell with some accuracy someone’s education level and station in life. For many, that constant, probing gaze of strangers can be wearing. So the relatively anonymous life for foreigners in Thailand can be liberating in many ways. Telltale indications that would mark many as deviants, addicts or otherwise dysfunctional in western countries are meaningless to most Thais.

This sense of escape has a name: anomie. However, while Thais may not be able to clock the most obvious of shortcomings in foreigners, they do not have a limitless tolerance for misbehaviour.

Many foreigners ostensibly move to Thailand to escape the rankism and intimate knowledge that others have of them. But the rankism within the expat community is perhaps nastier and more intense that anything they have faced at home.

I walked into the appointed room for the first day orientation and immediately saw a new face. My first reaction was that he looked like he would be at home in a skid row hotel. The big red nose of a hardcore, if barely functional, alcoholic. The bursted blood vessels that announce to the world that he soaks himself in the hard stuff whenever he gets the chance. A ratty looking pilled sweater added to the look of a down-and-outer on his last legs. This was even stranger for the fact that it is usually about 35 degrees Celsius or higher with humidity in Chiang Mai—sure it was cool inside with the air conditioning ramped up, but a sweater?

But this was Thailand. And so, those tell-tale signs that let anyone with a modicum of observation skills know that they were in the presence of a drunk, were instead likely chalked up to the fact that farangs are just different.

Milt Bender seemed affable and happy to have a job at the university. We were both from Australia and we discussed the different parts of the country from which we hailed. He had spent years in Thailand and it sounded as if he had seen a fair number of different schools in his time. He was also proud to let anyone know that he was married to a woman who had a good job for one of the big international NGOs based in Chiang Mai.

As quickly as I had told myself that he was a hard-core boozer, I started to ease up on my judgment of Milt. Who was I to come to hasty conclusions based on a large, inflamed snout? After someone becomes your colleague, you can only really accept him as competent until such time that he does something to convince you otherwise.

Within days of the start of the new semester, I started detecting in the elevator that nasty, boozy/fermented odour that drunks give off after a hard night of drinking. I didn’t always see Milt on those mornings, but I couldn’t help but assume that he was the culprit.

A few weeks into the semester and I started hearing stories about Milt. We all used less than perfect textbooks that Thai teachers had written. And we all noticed mistakes in them. But only Milt took it upon himself one evening to phone the teacher in question and berate her about the mistakes. No doubt he had imbibed a few cocktails before phoning and letting her know that her textbook was rammed full of mistakes.

I had the chance to talk to Milt on numerous occasions. Once, when we were assigned to put together a mid-term exam, he came into my office with a look of determination on his face. He sat down at my desk, and proceeded to outline a number of errors in my work. He bristled with a barely concealed contempt as he started to set me right.

“First, when you are writing numbers, you write them out when under 10, and use numerals above 10,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I responded. “However, when you have in a paragraph numbers above 10 for which you have used numerals, you use numerals for the numbers under 10 in that same paragraph. For parallelism, you understand,” I said with a bit of lecturing tone in my voice.

Milt jolted to a stop and considered what I had said. “Yes, you are right on that.” He continued with a bit more respect. And, he made some good points. I agreed to make the changes. Milt talked at length about various theories related to writing tests. Everything he said he backed up with references to the latest research, and he sounded convincing. Perhaps he was able to keep his boozing in check and was a very good teacher. Maybe the drinking was only a way to deal with the myriad frustrations that a teacher is faced with in Thailand.

I talked about Milt with some other teachers. Most of them were a bit suspect of Milt, and everyone had started hearing stories. But none of the other teachers were really worried about the presence of Milt. Sure, the possibility existed that irresponsible behaviour by a foreign teacher could a give a bad name to all the foreign teachers.

But the Thai teachers had seen it all from the human detritus who had washed up on the shores of their country to work as English teachers. The overall reputation of foreigners couldn’t get any worse. On the other hand, having an individual like Milt around could benefit us all. In comparison, we really didn’t have to do much to keep the Thai administration happy. When the bar is lower than a snake’s belly, you don’t have to jump too high to please your masters.

I was still holding out hope for Milt. I always liked the underdog. Besides, people like Milt who didn’t always toe the line and had a few demons always were more interesting than well-adjusted individuals. I wanted Milt to stick around if only for the interesting conversations that we might have.

One day I was in Clayton’s office and we started discussing Milt. Clayton was a fat yank who worked in the Romanian studies department, a project set up by the Department of Logic to take on students who weren’t able to gain acceptance to any of the other departments. Clayton had been involved in analyzing people in his previous life and liked to weigh in on various teachers and offer his “professional” advice about what neurotic tendencies they displayed. Clayton was well-versed in the language of alcoholism and recovery. He admitted that he had had problems with alcohol in the past, and together with his previous experience, he offered a grim outlook for Milt.

“He’s a hardcore drunk. No doubt about that,” said Clayton as he guffawed. “Many alcoholics are of the functional variety. But not Milt. He’s becoming dysfunctional. He’s probably already lost jobs, and from what I hear, he won’t last long here. After you start fucking your life up with booze, the next step is your health. The body can only take so much abuse. Then it starts shutting down. Then you die.”

I started to play devil’s advocate whenever the subject of Milt came up with other teachers, or with the head secretary at the university, a Thai woman who spoke good English and liked nothing better than to gossip about other teachers, both Thai and foreign.

It was at about that time that Milt started to change. It was when he interacted with other people. I would be sitting there having a conversation with him in the computer room and suddenly he wasn’t there. I don’t mean that he disappeared physically. But all at once it was if he forgot where he was and that he had been carrying on a conversation.

He would be looking off in the distance and then he would be mumbling to himself. It was surreal and a bit alarming. Even attempts to snap him out of his daze had little effect. He would keep rambling on to himself, as though interacting with another human was far too fraught with disappointments and pain.

One day when I was rushing to class late, the head secretary called out my name and motioned me over. She told me that there was a special announcement regarding an assignment for the class I was teaching. “And,” she added, “would you also look in on Milt’s class and give him the same announcement.” She handed me the memo and I headed off to class. Milt taught the same course to a different section just across the hall from where my class was.

I lightly knocked on the door of Milt’s classroom and poked my head in. He was standing in front of the class with the textbook open in his hands. “Important memo regarding one of the assignments for this class,” I said. I hoped that he caught my sarcasm. Milt looked at the memo and then read it out to the class. I tried to take my exit, but Milt started making some comments about the textbook to me. I looked around at the class, and then offered a perfunctory answer to Milt, hoping that he would take my cue and let me get to my class. Then, he was gone. In front of the class and me. The class of confused students and I looked at each other.

The embarrassment was palpable. Milt was mumbling and in some other dimension. I abruptly interrupted him and closed the door before he could object. It was a sad sight to witness. But I realized something then; he must want people to see him like this. It was a toxic mix of seeking pity together with a true breakdown of some sort; a slow, willful self-destruction for all to see.

A month later, the semester was finished. I was standing in the main office chatting with the head Thai secretary when the subject of student evaluations came up. At the end of every semester, students had the chance to rate their instructors. On a scale out of four in numerous categories, most instructors ranked in the three-point-five to three- point-eight range, with a few very effective ones coming very close to perfect scores.

According to the Thai secretary, Milt had bottomed out and been given scores in a number of classes that the Thai administration had never seen before. Twos. Some one-point-fives. It was unheard of. The outburst against the Thai teacher because of errors in the book she had written, together with the fact that Milt was usually marinating in booze, and now these horrid student evaluations meant that Milt was now essentially finished as an instructor at the university.

The last time I saw Milt he was striding out into the noonday heat in a garish sweater mumbling to himself. Maybe he would be OK. After all, there were still plenty of universities looking for foreign instructors. And not one of them would have a Thai in a decision-making role who would have a clue what the shattered capillaries were all about.

Bangkok Filth

Retroactive shame. It was a concept he had become familiar with in his little corner of the world. A corner on the other side of the planet. In the filth, seediness and anonymity of Bangkok.

He had landed there seven years ago. A failure from the west washed up on the shore like detritus. It wasn’t a planned destination. It was the closest and most convenient place to go after his money had almost run out. He quickly became comfortable for one simple reason. Thais seemed unable to clock people like him. They were unable to accurately sum up and judge him the way that someone back home could. The coarsened, red face, the tenderloin look, the speech patterns that were unusually slow and a bit off. Those were the things of which he was aware. While a social misfit, he still possessed a better ability to turn the cold hard light of inspection on himself than most other down-and- outers.

But there were those strange masks and mannerisms that everyone possesses and that can never be known. Except by those others in your orbit with whom you interact. They unknowingly conspire to draw out your hidden fears and involuntary reactions. The calm, placid face you view in the mirror is probably never seen by anyone except yourself.

His reactions in the face of any minor obstacle thrown up by ominous dealings with the other smooth-skinned apes brought out the reality. The crackling of fear in his brain betrayed his pathology, if only subconsciously, to others around him. The pleading look that started to appear on his face as soon as any conversation progressed beyond basic niceties. As any number of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of perceived judgements and challenges began to flow.

It always brought back fleeting images of squalor, filth, degrading insults. The image of his father reeling about the house drunk, suddenly raining down blows without any warning. If he could have built up a defense system based on some kind of pattern. But there was never any predictability to it. In its own way it had sharpened his ability to detect danger from others. But the absence of rational deduction about what represented something that could be accepted and dealt with and what was the kind of danger that could explode into the more sinister variety meant that danger lurked everywhere.

He consoled himself with the knowledge that he was at least aware of it to some degree. On this he was certain: he had one up on most of the other western degenerates he was likely to encounter in Bangkok.

They were more likely to construct bizarre persecution narratives. Somehow, coincidentally and consistently through years of failures, cock-ups and destroyed personal relationships, it was all the fault of the big bad world.

Besides being exposed to a minimal number of other westerners and the seeming absence of any real scrutiny from Thais, there was one other bright spot in the existence he had built here. It came in the form of a five foot nothing, slender, brown-skinned spitfire. He had met here in the run down building where he lived. She had been a cleaner. He had seen her over the period of a few weeks, wearing the drab grey uniform the company provided her, scrubbing the stairs or mopping the floor in the lobby. She must have seen him too because then he started seeing her on his floor most days. She seemed to be absent-mindedly working away at something, putting in minimal effort, smiling at him as he approached the door to his flat.

He started to acknowledge her albeit in an awkward blundering way that would have creeped out most other women. Her face lit up every time they saw each other and she said hello in her own style that somehow seemed tailored just for him. Then the greetings became something he looked forward to. One day she offered him some fruit. He accepted and invited her inside to share its flesh. Shortly after she moved in permanently.

He looked at her as she sat in front of the television. Flaked out on a quilt on the floor with some pillows, watching TV. It had quickly become her favourite pastime. Almost her only pastime. He looked at her features bathed in the glow of the television. Big round eyes. They often looked coarse and sullen until she focused on him. Then they took on the caring look that made him feel like he wasn’t an outsider anymore.

She got up and padded across the room on her splayed brown feet. She stopped at the refrigerator and opened it. Her face lit up as she looked at the array of food and drinks. He looked at her profile. The caramel skin, slightly mashed nose, lithe neck. She giggled and wrapped one of her tiny mitts around a can of Pepsi. She slowly treaded back towards her nest on the floor, crinkling her nose and smiling at him on the way past.

“What are your plans for today?” he asked.

She looked at him blankly. As if the question were superfluous when this cozy set-up in front of the tube was the most a person could want. She looked back at the flashing screen without responding and started barking like a seal at some inanity. She got up again and strode to the toilet. He followed her and bent down to peer through the keyhole.

She had stripped off her trousers and carelessly thrown them in a heap. She was squatting on the toilet which was a ceramic fitting a few inches off the floor. Most apartments rented by westerners had the traditional throne. This was a testament to how far down the chain he had slipped, even here. He watched her. Her legs were covered in stretch marks which blazed all shiny when she was squatting. He was under no delusions about the relative lack of her beauty and social standing. At first it hadn’t bothered him…no, it still didn’t bother him. He loved her. Who was he to judge? In many ways she was a reject from her society and he from his.

He thought of the looks from the pinch-faced hag who ran the shop in the lobby when they came in together. As time had gone on, he had slowly become familiar with subtleties that had eluded him at first. To hell with it, he thought. I didn’t care what anyone thought back home and I sure as hell don’t care here.

He thought of the little domesticated world they had started to build as he peered at her disrobing completely and climbing into the shower. We’re starting to trust each other, he thought as he watched her breathlessly. Her peasant fingers had always intrigued him. Thick and solid yet still somehow retaining their femininity. He watched as she clutched the faucet and turned on the water. It streamed down over her brown skin, over the vertical scar that started at her pubic hair and ended a few inches below her breasts.

One of her breasts hung significantly lower than the other one. This had the strange effect of offsetting the shortness of her right leg, at least when she was nude. She had been injured in a car accident years earlier and the injury hadn’t healed correctly.

He had once questioned her about the accident and she had not answered. He let the matter drop. He didn’t want to create any issues in their relationship.

She was out of the shower and drying herself now. As she emerged from the toilet there was a knock at the door.

“That’s Nap’” she said matter-of-factly.

Nap was her fat, sullen friend.

Nudge opened the door and Nap walked in without saying a word. She exuded pure misery.

She slumped on the couch

They started nattering in that strange language that made his brain crackle.

“We have to go see Mr. Damruat,” said Nudge.

Damruat was the man who owned the cleaning company she had worked for. When she had abruptly quit a few weeks ago, he had been less than pleased. One less person desperate for money that he could grind into the concrete for profit. He had seen him a few days after when Damruat had dared to come to his door looking for Nudge.

He stood to the side seething as Damruat berated her from the corridor. He had fantasized about lifting the old fucker off the ground with a tight uppercut and then kicking that face that was covered in sickly, loose flesh. Taking a fistful of that greasy, dyed black hair and ramming his face repeatedly into the concrete floor. Instead he stood there and watched the humiliation of the woman he loved.

“What’s that all about?” he asked.

“He said he needs to settle everything with me,” Nudge replied.

“But he’s already paid you, I don’t think there’s any reason to go.”

“It’s OK, I should go or he will make problems.”

“I would prefer if you didn’t,” he said with his voice gaining a slightly perturbed edge.

“Don’t you think you could phone him?” he said as he started feeling ill at the thought of her having to deal with the unctuous old bastard.

She nattered a bit more with Nap. “Please, don’t worry, he’s not that bad.”

“I really don’t want you going there.” his face had a florid edge to it now.

“I am sorry, I will go.”

Nudge and Nap gathered their accoutrements in a slow motion flurry of activity and trundled out the door.

He stood there alone.

Christ in the Classroom

Proponents of the so-called “intelligent design” theory have been accused of being less than honest in their attempts to market their half-baked claims. But it’s hardly surprising that those who believe an invisible sky daddy controls everyone and everything in the universe resort to deceitful means to advance their ideas.

A lot of people start braying about demands for respect whenever their particular superstition comes up for discussion. This is a plea hardly worth responding to. When you run around claiming that anyone who doesn’t believe in your religion will burn in a pit of flames for all eternity and suffer indescribable, excruciating pain; well, expect to get mocked.

And, when you further try to insinuate yourselves into government and shove your beliefs down people’s throats with policies based on your twisted morals, anticipate further ridicule. Finally, when you hold yourselves up as holier than all yet seem to produce a significant portion of the most deviant, sick, child molesting bags of excrement on the planet, assume that you will have the harshest and most disrespectful verbal attacks thrown back in your faces.

Of course, those who follow their religion and worship in private without condemning people with different viewpoints should be given the respect and dignity that all humans who live without harming others deserve.

Leaving the western bastions of Christianity to live and work in Asia hardly insulates a person from direct contact with the self-righteous throngs of fundamentalists. In many ways, they become more visible and their methods more loathsome when you are in Thailand.

Just as there appears to be an increase in deception in the intelligent design industry, duplicity in the ranks of foreign missionaries is also on the rise.

Missionaries in Thailand

While not officially a state religion, Buddhism is the belief system of the majority of Thais and is part of most aspects of life in Thailand. Any disrespect shown to the images or ideas associated with it will result in swift and extreme public censure or worse.

But Thailand is quite welcoming to Christian missionaries. Perhaps it’s the all pervasive nature of Buddhism and the feeling that no matter how hard anyone tried, there could never be any significant inroads made in terms of conversions.

A more cynical view would be that enough money changes hands to make the influx possible. The exchange, of course, between those seeking to spread their dogma that maligns any other religion or belief system and those who could otherwise restrict access to the country.

And, there are many wealthy Thai families who are Christian and who hold influence and ensure that missionaries have a fairly easy time of it when they are plying their trade and earning credits for the vague, unspecified, other location where they assume that their rank will be guaranteed and the ghostly images of their worldly selves will rule for all eternity.

Regardless, missionaries are in Thailand in fairly significant numbers. They tend to pitch up in small, poor rural communities. It’s hard to argue with the time and effort they invest and the material benefits they bring. But there are strings attached to the good will and the guarantee that it will continue to flow. The conditions are in the form of pressure on locals to renounce their belief in Buddhism and accept Christianity.

There are other insidious means used to influence the young and impressionable. Cartoons are hugely popular in Thailand. Missionaries now distribute cartoon books in Thai that show pictures of people suffering in hell for daring not to believe in the Christian fairy tale (this is, of course, something that has also been done for years in countless different countries).

And what better way to plant the seeds of fear in young minds than to be with them for hours every day in the classroom?

Missionaries in the Classroom

Anyone who has taught English in Thailand for a number of years will have, at some point, come across a Christian fundamentalist teacher. Their beliefs are often known to school management before they are hired and sometimes a friendly warning is offered during the interview process. They are cautioned not to turn the classroom into a pulpit for discussing their religion and trying to sign up new recruits. But the warnings rarely succeed completely.

Inevitably, stories filter out of lessons built around Jesus and the benefits of embracing him as a saviour. The most conflicted, confused and vulnerable students have a way of making themselves visible to the fanatics. The fanatics swoop in like shameless salesmen eager to add a couple of notches to their belts, please their superiors and earn a higher rank in their fairy-tale afterlife.

And, in many cases, parents or fellow teachers complain and the missionary moves on, energized at the thought of their persecution and convinced they have made some headway in the struggle to convert the heathens.

They do achieve some long term success in Thai schools though it appears it is restricted to certain types of establishments. I have encountered covert missionaries in universities in Thailand. However, the environment doesn’t seem to be the best one for them to thrive. While there are many young adults in the university setting who are looking for answers on how to proceed in life, colleagues are likely to look with contempt at such efforts to manipulate these youngsters. Administrators are similarly unforgiving. Because of the fact that most of these institutions are not strapped financially and have little trouble finding teachers, such tactics are not usually tolerated.

Language schools which are heavily into marketing their courses are often the place where missionaries are most comfortable practicing their trade. The mantra-like repetition of sales pitches used by the schools aren’t unlike the same type of brainwashing that succeeds in attracting new followers to their cult. If they are punctual and presentable and do a decent job, their occasional in-class sermon probably gets overlooked.

Similarly, poor schools in the countryside that are thankful to have an English speaking foreigner on staff may also turn a blind eye to evangelizing in the classroom.

Still, many organizations that send out successive waves of missionaries recognize that more traditional methods of trying to gain new disciples haven’t always been the most successful.

Tent-making

“Tent-making” is a code word used by missionaries heading overseas to spread the faith and build up membership in their religion. It’s simply a way of saying that they will be less than straightforward in admitting their true intentions when establishing themselves in a foreign country.

They will take on jobs as EFL teachers and make little mention of their true motivations. When pressed, they will likely talk about their beliefs but they will downplay them and deflect any suggestions that they are there solely to seek converts. Of course, they are only interested in making as many contacts as possible and softening up all new acquaintances and students for possible indoctrination.

It is disingenuous at best and brazenly dishonest at worst. But when you are convinced that you are on the side of absolute truth, anything can be rationalized.

And so they seek out the down-trodden, simple-minded and malleable while avoiding the intelligent, cynical and confrontational. This often means staying away from other foreigners who may disagree with their strategies or who are simply interested in an open discussion about the subject.

Many people dismiss the actions of missionaries and claim they are having little effect. I disagree. They are converting a large number of individuals and receiving little scrutiny. The issue is rarely, if ever, raised in the mainstream media and so the scare-mongering, emotional blackmail and other questionable approaches carry on with little resistance.

“OK children, today we’re going to learn about ‘guilt.’ What’s that? You don’t know what guilt is? Well, you will soon enough...”

The Reverend

I met the Reverend on the first day of classes at a university in Songkla in the south of Thailand. The first day of any new academic year was always interesting for the new freaks who would appear out of nowhere. Always validating the long-held truism in the expat community that Thais haven’t got a clue about how to size up foreigners.

The Reverend wore his full preacher’s regalia; all black attire with a white collar. He topped off the ensemble with a long flowing white beard and a staff. Yes, a staff. A long, hand-carved, cherry-wood staff that looked like something Gandolf from Lord of the Rings would carry with him.

The Reverend bounded up to me and pumped my hand and introduced himself. He was from a small town in Alaska. He was in Thailand alone as part of a round-the-world trip that had taken him to Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan, among other destinations. One of my first questions was “Are you working as a preacher while you are here?”

“Why, no,” came the answer. Then why the get-up? He didn’t say much about that though later he would as much as admit that he wore it for the attention it brought him. It was an affectation, pure and simple.

After telling me about himself and his travels, the Reverend and me finished up the rest of the first-day orientation and then had another quick chat before saying goodbye. I had no doubt that we would be seeing a great deal of each other in the coming semester.

The next time that I saw the Reverend, he approached me as if he had never seen me before. No, he did not just forget my name. It seemed as though the entire first meeting and our 15 to 20 minutes of discussion were a blank. This happened another two or three times. It was one of the most surreal things that I have ever experienced. I considered that it might have been the early onset of Alzheimer’s, but he was still relatively young—somewhere in his early 60s.

After the Reverend finally had in his mind who I was, we started to have some interesting conversations. The Rev, as I started to call him, had been travelling around the world for some years. The time he had spent in various locations had sometimes stretched to years at a time. And while he had done some stints preaching in some of those locales, for the most part it seemed he was content to play the celebrity preacher role. Celebrity that is, to the often simple locals who had been converted to Christianity years earlier and had in their minds the image of who should play the role of a benevolent preacher. Someone just like the Reverend.

I noticed that the Revered started to grate on a few of the other teachers at the university. One of them was a barely-concealed missionary who used the classroom as his pulpit. He didn’t like the Reverend’s brand of Christianity. It didn’t seem authentic to him.

One day, a number of teachers were gathered in the communal computer room, where we all spent many hours preparing exams and wasting time surfing the internet. The talk turned to gay marriage and the Reverend expressed his full support for the idea. The little missionary visibly cringed. My view of the Reverend went up a few notches that day. Not because of his opinion on gay marriage and the fact that it generally aligned with my ideas. But because he didn’t pander to anyone who happened to worship the same sky daddy.

A few weeks later, I casually mentioned the Reverend in conversation to the little missionary with the intent of finding out what was behind his contempt. He shook his head in disgust at the thought of the Reverend’s brand of Christianity. That anyone could use this thousands-of-years-old philosophy to justify their choices in life, lead a generally helpful existence, and enjoy themselves along the way seemed to unsettle the little missionary. He didn’t see the irony in the fact that his judgment was completely subjective and his way of spreading the word and leading his life were just as open to criticism.

One day as I chatted to him, the little missionary beamed with unbridled delight and a sense of accomplishment at the fact that he had quickly converted an attractive woman he had met. He sneered when he talked about her family and how they were upset that she was turning her back on Buddhism.

Months later, the little missionary started growing frustrated with the university because of class sizes that were larger than he had been promised. While that was the ostensible reason, I felt it was more due to the fact that he just hadn’t found fertile ground for turning people on to the omniscient sky daddy he worshipped.

The university catered to sons and daughters of wealthy Thais. And while there were many who were already Christians, the majority were comfortable with their Buddhist beliefs and had no intention of changing. The poor, desperate, and dispossessed appealed more to the little missionary and offered the kind of broken lives that would latch on to anyone or anything that promised better times.

I continued having conversations with the little missionary. He never came right out and stated that he was a full on Christ lover who was dedicated to saving souls, but I knew it and he seemed to know that I knew. He was symbolic of a more circumspect and cautious type of missionary who have become more prevalent in Thailand in recent years. Perhaps due to more straightforward and blunt-speaking people who let missionaries know exactly what they think of them and their manipulative ways.

For a few weeks, the little missionary and myself spent time working at a local factory as part of a contract with the university. We were doing English skills assessments of the workers, and we traveled a few hours each day together in a van supplied by the university. I got the sense that he was going to attempt a mild form of trying to get me interested in his cult. He prodded and probed a few times, and offered up his own dreary conversion story. I listened respectfully only because of the entertainment he was unknowingly providing. I was healthy, happy and a teetotaler to boot—something which he was not; a fact he lamented. I believe it grated on him that I was relatively well-adjusted and exhibited many of the traits that bible beaters said only came with acceptance of their religion.

At about the same, I met yet another missionary associated with the university. He was more open about the whole thing. He worked for some kind of fellowship that ran day camps for young children on the university campus. I met him at one of the campus cafeterias, and he instantly presented himself as a rigid, angry sort who was on the lookout for any signs that I was on the same righteous team as him.

When I did not give him any sign that I was enthralled to a nappy-haired little middle eastern carpenter who lived 2000 years ago, and instead only queried about his group, he grew sullen and non-communicative. However, when I mentioned that there were others I worked with who were Christians, he darkened further. As if he knew instinctively that no one could possibly possess the same understanding and demonstrate the same devotion as him and his fellow sect members.

What an odd, burdensome life he must lead, I thought to myself.

In comparison to the little missionary and the angry puritan at the cafeteria, the Reverend was friendly and lacking that tightly wound quality of someone who was certain they were living amongst heathens who would rot in a pit of fire for all eternity.

The Reverend butted heads with another teacher; a serious, unsmiling South African named Deke. Deke was in his mid-fifties, wore a military-style haircut, and brooked no dissent from his students. While on the surface he was a humourless bastard, Deke was well-liked by his students and was a decent person if you made the effort to get to know him. However, something about the Reverend annoyed him in a visceral way. They taught a number of the same courses and thus were in the same group assigned to develop the related exams and ensure that there was some degree of consistency amongst all the sections.

Deke had spent years as a captain in the army and the regimented approach infiltrated every aspect of his life. Something about the Reverend’s casual style enraged him. A number of teachers saw an epic feud brewing and wished that Deke would play along and wear his old army uniform to school. With the Rev in his preaching garb, it would have been something right out of a professional wrestling script.

I learned that the Rev had been in his past life a salesman. I ribbed him about this, saying that he had all the bullshit professions down pat: salesman, Reverend and now teacher.

As the semester started to wind down, the Revered hinted that he would be moving on during year-end break. I had never seen the Rev out of his getup the during the year I had known him. Not even once did he decide to wear “civilian” clothes to the university. The image was important to him.

I went looking for him on a lazy Friday afternoon near the end of the term. Most teachers had finished for the day or ducked out early after cancelling classes. I walked down the deserted hallway of the fifth floor of the old building where they housed the offices of the foreign instructors. I had walked past the Rev’s office on other Fridays and seen him holding court with students. It pleased him when a student sought out his advice on matters related to the course material or life in general. I was certain he would be in his office today.

I stopped at the door to his office. A wooden door, perhaps decades old, no window to allow someone to peer in before deciding if they wanted to knock. Paper stuck to the wall next to the door. Assignments from the students. The kind of things that you might see on the walls of grade schools back home but that somehow are appropriate from university aged students here. One was titled: Memory Trip to America—and read: “My trip to America was funny. I started to went to the airport with my family on May 14.”

I moved closer to the door to see if I could hear any movement from within. No sounds. Instead of knocking I tried the door knob. I eased the door open and looked inside. A spacious room, larger than necessary for one person. Numerous desks but the Rev was the only teacher assigned to this office. Piles of old papers and books stacked on most of the unused desks and the accompanying musty smell filled the air. The shades were drawn and it was as dark as it could be in the middle of the afternoon.

“Rev?”

I walked into the room and shut the door behind me. I moved toward the back of the room to get a look behind one of those cheap cubicle separators that they use to give some privacy when they want to create semi-private workspaces. I knew the Rev used this cubicle from the times I had been in here before. I saw him sitting behind the desk.

“What’s up Rev?”

I sat down in the chair in front of his desk.

In the dim light of the room I could see the Rev staring blankly through me, not even acknowledging me. No, it wasn’t like he saw me and was ignoring me, he just didn’t see me. He was in some kind of deep reverie. He was wearing his usual black preacher’s outfit. His white collar was off and lying on the desk. His shirt was open at the neck. But his black preacher’s shirt wasn’t pressed and clean like usual. It was rumpled and I could barely make out flecks of white on the front of his shirt. Dandruff from his beard I realized.

“Rev, for fuck’s sake! What the hell is going on?”

He turned his head slowly. His jovial, good-natured schtick was gone.

“Who the hell are you? What is this!” he said.

He was looking at his hands. Clenching and unclenching his fists. Looking up at me with a strange, angry look on his face.

“What is this?!”

“Rev, what the hell? Everything OK?”

I thought he was having some kind of existential melt-down at the age of 63. Perhaps it had finally dawned on him that he had devoted his one existence in all eternity to desperately hoping that upon death his conscious mind would go swirling out of his body to reside in some vague, unspecified location for all eternity. I was hopeful that I could guide him through this bit of nastiness. It must be hard to consider all the wasted years.

The Rev rose out of his seat and leaned forward over the desk so that he was looming over me.

“What is this?!” he shrieked down at me, spray from his mouth blasting me in the face and a line of saliva left hanging as he looked at me with a mixture of rage and incomprehensible confusion.

He held his clenched right hand up in the air and opened it, releasing a crumpled piece of paper that drifted down and landed on the desk in front of me.

I picked up the piece of paper and straightened it out. Some kind of letter...

Attention: The Reverend,

It has come to our attention that you have violated numerous tenets of the Global Interdenominational Reverends’ Association charter of conduct. It has been brought to our attention that during your time in Thailand, you have: indicated your support for same-sex marriage, worn your preacher’s outfit for personal aggrandizement while failing to preach for a period longer than six months and, stated that it is possible that there is no afterlife

Due to the nature of these serious transgressions, GIRA has ruled that you are no longer in good standing with our organization and therefore, you forfeit all benefits associated with GIRA.

Finally, we order you to immediately stop wearing your preacher’s outfit until such time as you resume regular preaching duties.

Yours in Faith,

The Reverend Damon Shuttlecock, PhD

I must have screwed up my face as I looked at that strange document. I remembered a discussion with the Rev and a number of teachers at school when he had outright admitted that he had no knowledge of whether there truly was an afterlife. He could understand why people doubted such claims though he hoped there was something to it.

I remembered the little missionary sitting in the computer room during that discussion, sullen and annoyed. I knew that he fully believed in an afterlife, and I think that he reiterated that claim on that day. But I recalled thinking that it was odd that he didn’t get involved more in a debate that he must have had strong feelings about.

“This is a real organization?” I asked.

The Rev’s brow furrowed even more and he whipped his head from side to side.

“Of course it’s real! It’s right there in front of you!”

“But this organization, you are some kind of member, you have had interactions with them in the past?”

“Well...yes, I believe so,” said the Rev. “I belong to so many similar organizations that I lose track of them all.”

“Even if you did belong to this organization, what does this letter matter? Are they capable of enforcing this demand about your preacher’s outfit?”

The Rev looked around the room as if he were pondering the question. As he was thinking about this, I picked up the envelope from the desk. I looked at the postmark: Arizona. I remembered that the little missionary was from Arizona, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. No doubt there were plenty of bible beaters and related organizations in the state.

“Listen, Rev, who gives a damn about this letter. Even if this is a real group, what are they going to do, send around some thugs to rough you up when they find out that you’ve been wearing your outfit?”

He sat down again and looked blankly at the dim room.

“How do they know this?” the Rev finally asked, as if arriving at some important understanding.

“Well, presumably someone who has heard you make some of these comments passed on the information to them.”

This made him think more intently.

“Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. All the other teachers like you, the students like you and you’re not doing anything wrong.”

Finally, I had hit on something that buoyed the Reverend.

“You say the students like me? How do you know that?”

“I just know. You can pick up on these things. I’ve seen them interacting with you as well. They don’t act that way around every teacher.” I thought of the little missionary and the way I had seen him dismissively waving aside questions from some students in the hallway after one of his classes.

The Rev seemed to relax and see the absurdity of what he had been upset about. When you live in a foreign country, things can easily get blown out of proportion in your mind. Still, I was interested to find out who had tried to throw a scare into the Rev. When I returned to my office, I did some searching online and found no website for the association the letter was supposedly sent from. No mention whatsoever.

A few days later I went down to the computer room just after lunch. A time when there was usually a good-sized gathering of foreign teachers. Yes, there was the little missionary sitting at a computer in the corner with a smug little grin on his righteous face. A few other teachers were there as well though the Rev hadn’t arrived yet. Everyone was silent, engrossed in various mindless online distractions.

As if on cue, the Rev strolled in, looking much better than he had the last time I had seen him. He was cleaned up and had some of the old bounce in his step, though he still wasn’t as lively as before.

The little missionary glanced briefly at the Rev and a look of annoyance flashed on his face before he went back to his computer screen.

“Your preacher’s outfit is looking nice and crisp today,” I said for the benefit of everyone present. I looked over at the little missionary as I said it, trying to gauge whether he was affected by my statement.

I got the little missionary’s attention further, “It looks good, doesn’t it?” I asked him pointedly.

“Well, I suppose so. Though I don’t think the Rev preaches. Do you actually preach, Rev?” he asked.

“No, not at the moment.”

I looked at the little missionary. He was wearing a grey polo shirt, with a colourful logo over the left breast pocket. Some coloured triangles joined together, and underneath it, the words Tri Angels Fellowship. He’s starting to be more up front about it. Trying to assert the superiority of his particular sect.

“So then, what is the point of wearing it?” the little missionary asked.

“I feel comfortable wearing my preacher’s garments,” the Rev said. He said it in a harmless and unaffected way. It was clear that he hadn’t picked up on the hints I was giving him the last time we talked.

“You know anything about the Universal Interdenominational Reverend’s League?” I asked the little missionary, purposefully butchering the name.

The little missionary started to say something and then caught himself.

“No, I don’t,” he said. He shrugged his sloping shoulders and turned back to his monitor.

This smug little fuck knew that I knew.

“I hear the organization is based out of Arizona. You’re from Arizona, aren’t you? Surely you must have heard of this group.”

“Nope,” he said without looking at me.

“I think you have heard of them,” I said, as I bolted out of my chair and moved towards him. In a few strides I was standing over him. He refused to look at me.

“I think your pathetic little cloak and dagger bit of nastiness highlights you as a hypocritical piece of filth. Dishonest little puke as you’re running around talking about how your purity will give you some eternal fucking life.”

The little missionary’s face started quivering as he rose out of his chair.

“How dare you!”

“Shut your fucking cake-hole you duplicitous little fuck! Admit to us that you wrote that pathetic letter threatening the Rev!”

The Rev naturally reverted to his peace-loving role. “That’s not necessary,” he said as he got up and moved between us.

“Rev, this little fuck was trying to cause you grief just because you don’t have the same rigid interpretation of things as he does.”

“No one is a true Christian who believes in gay marriage!” the little missionary shrieked as he backed away from us and pointed his finger at the Rev. “You will rot in hell just like all the deviant homosexuals you support!”

The Rev dropped his hands at his side and looked at the little missionary with a pitying look on his face. He must have known now that the florid, enraged little freak gesticulating in front of him was the person who sent the letter.

“You ridiculous buffoon. Do you really think that you are emulating what your religion preaches? Honestly?” I said. But of course, he did.

The little missionary seemed to realize how much of a scene he was making. He looked around at the other teachers in the room who were staring with that intrigued sense of detachment people get when they witness others losing control.

“Why exactly does it bother you that the Rev wears his getup? Are you jealous because students actually like him? And while we’re on the topic, there is nothing wrong with him wearing his preacher’s outfit as far as the university is concerned. On the other hand, they don’t like evangelizing in the classroom. In fact, it is forbidden...”

The little missionary looked at me with contempt, composed himself further and walked out of the room.

I had done some research and found that any proselytizing on campus could get a teacher sacked. An anonymous letter that was truthful would be sent to the administration of the university.

And it was sent. The university undertook a brief investigation, which amounted to them asking the little missionary if he was indeed trying to convert students. Apparently, the little missionary answered in the affirmative, happy to take a fall with the knowledge that he was being martyred for an honourable cause. The last I heard of the little missionary, he had given up teaching and had headed to the north of Thailand, where some of the cushiest missionary gigs were located. While the Rev didn’t thank me directly, he returned to his former self and finished out the semester before he too moved on.

The Rev knew that I openly mocked his beliefs and he in turn ripped me in his own affectionate way. I had no problem with anyone latching onto any kind of philosophy as a way to help them through life. It was the bitter, intolerant brand of self-righteousness masquerading as religion displayed by the little missionary that always turned my guts.

The Rev and I got together before he left and we sent a response to the non-existent organization which had enclosed a return address. If the little missionary did ever get the envelope, he would have found a single photograph of the Rev at the front of a classroom in his preacher’s garb, carrying his staff in one hand, and flipping the bird with his other hand, a broad, carefree smile on his face.

Carpen Rutledge

What can be most frustrating for foreigners in Thailand is offering up what they think is considerate and respectful behaviour and finding that there is no type of positive payoff similar to what occurs in their home country. What follows is an anecdote that demonstrates what can happen when your expectations are ground into the concrete when in Thailand. Alternatively, you will see that with some tolerance, shifts in attitude and an ability to laugh at yourself and the whole damn world, it doesn’t have to be that bad.

Carpen Rutledge was a Mormon from Utah in the US of A. He was a hard-working, god-fearing sort who loved his family and was self-disciplined. He was so self-disciplined that he administered his own form of corporal punishment after he had relieved himself of that tension in his groin area out back in the old woodshed. That he was forming a connection between pain and pleasure deep inside his subconscious was something that never occurred to Carpen.

One day tragedy befell Carpen. While his Mama was throwing out hallelujahs down in the cornfield, his Daddy unknowingly ground the old hag into the soil with the International Harvester combine. His lack of awareness about what he had done quickly turned to horror as bits of her flesh splattered back into the windscreen of the cab, where he was listening to the afternoon gospel hour on Righteous Radio 104 AM. Carpen’s Daddy rammed the combine’s gears into neutral and with the din of the powerful engine still clattering, he stumbled down the steps into the cornfield, clutched his chest and dropped dead.

Carpen and his extended clan were stricken. After the burial proceedings were wrapped up he realized that he was left with nothing because his parents had willed everything to the church. Never one to waste time on self-pity, he started to think about his future and hit on the idea of teaching English in a foreign country as a means to cleanse his mind of sadness and a way to see the world and help others. He remembered that a few years ago a family from Thailand had joined the local congregation.

He got in touch with the Thai family and was filled with tales of wonder and excitement over dinner at their house. He promptly set about preparing a carefully detailed plan to become a qualified teacher, move to Thailand and begin a new life. Rigorous study sessions ensued where he absorbed every grammar rule possible and slogged through volume after volume on teaching methodology. He took an intensive six-month TEFL training course at the local college, which almost sapped his resources dry. But he was certain it was more important to be prepared than to have a few more dollars when he arrived.

He spent hours on the internet researching Thailand and locating school addresses. He e-mailed numerous schools that appealed to him and got a handful of responses. One offered him a teaching job. He promptly responded in the affirmative, a contract was faxed and he scrawled his name on the line marked with an “X” (as it was all in Thai) and sent it back to the school in Thailand. He was ready to go!

At about the same time, Simon McCracken was working at a factory in a grimy industrial section in Slough, just north of London, England. He was almost broke and going nowhere fast. His only enjoyment in life was pouring pints of lager down his flabby neck at the local pub and surfing the internet at all hours of the night.

Simon had completed a year of college but had never finished his full degree. Instead, he had majored in late nights at the pub with a minor in loose women. He was relatively content with his unmotivated life and the nights out with the lads. “If something else comes along, I might take the opportunity. But then, why should I waste my energy?” was his unofficial motto.

With a few weeks of annual leave approaching, Simon and a couple of his mates decided to take a vacation abroad. They did some research and agreed on Thailand as a good destination. It exceeded their limited imaginations. They spent some time in Bangkok and then headed to one of the islands. Lazy days on the beach were followed by wild nights swilling beer in the bars. The time flew by and they returned to Bangkok, ready to fly back home the following day. On that final day, a late afternoon buzz kick-started at a Suhkumvit beer bar quickly revved into high gear. In their short time in the nation’s capital they had learned, as everyone quickly does, that nightfall turns Bangkok into an entirely different city.

Simon vaguely remembered the hazy beginnings of the previous evening when he woke up the next morning. He was alone in his hotel room. There was no sign of his travelling companions and it was past the departure time for his flight back to London. He got up, stretched and looked out the window. Bleary eyed, he dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant for some coffee.

Stranded in Bangkok. It had a nice ring to him. While not broke, he didn’t have enough to purchase a new ticket. The flight he had missed was the cheapest he could buy; non-refundable and valid only on the originally scheduled dates. He slurped his coffee and looked at the English language newspaper someone had left at his table. His eyes passed over some stories of maimings, mishaps and misappropriated land on the front page. He scanned the odd collection of articles in the entertainment section, written in English by Thais. The result was a strange and skewed syntax that had a disconcerting effect on his addled brain.

Glancing at the want-ads, he noticed further inappropriate use of the language. Strange double entendres. Also, things a person just couldn’t write in the west “Wanted: Thai nationals only,” was a common tag at the end of many of the ads. But here was a cluster of ads all looking for foreigners. English teachers. Yes, he had heard of the ease with which someone could land work and extend their stay here by teaching English. Why not give it a try?

It was remarkably easy to get set up. He rented a concrete box of a flat for the monthly sum that was the equivalent of a big night out on the town with the lads back home. He bought a few cheap pairs of trousers and some short-sleeved dress shirts that made him look like an airline pilot. After walking into a few schools to inquire, he was offered a job.

On his first day he strode into the classroom with a reckless who-gives-a-damn outlook. He proceeded to introduce himself to the students by singing his name and where he was from while doing an asinine dance at the front of the class. The students were a bit taken aback at first but he continued the schtick and everyone was laughing within a few minutes. Simon flipped open the book he had been given, asking the students which chapter they had completed. A sharp-eyed student in the front row noticed that Simon didn’t have the correct book. “Mr. Simon, that book not same we have…”

“Oh…well, which book have you got?” Everybody held up their books.

“Which chapter?” asked Simon.

“Three!!!” everyone shouted together.

Simon had a quick look at one of the student’s books.

“All right, let’s go over the homework! Two teams, each team will have a chance to answer a question for a point and then it will be the other team’s chance.” He had heard that playing games with kids in the classroom was a good way to keep them interested.

Meanwhile, Carpen was at his first day on the job at the Catholic school where he had been hired to teach. His brand of fundamental Christianity was different than Catholicism but he was happy that at least he would be close to people who believed in the same god as him. Carpen arrived 30 minutes before classes were to begin and was a bit dismayed to find that his classroom was not open. “That’s OK,” he thought to himself, I’ll just wait outside the class and run over some things in my head.”

At 10 minutes past 9 nobody had arrived to open the door and there were no students in sight. Carpen felt a slight twinge of annoyance but tried to relax. He went down to the office and asked if anyone knew what was going on. Nobody in the office spoke English. He spoke slower and louder in the hopes that this would make them understand. The three secretaries in the office became frightened and since they had never seen him before, they thought he was looking for a job. They directed him to the fifth floor by using the few words they knew while pointing up. Carpen assumed that the classroom had been changed for some reason.

Carpen went to the fifth floor and went into a room full of secretaries typing away at their keyboards. All of the secretaries were extremely attractive, many of them wearing short skirts. Together with the growing frustration of the first day miscommunications and Carpen’s puritanical outlook on male-female relations, he involuntarily twitched his head to the side, the cords in his next straining.

Meanwhile, in no time Simon had become popular and well-liked amongst his Thai colleagues. Far from being seen as someone who would accept anything without question, his good nature and sense of humour endeared him to Thais. So much so that they started going out of their way to accommodate him and avoid instances where he would have to deal with inconveniences.

Carpen suffered a much less honourable fate. There were various reports, none of them confirmed but somehow all plausible. People said they had seen him barking like a dog in Siam square, convulsing at the sight of students in uniform, and on his knees in the middle of a busy sidewalk pleading to the heavens.

The Myths

Myths about Asia are circulated at will and readily swallowed by westerners without question. The mystery of the Orient seems to make anything seem plausible. It frames things in a nice tidy way and plays up to our real lack of knowledge about the place. Someone who has spent a few months in Thailand thinks they have the width and breadth of every subject sorted out. And people believe them.

Some gin-soaked old mule on a bar stool in Bangkok tells a new arrival about some nasty sounding scam to beware of and the narrative is reinforced. The wet behind the ears little whelp is living on the edge in gritty third world despotic chaos and loving it. He’s taking risks and most importantly, he’s proven to himself that he’s different from his mates back home.

Choose a topic and there are myths. For example, food. Myths about food can be so pointedly absurd that I lose friends when I hear them repeated by otherwise sane people because I have to start barking with laughter in their faces. The one that always gets me is the “there’s a certain beer that’s manufactured in Thailand that has formaldehyde in it.” Now, formaldehyde is used in the pasteurizing process of many beers and trace amounts may remain once it has been bottled. But the inane insistence that it is added as some kind of special ingredient makes me want to start throwing haymakers. Do the credulous louts who repeat these dimwitted claims honestly think through what the meeting sounded like where the decision to add formaldehyde was made?

“We’ve got a quality product here. It’s won over people in taste tests. We’ve got a solid distribution network sorted out. Hell, we’ve got a government ensured monopoly. We’re ready to roll. But we’re missing something.”

“How bout we add some ingredient that could possibly poison people, damage our reputation beyond belief and result in endless lawsuits? Like say, formaldehyde.”

“Are you insane?”

“No, imagine the cachet we’ll gain from countless lovers of the “sinister mysteries of the orient” type of horseshit repeating this fact while they continue to chug back our beer? Hell, we don’t even have to add it. Let’s just employ some shady looking locals full-time to go around to bars telling this tale to the most gullible looking foreigners.”

“But won’t the knowledge, even if it’s really false, dissuade people from drinking our beer?”

“No, it’ll make them think they’re hard cases. They knock back a few bottles and then scurry down to the local phone box to telephone their mommies for a cash infusion to be wired so they can continue drinking and acting like hard cases.”

“You’re a genius!”

The other one that grates is the “street vendors use motor oil to cook food.” Again, the asinine aspect is rarely considered as this bromide is repeated time and again.

“Hey, we can buy reasonably priced cooking oil which is available anywhere or we could buy much more expensive motor oil which would make our food taste like crap and would drive away what few customers we have.”

“Well then, there’s really nothing to consider. Buy the motor oil.”

Apart from these absurdities, there are other nastier realities that somehow don’t rate the same exchanges of knowing looks and furtive glances. For example, the amount of pesticides used on fruits and vegetables and the amount of oil—the proper kind for cooking—used to fry foods.

Many people outside of Asia or those who have never visited may have a vague, general idea that all Asian food is inherently healthy. Some northern Asian cuisine, such as Japanese, with a great deal of steamed seafood and vegetables is much healthier than a lot of Thai food.

Depending on where you eat, a lot of Thai food is soaked in oil and fried in it with abandon. Big greasy woks filled with lakes of sizzling oil rammed full of food swimming in the artery hardening swill. Though it definitely isn’t motor oil, it certainly isn’t of a high grade. Walk down any sidewalk lined with street vendors hawking their grub and a greasy veil hangs in the air and stings your eyes.

Whippet thin, lean-arsed Thais are being replaced by slothful hogs with piggy little eyes buried in mounds of flesh on their swollen faces. The children are the worst. As in the west, a generation of bloated porkers are being fattened up on rivers of sugary drinks, awaiting the day when they can ride the wave of a full-scale national health-care crisis directly into their early graves.

Another assumption made by every tourist sprinting to the bogs to spray the contents of his or her guts into the toilet, is that Thais suffer no such annoyances. “They must have guts made out iron,” the thinking goes. “They’ve been slamming back chilies since they day they were squeezed into existence. Those lucky bastards can eat whatever they want and suffer no ill health.”

I can confidently report that Thais suffer percolating guts with just as much frequency as the rest of us. And like with tourists and expats, their stomach problems are just as often related to poor food hygiene as to overly spicy food. Sadly, there seems to be a good portion of Thais in the business of serving up food who just don’t take common cleanliness very seriously. It’s still not uncommon to see uncooked meat sitting in trays at the front of an open air restaurant exposed to the sun, as if the sight will entice people to order up a few dishes. Apparently, the ploy often works.

Slop-houses are restaurants which precook large helpings of a number of different dishes and then display them in stainless steel pans, ready to be slopped onto plates. In fact, many of these places have some great food. The trick is in ensuring it’s a popular place and the slops haven’t been stagnating for too long.

It is interesting to note that the popularity of Thai food in the west in recent years doesn’t give the merest glimpse into the real culture of food in Thailand itself.

Take mayonnaise for example. The sickliest, sweetest bastardized version you can fathom. In great stomach churning gobs on just about anything. Thais absolutely love the vomit-inducing stuff. Squeezed onto any and every type of food imaginable. There is a putrid, ersatz type of pizza that is sold at some shops which has in place of cheese, that’s right, yellowing dastardly mayonnaise. Blech!

Especially prone to the nastiness are pastries, for which Thais truly are the world’s absolute worst purveyors—don’t worry, we’ll get to what they are good at in the culinary world, of which there is a lot. Travel to any of the handful of neighbouring countries that were colonized by the French in years gone by and you can sample high quality baguettes and croissants. Not in Thailand.

When I am surveying the shelves in the bakery section at the local supermarket, the ones loaded with croissants, cakes and breads of all types, all oozing with that nasty otherworldly breed of mayonnaise, I always imagine what led to such an atrocity.

Maybe it can be traced back to the training days for new hires.

“Alrighty ladies and gentleman, welcome to Phlegmco. We’re a huge chain of British supermarkets that has invaded your country in the past few years. We’re going to pay you a kick-in-the-teeth salary every month, and for that we expect professionalism and diligence.

“Now, you are lucky enough to be working in our bakery section. There are detailed recipes for all our products, ones that have been perfected over weeks of trial and error. Our customers in Britain have been stuffed full of our delectable baked goods for years.

“The four of you gathered here today are the lucky ones. You are being fitted with a special hygienic backpack with an 80-litre drum filled with mayonnaise. As you may well know already, many of our top selling products include mayonnaise as an ingredient. Therefore, it your job to walk throughout our vast production plant adding those lovely, beautiful dollops of flavour to various creations.

“You will have a list of tasks to accomplish every day. Specific batches of freshly baked treats that require the finishing touch of mayonnaise. You will also be summoned by other workers at various times to add mayonnaise to pieces that may have been insufficiently covered. And, when communication breaks down on occasion, or it is unclear whether the mayonnaise is necessary on a specific item, you will have the responsibility and authority to make that decision.

“Therefore, you are very important to this operation.

“Now! Go forth and smear, spread and smother without fear, with a judicious sense of duty, honour and respect for how much Thais crave this nasty goop we call mayonnaise!”

“Oh yeah, I can get used to this,” Somchai thinks as he starts getting a feel for the pump action lever that sends out a stream of mayonnaise.

“Does this freshly baked pan of scrumptious croissants need to be soaked in mayonnaise?”

“Ahhh, mmmm, let’s see. I’m not too sure, yeah might as well give em’ a hit.”

“Hee, hee, hee!” Somchai starts to develop a thrill at the power he has over determining the taste of most of the baked products on the shelves.

“What about these delicately baked, tender and flaky pastries? Do they need any mayo?”

“Well, they seem to be topped with some expensive strawberry filling and dusted with icing sugar. You know what? Lay the damned mayonnaise to ‘em. You can never be certain!”

“Heeeeyaaa!”

He develops a glazed look in his eyes, similar to the shiny gloss that develops on the lumps of rancid mayonnaise he starts blasting onto any pastry that comes within his line of vision. He walks with a strange kind of stiff-legged purpose, holding his arms ridged in a way he remembers from Hollywood movies where the characters spray machine gun bullets at will. Those other workers who dare offer any resistance to his onslaught promptly have mayonnaise blown into their faces.

“He’s laying the mayonnaise to everything without regard for recipe, good sense or logic. Run!”

Later, Somchai gets called on the woven mat. He suspects the gig is up. His days of spraying mayonnaise with abandon are all but over.

“Somchai, we were going to sack you when we heard of the crazed shooting spree you’ve been on over the past week. However, sales have skyrocketed! People are lapping up the mayonnaise encrusted lumps of dough you’ve been creating. Even the chocolate cakes and donuts slathered in the swill have become some of our most popular items. Keep up the good work!”

No doubt the Thai palate does differ from the western one in many ways.

As with mayonnaise, there is a raging culinary love affair with corn. Corn on pizza, in ice-cream and yoghurt, and in just about anything really. When all else fails, cups of corn niblets served up absent any other flavouring. Other treats slightly alien to western taste buds include fried maggots and other insects, bird beaks, blood, frogs, and uncountable numbers of other various types of local swill. The other day I saw a street vendor stuffing some young, undeveloped and still alive prawns into a bag full of vegetables.

These are just a sampling of the things Thais happily cram into their gullets. The dishes westerners hear about are those ones that have universal appeal and have crossed the ocean, along the way getting the usual bastardized addition of seasonings and other ingredients that appeal to our appetites.

Thais, as people in all nations, do this as well: Japanese food in Bangkok does not taste the same as in Japan or North America. When you stay at a nice hotel in Bangkok and eat in their restaurant, you’re likely to get the best of both worlds: the best local ingredients with the taste tweaked ever so slightly for your grinning bovine face.

Like all aspects of life in Thailand, the world of food is stratified according to class. Street vendors, low-level slophouses, sidewalk restaurants, moderately priced joints, some of which serve meals equivalent to European four starred places listed in the Michelin guide, and top rated restaurants that rank among the best in the world. All can be found in the same city block in Bangkok.

Most Thais haven’t lost the real, all encompassing nature of food that infuses every part of their lives. At the same time, western influences abound, from the rampant fast food outlets to 7-elevens—there were no fewer than ten on the university campus where I once lived and worked—to the previously mentioned supermarket chains.

The good news is that the positive things you hear about Thai food are true. On my travels through Asia, I have not come across any country-specific food that is as varied and delicious as it is in Thailand. A certain meritocracy exists amongst restaurants and street vendors in Thailand. While department of health inspectors may not patrol restaurants and vendors with the same frequency as in western countries, word of mouth and simple observation will guide you to the best locations.

Take advantage of the bounty of great food in Thailand if you get the chance. It can be an escape and a blessing in a place where so many other things will drive you off the deep end.

Suicide Solution

South American countries have a macho image fueled by a sneering, womanizing male culture that values bravado, honour and never backing down from a fight. It fits in with the strong-man political regimes that have ruled for generations in various Latino nations. There is no need to convince people of the nastiness of corrupt police forces controlled by even more ruthless governments in places like Brazil, Chile or Argentina. They speak for themselves with their actions and emulate the societies from which they originate.

Many tourists have traveled to such destinations and returned with tales of good times and friendly hosts. Yet perhaps a handful of situations reinforce the notion that there is a hot-blooded and emotional undercurrent that can explode. A menacing glare from a man walking hand-in-hand with his wife or girlfriend. Women shamelessly groped. A small dispute over a hotel charge that heats up beyond its importance in an instant.

There is no disconnect from the experience people have and the broader social happenings related to crime and politics.

Compare that to Thailand.

A medium-sized South East Asian country whose tourist industry continues to grow and brings in more than 10 million visitors every year. The vast majority of those people enjoy a memorable trip and go home raving about Thai food and hospitality.

But the violence and mayhem that exist in Thailand rivals that of any poor South American country that also relies on tourism to keep its economy ticking along. A murder rate that ranks the country amongst some of the highest in the world, and corruption rankings that place Thailand as worse than other bastions of fairness such as Italy and Colombia.

The country’s most respected forensic pathologist made a public comment a few years ago regarding the number of “mysterious deaths” that occur in the Kingdom every year. She ranked the number at approximately 1000. These are deaths that are unexplained and largely go uninvestigated by Thai police.

So, on top of the high number of murder victims, there are 1000 deaths deemed completely unworthy of looking into. Perhaps due to the social status of the departed or the possible murderer. Or maybe the mind-numbing heat plays such havoc with corpses that things go beyond the solvable stage a lot faster than in other parts of the world.

While not the freest press in the world, this news does get reported. But somehow it doesn’t resonate outside the country as much as it should. That image doesn’t jibe with the experience most people have had while vacationing here. The winsome, ever-smiling Thais with a rich and varied culture are just so darned nice in the short, hazy doses of a two-week vacation. And of course, most Thais are genuinely decent people. Still...

Tourism provides millions of jobs and billions of dollars every year. Disconcerting tales of murdered foreigners, dual-pricing or rip-offs targeting tourists are dealt with as quickly as possible and then forgotten. Thais are remarkably adept at narrowing their world into a blinkered and carefree existence that is unperturbed by social upheaval gripping other parts of their own country. The nation is still overwhelmingly poor. Most people are pre-occupied by the struggle of day-to-day survival. The wealthy are busy screwing the poor into the ground and trying to maintain their image as some kind of progressive nation in a squalid part of the world.

The end result is an inexpensive and impressive tourist destination that has maintained a fairly unsullied image despite its track record. Thailand has taken far fewer hits from a litany of disturbing attacks, murders and other untimely deaths of visitors and expats than a person might expect.

So far as the negative incidents do take hold and contribute to Thailand’s image, they almost act as a positive. Many of the tourists to Thailand are attracted by the mystique of the orient and cheap sex. The backdrop of seediness and intrigue just adds to the overall appealing weirdness. Like you’re a supporting character in a grand crime noir drama that takes place in the sweltering heat of South East Asia.

The first visit hooks many. For those who have achieved little happiness or satisfaction in their home country, making the move to Thailand and giving it a go as an expatriate has a nothing-to-lose feel to it. Unfortunately, instead of being the move that turns their lives around, cultural differences regarding right and wrong and unwise personal relationships result in a lot of misery and heartache. Overwhelming poverty in Thailand drives many people to desperation. Perhaps the mirror-image sense of an unreal and strange culture represented by foreigners in their country drives many Thais to see expats as an opportunity.

Or maybe many foreigners tie up loose ends in their home countries and head off to the unknown with the niggling sense that they will never return. While many of the thousands of Europeans and North Americans who start over as expats in Thailand end up leading normal and productive lives and either return home one day or live out their days in their adopted country, a disproportionate number decide to end it all.

The suicide rate amongst expats in Thailand is shocking. Who are these people? What are their stories? Why does the method of choice seem to be a swan-dive off a tall building? Or are some of those individuals getting a helping hand?

Suicide Solution

Everyone has an opinion on suicide. For the simple fact that everyone at some point in their lives has, to varying degrees, contemplated the notion of severing their connection to the world. Most have also been touched, at least indirectly, by its effects.

The act of suicide is so common that there are a handful of ready made clichés and platitudes that can be vomited forth at a moment’s notice. It’s one of those no middle ground topics. Most people heap pure loathing on those who take their own lives or they exhibit an empathy and regret that no one reached the individual at their darkest moment.

Just as killing yourself is the ultimate in self-criticism, so too a person’s opinion on the most desperate of actions says something about them. Perhaps those merciless individuals who curse and degrade those who have exited the world by their own hand are similarly hard on themselves. Quite possibly they have contemplated such an ending more than they care to let on.

There are almost weekly examples of foreigners killing themselves in Thailand. Each subsequent tragedy is trotted out in the local media. And here is another question that should be examined: is it a false impression that the per capita numbers for expats and tourists are higher here simply because there seems to be such a prurient appeal for the local media to report when foreigners go out with a bang or a splat, as it were?

Not every suicide in England or Australia receives the sensationalistic coverage it gets here. But it’s also hard to believe that so many of the suicides in those western countries are jumpers.

Or maybe the expats who feel there is nothing left to live for are more adventurous and dramatic to begin with. After all, not everyone has the guts to pull up roots and move half way around the world with the vague notion that success and contentment can be found in a foreign country. Once they’ve made the move they probably retain contact with a few mates and family members from back home. The e-mails and phone calls are likely more positive than the reality. Most people like their friends and family to think that things are ticking along nicely and confirm that in fact it wasn’t such a hair-brained idea to make the move.

When depression hits due to a traumatic experience, drug or alcohol addiction or simply because things don’t quite work out as planned, there are far fewer support systems for the foreigner in Thailand. That skewed, almost child-like way of thinking takes over when suicidal thoughts enter the picture. When the decision is made, despite the finality of it all, many people retain the strange belief that they will be able to witness the aftermath of their own death. There is a subconscious or deliberate decision to write the final chapter in the most dramatic way possible. While they may have failed in life, at least they have control over how the last scene will be played out.

Other explanations abound. The typical expat likes the seediness. It matches his inner thoughts, makes him think that he’s living on the edge in a gritty third world country. Offers a way for him to fulfill the fantasies he has long held but has been unable to experience because of his social status in the west, or his appearance, or his eccentricities. But almost as powerful as all that is the fact that living in Thailand offers anomie. That first-year psychology term that describes the situation of being disconnected and out of place. Of course, in those first-year textbooks, anomie is usually used in a very negative sense: alienation, darkness.

But many people know otherwise. To them it is liberation. Free from the constraints of extreme familiarity, they see unlimited possibilities. And free from the knowing looks of others from their country of birth, they are unburdened. People who know what your facial expressions mean, what social class you are part of simply because of your mannerisms and the way you dress. While the same kind of familiarity eventually develops in your adopted country, it can never be as smothering and intrusive.

Freaks, Frauds and Failures

Try and imagine what it is like for the broken expat. You haven’t built up anything in your home country, or have lost it all. Maybe you convince yourself that all those symbols of status and accomplishment don’t mean that much to you. Whatever the case, that willingness to drop everything and relocate to a vastly different country than your own also means that you don’t have as much to lose

But the honeymoon period always ends. Inevitably, an expat faces personal problems and crises, as all people everywhere do. With nothing back home to return to, you rationalize, focus on the positives and carry on as best you can. Until something comes along that hammers you in a way you never thought possible. A combination of your good nature and trust in people sets you up for a life-altering bit of nastiness. And that’s when the earth truly opens up around you. All you previously thought winsome, quaint and enchanting becomes sinister and loathsome. You enter territory previously unknown. At best you can classify it as a nervous breakdown; at worst a period of temporary insanity. With no support and nowhere to turn, things become dire in a short period of time.

The onl saving grace may be if you crawl down into the slime in which you find yourself and see it as a learning experience. Unfortunately, many of the lessons only further darken what has become your corrupted and hopeless outlook on the world. You know with all certainty that the ability of humans to empathize is almost non-existent and is only a pathetic narrative we have created over time in order to convince ourselves that understanding the pain of others is actually possible.

It isn’t.

You may find some solace in knowing that you are one of the damaged and can never return to the place you were before. It’s a twisted brotherhood that holds no meetings, has no support groups and provides no comfort beyond the knowledge that there are inevitably others somewhere who have suffered far worse than you have.

It’s not all bad, of course. You still have life.

But many people are not able to deal with this prospect, and so they choose a more final option: ceasing to exist.

A couple of qualifiers are in order about the supposedly higher rate of suicide by expats in Thailand as opposed to the overall suicide rates in the countries from where they originate.

In western countries, the media does not report suicides unless they are by celebrities or done in a high profile way. Despite the fact that suicides are one of the leading causes of death in many countries, the issue is out of sight for many people. On the other hand, a suicide by a foreigner in Thailand almost seems to be reported in a gleeful way by the local media. A freakish spectacle for all to see. Thus, supposed suicides by foreigners are very visible in Thailand.

However, while many suicides and deaths of foreigners are reported in the media, there is no way of determining how many go unreported.

Also, there is no accurate census of how many foreigners there are in Thailand at any given time. While statistics in 2009 and 2010 pegged the number of visitors to Thailand at about 10 million per year, the majority of foreign suicides appear to be by expats. Whether the suicides represent a higher per capita rate than in western countries is impossible to know. But the perception is that a peculiar number of foreigners meet their end in Thailand, and very often it is by suicide.

Take a look at some of the reported suicides of foreigners in Thailand in 2010:

January 27, 2010

A German man is found dead in front of his apartment building in Pattaya. He fell from his balcony on the 8th floor and the police “presume that he had committed suicide.”

February 8, 2010

A German man is found hanged from a sliding gate connected to his house in Pattaya. When he was found, he was wearing a white t-shirt and blue shorts. Also, a plastic bag was covering his head and he had heavy bruising on his knees and legs. Family members indicate that he was depressed due to financial troubles.

February 21, 2010

Russian tourist does a swan dive off his 16th floor apartment in Pattaya. The 32 year-old man was found dead on the balcony of a sixth floor apartment. Police ruled the death a suicide.

March 10, 2010

An elderly Norwegian woman is found dead in front of the 18-storey building of condominiums in Pattaya where she lived with her husband. Her husband indicated that she had experiencing the onset of dementia-like symptoms recently.

March 19, 2010

The body of a 75 year-old Finnish woman is found in her apartment in Pattaya. Police do not suspect foul play.

April 7, 2010

A 71 year-old foreign man is found dead at the base of the apartment where he resided in Pattaya. Police speculate that he leaped off the balcony of his 14th-floor apartment.

April 23, 2010

An American man falls to his death from the 25th floor balcony of his apartment in Pattaya. Police believe that it was a suicide. The 73 year-old man suffered from numerous ailments associated with old age and his 29 year-old wife indicated that he had been depressed.

August 6, 2010

A 73 year-old British man and his 56 year-old Thai wife are discovered dead in their Pataya house and the police ruled it a double suicide. The couple were having trouble paying off business-related expenses and they left instructions in a suicide note that their house should be sold and the money used to settle all outstanding debts.

August 10, 2010

Neighbours notify police that they believe a Belgian man committed suicide in his home in Pattaya. The neighbours saw the 73 year-old man hanging from a rope tied to the awning of one of the windows on his house. His head and face were covered with a blue toque and his hands were loosely tied together. Not surprisingly, police have been reluctant to close the book on this case and are not willing to classify it as a suicide for the time being.

The last case mentioned above demonstrates that only when circumstances blatantly point to a likely murder do the police go so far as to hold off on classifying the death of a foreigner as suicide.

Ostensibly, most of the cases mentioned above reflect the usual reasons people have for killing themselves: financial problems, old age and chronic ailments, relationship problems, and loneliness. All of which can be compounded and made to seem hopeless when you are in a strange place with few services in place to offer help to those in distress.

But why do so many of these apparent suicides choose the most horrific method possible—jumping off a balcony of a high-rise apartment? When that most brutal thoughts could enter a person’s mind before they hit the ground: “Perhaps there is another way.”

This has been discussed at length amongst the expats of Thailand who debate such things. Some people claim that the relative difficulty in obtaining firearms for foreigners in Thailand, removes a method of suicide that is much more common in their home countries. Others point out that foreigners who have fallen to their deaths are ruled suicides in relatively short order. A phenomenon that confirms the suspicion of many expats: that foreigners are viewed with contempt by many Thais, and that we are a sort of second-class citizens whose misfortunes are a source of amusement for the locals.

Has a sort of ready-made, stay-out-of-jail card been fashioned for the underworld in Thailand? If you want to bump off a foreigner, send him off a balcony and it is unlikely that the police will do anything more than a cursory investigation? Extort and rob from the outsider before you send him to a well-deserved death in your country, and if you have left the scene relatively free from any signs of struggle, you will probably get away with it?

While there is absolutely no evidence of that, the number of relatively well-off foreigners who continue to die from falls from high balconies, many of them concentrated in one geographic region of Thailand—Pattaya—continues to baffle many people. Just what is it about Pattaya?

Pattaya

Pattaya has often been called the vicepit of Thailand and the region. Located about 90 minutes from Bangkok on Thailand’s eastern seaboard, Pattaya has long attracted some of the seediest and least appealing tourists and expats. A decades-old, well-entrenched prostitution industry caters to every form of deviancy imaginable. Of course, willing suppliers and purveyors of the filth must be present before the shit-seeking flies begin to hover and the maggots begin to convulse.

As with any cesspool of human garbage, there are the accompanying thugs and criminals to provide the drugs, collect the unpaid loans, and recognize those who are out of place and ripe to be taken.

Few, if any, outlets exist for relatives and friends left behind to officially question whether an investigation was thorough enough or to point to potential evidence that could indicate something other than suicide.

Of course, often times a suicide by a foreigner is obvious and tragic and a sign of how brutal and unforgiving life can be. When an unspeakable horror takes place in the life of an expat in Thailand, the sense of inescapable doom can be overwhelming.

On August 28, 2010, a 40 year-old American man wrote out his farewell note, emptied a bottle of prescription drugs, lay down on his bed in his apartment in Pattaya and went to sleep for the final time. The final days of his life were the most harrowing nightmare any person could ever endure. Four days before he took his own life, he had been sitting on the balcony of his fifth floor apartment with his four year-old son. The man got up and briefly walked back into the main room of his apartment. As the late afternoon sun was starting to go down in the sky, perhaps he was getting a cold drink for himself and his son. As he returned to the balcony, his mind was flooded with pure horror. His son was gone. He looked down and saw his son’s small body lying still on the concrete below.

He rushed down and tried in vain to resuscitate his son, but it was too late. Four days of hell were enough for him, and that was when he took his own life. Of that, there is no debate.

Rankism

Human beings live to rank themselves against others. The ways in which people can compare themselves to others is nearly limitless. Perhaps you might think that expats living in Thailand have left all that behind. A certain image exists that to live in a tropical paradise is to get one of the best possible lifestyles free from the annoyances of hung-up, western countries. In many ways, that is true. But the compulsion to compare oneself to others is alive and well in the expat community, and perhaps stronger in some ways than back home.

Because the opportunities to compare yourself to others are less frequent for expats in Thailand, it’s almost as if when the chance presents itself, it must be done in a way so that it lasts for a good while. The “my Thailand experience is better than yours” comparisons can be brazen and contemptuous.

But because there are so many broken, wasted individuals living the expat life in Thailand, sometimes there is no possibility for them to rank themselves favourably.

Which leaves one last option—to mock those who are dead: I am alive but you aren’t. Who you compare yourself to is an indication of how you see yourself. When you choose someone who is dead, who can no longer defend himself, and whose death is probably clouded with incomplete facts at best, you are saying a lot about yourself with your smug, sneering, gleeful pronouncement.

Yes, this does take place, usually by freaks who spend their time on various discussion forums for western expats living in Thailand. There is truly nothing left for you when you feel a twisted sense of satisfaction at seeing someone who has suffered through some kind of trauma and has either been murdered or committed suicide. True, this kind of sick gloating comes from many people in society and not just expats.

But it takes on a special kind of repellent quality when perpetrated by expats in Thailand against other expats in what should be seen as a brotherhood of others who have chosen this country as their second home. Those who are energized by tragedy that has befallen fellow expats must truly have nothing left.

To the families who have lost loved ones in Thailand in what are uncertain circumstances, or even in those cases where it is clear that despair did get a hold of your brother or son or friend: yes there are many who do share your pain and do not judge. The indignity of passing away in Thailand is compounded in many ways. From the local media who swarm a crime scene and take photos of the deceased that are shamefully printed and played on TV to the lack of thorough investigations, to the sheer overwhelming despair and loneliness of dying alone in a strange place.

This is only the beginning of my exploration into the deaths of foreigners living in Thailand. It may turn into nothing more than a tribute to people trapped in despair while living in a strange land. But I will keep looking, asking and talking to families of the deceased in an attempt to shed more light on this topic.

Getting Settled in the Slums

Tales of newbies are always entertaining. The fresh eyes, the mixture of wonder and rage that all so often culminate in tragedy and horror. But it isn’t all bad. Some newcomers to Thailand discover that with a little effort and some unflinching self-honesty, they can find their own little comfortable niche.

I arrived in Bangkok in 2005, fresh off a whirlwind TEFL course I had completed in Los Angeles. It’s the kind of teacher training designed for those who make decisions on a whim and are short on time and money yet still recognize the need for some kind of preparation. In many ways, these courses are simply a way to validate your decision to pull up roots and start a new life half-way around the world.

I rented a cheap room in the foreigner slums of Suhkumvit road, a span that stretches from the dire bars and whorehouses of Soi 4 and continues on for miles towards the south of Bangkok and the district of Bangna. The farther south you head, the thinner the concentration of foreigners (at least the white-skinned ones who have largely arrived out of choice rather than desperation). Their presence in terms of apartment rentals and “neighbourhoods” is probably strongest around Sois 17-30. The main thoroughfare of Suhmumvit in this stretch is fronted by 7-elevens, restaurants and bars and cluttered with street vendors. There are numerous side streets (sois) with more restaurants, bars, massage parlours, hotels and apartments for rent.

Dead-eyed expats with booze addled faces and listless appearances lumber or slither along the streets. Many look as if they are retired and have no aim but to drift from bar to bar to air-conditioned room. If it weren’t for the fact that many of them have decades-younger prostitutes in tow and relatively presentable attire, many of them wouldn’t look out of place in skid-row soup kitchens in the west. The reality of their lives is no doubt more nuanced and not so easy to characterize.

Despite the hedonistic overtones of the area, it’s a logical starting point for those looking to stay in the country for a few years or more. The presence of relatively inexpensive housing, amenities that appeal to westerners and other foreigners to socialize with and seek advice from makes it easy to settle in for a short period of time.

The Job Search Begins

After a week or so of getting acclimatized I started my job search. There was a small language school just down the street from where I was staying. The Australian who owned the place essentially offered me a job on the spot despite my lack of experience. The teaching would be at corporate offices at all hours of the day and would require me to take taxis and the skytrain to various locations. Although the pay was well within what I had expected, the thought of trudging around in the stifling heat (something I was still getting used to) didn’t appeal to me. Finances were no concern at that point and together with the realization that jobs were plentiful, I held off on accepting.

The next day I pounded the pavement again, this time walking south down Suhkumvit near the Emporium shopping centre in hopes of stumbling onto some more options. I hopped on the Skytrain and travelled a three or four stations further south. A few of the side streets were mainly residential and some had signs at the soi entrance advertising schools. It was close to mid-day and I was already soaked in the shirt, tie and trousers I had worn with the aim of making a good impression.

I came to the front entrance of a kindergarten. There was a large sign with pictures of animals in bright colours and some kind of annoyingly simplistic and optimistic slogan. I had certainly never considered the possibility of teaching such young children. At the same time, the thought of being at one location in air-conditioned comfort all day was appealing.

I went through the gates towards the main office area. I was quickly ushered in to talk with the principal and owner of the school, a refined and pleasant Malaysian woman who was immediately receptive and indicated that they did, in fact, need a teacher or two. She asked if I was willing to do a short teaching demonstration.

“What? Right now?”

“Yes!’

“Er, OK...”

What did I have to lose? In fact, not even more than three minutes of my time. We went to a class that was already in session and asked the teacher if we could disturb her for a few minutes. I blundered to the front of the class, asked some of the students their names, told them a bit about myself and drew an idiotic picture of Snoopy on the board. With absolutely no idea what I was doing and creating what I was sure was an awkward and cringe-worthy situation, I was sure she would politely tell me “Thanks, but no thanks.” The very fact that she had cut the demonstration so short convinced me of this.

But instead, she offered me a job. I hesitated, unsure if it was really what I wanted and again stunned at the ease of finding work as a completely inexperienced and relatively unqualified teacher. If the first few days had yielded such positive results, perhaps I should just keep looking. Not wanting to appear too eager, I told the woman that I would consider her offer and give her an answer shortly. A few days later I phoned her and told her that I would need more money to consider the job. She quickly agreed to add another 3000 baht per month (at that time, about an extra 100 U.S. dollars).

I finally accepted the position, content that I had wrangled more than the standard salary other teachers were apparently receiving and certain that even if I didn’t like the situation I could leave and find something else in no time flat.

Only Misfits Need Apply

I began the following day.

At first glance, my colleagues seemed to be a group of exiles, rejects and broken down desperadoes who had nowhere else to turn. Odd that a kindergarten would throw open their doors and welcome them all (including me) as the people to serve as the first teacher many of these students would know in their young lives.

There was a Saudi Arabian man with a heavy accent, a wonky knee and a strict reliance on a handful of classroom games he played repeatedly with the kids, day after day, week after week. Another teacher from India was a motherly woman who seemed genuinely devoted to the idea of teaching and nurturing the children she was assigned. There was a chubby British lady who took her duties seriously enough, though from small talk I knew she was teaching mainly to extend her travels. And a Brit of about 27 was the longest serving teacher with three years under his belt at the school. It was obvious that he was the golden boy in the eyes of the principal and also appeared to be well-liked by all the students.

The Brit had prepared reams of documents, lesson plans and supplemental material. He had a good grasp on classroom management and offered me advice and encouragement on how to establish myself with the children. The youngsters absolutely loved him. During recess he was swarmed by the screaming tykes and he never shooed them away or sought refuge from their relentless demands.

However, at first it struck me as slightly odd how he interacted with them physically. He was constantly grabbing and hoisting kids in the air, which is nothing out of the ordinary. And they loved it. But on one occasion he was playing a kissing game with them during recess. I checked myself when I saw this and realized it was over-sensitivity on my part due to the climate of fear in the west and the notion that there’s a pedophile lurking on every street corner.

Any ulterior motives just didn’t fit with this individual. Young, athletic, lean, drove a slick motorcycle and had a young and attractive girlfriend. I believe he was simply a devoted and skilled teacher who was a natural with kids. Still, it was bit strange.

A Big Mistake

After a few days I started to think about what it meant to be a “real” teacher. One with a degree in education, countless training courses under your belt, up to date on the current thinking in early childhood development and years of experience in the classroom. But many of these people I had been initially dismissive of looked to be pulling it off and providing a good environment for their students regardless of whether they had all the relevant qualifications.

I quickly realized that I was the one who was out of place. I knew almost immediately that I had erred in taking the job. I just didn’t have the temperament nor the desire to spend my days babysitting. If I had had the patience, no doubt I would have seen that remarkable sponge-like learning ability of children who are so young and that would have motivated me to continue. But I didn’t have the desire to hold on that long.

I had a few moments of clarity during the short time I spent there. They helped me to realize that I wasn’t cut out for being a kindergarten teacher and to stay any longer would only result in the children under my care being shortchanged.

The first thing that turned me off was the overall set-up that existed at the school. While the female owner came across as wanting to offer the best for the students whose parents had paid so much tuition money, there was little organization. The materials the Brit had developed were helpful but essentially there was no course curriculum or syllabi to speak of.

The husband of the principal was a certifiable asshole who strode into a staff meeting one day and stated that it didn’t matter what you did as a teacher, so long as the children were happy and in turn the parents satisfied. Whether any real learning went on was unimportant.

On another occasion I was watching the children at the end of the day. We took turns supervising them as they waited for their parents to arrive. The father of one of the kids, a Caucasian who had evidently married a Thai woman, turned up and looked disappointed to see me.

I had heard that the turnover for teachers at the school was quite high and I’m sure it was depressing for him to realize that no stable patterns were being established for his child. He seemed to sense my unease and awkwardness and briefly looked at me with near contempt. His feelings weren’t misplaced.

Final Decision

The final moment that cemented my decision to get out took place in the classroom. The first few days had been hectic but I had established some order and started to develop some routines with the kids. But the constant scolding and telling students to return to their seats was getting me down.

Finally, I snapped at one child, a young Chinese kid (many of the students weren’t Thai but the offspring of foreigners working for multi-national companies) named Li Li and made her cry. I felt sick with guilt and knew it was time to leave.

I went into the principal’s office after school and informed her of my decision. She begged me to at least stay on another week so that I would complete the probationary period and be paid for the work I had done. I refused and said that the money was irrelevant. Anyway, I had visions of her husband trying to rip me off if I stayed on.

One week with no pay was easier to handle than another seven days wondering if I was going to be screwed over and putting up with further stress in the classroom.

I strode out into the late afternoon sunshine and knew that I had made the right choice.

I had lasted one week at my first teaching job in Thailand.

Heading Home

Most expats make an attempt to return home at some point. Things sour in Thailand, or the realization that life is passing them by hits hard and they convince themselves there must be an opportunity just waiting for them “back home.” Sometimes things work out, but often the return is short-lived.

In 2000, I returned from a long stint of working and traveling overseas. I settled in Vancouver, Canada, convinced that its climate and landscape would make it an ideal place to live. The city is located in a beautiful physical setting. The water, the towering evergreen trees, and the mountains in the distance make it serene and picturesque.

However, the actual city itself, like most in North America, is a bland disappointment. The lack of distinctive architecture, poor planning that limits options for pedestrians, and a generally sullen and self-interested populace, all rank it as a wasteland compared to the cities of Europe and Asia.

Bored of whiling away hours at the gym and realizing that most people had their own lives and little time for new friends, I began wandering around the city in the evenings and on the weekends.

On occasion I strayed into the notorious east end for kicks. The public shooting gallery replete with junkies, whores, and other assorted freaks always provided some sordid, sideshow entertainment. A few decent drinking dens that offered cheap beer and catered to genuine sleaze and outsiders like me looking for a bit of seedy chic also made it a worthwhile neighbourhood to visit.

Amsterdam North

One night late in the fall of 2001, I was trudging up Pender Street when I noticed a shop-front sign: The Marijuana Teahouse. I assumed it was one of the many head shops in the area stocked full of the usual trashy drug paraphernalia and white trash baubles. I blundered in for a look.

I was met by a wary brother decked out in the clichéd costume of one of society’s stock rebels. He was tentative yet welcoming at the same time.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“You can go in if you want...”

I strolled into the relatively empty main area. It was dimly lit with some colourful spotlights here and there, an arrangement of small tables with chairs and some appropriately hip designs painted on the walls. The distinctive pungent odour of marijuana hung in the air. Against the back wall was a small bar that appeared to serve only a limited selection of non-alcoholic drinks such as tea and fruit smoothies. “I could spend some time here,” I thought.

A small, bespectacled, energetic looking individual sidled up to the table where I had sat down.

“Are you a cop?” he asked.

“No.”

“Can I see some ID?”

“OK.”

I plunked my driver’s license down on the table. The agitated, cloak and dagger horseshit was contrasting weirdly with the environment.

“Come in the back.”

We walked down a short hall into a back room with a few tables, a couch, and a large cage that contained half a dozen white birds. The little proprietor introduced himself as Levi. He asked me what kind of product I would like to purchase after rattling off half a dozen absurd sounding names: Northern Lights, White Widow, Purple Haze and a few others.

If this was the price of admission to this strange place, I was willing to go along. Levi disappeared behind a locked door and returned a few moments later.

He handed me a small bag that he assured me would deliver a cerebral high, unlike some of the other strains which offered, depending on their properties, a full body assault, a vibrant relaxing buzz, or a bright, intense experience.

I had tried a joint at a party many years earlier but had found that I didn’t like its effects. However, for the opportunity to have a front row seat for this spectacle I was willing to step back into the pleasant haze of the Teahouse. I would roll cigarettes with Drum tobacco and surreptitiously leave the other packet behind for someone who would get some enjoyment out of it. I was here to observe.

A Brazen Gambit

It’s important to emphasize exactly how remarkable the place was. Not for its decor or atmosphere or quality of jasmine scented llama-hair tea. It was the fact that they were openly flogging marijuana in a shop with a brazen store-front advertisement on a main drag. This was not a secret smoke club tucked away in some hard-to-find side street open to a select few individuals who luxuriated in the nonchalant head swiveling privilege of breaking the law in a semi-public place. The Marijuana Teahouse was as out in the open as Amsterdam coffee shops.

Resident Gimps

It quickly became apparent what the justification was for breaking the law out in the open. It was being done under the guise of providing medicinal marijuana to those suffering chronic ailments. The resident gimps may or may not have had prescriptions for the drug but they all derived some kind of relief from inhaling some of B.C.’s finest. Over the next few weeks as I checked in to experience the absurdity, there were always a few obviously ill individuals on location to lend credence to the ostensible purpose of the Teahouse.

A morbidly obese, genial, bearded oaf who played a mean game of chess was always in the back room holding court as new opponents sat down in front of him for a game and a smoke. He had a deep sonorous voice and he mentioned that he had done professional voice work in his day.

An assortment of other hard-luck individuals came and went. I recall witnessing an attractive young beret-wearing tart blanch while trying to maintain a cool appearance after the haggard looking individual she was sharing a joint with dropped the fact that she was HIV positive.

So aside from the usual hacking that goes along with large groups of people sucking back joint after joint, there was a fair amount of wheezing and more than a few colostomy bags. And the good, compassionate little hipsters did the requisite fawning over the down-and-outers, tacitly thanking them for providing a defensible reason for this gathering place that provided both quality marijuana and the potential to socialize with other like-minded individuals.

License to Print Money

Of course, the medicinal rationale was shamelessly exploited and at times bordered on being a complete and utter sham. Were there people suffering who received comfort from the marijuana? Sure. Would that continue to be an important benefit the longer the Teahouse stayed open? No doubt. But from my observations, the real reason for the existence of the Teahouse was to print money. And that’s exactly what Levi and his partner, Dave, did.

Levi flitted around and played the raconteur. He thrilled at being in the spotlight and being the dispenser of “legally” distributed marijuana. The transactions always took place in the back room where Levi segued into his little schtick, rhyming off the names of the current strains on offer and lighting up like a pinball machine as the fistfuls of dollars were handed over.

Things became so busy that he had to start taking orders from groups of up to a dozen people all ringed around him listening to his descriptions of the highs they were sure to enjoy. Sitting a few metres away and listening, I heard some hilarious interactions. Inevitably, people started asking if cocaine and acid were also available, which resulted in loud guffaws from everyone in attendance.

I only witnessed one instance of aggression during the dozen or so times I checked in. A group of sneering young Iranians was gathered around the large bird cage as I looked on through a surreal haze. The worthless little punks violently rattled the cage and then looked at me, as if their gutless little performance was somehow a challenge.

Otherwise, a good vibe almost always prevailed. It was heaven for people-watching. I enjoyed seeing first-timers who openly marveled that such a place existed, while those who were visiting the Teahouse for the third or fourth time gave them the low-down in a world-weary voice. I engaged in a few good-natured debates with those who were constantly pushing the left-wing propaganda that marijuana was completely harmless. It was an absurd notion, especially considering the potency of the current strains available.

An “us against the man” sentiment seemed to prevail and I found few people who agreed with my view that the left-wing bullshit about marijuana was almost as ridiculous as the right-wing variety. However, I had to agree with the oft-repeated line that there never seems to be violence when a large group of people gathers and smokes joints, as opposed to when the booze starts flowing.

A definite youthful element started to become the majority. They added their own distinct vibe, which included acting out with their inane methods of imbibing the drug. The place started becoming unintentionally farcical. A large framed picture appeared in the back room. To buy anything, you now had to tilt the picture aside and speak through a hole in the wall to Levi, who was in another room. The novelty was starting to wear off for me and I drifted away.

Throughout the whole time I visited the Marijuana Teahouse, I was always amazed that the operation was being left alone by the police. It was an exercise in how quickly people become blasé about a situation and assume that because something negative hasn’t happened yet, it won’t happen in the future.

The End

I suppose it was inevitable that the place would get shut down. One day, a few weeks after I had last visited, I walked by the Teahouse and it was boarded up. The next day I scanned the most recent newspapers and found a small item mentioning that police had raided it and arrested Levi and Dave. I heard talk about the U.S. DEA leaning on Canadian authorities, or the new right-wing provincial government in B.C. as possible reasons for the raid. In the end, most people forgot it was still illegal to peddle drugs. The Teahouse had managed to stay open for less than three months.

About a month later I was sitting in a downtown internet cafe when Levi strolled up to me.

“Hey! We got a new software shop set up down the block if you want to drop by for a visit...”

The Transit Strike

It’s easy for an expat to get in the habit of criticizing everything about Thailand. It sometimes takes a temporary return to his country of birth to realize how good he has it in his second home. A litany of annoyances can intrude on your daily life in Thailand, but a public sector transit strike that partially shuts down an entire city is not one of them.

Andy sat on the bus and stared straight ahead. It was strange to be back on the bus after six months of a brutal transit strike. He considered how unreal it was as people silently shuffled onto the bus without any harsh words to the smug, sneering individual behind the wheel. The drivers had gotten what they wanted and wreaked devastation on thousands of lives. Many of them were high school drop-outs and were simply allowed to hold people hostage for months on end. Yet here they were, the people damaged and beaten down and without the guts to even say anything.

The driver looked to be about 45 years old with long straggly hair and a few faded tattoos visible on his arms. Andy thought he smelled the reek of alcohol on the driver’s breath as he stepped on the bus.

The driver stared ahead and marveled at what a gutless and easily manipulated city he lived in. The drivers had held out and got what they wanted, and then some. Sure they had lost money during the months they were out but they had made up for it in other ways. The driver had known many friends who had sold drugs during the strike, making a tidy profit while taking a sick satisfaction in the misery that people were suffering through.

He barely acknowledged the sad fools getting on the bus though he had to admit they were useful idiots in providing him with the potential to rake in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year. It was so simple to play the system that he could hardly believe it. He briefly noticed a man wearing a ski mask in the handful of people still getting on. Strange he thought, hardly cold enough for that.

Now he was being manhandled and ripped out into the cold air and vaguely noticed that it was the man with the ski mask. It was one fluid brutal motion and he was face down in the cold slush of the street, inches from the tire of the bus, an oppressive and overwhelming pressure being applied to his neck. He was blacking out quickly.

The man with the mask drove his foot down on the driver’s neck with all his might while pushing up on an immovable rod that supported the side-view mirror of the bus. The spindly tattooed arms of the driver thrashed in the snow, the sneering look long gone and replaced with a pop-eyed horror at the realization that his life was ending. No sounds escaped through his bent, yellowed teeth as the thousands of pounds of pressure mashed his windpipe to the concrete.

The odd thing about this spectacle was the group of people on the bus. There was a silent collective sense of pure fascination as people sat forward on their seats. No one breathed a word nor stepped forward to intervene.

A few metres away, a fat bus driver was walking slowly down the sidewalk, shoving donuts into his cake-hole, thinking about how his mother always told him he should get a good education. What a laugh! He was making more than many of these complete fools who spent years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars struggling through university. It had given him extra pleasure to know how much those jerks had suffered during the strike. He had always felt they looked down on him before. Not now!

He noticed a commotion at the bus that was stopped a few metres away. There was another driver lying on the street and a man wearing a ski mask standing over him. He was confused, unsure what to do without the comfort of dozens of his fat, uneducated colleagues to back him up. Still, he had to do something. He moved to within a few feet of the situation.

“Hey, wh…whh…what is happening here?”

The man with the mask stepped off the lifeless corpse and took a short metal pipe out of his jacket pocket and brought it down in a vicious windmill arc onto the head of the fat bus driver, sending him to the concrete. A few blobs of chewed donut oozed out of his mouth as he somehow managed to get to his knees. The man with the ski mask hammered the fat driver’s head into a soft pulp.

At that moment, a hefty female bus driver with a short haircut was ambling down the same sidewalk where the fat driver had walked his last steps. She had come out of the same donut shop and was sipping on an extra large coffee. “What’s this?” she thought, as she saw two bus drivers in lifeless heaps. The man in the ski mask stood between them staring at her.

She dropped her coffee and rumbled towards the man with the ski mask. He smiled to himself. Fitting that the only one with any guts amongst them is this buffalo who’s ready for action, he thought. He stepped forward and lifted a tight, brutal uppercut into her windpipe, sending her to the ground. It all took on a surreal quality in his mind as he leapt into the air, lifting his knees up to his chest and achieving an impressive vertical height. It felt as if he were suspended for minutes, the whole scene before him as he came down on the female driver’s head, stomping her skull with a solid, satisfying finality.

He stood and surveyed the wreckage. Yet it was only a mere fraction of the suffering the drivers had brought on the thousands of innocents. Minutes passed and the steam from the blood, innards, and brains of the bus drivers’ carcasses rose into the air. The man with the mask breathed in heavily, turned and walked into the bus, settling behind the wheel and driving into the street as if he were accustomed to such brief interludes.

Andy was rigid in his seat, still unsure if he was dreaming. He shook himself out of his dream-like state and considered what he had witnessed. “Why does society condone the brutality that the drivers were allowed to perpetrate but this kind of response is so shocking to us?” he thought. And there had been real violence and devastation because of the strike.

The 75 year-old woman who couldn’t take the bus to visit her doctor and then withered and died in her small apartment, no one aware that an abdominal infection had set in and taken hold.

The 24 year-old woman who was putting herself through university and refused to give up, walking the four miles to her part time job every evening at the local grocery store. She never would have been walking on the side of that road that had no sidewalk. She never would have been hit by that car and left to die.

The newly arrived immigrant who had no support system and no way to get around. She lost her job and took her own life one evening in her tiny, run-down rented room. And all the law abiding fools went along with these tragedies and never responded, never took any action.

The man with the ski mask seemed to know where he was going. He was driving down the street at a good speed, stopping at every red light and obeying all the traffic laws. In the distance Andy saw The White Hog, a well known stand alone drinking saloon. It stood well back from the street and had no other businesses around it. It was a location where many local bikers and other undesirables drank. Something twigged in Andy’s mind as he remembered reading that the bus drivers were holding a celebration rally in the parking lot of The White Hog. Appropriate, he thought. Just like the bikers, the bus drivers were a form of white trash royalty, thrilled that they could intimidate and cause harm to those who played by the rules.

They were almost in front of The White Hog now and Andy saw that there was a large crowd of bus drivers there, at least 2000 to 2500, he thought. The man in the ski mask roared the engine of the bus and sliced the wheel hard to the right, going up over the curb and slamming into the crowd of bus drivers, bashing through them like so many empty beer bottles. The forward movement of the bus was hampered by the corpses being dragged under the bus but the man in the ski mask kept gunning the engine. The bus finally came to a stop. It was surprisingly silent except for the moans of some of the drivers scattered in the parking lot. The man in the ski mask had done a remarkable job of taking down every last one of the drivers.

The man with the ski mask opened the door of the bus and started walking amongst the corpses and writhing bodies. The others on the bus got off as well and started mingling amongst the injured drivers who were begging for mercy. Strangely, the passengers were in no mood for mercy. An old woman knelt and choked the life out of a bloody mass of flesh struggling to crawl away. A ring of passengers formed around a driver who only had minor injuries. They silently kicked him to death.

The man with the mask was looking for someone. He finally zoned in on a particular individual. Andy came up behind the man with the ski mask and looked at the driver on the ground. He recognized him. He was the fat, arrogant individual Andy had seen on the news throughout the strike. He was the one goading on and leading the other drivers. The other passengers now came towards Andy and the man with the ski mask. They too recognized the man on the ground. An older, well-dressed woman wearing stilettos raised her foot and drove a heel through the palm of his hand. He shrieked like a little girl. Suddenly, he was swarmed. Someone took his eyes out while others repeatedly stomped his ankles, knees and shoulders. There seemed to be a general understanding that he wasn’t to be wiped out as quickly as the others.

The crowd of passengers suddenly stopped the beating and allowed the man with the ski mask to reach down and drag the battered lump back towards the bus. A few of the passengers followed him. He stopped and with the help of the others, lifted the still breathing sack of flesh into the bike rack on the front of the bus. The man with the ski mask looked around him and nodded at the passengers before getting back on the bus alone and driving off. The passengers in the parking lot of The White Hog slowly wandered away from the final resting spot of the scum who had tried to destroy their lives.

The man with the ski mask turned into the bus corridor and slashed through the night air. He surveyed the empty road in front of him and thought of the millions of tax dollars that had gone into constructing this special route reserved for the city’s buses. He peered out through the windshield of the bus and saw the twitching, bloodied oaf jammed into the bike rack.

He saw the section of the road ahead, the stretch that cut through solid rock. There was an imposing wall of concrete located to the right of where that section began. He veered straight toward the wall, opened the door and launched himself out onto the road. He landed hard, rolling for 30 metres before coming to his feet. He stood up straight and watched intently as the bus rammed head on and exploded against the wall.

The man with the ski mask disappeared into the night.

Mazoonga

After the novelty of being an expat has long since worn off, there is still a desire to experience strange and mysterious lands. So where do expats go when they want to get away from it all? Somewhere more exotic and foreign than the country where they currently reside.

For a man seeking illicit sex with women in foreign countries, one of the potential dangers that adds to the thrill is trying to gauge the reaction of local men and how they view interlopers. Being unfamiliar with mannerisms, facial expressions and warning signs of those from a different culture can lead to tense situations.

Arriving in the southern African nation of Malawi after a recommendation from a good friend, I immediately took another flight from the capital Blantyre to a small but burgeoning location for tourists named Nkhata Bay. It was a small twin engine plane that transported me there and landed on a short runway outside of town, the airport a small corrugated iron building smaller than some commercial garages.

The dirt roads, street stalls and locals who still saw white-skinned foreigners as a novelty were all the things that appealed to me as I made my initial observations and breathed in the sleepy atmosphere.

On the shores of the massive lake Malawi, locals earned a living from fishing and the growing influx of western tourists. It was far from any well-developed standard with only a few rudimentary guest-houses, the main clientele being bleary-eyed backpackers. The usual grimy pseudo-sages were present: the ones convinced they had discovered nirvana in the seedy chic outpost where ganja could be smoked cheaply and western currency stretched many stays into weeks and months.

The beautiful local women with their naturally curious smiles and their voluptuous figures were another major attraction. I was tentative about how to engage in a possible short-term relationship with one of the nubile, dark-skinned beauties and was also apprehensive about offending the sensibilities of the local community. There were obvious brothels on the edge of town but I felt I was above that option.

The first few days I wandered around briefly and spent most of the time lounging at the guest house which was perched on a hill that provided a good view of the expansive lake. Actually, “lake” is almost a misnomer in this case because of the idyllic image it creates in most people’s minds. Lake Malawi is one of the biggest lakes in the world and stretches as far as the eye can squint. On the second day, I was sitting at the guest-house bar staring out at the vast body of water when I saw a black blur far off in the distance slowly moving across the surface, like an impossible-to escape spectre. I was informed that it was a swarm of locusts.

Though enjoying the relaxed, nearly catatonic pace of life and the sweltering heat, I grew restless after a few days. I trekked to the opposite side of the bay and found a relatively nice hotel operated by the only long-term expat I had met there so far. With some basic rooms in the main house and some huts along the beach I rented a beach house hopeful for a change. I made my way slowly back to the first guest-house and transferred my bags.

The next day I woke late and as usual lounged around drinking coffee and fruit juice. Feeling like I needed to see something different, I rented a canoe on the beach and decided to explore for a short distance along the coastline of the bay.

It was easy going; I stayed close to the shore and had no problem with the small vessel—a standard western style canoe with a strong wooden paddle. Shortly I was out of sight of the hotel and any sign of human activity. I could see an inlet opening up in the distance and staying as close to the edge as I was, a new stretch of shoreline kept coming into view as I rounded the gradual curve. The scenery on the banks was of fairly thick tropical trees, the occasional small rock outcropping and short stretches of beach.

As a new slice of shoreline came into view, I was greeted with the pleasant site of a nude, shapely African woman bathing on a raised ledge of rock next to the water’s edge. Low enough so she could jump into the shallow water to wet herself, that is exactly what she did as I approached in the canoe. Far from being embarrassed, she beamed at me and waved as I came abreast of her, using the paddle as a rudder to slow my movement.

She rinsed off the soap that she had been lathered with and then started to climb back onto the low rock ledge, affording a glimpse of her beautiful black arse. I had drifted by slowly at this point and was a good 10 metres out from the side. She had now turned back to face me and continued smiling. I didn’t want to misinterpret simple friendliness combined with an unashamed openness with nudity as anything beyond that, but still I was excited and intrigued at the same time. I looked at her with an expression of expectation and raised one hand in a gesture of appeal. She laughed and happily waved me towards her.

I pulled up the canoe on the small spot of beach to the side and scrambled up towards where she was standing. She said a few words in English but almost unspoken it seemed like such a simple, almost fated opportunity for two people to engage in the pleasure of bathing together in the cool water, heavy air and hot sun. I disrobed and she giggled and then we both laughed and we jumped in the water together and shared the bar of soap she had. We took turns soaping each other and there was some obvious excitement from both of us but it was so simple and playful and lacked any of the sinister overtures with which so many western women seem to see potential first-time sexual encounters.

She was incredibly beautiful, a natural ample figure with a glorious smooth swell at her ass and hips and full heavy dark breasts. She wasn’t especially young but her flesh possessed the perfect amount of responsiveness.

After rinsing our bodies intermingled with a few kisses and squeezes we lay naked on the slab of rock ledge drying ourselves before she led me back under the relative shade that the palm tress provided where there was a small neat thatch-roofed hut. Not her home, I gathered, but seemingly kept by her as a rest-house near the water, with a few of her belongings inside including a small bed with cool, clean sheets turned back. We made love there, something incredible and fell asleep in the sullen afternoon heat though a gentle breeze passed through the window nicely and provided a perfect combination for deep slumber.

I awoke sometime later feeling refreshed and gently got up, intending to have a relaxed walkabout and return to lounge with the still sleeping Shira, as she had told me her name was. I was congratulating myself on what an operator I was, a libertine for the new century, a true lover of women, when, as I exited the small hut, my guts dropped as I saw three men sitting in various locations in the small worn clearing surrounding the hut. They vaguely glanced in my direction with indifferent looks on their faces, apparently uninterested by the sight of a naked foreigner.

I turned around and went back inside the hut, scanning the small shelter for anything I could use as a weapon if the need arose. Like being pulled over by the police when you have done nothing wrong, I still had a sickening sense of guilt and fear. I mentally prepared for any trouble as I accepted the rationale for their potential displeasure with me. Maybe if I went back out there and paraded around starkers, my average-sized Caucasian dick would alleviate any sense of fear they may harbour about foreigners. Though they outnumbered me and were on home turf, psychological offerings like that could often have more of an effect than most people imagined.

I heard Shira stirring and she raised herself up in bed and started rubbing her eyes. She seemed to have a qualitatively different look on her face now. She must have sensed my fear and she started out of bed and covered herself with a colourful wrap that had been draped over the back of a chair. Despite the potential situation that was developing I still took a last admiring look at her impressive ass before she was under the sarong.

“Shira there are some men outside.”

She was out the door without having acknowledged me and I scrambled to get dressed. I considered the window at the back of the hut. But really, I was acting asinine. What was there to be scared of? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I decided to casually amble out, make whatever gestures seemed appropriate and then be on my way. Before I exited the hut, I secured a heavy pestle that had been with some cooking utensils on a small table and placed it under the bed.

Striding out as naturally as I could, I saw Shira with the three men who were now all grouped together sitting under a large tree. There was a hooded veiled glaze to her eyes and she didn’t look towards me.

“Please, join us,” one of the men offered in a seemingly friendly voice. Having no real choice, I sat down on the ground.

“You make love to my sister?” the same one speaking now, a slight clip to his voice. So here it was, I thought, at the same time impressed with his English.

“Well, I uhh…I,” I stammered out a non-response taken aback by the sudden shift.

The man who had spoken, ostensibly Shira’s brother, started laughing a good natured affected laugh, as he rocked back and forth and the others took this as a signal to join in. I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Of course, it’s only us western puritans who are so hung up about sex I thought. Maybe I’ll somehow try to leave a small bit of cash as a goodwill offering. I started to slip back into that relaxed mode, the vagaries and surprises of travelling filling me with a feeling of bonhomie as I was already considering how I would impress the rubes back home with this tale.

As I was latching on to this feeling of relief, I noticed that Shira was not sharing their enjoyment and was in fact looking tentative and frightened. Her eyes seemed to plead with me and despite my earlier pang that she was in cahoots with these three, I now realized that our brief time together had meant something to her. Her “brother’ continued the laughter well beyond any normal length of time and now looked directly at me, eyes blazing and ratcheted his now obviously contrived cackle into a high-pitched shriek.

Jaysus!! I was thinking to myself, what’s this freak trying to do? Just trying to put a scare in me? Despite my best attempt to appear unfazed, I knew I must be blanching like a son-of-a-bitch.

He stopped abruptly.

“Mister, mister white man…we need you to pay for the services of this young woman!” the laughing psycho said in a staccato voice while straining the cords in his neck and trying not to keep laughing.

“That’s OK with me. I’ll just have to get my wallet from the room and we’ll settle up,” I said and got up and started moving towards the hut, not waiting for permission and trying to act as calm as possible. This seemed to be acceptable to them and one of psycho’s flunkies slowly ambled behind me. I already had my wallet secreted in a money belt under my shirt but I needed to put together some half-baked plan, no longer convinced a payoff would keep psycho satisfied.

As I reached the door to the hut my sinewy escort came up directly beside me and I noticed his soiled dungarees, work shirt and sour smell of sweat. His slight build didn’t convince he would be easy to take. I nodded at him and he smiled a bemused almost disinterested grin that somehow seemed inappropriate for the situation.

I entered the hut and moved towards the bed. Kneeling down I looked under the bed and wrapped my hand securely around the pestle I had placed there earlier. My shuffling escort loomed over me now and I came upright but still on my knees and drove the thick end of the pestle with all my might into his groin. He groaned and doubled over and now I straightened up on my feet and lifted the thick club-like utensil into the bridge of his nose with an uppercut motion, shattering the bone and splattering blood onto the hard-packed dirt floor. I laid the pestle across the back of his neck like a blackjack, careful not to use all my force for fear that I would kill the bastard and I’d be on the run from a local posse seeking vengeance.

Hopeful that the others hadn’t been alerted and feeling better now that it was only two against one and having a slight surprise factor, I strode towards the door of the hut intent on carving a path to escape. As I came out into the light I looked towards the tree where we had sat and saw nothing.

My puzzlement was quickly solved now as psycho and his remaining thug were on me coming from the side, surely having heard the bashing I had given their mate inside. I flailed wildly clipping something hard with the pestle that I still held in my hand….I was kicked solidly in the guts and saw stars…taking repeated shots from fists attached to sinewy black arms…it didn’t matter how incensed I was, there was no staving off the eventual kicking that I was going to take which surely could end in disaster…I was now on my knees and there was a brief lull as I saw the game was up, psycho and his sidekick looking down at me panting…I saw that I had inflicted some damage with the solid stone tool that probably mashed countless thousands of herbs and vegetables before I turned its use to human skulls.

In that brief surreal respite I felt the strange realization that this day that had started out with such a light-hearted sense of adventure was almost drawing to a close. Dusk was settling and the new sounds that always came with the darkness were already starting. If only I’d been happy to go with one of the women from the brothels in town.

There was a shriek from behind and the three of us turned to look, my aching neck making it a painful task. It was the woman, Shira, standing a good 15 meters behind us with a machete in her hand. Much too far to be of any use against my attackers, it was clear in the manner that she was holding the knife that she was threatening to harm herself.

While they were distracted I drove the stone utensil into the guts of psycho, dropping him to the ground. I staggered up and pin-wheeled backward managing to slump down on the hard earth a few metres in front of the woman. I got up and she handed me the knife. I now saw the toothless flunky I had bludgeoned inside crawl slowly out into the open and lean back against the small hut. I took out some cash from my wallet and threw it on the ground, happy to give everyone an out from this absurd explosion.

Grabbing Shira and moving through the line of trees towards the canoe I kept glancing back with a wary eye on the prostrate psycho and the other two, of whom only one was now capable of standing. I tucked the efficient little stone club that had helped me into the waistband of my trousers. I helped Shira into the canoe and we pushed off. It was difficult going as I ached all over from the pasting I had absorbed. It was dark when we eased back into the beach area where the hut I had rented was located.

Though I would have loved to worship Shira’s glorious black arse all night long, I had to settle for her swollen jugs as a comfortable pillow as I rested my bruised carcass. In the morning I was eager to get out of Nkhata Bay as soon as possible for fear of reprisals. She assured me that the three involved, of whom psycho was actually a cousin and not her real brother, would have taken the money and been long since drunk on whatever alcohol they could find. Still, I packed up my things and trudged my way to the nearest road that led back to the other side of the bay. A dusty cab happened by, one of the only ones in the sleepy town. Shira followed along and I said goodbye to her at the small airport where a flight was leaving within the hour. I gave her some cash for her troubles and was off, cursing my luck at not having had more time with her.

Strange rhythms course across that continent. Walk up to the invisible ghost outlines of foreign tourists who have gone before and watch those on the other side of the contrived interaction play another role. Step outside the normal, tacitly agreed upon boundaries, and the results are not so certain.

Musings on the Final Days

Something about the human condition makes us want to share our innermost feelings, often with complete strangers. This can become a compulsion for the expat when he feels that there is nowhere to turn and no one to listen. In the following confessional, an expat who lived in Bangkok writes about what motivated him to return home. Some names have been changed and faces mutated to protect the damaged and discarded.

The horrible thing about a nervous breakdown as brought on by some insane event is that there is no escape. Your life has been forever altered. There is no reprieve in sleep. Sleep is fitful and unrewarding. There is an insidious moment when you wake up every morning and for a cruel instant the horror is not there. Then the heavy wave of revulsion, sickening bile-filled guts, rubbery legs and hopelessness come rushing back with a vengeance.

Now, for the first time I am considering seeking out some medication to alleviate what seems like a permanent state. What is there to lose? Perhaps I can regain some form of functioning normalcy, some escape from this never-ending nightmare.

I am racked by violent fantasies in which I perform all manner of nasty and vile tricks on the evil piece of filth who has brought this on me. I can’t get out of my head the pure essence of joy that would flow from burying her alive. To see the horror in her eyes and the quivering of her taped mouth as she screamed an intense shrill wail of horror that could be heard by no one. Ricocheting inside her doomed insides as I heaped a shovelful of dirt on her face. Or simply barging into her home and putting bullets in the heads of all her family members as she watched. And then, ending her life as well.

If I reach the end of all hope I just may do one of these things. That people don’t weigh these possibilities before they decide to cheat, dishonour and degrade another human is strange.

Slow-motion suicide is another option. Try to burn away all remaining shreds of care, decency and moral codes. Walk into any insanity. Let them pile one on top of another until the misdeed is just a pedestrian, passing moment under the crush of everything that flowed after that time.

Her face is hideous. At 30 years old she is still plagued by severe acne. It is such a nasty, rancid variety of the skin affliction that usually hits people half her age, that a rank odour rises from her face in the early hours of each morning. She has had a nose job. The effect is jarring. An inappropriately large beak pasted in the middle of this face of oozing pus and scars. Her receding chin and skinny neck and poor posture result in the image of this out of place beak leading her around.

The violent fantasies seem to have a life of their own. Upon closing my eyes I keep seeing an open field with a clump of bushes at either end. She is wandering into the middle of the field. I am in the bushes and I take aim with a high-powered rifle and casually blow her skull apart. In another fantasy, it is the same scene but this time I shoot with a cross-bow. It doubles her over, impaled and gasping. I saunter up to her and slit her throat.

The lack of control is what is so insidious. The dream of living an honourable life is gone. I’ve got to reshape things. Reconcile it and get on with living. Lifelong torment and eventual suicide is the only other choice.

One thing you don’t anticipate when you face some kind of devastating crisis is the obliteration of your own self-image. Everything you saw in your own self-image, every positive aspect of yourself disappears in the mist of rage, despair and horror. You have to reorder your mind. Somehow rearrange things. Or death. There are no other options.

How we cherish the image we have built of ourselves. Something comes in and slices it away. It’s hard to say accurately what qualifies for I can only assess those things which have befallen me. But I can speculate on events in the same vein, and here I’m talking major devastations. Someone purposely infects you with AIDS, you are raped or forced to watch someone you love being raped, you are forced at gunpoint to kill someone you love, you’re swindled out of your entire life’s savings.

If you can ride out the collapse, a small amount of hope surfaces There comes a morning when that brief horrible moment of remembrance that comes with a wave of sickening despair is not there anymore. It’s a dull ache somewhere in the back of your mind. You have been fundamentally altered. But you still have life. You can still create, gain some small pleasure, marvel at the surreal nature of life and existence.

In a strange kind of way, the whole train wreck takes away some inhibitions and restraints that may have guided your life before. If you seriously considered suicide for the first time, surely no act is unthinkable for there is always an easy escape if necessary. If the tripe of honour codes and other meaningless horseshit has rewarded you with this injustice, why should you continue to follow any rules?

What brought me out of it? I was drawn to reading accounts of horrible things happening to other people. It wasn’t conscious. These stories are everywhere if you start paying attention. Newspapers are the obvious first source. I started to notice a soothing respite from the pain I was enduring when I was reading about other people’s lives being destroyed.

What if inflicting this kind of punishment myself were to generate this kind of balm?

After being involuntarily bombarded with violent images every time I closed my eyes or paused during the day, it was natural that the perfect crime came to me.

I’ll lure her into picking me up in her car. My location ensures we will soon be on the expressway. As we approach a line of cars waiting at a toll booth I will turn slightly in my seat and drive the almightiest punch possible directly into her face, knocking her unconscious. Okay, it might not put her out directly but I’m confident repeated batterings with side-fisted hammer blows will.

As she slumps against the side of the car door I will unclip her seat belt and coast into the line of cars at 80 or 90 km per hour, turning the wheel at the last moment to maximize the side impact collision against her prone body. The risks are quite high. I of course could and likely will be injured. I’ve done some research on side impacts and even being away from the side that takes the hit presents potential for severe injury or death. The possibility of whip-sawing against the side of the car door and suffering head injuries is real.

Still, the whole scenario will muddy the waters and provide a good cover. How can anything be proven let alone hypothesized in a way that will convince most people?

The main problem is whether I am willing to do this and live with the moral consequences for the rest of my life. Will it start to eat at me? Has the weight of a lifetime of B movies and pulp fiction filled me with a skewed sense of the potential freedom this could bring?

To eliminate the most insidious piece of filth I have encountered, who has brought me more misery in a brief explosion of time and insanity than any other person anywhere or anytime in my life? Or is the counter weight, those feel good mantras offered up by society’s feel-good shysters and repeated ad nauseum on refrigerator magnets and by willing dupes, a stronger force?

“Let it go. Move on, forgive,” etc. The dull abject pleasure of pure revenge seemed much more soothing. Many of the fantasies involved duct tape. Bashing the living fuck out of that wretched face and then binding her hands, feet and mouth and taking off a few of her digits with my teeth. Both of her thumbs. Render her completely fucking worthless for the rest of her life. Soaking her face in acid. Taking apart her cosmetically altered nose. That freakish, utterly out of place ridiculous nose. How fucking absurd and ugly she looked.

Amidst all the violent fantasies I knew there was only one real final solution. I would have to leave. I felt nothing but contempt for these simplistic, dishonest, cheating bags of filth. How they have constructed this false image of themselves as benign, smiling, good-natured people is truly beyond comprehension.

It’s the utter surreal nature of everything here combined with most people’s relatively short stays. The same greasy, waxen faced, nasty fucking cheats stand at the same well known, public places every day and openly cheat foreign tourists. The police know it. Any local with half a brain knows it. Yet it carries on. It is allowed to carry on. It makes up for the gnawing realization at the back of everyone’s mind that they are completely inferior. They make up for it by cheating and lying.

The new airport stands as a testament to how totally fucked this backward shithole of a country is. Built on a swamp and 40 years in the making, it was a big, well-used tit to be sucked dry by any of the miserable, soulless, individuals who have helped to fuck this nation so thoroughly over the years.

The runways started to crack a mere few months after the place was prematurely opened against the warnings of many. Cut-rate tiles broken, water leaking from the ill-planned parking garages into the elevator shafts, shoddy, worthless workmanship in the so-called “5 star” hotels that adjoined the farcical structure. Passengers stand baking in line-ups because of the overhead windows some fool made a fortune out of selling to the ignorant apes in charge of building the fiasco.

It would be the last thing I would see as I departed for the final time.

One Soul in Bangkok

When he felt like this, the whole world was his punching bag. Every face turned into a smirking target. During the day when he walked the street he felt like a ghost, unable to deal with all the people and ideas he couldn’t understand. He felt that anger just as equally during the daylight hours but he couldn’t react as he could during the night. When darkness settled he played a starring role in his own personal movie, and the running theme was revenge.

Walking through the dimly lit bar with music playing in the background, he breathed in the feeling of liberation. He sat at the bar and surveyed the scene around him with a rictus grin and a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

The first time he had felt like this he had gone off the rails almost instantly. The feelings of rage had long been there but this simple new awareness that there was a way out had been new. That virginal eruption had been abrupt and violent and he had wakened with a broken nose, sore ribs and a number of missing teeth. He had ached for a week but he had also felt like a new man. When he had thought back over the events that had transpired that night he felt thrilled and for the first time in a long time had known that there was a reason to continue on. Those feelings had kept him going for some time and when the razor sharpness of that experience had slowly started to dull, he planned when and where he would embrace the night again.

After a few times he had learned to enjoy the feeling more thoroughly and look for a situation that would give him the most righteous sense of being alive. It was almost like learning how to ride a bike; no, that wasn’t quite right because riding a bike was a solitary activity. This involved much more, especially learning to read others, dispense the fear in the most devious and deviant ways possible.

How people could not sense that something was going on in his head that was out of the ordinary, he could never quite figure out. He was raging and blazing but after the first few times able to control it to a degree. Perhaps they just felt he was an excitable person with overt mannerisms.

He always chose a place as far away from the neighbourhood where he lived and worked.

“Beer,” he blurted out, the first words he had spoken in hours. His voice came out sounding higher than usual and odd to his own ears. He laughed out loud, a short bark. He felt strange speaking an English word in his own country. But at the same time, he liked the strangeness. It emboldened him for what he intended to do.

The bartender turned to reach a bottle out of the cooler.

He swiveled with the cold bottle now in his hand. He leaned back against the bar with both his elbows in an exaggerated and affected way, an imitation of something he had seen in a movie once.

There are so many things I have wanted to do before, but have always been conscious of others, so much energy spent on avoiding looks, he thought to himself. Simple things, stand up and survey the room with a sneer on my face, leer at the most beautiful woman here, not a trace of care as to what results my actions are going to bring. Now sitting back down to enjoy the energy. Swallowing the beer, able to knock back countless bottles when I’m like this.

“Even if an ass is clean per se, it’s still got that distinctive smell of ass. You know I’m talkin’ strictly female ass here? Now lay a good lathering of soap on and that is one of the most pleasant and…”

That flat dull sound pulled a string taut in his mind. He sat listening for a few moments, his addled brain recalling why that voice made him feel a pure anger that he knew he would respond to.

He jolted up and strode to the toilets. Pushing the door open he moved to the nearest stall, slipped inside and closed the door behind him. Now he pulled out a small bag, took out two white pills and swallowed both of them. This would make the uncoiling a more enjoyable experience.

“I sit next to you, OK?” he said, playing up the stilted accent.

The two men sitting at the table looked at each other.

“Why not?” said the man who had been doing most of the talking all night. “It’s always nice to talk to some of the locals, makes our experience here seem more authentic!” he said, stopping to emphasize the final word. The comment made him laugh out loud. The other man joined in, simply because he always laughed when the first man did.

“Sit yerself right down, please do and let me get you a drink. What’re you drinkin’ there son?”

He looked blankly at them and waited for the loud one to imitate the motion of raising a glass to his mouth before he indicated he understood.

“Beer OK,” he answered but the loud one was guffawing loudly again and his reply was barely heard.

“He hardly understands a goddamned word we’re sayin’. We can have a few laughs here Bert!”

He looked around again at the bar they were in, shutting out the sound of the two animals in front of him. A few loners nursing beers with the thousand-yard, slack-eyed look, some couples and these two out-of-place fools. What nationality were they? Must be Americans; the loud grating, supremely confident attitude. And that comment, “more authentic.”

“Soooo, ya come here often? Bwaaahahahaha!!” Again the loud one performing for his flunky.

Yes, I’ll play whatever game you want, he thought to himself, enjoying the pure feeling of anticipation.

It was light when he had come in but now the night was on the streets, making the cover of this place, far away from his normal haunts, feel safe, like a lonely outpost in a different galaxy, where all fear of consequences was gone.

He remembered why that voice had jarred his brain into formulating a basic, but somehow doable plan for the night.

How old was the loud one? It was hard to tell with these types—large through the middle, sun-reddened faces, surely not attractive, even to their own people. Alone he could take the obnoxious one with little effort. The other man, the quiet one who just laughed and agreed with the oaf would frighten easy. With the added strength and recklessness from the pills he would do all right. The loud one shoved some peanuts past his stained teeth into his gob.

A foreigner had once raped his sister. The rapist had left the small village in the north before anything could be done.

“Dale, I don’t think everything’s OK with this chap here,” the other one, the one named Bert said, speaking for the first time.

He had become lost for a few minutes, thinking back.

“It’s fine Bert, these sinewy bastards have an amazing threshold for everything. He doesn’t know or even give a shit what you’re talkin’ about. We just bought him a beer fer Christ’s sake. A beer that probably represents a few days wages to him. He’s thankful that he got that damn bottle from us. Now he owes a bit of entertainment. Doncha son?”

Now they were in the night—heavy air but with a light breeze, a different world than Bangkok of the day. The two Americans, as he had confirmed that they were, were now walking, well, more like staggering down the road with him. They had bought him some more drinks and continued to become more inebriated themselves. He didn’t feel the effects as the pills offset the potency of the alcohol.

Now walking together with them, he was jacked up and feeling anxious. He wanted to move the situation now.

“We go somewhere different now. Place no foreigners ever go,” he said. He knew these two wanted something authentic.

Secrecy and Shame

Secrecy has always been a big part of my life. Never more so than when I returned to Canada after six years in Thailand. I was on a mission: to put my head down, complete a one-year post graduate certificate program, get a job, and bring my Thai girlfriend/soon-to-be wife to Canada. I had left her in Thailand for what I thought would be the duration of my studies and the brief time I hoped it would take me to find a job.

I settled in a dreary bachelor apartment and went to work.

It wasn’t something that I set out to do, but I found myself not sharing my story with anyone. Sure, I let them know that I had been in Thailand. But I didn’t disclose any details about my girlfriend. I didn’t want any sympathy from my classmates, and I didn’t want the storyline of me being away from her to result in constant questions. And I didn’t want to be reminded of something that was causing me a great deal of pain and guilt.

Not only that, but any mention of my girlfriend waiting in Thailand could elicit a lot of emotion. I didn’t want to lose it in front of relative strangers.

Of course, I have always held back information from people I meet. What is the benefit of sharing intimate details of your life? It can be used to form sneering, judgments on your character, your background, and your intentions. More enjoyable to let the false impressions form and keep the truth to yourself. Watch the smug looks on people’s faces, see them put forward what they think is an appropriate role for you to fill, and then give them exactly what they want.

During the certificate course at a local college, I caught a cringe-worthy glimpse of how I might have come across to others if I had opened up about my personal life. A decent individual with whom I worked on a number of projects shared with the class the fact that his girlfriend was studying at a university that was a few hours away by train. I thought about my girlfriend who was a 20 hour plane ride away and who I might not see for more than a year. I resisted the urge to trump his tale of woe.

As is the case when you start to reveal details of your life to others, the whole storyline starts to dribble out, including how you see yourself in your own little melodrama. And, the particular way your image to others may take shape will have nuances that don’t come out in other situations. The unique collection of people, the stresses of the situation in which you find yourself, and even the physical location, all conspire to present you in a light never before seen by others.

And so my classmate increasingly let it be known that he was suffering for the time he had to be away from his soul-mate. Of course, I could really feel what he was going through, but I dared not let him know about my life.

He worked fairly closely with another classmate who was a broken, bitter individual who had been through a tough divorce. Older than the rest of us, the bitter classmate was a tall loose-limbed, individual who suffered from numerous ailments. He was a veritable basket case who seemingly enrolled in the course because it was something to do and he could receive funding to pay for the tuition.

The classmate who missed his girlfriend—I’ll call him Lonely Heart—quickly developed an acute sense of loathing for the bitter classmate—Basket Case—and never missed an opportunity to rip into him when he wasn’t around. Going against one of my cardinal rules, one day I engaged Lonely Heart when he started ripping Basket Case and even threw in a few jabs as well. Later, it became clear that Lonely Heart played both sides and got some enjoyment out of drawing me in. When Basket Case repeated a distinctive phrase I had used when talking to Lonely Heart, I knew Lonely Heart was a weasely little bastard.

After the course finished, all of the students had the chance to spend two months at a work experience placement. As soon as I started, there was no question that I would once again keep most of my personal details secret. A chubby, alternately smug and unassuming young woman was already working there. She had finished the same program as me the year previous, and was firmly entrenched in the subculture of the workplace.

She was close friends with a colleague: a short, pot-bellied, pony-tailed little oaf who was convinced he was one of the most clever individuals around. When they got together in the staff room, or at staff meetings, they started riffing off each other, validating each other’s witty little asides, and generally combining to be two of the smuggest, most annoying fucks on the face of the earth.

One day as we sat in the open area we shared, our desks a few feet apart, she started asking questions about my time in Thailand. She mentioned a handful of the most common generalizations about Thailand: prostitutes, strange expats, the EFL teaching racket. All of which had some truth to them. But she was clearly trying to get a rise out of me. Further confirmation that I didn’t want to share anything with people who I would “know” for a grand total of two months.

It started dawning on me at this point that the workplace in Canada had changed since I had been away. Or more accurately, it had been moving toward this point for a long time and I really hadn’t had an accurate glimpse of things before. Most of my jobs before I left Canada had been of the menial sort and didn’t reflect the office environment stocked with full-on manipulators, politics and all the other interpersonal nastiness you could think of.

The fact was that women were becoming the majority in many workplaces. This presented some realities that anyone would be wise to reflect on if they want to stay sane and not run afoul of a litany of written and unwritten rules.

The first reality is that if you mention something casually to someone with whom you work, others will know about it. If you want control over your workplace image, you simply don’t share many details with people.

Second, while men have ruled most aspects of western societies for many decades, and have come in for plenty of well-deserved criticism, the unpleasant situations that arise in any workplace are due to power relationships. Hence, with the increase of women in the workplace, transgressions that were traditionally committed by men are now being committed by women as well. Perhaps not to the same degree and not by as many women, but unpleasant behaviour is becoming more common from females on the job.

Something about sex—perhaps too it is the inherent power aspect—makes it an unavoidable topic for many people in the workplace who feel they are somehow above the rules by which everyone else has to play. The number of sex-related comments from women in the workplace stunned me on my return to Canada. As the men sat by with a look on their faces that said, “no way am I getting into this,” I repeatedly heard comments from women related to penis size, the appearance of men, and other tittering little innuendoes. These comments were all made during meetings or in the lunch room.

I once walked into the lunch room where a meeting of only women was taking place. The talk was of women who worked in the organization who didn’t wear bras. The chortles and guffaws rang out as I silently went about making a cup of tea.

One woman who was my direct superior openly mocked me for apparently not having a girlfriend. Of course, I could have set her right and informed her about the reality of my situation. But why bother? She thought she had me figured out and I was willing to play along. I laughed along at her little sneering jokes.

You may well be thinking, “Oh, poor you. Insulted by a group of women making some questionable comments.”

I found it interesting more than anything, and it really highlights the issue as one of power. I enjoy observing people and their hypocrisies. And besides, there was nothing I could do in the situation. Not even make a comment against the snide suggestions that I wasn’t worthy of finding a female companion. I was on a short contract and was hoping for a renewal. My manager had loads of capital with the organization: she was heavily qualified, had done years of good work, and her husband had terminal cancer. Not much a person in my position could have done to stand up to her.

Return to Thailand

After I returned to Thailand, I found no reason to open up to relative strangers about the details of my life. I seem to be the anomaly. Most people have a compulsion to share cringe-worthy personal information with people they have just met. The Facebook phenomenon is further proof of this.

In various staff rooms, you can hear fools bragging about their drug and alcohol use as if it is some kind of badge of honour. Why would they do this? If and when someone decides to use it against them, they will have to cast their minds back and remember who they have shared the information with. And then they have to determine, probably incorrectly, who it was who used their own idiotic admissions against them.

In another example that validates the practice of keeping those around you in the dark about your personal life, one monumentally ignorant fool started ripping another member of the office when he wasn’t around. He started making weird comments about the individual’s wife and child. If people don’t know anything about you, you don’t have to wonder what they are saying behind your back.

Going after someone’s wife or family is the lowest of the low. But amongst the foreign scum that surfaces in Thailand, the standards are lower than almost anywhere else.

In the small community of expats who live in Thailand, there is a shameless rankism that exists. Humans crave the opportunity to rank themselves against others.

This is nowhere more apparent than when you are living in a foreign country. Because expats have fewer chances to compare themselves to other expats, when the chance does arise, they make the best of it.

This is compounded by the fact that Thailand is a bitterly classist society. This habit of looking for any and all means to raise themselves above others must rub off on the expat detritus. Not to suggest that this sentiment doesn’t exist in other countries. But it is much more crass and brazen in Thailand.

Black skin equals poverty, equals a lower class of human being, equals the kind of people who deserve derision and abuse. And an entire region of Thailand is full of poor, dark skinned people who serve the middle and upper classes not just as slave labour, but as a never-ending source to stoke their sense of superiority.

The feeling you get from others constantly sneering at you and your choice of mate is not always shame. It is a weary, fed-up anger that makes you want to shatter skulls. But because you can’t do that, you engage in other types of behaviour that make you feel better and convince you that you are protecting the honour of your wife who happens to be from the region that is culturally acceptable to mock. Secrecy is one way.

And you wonder about those expats who have taken on the habit and enjoy the sneering good times of ranking themselves against others based on their choice of spouse. Because for those expats who have spouses from the upper classes, the sneering rankism falls somewhere else. On them.

For wealthy Thai families whose daughters choose a foreigner as a husband, there is no small amount of finger-pointing, mockery, and yes, shame, that they must endure. Racism is rife in Thailand and while white skinned foreigners don’t suffer the worst of it by any means, there is still plenty of cultural ammunition to train on a young woman who has chosen a foreigner as a husband.

And while the foreigner who has married the daughter of wealthy Thais may not feel the slings as directly as does a foreigner who has married a Thai woman from a poor family, only the dullest-witted of them will not sense that things are not quite right all the time. Only the most devoid of any observation skills will not feel the stares of other well-off families, the smug looks that inform the family weighted down with an embarrassing white-skinned ape that they would never allow such a thing to happen in their precious clan.

But then, those same individuals who couldn’t read such situations would probably also not have any qualms about being supported by their wealthy in-laws. It would not even dawn on them that they are beholden to their wives’ families. Only if the befuddled foreigner decided to move his family back to his home country (with children by then of course) would he possibly find out that dear wife may choose her extended family over him.

For anyone in either of these situations to say that they are unaffected is foolish. No doubt, like all things, it is all about degrees. Some progressive and wealthy families may say that they give not a damn about what others say. And to the degree that is possible, it is probably true. But it is impossible to insulate yourself completely from what others think and say about you. Even if its effect is only to make you rebuff those sentiments.

So the best course of action as an expat is to live your life and choose your friends carefully, protect yourself and share details with only those you trust. And when the sneering, barely concealed jab at your choice of mate inevitably comes, ask some pointed questions or make some similarly snide comments of your own.

And if that doesn’t work, drive your fist into the fucker’s nose, and when he has fallen to the ground and he’s clutching his shattered face, kick the piece of shit until you’re physically exhausted.

Death of an Expat

I didn’t think about my own unavoidable death for the first 35 years of my life. Barely crossed my mind. Oh sure, I read about other people dying in books and movies. Death plays a major part in all the dramas that we like to watch and read. But those dramas are all about other people.

And that is part of the appeal of all those movies and books. We all think about death in a very superficial way, but to read about other people dying reminds us that we are alive. And puts off indefinitely the need to really think about our own mortality. But subconsciously, it must gnaw away at all of us. For otherwise, why would vast portions of the world’s population willingly believe in fairly tales about eternal life?

Like most young people, my death was a far off and surreal notion that had no basis in reality.

But then out of the blue it really arrives. The realization that one day you truly will cease to exist for all eternity. What is the event that brings this realization about? Is it the death of a loved one? No, I don’t believe so. I have seen no correlation between suffering and the loss of loved ones and the ability to understand the temporary aspect of your own life in a visceral way.

For me it came as I approached 40. With more than 20 years of adult living behind me and perhaps 25 or 30 years left to accomplish what I set out to do in life, the ethereal, organic reality of it all exploded into my everyday conscious mind.

Suddenly, the horrible, inescapable reality that I was going to blink out of existence forever hit me like a ball-peen hammer straight between the eyes. I meditated on this for hours, days, weeks. It became a vivid, horrific scenario; the last minutes before going down for the final count. Ceasing...for eternity. It is the knowledge that it is all going to end. That you will never find out how it all plays out. You will never find out how your children will make out in the world. Never have a front row seat as the convulsions that shape history take place. Never be again.

But that is the whole problem with coming to terms, in a real, unflinching and honest way with your own inevitable demise. Language simply fails with regard to describing death. When all we have ever known is self-awareness, it is impossible to imagine anything else. And of course, not existing won’t be a painful thing. It just won’t. Be. Anything. But there goes the language failing again. Because any way you frame it, the notion is there, that you will somehow be somewhere else, still “you,” looking back on this existence and reminiscing, “well, I did enjoy it.” Even the line “ceasing to exist for eternity” implies that it is somehow a sentence that you have to endure.

The classic response from avowed atheists as to what comes with death: nothingness; implies an endless night of silky black horror, during which you are conscious.

Our notion of the final end is that we still exist but are somewhere else. Our lives are made up of various ends and new beginnings. Which is why the eternal-life narrative is so appealing to so many people. Many times I have wished that I could believe in those absurd, desperate attempts to convince ourselves that our conscious minds will continue on.

As soon as my own mortality started occupying such an immediate and, at times, horrifying place in my day-to-day thoughts, others things happened too. Those books and movies that had been part of my life in such a big way no longer had the same effect. So many popular depictions of dying and death are cartoon-like and insipid. To be sure, there are many superb and effective renderings as well, and enjoying those became all the more sublime.

I had another observation as well. It dawned on me that without really knowing it, I had been conducting a life-long study of how other people come to grips with their own mortality. Most people never do until it is too late. Throw-away clichés like, “might as well enjoy it while you can,” are a clear indication that the person making the statement lives in that state of relatively ignorant bliss and truly can’t comprehend that everything is going to come to an end.

Another classic is that observation that “I wouldn’t want to live forever.” Really? When all that exists for a person— their reality, eternity, and everything—is in their one and only life, why wouldn’t you want it to continue? Nothingness is a better option? Again, proof that the incomprehensible makes us rationalize and say patently illogical things.

The fact is, many people who offer up the “I wouldn’t want to live forever” nugget, believe that they will live forever. But they believe the infinite life will begin after this life, in some mysterious place where they apparently exist as some ghostly outline of their worldly selves. I would gladly take everlasting life on earth. It wouldn’t take but a few million years of contemplation to overcome the ridiculous notion that anything more than the horribly brief current reality is somehow too much.

Of course, not facing down the most difficult of truths in life is a completely logical coping mechanism. I often wish that I could return to that state. On the other hand, living with the reality that I can blink out at any moment has motivated me to make changes in my life and to strive to accomplish as much as I can, to give back and bring as much good as I can to those I care about. And, if a person is willing to face down the hardest truth of them all, then the problems we face along the journey become somehow easier to deal with, if more soaked in a fatalistic melancholy.

Any thoughts of suicide that I may have had as an angst-ridden younger fool have washed away for good. When you fear death so much and are obsessed with the desire to do things before you cease, the thought of sending yourself into eternity becomes ridiculous.

If only I could reach those people who have been overcome with despair and convince them that they should carry on. If only for the fact that the horrid fleeting nature of life will sweep them into eternity soon enough.

I just hope that when it comes, that I am with my wife and child and somehow I have managed to reach some kind of peace. Perhaps then, the terror will be lessened somewhat.

The death of a foreigner in Thailand, so far from home, and often before his worst demons can be confronted, is more poignant and heartbreaking than others—at least for other foreigners in Thailand.

To recount the life and final days of one such foreigner is one way that we can bring some meaning to his life and allow him to live a little while longer. Perhaps, just as we gain some sense of our own aliveness by hearing about others dying, so too memorializing others is a shameless hope that others will also remember us when we are gone.

The Beetle

The Beetle, as he was known to his closest friends, arrived in Thailand when he was 53. Born in Australia, the Beetle lived a carefree life of partying and adventure. He lived for many years in the Czech Republic and then drifted east, arriving in Thailand in 1999.

The Beetle gave new meaning to “going native.” He sought out authentic experiences that allowed him to really feel the culture and get to know the people. Living with a group of hill-tribe people in the north was one of his favourite periods of time in Thailand. He had no problem accepting the routines and found it a nice break from the usual.

He also liked the fact that this allowed him to steer clear of other foreigners in Thailand. Sure, there were some decent people who he had met. But for the most part, he inevitably tired of the sameness that they represented and he ended up involved in some kind of confrontation with them before too long.

Alcohol was his constant companion and his disputes with other foreigners often were a result of his over-the-top consumption. He found work as an English teacher in a medium-sized town in the northeast of Thailand and quickly fell into the habit of getting fall-down drunk on weekends. Before long, his weekends started on Thursday evening, which meant that he rarely made it in to work on Fridays.

When he did roll in on Fridays, the stench of booze rose off him like the rancid odour from a corpse that had lain in the sun for a few days. Like so many alcoholics, the inevitable melodramas nourished him and gave him a purpose in life.

The fact that so many people cared about him and wanted him to set things right was also some kind of balm. But to a person who is immersed in the downward spiral of alcohol abuse, it doesn’t seem so cringe-worthy and borderline offensive. Because aside from the booze, melodrama is all the alcoholic has to sustain him.

When the crises and histrionics wear thin for many of the alcoholic’s friends and acquaintances, they start to fall by the wayside. Most people just don’t have time for someone who is perpetually dysfunctional. Most people won’t tolerate someone who doesn’t treat others with respect and decency. Alas, long-term alcoholics rarely treat others better than they treat themselves.

And so it was with the Beetle. He got drunk in public and blundered his way through the semester at school. He missed more days. He insulted more of his friends. Finally, he lost his job. Instead of accepting what he must have known was caused by his own actions, the Beetle chose to frame the dismissal as some kind of stitch-up.

He contacted a lawyer and together they worked up a case of wrongful dismissal. As irresponsible as the Beetle had been, and as justified as the school was in letting him go, apparently they hadn’t followed the word of the contract and a labour court ruled in his favour. He received a reasonable payout and promptly went on a bender to celebrate.

Though booze was the Beetle’s addiction, women were his passion. In Thailand, even habitual alcoholics like the Beetle still have a shot of landing a reasonably normal woman for a companion. When his repellent public behaviour drove off the most desperate women, prostitutes took up the slack.

In early 2002, the Beetle entered his most self-destructive phase. His remaining money was going to alcohol and prostitutes.

On Thursday, April 20th, he shambled into one of the city’s beer bars/prostitute pick-up locations and found a seedy looking young whore whose services he had procured in the past. With a few words they were off to his room, a short-term doss-house where you could pay by the day, week or month.

The Beetle liked this particular whore because she was business-like and tolerated the fall-down drunken state that he was in when he picked her up. She also had another feature that pleased the Beetle. She could acquire marijuana, a habit that the Beetle had been indulging in more and more in recent months.

As they settled onto his unmade bed, the Beetle rolled up a nice fat joint. He looked around at the squalor. Piles of dirty clothes and empty take-out food containers littered the tile floor. A cheap stereo system was on a table in the corner, and an array of cracked CD cases were on the floor surrounding the table. On his kitchen table were a few full ashtrays and a tea kettle. Not one of the new-fangled kettles with a base and a tall cylindrical, plastic container with a gauge on the side that showed how much water was left. This kettle was one of those old fashioned half-globe metal jobs with only a handle and a spout. The Beetle had picked it up at a local second-hand store. He liked its simplicity and it reminded him of the kettle that his mother had when he was growing up.

The stale air in his cramped little room smelled of cigarettes and that fruity, boozy odour that follows drunks wherever they go. The shutters opened out onto a fairly busy road and the noises from the street drifted in. His only other possession was a rickety old fan which would only operate on the lowest setting.

Perhaps the Beetle had a notion that his behaviour was becoming more self-destructive and dangerous. He knew that the risks associated with using illegal drugs in Thailand were real and ever-present. Still, a number of other foreigners indulged in the occasional joint and nothing had happened yet. Let the good times flow and damn the consequences.

Maybe there was just a little twig in his mind as he went to the toilet and saw the whore take out her mobile phone and start dialing. Maybe he even saw in his mind’s eye the ultimate drama taking shape as he shut the door on the toilet and heard her talking in hushed tones. He could understand Thai quite well and so he imagined that she was probably setting up another date for later on in the day. It was only 1:00 in the afternoon. He still had some money and was going to enjoy the high from the grass and the sex that followed.

He sat on the toilet and looked up at the drab walls. The calm reverie of an afternoon with no responsibilities overcame him as he listened to the dull drone of other people going about their daily lives down in the street. Maybe he would take a break from the bottle after today. The after-effects of benders like this were taking longer and longer to wear off. He knew there were a couple of schools in the area that were looking for teachers. And he would need more money soon.

The Beetle’s reverie was disturbed by banging at the front door of the room and then some shouts in Thai. He heard the door being opened and the sounds that come with the presence of a number of people where before there were none. Who the hell is it? He knew a few down-and-outers who lived on the same floor but they rarely showed up in the middle of the day. Why did she let them in?

He opened the door and saw four Thai police officers in his room. He looked toward the door and saw the merest hint of the whore as she ducked out. They weren’t interested in her. The Beetle’s guts dropped. He had been set up.

After the Beetle was arrested, news of his plight appeared on a discussion forum that was based in China but had a section devoted to Thailand. The Beetle was a popular poster on this forum leading up to his arrest for possession of marijuana in the spring of 2002. Before that time, he was the good-natured and affable Beetle, the secret of his alcoholism known to only a handful of people on the forum.

But as with any dramas that break into the open, a compulsion overtakes some people to share as much information as possible. The human need to share bad news is almost overwhelming and is often cloaked under the guise of letting people know with the hopes that others will step forward to help. That happens on occasion, but this was not one of them. It was voyeuristic pablum for the throngs, many of whom weighed in on with their views about whether the Beetle deserved what he was currently going through. He was banged up in a jail in the northeast, awaiting his trial for possession of marijuana.

The handful of posters on the forum who did step up and take charge of helping the Beetle as much as they could, were aware of the situation from almost the beginning. They started visiting the Beetle in jail and relaying his comments and general state of mind to the people on the forum.

Ostensibly, there were a few reasons for those in direct contact with the Beetle to comment on the discussion forum about the developing situation. They could pass on information to the gaping bystanders, and they could try to elicit donations.

They took pleasure in breathlessly posting on the thread with new information and expected court dates. They contacted the Beetle’s family in Australia and met one of the Beetle’s brothers when he arrived in Thailand to work with the Beetle’s lawyer and the Australian Embassy.

It should be noted that from all accounts it appears that the Beetle authorized the individuals who were helping him. In his state and situation, it probably was something to hold onto. The realization that there were people who were pulling for him was probably a source of hope. Of course, he could have no idea what was being written about him on the forum.

The comments about the Beetle’s situation fell into three categories. Some posters heaped scorn on him for being so stupid and getting involved with illegal drugs in a country that is known for having harsh laws. Their barely contained glee at seeing the Beetle get “exactly what he deserves” was a corollary of people who feel more alive when they hear news of relative strangers dying in mishaps. Others felt nothing but sympathy for the Beetle and wanted to concentrate on doing what they could to help him.

Did anyone from the group of supporters do anything tangible to help the Beetle? Visit him in prison or donate money? Aside from those two or three posters who were in it from the start and did everything possible for the Beetle—and they fall into the third category: people who expressed their concern and actually did something—there is not much evidence that anyone else helped in any real way. Some donations did trickle in to a fund set up to help the Beetle, but most people stayed on the sidelines.

The administrator of the discussion forum at that time was someone who lived in the same geographic area in Thailand as the Beetle. He had gotten to know the Beetle, had been on a few drinking sessions with him and had even helped the Beetle to find work on a few occasions.

As the Beetle’s current situation was due to his being in possession of illegal drugs, it was somewhat ironic that the administrator of the forum had for a user-name the chemical designation of a popular drug from the 1960s: LSD.

It was clear to anyone who read or posted on the forum that LSD had felt contempt for the Beetle for some time. Despite the fact that the Beetle had been one of the most prolific and popular posters on the forum, something had changed between LSD and the Beetle in recent months. No details were forthcoming, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that something in the real world had caused their relationship to sour somewhat. Also, the Beetle had made a snide comment regarding LSD’s wife, suggesting that she had breath that could burn a hole through a brick wall. Whether this was on top of other insults or misdeeds in the real world was not clear.

When news of the Beetle’s arrest hit the forum, LSD was cool to the situation but didn’t hide the fact that he was always eager to increase readership numbers. And a thread like the one that was following the Beetle’s incarceration and legal wrangling was the most popular thread the forum had seen in years.

Some controversy erupted over whether the thread should be allowed to continue because of the overwhelming number of negative comments directed toward the Beetle.

While the forum was anonymous for the most part, because the arrest had been covered—though it was very low profile—in the media, anyone could now deduce exactly who the Beetle was.

LSD’s only criteria for allowing the thread to remain was the fact that the Beetle had apparently given his blessing via the forum members who were visiting him in jail, bringing him food and small amounts of money and passing on messages to the Beetle’s family, who were now all back in Australia.

The saga of the Beetle’s time in jail dragged on longer than anyone could have predicted. The legal back and forth continued and a number of preliminary trials were held and finally the Beetle was transferred to Bangkok. It was inevitable that he would be found guilty of the charge, serve a month or so more and then be deported from Thailand, never to return.

By the time the Beetle was released, four months had passed. This might not seem like a long period of time, but inside the unrelenting and brutal conditions of a Thai jail the four months felt like a lot longer to the Beetle. His health wasn’t great due to the chronic abuse of alcohol, and, at the age of almost 56, the Beetle had declined markedly during his time away.

Those last few days before he was loaded on a plane and sent back to Australia must have been bittersweet for him. Of course, he had no days of freedom to say goodbye to the friends he had made over the years. From the jail in Bangkok he was transported in a van to a holding cell at the airport, and then, with an escort from the Australian embassy, put on a plane for Sydney. As the plane took off, it really hit him how much he was losing. He could have seen himself living out his final years here. That was out of the question now. He would never be able to return. Barred for life.

Upon his return to Sydney, the Beetle was put up by a brother and he went through a period of strange euphoria followed by deep despair. He rode a wave of twisted celebrity amongst some of his long lost mates in Australia and his family, who were thankful that he was home in one piece. It was a few weeks before the Beetle logged into the discussion forum to see what was up. The thread discussing his incarceration was still at the top of the list.

When the Beetle posted on the forum for the first time following his ordeal, he was greeted with a round of welcomes and queries about how he was getting on now that he was back in the “real world.” He relayed some of the details that hadn’t come out about his arrest and jail time. He was still bitter about the fact that “the whore set me up.”

As the months went by, the Beetle logged into the forum less and less. He was struggling to find work and he grew angry about some of the comments that people had made. It dawned on him that it was too easy for anyone to determine his real identity based on the information that appeared on the forum and he asked LSD to remove the thread about his arrest and incarceration. LSD promptly refused.

He stated that no one had directly outed the Beetle and the thread was one of the most popular the forum had ever known. LSD had never made any bones about the fact that his main goal was to make the forum as popular as possible and reap the profits from advertising.

He wasn’t about to delete a thread that brought in so much traffic. Would he have deleted it if it had been about someone who he hadn’t fallen out with in recent months? Hard to say.

But LSD’s glee that he held the whip hand with regard to the fate of the thread was palpable.

The Beetle would never again log into the forum. Six months later he was dead.

The Beetle was Found Dead

The thread announcing the Beetle’s death appeared one day in early 2003. It was posted by LSD. LSD had been informed that the Beetle had been found dead in his apartment in Mexico by one of his fellow teachers. The Beetle had been bitten by the travel bug about six months after he returned to Australia.

After so many years on the road, he never really had a chance at finding something meaningful that would sustain him as he passed age 56. He had considered Korea but the complications arising from his arrest in Thailand meant that some countries were now out of the question. He decided on Mexico and when he arrived he plunged into the life and culture and had found a teaching job in no time.

It was anyone’s guess as to how he had died. The years of hard living and drinking had no doubt taken their toll. And the four months in prison were difficult on his mind and body.

LSD’s obituary thread had that energized tone that once again proved the truism that humans love being the bearers of bad news. There’s just something borderline thrilling about dropping the bomb that will leave people reeling. It’s usually not a sinister thing.

An outpouring of angst and emotion quickly appeared in posts on the thread. The majority of people posting on the thread had neither met the Beetle in person nor even been regulars on the forum during his heyday of posting.

But a handful of posters knew the Beetle quite well and their thoughts were moving and genuine. Still, there was the sense that surrounds anyone’s death, that much of the hand-wringing and grief was based on the acute realization of one’s own mortality.

Anger was directed at LSD because of his earlier dispute with the Beetle over the incarceration thread. LSD announced that the thread had now been deleted. The jabs against him continued, with some posters even suggesting that LSD had not been helpful when the Beetle had landed in jail.

A few pages into the obituary thread, LSD unloaded and let his true feelings about the Beetle come out. He had felt barely contained contempt for the Beetle for some time because of the Beetle’s behaviour in the year leading up to his arrest. According to LSD, the Beetle had been a disrespectful bore, getting drunk in public and letting his drinking habits affect his teaching. He had borrowed money from other foreigners and never paid it back. And some other minor grievances.

Other posters suggested that it was hardly the place to criticize someone; in the online equivalent of a wake. But LSD was unrepentant. He was electrified at the knowledge that he was in control and could do whatever he pleased. He wasn’t aware of how gutless it appeared to others.

The question had to be in everyone’s mind: Why would he wait until after someone had died to air the harshest criticisms of that person? When that person was no longer around to respond?

But then, LSD had always come across as disingenuous to me. In many ways, he was a perfect choice as the administrator for a strange, dysfunctional discussion forum populated by anti-social lunatics who couldn’t make it in their home countries.

Had he treated him disrespectfully when he was alive, refusing to delete some information that could have given the Beetle a sense of well being as he tried to start over, and then further trashed him after he was gone, simply because the Beetle had suggested LSD’s wife could improve her personal hygiene?

To determine someone else’s motives, let alone your own, can be an impossible task. The litany of neuroses and layers of subconscious forces at work mean it is a fool’s game to even try. But one thing is certain: the Beetle touched many people with his approach to life, his humour in the face of obstacles, and his simple acts of kindness. He will be remembered by many people, even those he never met, for a long time.

Garvin the Meek

Thousands of expats live in Bangkok. Still, you can go weeks without having a normal conversation with someone who speaks English. As a result, you often end up spending time with people who you wouldn’t otherwise. You may even become friends with someone who you would never interact with in your home country.

Garvin was that kind of person. Younger than me and into the whole clubbing scene, the only thing that I had in common with him was that I lived in the same condominium complex. He liked to feel plugged in to the buzzing, hectic lifestyle that involved constant outings and stringing along multiple women at the same time.

I sensed the first time he started talking to me next to the condo swimming pool, that he really wanted someone to rank himself against. To determine if he was living a more authentic and worthy expat experience. In turn, he provided observational fodder for me.

He was from Scotland and was working as a corporate English teacher. On the number of occasions I ran into him after the meeting at the swimming pool, he hinted that he was already thinking of moving on. He had been in Thailand for two years and wanted to go back to Scotland and upgrade his education.

He was lean, not unattractive to women and generally an affable person. I ran into him a couple of times over the next few months and exchanged pleasantries and meaningless small talk. Like many expats in Thailand, he had that compulsion to share with me what he thought was an impressive track record with Thai women.

A few weeks after my last interaction with him, Garvin phoned me at home and told me that he wanted to meet me at the swimming pool. This was back in the day when the only available Internet option was dial-up, and because of the amount of time I spent online, it was often hard for people to get a hold of me due to the fact that the phone line was busy. Also, I still didn’t have a mobile phone.

I walked down to the swimming pool and met Garvin.

“Listen, I’m moving on next week. I’m moving to a different place in Bangkok. And then, probably within the year, I’ll be heading back to Scotland.”

I felt a twinge of envy at hearing that someone had taken the appropriately short amount of time to get all they needed from this country.

“Probably a good idea,” I said as I wondered what he needed from me.

“I wanted to ask you a favour. I was hoping that I could store a few of my things at your place for the next three weeks or so.”

I hesitated for a minute. I had always taken great pleasure in casually saying no to people’s requests when they thought they had softened me up enough to guarantee agreement. Many people mistake politeness for weakness, and I loved offering up, with no explanation at all, a blank-faced “No.”

But, perhaps this was a relatively benign request.

“What kind of things?”

“Well, why don’t you come up to my place and I can show you. Some of the things you’re free to keep. It’s just that I really don’t have the means to transport everything to my new place. And, to be honest, I’m having a bit of a dispute with the people who own the condo.”

“Ah. You want to slip out unnoticed,” I said.

“Come on up and take a look.”

The inside of his apartment looked like a skid-row dive. Dirty clothes and plates were strewn around the room. The oily reeking miasma of rancid food hung over the kitchen sink that was piled high with dirty dishes. Numerous empty pizza boxes were among the detritus that cluttered the filthy rooms.

I looked at Garvin. He had one of those shit-eating grins on his face that people display when they think that others are somehow impressed with their repellent, self-serving behaviour.

“Classy,” I said.

The smirk fell from Garvin’s face as soon as I said that. In the handful of times I had interacted with him, I noticed that Garvin didn’t like to disagree with people or cause them any kind of discomfort. He quickly changed an opinion or modified his actions to suit the people he was with.

“Yah, I know,” he said in his Scottish accent, suddenly tinged with a hint of apology. “Me and my mate who was staying here with me kind of just let things get out of hand.”

Garvin pointed out the things that he wanted to store in my place.

“And you can have this washing machine,” he said. It was a semi-manual washing machine. You added the water with a bucket and then took the washed clothes out of the drum when they were clean and put them into a separate spin container. There were a few pieces of small furniture, a guitar, and a wooden crossbow, of all things. Not a lot really. I could push it all into one corner of my place and still have plenty of room.

“OK, sure,” I said. We spent the next 45 minutes carrying everything across the complex into my building. Despite the relatively small amount of work, we were both soaked because of the oppressive humidity.

“So, you’ll phone me when you want to swing by and pick up everything?”

“Yes, exactly. It should be about two or three weeks.”

The weeks came and went and I didn’t hear anything from Garvin. I hadn’t taken his phone number because the onus was really on him to pick up his things. When the few weeks he had predicted turned into three, four, and then six months, I was getting ready to throw out the bulk of the worthless things he had left in my apartment. As if he sensed from afar that I was pissed off at his lack of contact, he phoned me.

He told me he would arrive the next evening at 6:00 in the evening with his Thai friend who owned a truck.

“Ah...that won’t work. This condominium complex is strict about move-in and move-out times. They won’t let anyone move after 5:00 in the evening.”

I heard Garvin’s muffled discussion with someone in the background. He came back on the line.

“My Thai friend says it will be OK.”

“Uh, and why does your Thai friend think it will be OK?”

“He says it will be OK. Just come down when I give you a call, OK?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. I was annoyed. Who the hell was this moron friend of his?

The call came an hour later. When I came down, I was met by a sheepish looking Garvin and a young Thai man with glasses.

“They won’t let us move the things out,” said Garvin.

“No kidding. That’s exactly what I told you.” I looked at Garvin’s friend with a sneering sense of victory. I could read him instantly. A son of rich Thais who was used to getting his way. He picked up on my contempt and his body language said he wanted out of there.

Garvin assured me that he would get back to me soon.

I didn’t hear from him for another year.

During that time the things that he had left became part of the surroundings in my apartment. I used the washing machine that he had left, but most of the other things were worthless knick-knacks and a few pieces of unwieldy wicker furniture.

One day I received a call from Garvin.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

His uncomfortable voice came over the line.

“Sorry, I haven’t been able to get a hold of you. Your line is always busy.”

It was true. I spent a lot of time online and because it was dial-up, it would be hard for people to get a hold of me.

“So, are you going to pick this stuff up or not?”

“Yes, when can I come by? I’m finally heading back to Scotland in a few weeks.”

The signal that someone was else was phoning sounded. Perhaps this too was a call that I shouldn’t miss.

“Can you hold on for a minute? I’ve got another call,” I said.

“OK,” came Garvin’s sullen response.

It was the office of my condominium complex with some questions about work that they planned on doing in my unit in the next few days. I answered their questions and then clicked the switch-hook to return to Garvin on the other line. There was only a dial tone. He had hung up or been disconnected. I realized that I didn’t know what his number was. It had been so long since I had phoned him and if I ever had written his number on a scrap of paper, I didn’t know where it was now.

I assumed that he would phone back, but he never did. He must have thought that I was trying to avoid him or that I wanted to keep his things.

Life carried on and Garvin faded into the background as just another interesting character that you get mixed up with when you are living as an expat in Thailand.

I left the condo complex and lived in different regions of Thailand. Then I returned to Canada for a number of years. Finally, I gravitated back to Thailand and after a few years even returned to the same condominium complex.

I was walking through the local supermarket one day and passed a lumbering western lummox and a not unattractive Caucasian woman. I continued on with my shopping. But as I was in the checkout line, the lummox approached me and asked if I remembered him. I’m sure I had that deer in the headlights look momentarily, but I instinctively knew that it was Garvin.

“Yes, you are the one who left all the things at my place,” I said. It would be foolish not to have mentioned the single thing that was the focus of our brief friendship, if you could even call it that. I thought I sensed a momentary glimmer that told me Garvin wasn’t satisfied with the way things had played out seven years earlier. But no, he didn’t pursue it. We both seemed kind of pleased with this coincidence, the kind that pops up in most people’s lives every once in a while.

Garvin wasn’t fat per se, but he had filled out. Simply grown up was probably a better way to describe it. He was in Thailand on his honeymoon and the woman I had seen with him was his new wife. He also informed me that he was working on completing his PhD in Scotland. It looked like things were working out well for him, though I’m convinced people like others to think they are happier than they really are. Still, on the face of it, he had got out at the right time and was making a decent life for himself.

We didn’t exchange e-mail addresses or talk about meeting up for dinner. We had barely known each other. Any attempt at socializing would have been awkward and artificial. We shook hands and I wished him good luck.

The Flood

In July of 2011, in the middle of the yearly rainy season in Thailand, flooding arrived in the north and northeast of the country. Flooding is not uncommon in Thailand. Especially in recent years, heavier than normal rainfall and over-logging in the mountains has resulted in more runoff than usual.

But 2011 was exceptional. The rains just kept pounding down day after day. The pictures on the evening news were depressing: montages of old women being rescued from submerged homes, sandbags being stacked and breached, and relief centres distributing food.

By the end of September, the floods had moved further south to Ayyutaya and then into the region of Patum Thani that is just north of Bangkok. Thousands of homes and factories were under water and the rains kept coming. It slowly dawned on everyone that Bangkok would be next to be hit with severe flooding. Flooding takes place in Bangkok on a fairly regular basis during the rainy season, but it is localized in a few low-lying areas and usually only lasts for a few days or weeks at a time.

This time around, it was much worse. To drain off the deluge, the waters would have to be routed through Bangkok and then on to the Gulf of Thailand. And it was a massive amount of water.

In late October and early November, the water arrived in numerous districts in the north and west of Bangkok. The water started coming up through the drain pipes, and then there were 30, 40, 50 centimetres and more of water. Lakes of water wherever you looked. Buses kept plowing through all but the deepest areas, but cars were completely absent in some districts. The surreal silence early in the morning as I went to the main street near my apartment was striking and peaceful.

Many people had fled the capital city, but there were still a fair number of zombie-like people walking around with blank looks on their faces. It was hard work trudging through all that water.

The store shelves were quickly emptied of all the basics. The food production factories in Pathum Thani were shut down, and getting what supplies existed was made difficult because of all the water. It brought home how much those in the cities blindly count on so many people and organizations to keep their conveniences alive and well.

A few years before the flood of 2011, I met a Brit named Louis, who had retired to Thailand and married a Thai woman. Louis had owned a small construction company for 30 years in London and his savings guaranteed him a comfortable retirement in Thailand.

My friendship with Louis was unlikely, especially in Thailand. In the real world, having friends in different social classes or with more disposable income was not unheard of, but in the expat’s world it was almost unknown. Sure, you could meet different people from different backgrounds, but to maintain a long-term friendship with someone who rolled in a higher income bracket was an anomaly.

The reason is simple: westerners who settle down in Thailand ostensibly want to leave behind many of the annoyances and familiarities of life in their home countries. However, rankism amongst expats is more extreme than class divisions at home. The absence of day-to-day interactions with others who possess relatively similar world-views and conditioning results in exaggerated displays of those social habits when expats do mix with each other.

Add to that the fact that Thailand is an extremely class conscious society. Expats get drawn into this whether they like to admit it or not. Foreigners living in Thailand want to prove to Thais and expats just how far up the food chain they believe they are.

Louis was no exception. He was rightfully proud of what he had accomplished in his life and the financial rewards it had brought him. He had a new house, new car, all the latest technological gadgets and a Thai wife 20 years younger than him.

Louis would invite me over to his house in Patum Thani on occasion. Inevitably, we would always spend the first half hour or so standing around his recent acquisitions as he regaled me about all the features and looked at me expectantly for the appropriately impressed reaction. Then we would settle into the bar and games room at the back of his house.

It was a stand-alone structure that had been built shortly after he bought the house. A snooker table, dart board, full bar, and wide-screen TV fitted out the large, air-conditioned room. Leather couches lined two walls of the main room, with the bar at the rear, and bar stools lined up along the fourth wall. The large, red-felted snooker table was in the middle of the room. A narrow hallway near the bar led to another room that contained an 80 inch Samsung TV fitted to the wall and another section of the room set aside for darts.

It was indeed a nice place to spend a few hours.

“What do you want to drink then mate?” Louis said to me as I sat on one of the couches in his well-appointed games room and bar. It was a Friday afternoon in August and there had been no rainfall for the past few days. The heavy humidity of the day was a good excuse to seek refuge in here and shoot a few games of snooker.

“Just a cold bottle of water,” I said.

Louis let out an expulsion of air and guffawed. “The best private fucking bar in Pathum Thani and you want a drink of fucking water,” he said with no trace of animosity.

He went to the bar and pulled out a glass bottle of mineral water and set it on the granite topped bar with a solid clacking sound. I could see the bottle frosting up nicely. Then Louis pulled down a tall glass from an overhead shelf, took the lid off a stainless steel ice bucket, and tonged three large cubes of frosty looking ice into the glass. He placed the lid back on the ice bucket with affectionate care, pulled the tab on the bottle and poured the water into the glass with a flourish. From below the bar, he lifted up a small white dish with pre-cut slices of lime, took a small set of tongs and placed a few wedges of lime into the glass. Finally, he took a coaster with a logo and the name Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum and a napkin emblazoned with the same name, set them down on the long, low glass table in front of the couch and placed my water on the coaster.

“There you go mate,” he said with a satisfied smile. “Just give me a few minutes to prepare my drink.”

I knew from past experience that he would probably be opening a fresh bottle of the kind of spirit whose name was on the coaster and napkin. Louis ordered bottles of expensive liquor from various online shops and had them shipped to Thailand. When he opened the boxes, they often included a few stacks of coasters and other marketing knick-knacks such as key chains and calendars.

He went to the bar and pulled down a bottle of, yes, Gosling’s Family Old Reserve Rum. He looked at the bottle for a minute, and then located a small pull tab at the top of the bottle and pulled it. The blob of wax that sealed the top of the bottle loosened and fell onto the bar top. He then popped the cork on the bottle and inhaled deeply. Then he took down the same kind of tall glass he had served my water in, ran a wedge of lime around the rim of the glass, turned the glass over and dipped it in a plate of sugar.

Next, he produced a stainless steel shaker from beneath the bar, filled it with crushed ice, splashed a few jolts of bitters into the shaker, added some lime juice, and then carefully measured out two ounces of the rum and poured it into the shaker. He shook the concoction vigorously for 30 seconds or so, flipped off the lid and poured the contents through a strainer into his glass. He added a few leaves of mint to the drink and finally topped it off with a few slices of lime. Then he plunked a stir stick into his drink; the kind made out of translucent blue plastic and shaped like a caricature of a beautiful, buxom woman. He picked up a coaster, napkin and his drink and sat down on the couch next to me, ensuring that he left space between us.

“Well old chap, here’s to the good life!” he said. We clinked our glasses and each took a sip of our drinks.

Louis let out a theatrical sigh. “Some quality rum there my friend,” he said.

“I would have thought that’s the kind of quality that you would reserve for drinking straight,” I said. He looked flustered but recovered quickly.

“You are right there my friend. And usually I would only drink it straight, but on a day like this, a nice cocktail helps a person to cool off. Now, shall we play a game of snooker?”

He was up before I answered, racking and arranging the various balls in their correct locations on the table.

“Why don’t you break,” he said.

My pool playing skills were next to abysmal. I always tried to make up for my bad playing with an explosive break, even though a player didn’t necessarily want to spread the balls out so much in snooker. I figured the harder I blasted the shot off the break, the better chance I had that something would go down.

I wound up and drove my shoulders into the almightiest shot I could muster.

We played silently for the next 40 minutes or so, with Louis winning both games. As he was racking the balls for another game, I heard the door to the games room close behind me. I turned to see a dusky, five foot nothing Thai woman padding across the room in her bare feet. She had that practiced blank look of many Thais. Not necessarily a coldness, or shyness, but simply the lack of moronic, superficial gesturing and grinning that so many westerners engage in.

“There she is! Come here sweetheart,” said Louis. His wife looked at her husband as if to say, “Have some class you old fool.”

But she relented and walked up to Louis and allowed him to give her an exaggerated embrace for my sake. “You’ve met the missus, haven’t you Robin?” he asked me.

“I don’t believe I have, no,” I said. I was trying to think back over the handful of times I had been to his place. Apparently his wife had remained a shadow in the background. I was surprised at this as Louis had a compulsion to show off his possessions.

“Well Robin, this is Pook. Pook, I want you to meet Robin, one of my friends.”

Pook and I looked at each other and exchanged an uncomfortable nod. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Yes, me too,” Pook said.

“Louis, some friends said the water coming closer,” Pook said.

“Ah, don’t worry about the water. We’ll be all right. I was reading the news online this morning and the Thai government seems to think that everything is in order,” said Louis.

Pook didn’t look convinced. She sat down on one of the couches, crossed her legs and looked sullenly at some unspecified spot on the opposite wall.

“You think the Thai government has provided an accurate picture of how things are going to play out with this flood?” I asked Louis.

“I think so. Anyway, she’s getting told what to do by her big brother. I think he’s got a pretty good idea of things.”

Louis was referring to the current prime minister of Thailand and her exiled brother who was the former PM. I had noticed that expats seemed to take on the political views of their host country depending on who their romantic partners were. Hook up with someone from the lower classes and the expat is liable to support the so-called populist government who has thrown a few crumbs to the peasants to keep them onside. Marry a girl from the middle or upper classes of Bangkok and he’s bound to take on the elitist view and think the party who makes it easy for the rich fuckers to maintain the easy life is best for Thailand.

“So you still doing the English teaching gig?”

Here we go, I thought. Louis always got on this topic. The longer we knew each other, the more comfortable he felt riding me about my job. Teaching English did put one firmly at the bottom of the expat hierarchy in Thailand.

“Yes, I am” I said. I lined up a shot and stroked the cue ball. One of the red balls dropped in a corner pocket.

“How much you getting paid for that Robin? Enough for beer, your rent and a few DVDs every month?” Louis snickered and watched me as I lined up another shot.

“I probably make more than you know,” I said.

“Louis, that’s not polite,” Pook said. We both looked at her surprised that she had understood everything.

“We’re just havin’ a laugh sweetheart,” said Louis.

I made a point of smiling at Pook.

“So how much do you make Robin? Really, I’m just curious.”

So you can rank yourself against me a bit more, I thought. It was pointless to get into it with Louis on any level. Playing the “I truly don’t care” card when discussing money was futile. Even if you really felt that way, you could convince no one. And usually you were trying to convince yourself at the same time as well. Who doesn’t want a bit more to make things easier?

“I’m a bit old school about things like that. Let’s just say that I’m doing all right,” I said.

A certain sneering arrogance inflates expats who are retired in Thailand or were sent over to work for some multinational company. When they get an EFL teacher in the room, they can barely contain themselves over what they are certain is a massive difference in earnings and savings. For the most part, they aren’t wrong. But the bland assumptions that are never questioned and the belief that they have the whole width and breadth of the English teaching possibilities clear in their minds because someone once told them what they wanted to hear, can really grate.

“I see,” said Louis with a smug grin on his face.

We continued playing snooker for another hour or so. At one point, talk turned to the expat community in Pattaya and the strange number of suspicious deaths of foreigners that took place there.

“Another swan-diver there the other day. Read about it on one of the online Pattaya newspapers. What kind of sad fuck-up gets himself into such a hole in this paradise that he jumps off his balcony. Probably working as a ...” Louis caught himself before he finished. He leaned over and made a shot. “Well, you know what I mean Robin.”

“Yes, I certainly do.”

I had long thought that the people one compares himself to provides a pretty good indication of a person’s real self-image. If you get satisfaction out of seeing others in despair and ending it all, then you’re aiming pretty low.

We finished up the game and I left shortly after. I got the feeling it would be some time, if ever, that I would return to Louis’s house in Pathum Thani.

It turned out that it was less than two weeks later that I would be in contact with Louis again. Despite assurances from the government, the flood waters did come surging down from the north and they turned the whole of Pathum Thani into a vast lake, with areas that were like a surging river. The worst floods to hit Thailand in a century and the entire basin of Pathum Thani filled up.

I thought of Louis as I watched the images on TV of people moving through chest-high water and of others having to be rescued by boat. What about all those bottles of expensive alcohol Louis had ordered online? He must have found some way to save them.

At the beginning of November I received a call from Louis. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was lying next to the pool in the apartment complex where I lived. The complex was completely dry though there was water about 100 metres away. Regardless, being on the fifth floor meant that however close the water came, I wouldn’t suffer too much.

“Louis, how are things? You staying dry?” I used that annoying question that had become so common during the flood. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t dry at all.

“No, our house is destroyed. Everything ruined.”

“I thought you said there was no way the flood waters were going to reach your place. Surely you took some precautions.”

“No, we took none. I thought until the last minute that we were going to be OK.”

“Yah fucking idiot!” I said, using my best “just ‘avin a laugh mate” voice. “I’m dry as can be here yah brainless fucking Brit cocksucker! What about all that precious booze you ordered online? You must have been able to save some of it.”

“No, all gone too,” he said. His voice had gone down an octave.

“So, where you calling from? A fucking dinghy?” I burst out laughing. “Ha, ha...you got the wife manning the oars for you Louis? I am enjoying life at the moment as all these sad motherfuckers who didn’t prepare for the worst are crying their fucking eyes out.”

A tense silence came over the line.

“It’s a lot more complicated than that, Robin,” he finally said.

Ah, the amazing ability that personal experience has to teach us all about nuance. The whole country was shrieking that the floods were bearing down on Pathum Thani but Louis smugly insisted that he would somehow stay dry. Yet he easily gained a sense of superiority when considering expats caught in the grip of despair who decided to end it all.

“I guess what they say about every good thing having a bad side and vice versa, is true. When you’ve got a lot, you’ve got a lot to lose as well. You think those sad bastards who leaped to their deaths maybe had a story that was a bit more complicated than you gave them credit for?”

I didn’t hear any response.

“So what are you going to do? Where the hell are you anyway?”

Nothing.

“Louis, what the hell is going on? Where’s your wife, is she with you?”

“She left. She went to her family I think. I’m at a hotel on Sukhumvit Road.”

I felt a wave of pity for the old buffoon.

“Suck it up old boy. Everything will work out in the end.”

“Sometimes things don’t work out. I get the feeling Pook won’t be back.”

After I hung up the phone, I decided to head down to Louis’s hotel to pay him a visit. The hotel was located in a part of Bangkok that hadn’t yet been affected by the floods.

It was one of those places that had a nostalgic feel about it, like a long-lost era that was preserved and showcased in the form of crisp employee uniforms and overly solicitous service.

“I want to talk to Louis Trompford,” I said to the front desk employee. “What floor is he staying on?”

“On the 18th floor, sir.”

Arse Wars

“You son-of-a-bitch!” The utterance of his last word coincided with his fist slamming into my orbital bone, hot fluid running down my face, and near unconsciousness. Despite it all, I couldn’t help smirking, looking up through blood, matted hair and clenched teeth, straining against the ropes that bound my arms behind the chair and challenging the cunt with a look of defiance.

The greatest commercial fraud ever perpetrated on a group of unsuspecting fools.

A multi-billion dollar industry built on the nearly unquestioned belief that the best way to clean yourself after defecating is to take a coarse piece of paper and smear the remnants of shit all over your arse. Gouge, tear and mash away at that tender and sensitive tissue.

The most prosperous and advanced nation in the world and the majority of its populace are walking around with chunks of shit clinging to the hairs around their arseholes.

Overseas proctologists cringe when they see bloated expat yanks blundering towards the entrance to their clinics, knowing that awkward and sickening moment when they have to summon their assistant with the jackhammer.

Take a drunken yank slut home for a mattress-pounding session and there is always that tentative hesitation as to whether you should manhandle her into doggy style position for fear that as she spreads her cheeks your lust will be castrated by the sight of her soiled hole.

Why has the whole world figured out the simplest, most effective and hygienic way to clean your arsehole is with water, while yanks, Brits and perhaps a few others insist on luxuriating in their own filth and excrement?

Many Europeans have the somewhat cumbersome bidets while most of Asia uses a simple hose and nozzle that can be adjusted with different levels of water pressure. The result is quick, thorough and painless.

Doctors have done studies that have shown that those who use water as opposed to paper are less likely to suffer from hemorrhoids, piles and other conditions.

During my years in Asia, it never ceased to amaze me that no one had taken the idea back to the UK or the US and made a concerted effort to market the hose and nozzle method. If you could convince people to try it, it almost couldn’t fail simply because any damn fool would have to see the superior cleaning that resulted.

On reflection, there were certain obstacles that would have to be overcome. Those habits surrounding personal hygiene are learned early and become personalized and ritualized in decades of layered and hardened shit. It’s hard to crack that petrified wall of excrement even with undeniable logic and reason.

That and the fact that there was no actual invention or innovation that could be patented. I determined that the hose and nozzle method was the best option. While already available in any hardware or DIY store and often used for other purposes, such as hooked up next to the kitchen sink and used for washing up, if it was packaged specifically as an arse-hose and marketed in conjunction with an advertising campaign, it just might work.

In fact, this is exactly what I did. I took on the UK market while some of my associates handled the US. I managed to co-opt a few high-profile proctologists who quickly agreed to shill for our product in exchange for some time with the entourage of Asian tarts I had brought with me. There was a lighthearted advertising campaign that degraded anyone who was filthy enough to not see the benefits of water over paper.

It somehow seemed to be the right time; the public was receptive and the media lavished so much free publicity on us that we were able to scale back the advertising as sales quickly racked up. One concern that could have prevented quick acceptance was the fact that most homes and public restrooms would have to be renovated with special fittings so that the hoses could be installed. An inconvenience and additional cost that could throw a shit caked toilet brush into the works.

We insinuated some of our thugs and operatives into various plumbers unions on both continents. People were leaned on and the clogged pipes of understanding were cleared up in remarkably short order. Favourable deals were struck that meant any customer who wanted to have our product installed would receive a fair deal and others who saw how easily they could siphon off some of our business with their own set-up were quickly dissuaded by abrasive and uncooperative plumbers.

It was about that time that the big corporate, toilet paper giants started to make shrill public comments about the supposed “dangers” of our products. The absurdity of their claims were commensurate with the continuing demand of our product and skyrocketing sales. They ratcheted up their own advertising campaigns but they were no longer touting the benefits of paper, they were manufacturing bogus claims to try and smear us. Testimonials were trotted out with bloated illiterates claiming to have suffered permanent internal damage from our arse-hoses. We beat off a few high profile lawsuits and we just kept on hammering those shit smearers closer to a day when they would be obsolete.

They did seem to have some loyalists and almost to a person they were uneducated bible-beaters. As their empty skulls were clogged with the absurd self-righteous and judgmental shit that refused to be cleansed with logic, so too they hung onto their shit-caked lard asses as a defiant sign that their ignorance was invincible.

We carried on unimpeded and headed towards an empire built on pristine and well-maintained arseholes. At the same time, threatening phone calls and strangers following us were becoming the norm. We laughed it off, the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it adding to the cachet that surrounded us.

One night as I headed home with a young tart at my side from a night of celebrations, I had the sense that I was being followed. The tart had become part of the group who moved with us and hoped for some crumbs of attention. Occasionally when one of us was particularly soused and had no other prospects, such as tonight, she would stagger home with us and hope for the best. At least I could be relatively certain that no unpleasant surprises awaited if she offered her ass up to me.

I fumbled with the key to the door of my walkup flat that led into the street and just as I managed to get it open we were barreled into from behind and driven into the foyer of my home. There was mass confusion and screaming and with my inebriated state and the pain from the lambasting I had just received I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on until I came to. I was rigid and unable to move, tied up in a chair. A fuming thug was in front of me with his arrogant accomplice leaning against the wall in my kitchen.

“You cunts just had to keep coming, dincha? Things were OK when you carved out a slice of the shit-filled pie but you had to have the whole thing hey? You know that I put two kids through college with this,” he held up a handful of toilet paper from a pile on the floor in front of me. He was quaking, red-faced and nearly apoplectic and barely able to hold in his rage.

“Yeah, two punks with ‘shit-caked arseholes’ as you and your fucking asshole associates like to say so often!”

He rammed a fistful of the paper into my gob, the slight perfumed aroma and the dryness that soaked up all my saliva making me gag. Then they went to work on me and did a pretty good job. I looked up with a false sense of bravado, knowing that I didn’t have much hope left, wondering what happened to the girl and scanning my memory for every bit of cinematic pop psychology of someone who had used a last ditch attempt to sway his tormentors.

The thug was sweating and panting now, taking a breather from the energy he had spent laying a pasting on me. His accomplice had casually wandered out of the kitchen. The sneer on his face perhaps an indication of what he had in mind for the girl.

I managed to spit out the wad of toilet paper that he had shoved into my mouth.

“You smell like shit you son-of-a-bitch! Can’t you see how brazenly fucking logical our product is! Yer so fuckin’ brainwashed yourself that you’re still using the god-damn paper! You sick filthy cunt! You work up a sweat and all the shit caked to your filthy hole starts emanating that putrid odour. When was the last time…”

He was still enraged but I had hit a nerve.

“How much they paying you you daft cunt!” I blared at him, my new-found sense of bravado urging me on. But his guffaws in response to my verbal attack told me that I was in for another round of abuse.

“You must love picking out the bits of paper clinging to the shit-caked hairs around your whore of a wife’s asshole as you’re fucking her!”

He came at me screaming and though my hands were bound behind me to the slats at the back of the chair I was able to stand up. I lurched to one side as he crashed into the cupboards behind me. I lunged into the other room with the chair laced to me. My forward movement carried me towards the front door that the fools seemingly hadn’t closed and I burst through into the night air launching myself off the stairs and onto the concrete of the street below where the chair shattered.

My hands now freed, I bounded back up into the house, no ache from the impact, flying on adrenaline, I charged back into the kitchen where I unloaded in a frenzy on the oaf who was still prostrate. Kicking until I was exhausted I remembered the other thug and pulled a knife out of a kitchen drawer and turned to sink it into his chest as he came back into the room in a flurry, the remarkable fluidity of the entire movement amazing me as much as the surprising lack of resistance of his flesh to the knife as he slumped to the floor.

I stood panting, the rage waning but still not gone. In workmanlike fashion, I hauled the oaf into the toilet across the hall from the kitchen along with some loose excess rope that had been used to tie my hands. Without pausing to consider any potentially unpleasant aspects of what I was doing I tore his clothing off, took the gold plated nozzle that was hanging on the wall next to the toilet and using my foot, drove it as far into the screaming oaf’s arse as I could.

Then un-attaching the hose from the wall I started lifting kicks into the squealing fucker’s midsection, driving him towards the hallway. I was directing him towards the stairwell that led towards the basement and then with a tremendous punt I lifted the bag of flesh into the air. Clattering down the stairs screaming and begging for mercy as the hose dangled from his arse, he landed with an expulsion of air and then he emitted a low moan.

I rifled through the small collection of implements and tools I kept in the basement and located what I was looking for. Grabbing the oaf by his blood-matted hair, I dragged him towards the collection of pipes that came out of the floor near the rear wall of the basement. Taking the end of the hose hanging from his arse I added a fitting and then screwed it into the main water pipe, wrapping it securely in electrical tape and cinching it tight with a spanner.

For good measure I emptied a few tubes of caulking onto his arse and then took a long pincer like utensil that was normally used for plucking small items from places that were impossible to reach by hand. I pinched the end of the hose where it protruded from his arse and drove the implement and hose further into his rectum causing him to emit a wretched scream.

I jacked up the pressure of the water far beyond anything that was possible in the toilet connection and then put my hand on the lever that would release the explosive torrent.

“I’ll show you the benefits of water you worthless son-of-a-bitch!”

Bangkok Noir

“Your thumbs ache after you strangle someone.” A convicted murderer told this to Sal Veneer in the visitors room at a federal prison in Kingston, Ontario.

Veneer started writing to prisoners when he was 16. He wasn’t really surprised when they answered. What else did they have to do with their lives? He craved the insight they could provide into the crimes they committed.

Veneer decided early that he wanted to spend his life writing about criminals and crime after he got his hands on a stack of crime noir novels. Jim Thompson, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler. He couldn’t get enough. Something bleak and unrelenting about the books drew him in.

He didn’t make much headway in his criminology classes when he got to university, though he learned plenty of valuable things and continued his habit of reading whatever he could devour on the subject. He started visiting prisoners in his second year of university to help with research one of his professors— named Gletgen—was doing. That’s when a convicted murderer told him about strangling someone. And when the idea of writing a book about crime really started to take hold with him.

He still attended his classes, but they had started to become little more than a opportunity to daydream about the book he was going to write. And a chance to talk to his classmates and pick their brains about various theories he had about criminals.

He sat next to a female student named Sherry in a class with professor Gletgen.

“Those men excite me. The ones who pull off the biggest heists and deal in the most relentless violence.”

“They don’t repulse you?”

“Yes, that too. But something vile about the whole world in which they live. The satisfaction that I am still alive in a dangerous world. To be on the very edges of that; when a writer gets inside that world and pulls you in, it can be incredibly moving.”

Veneer leaned back in his chair and smiled. Something he felt for a long time. People get a thrill out of knowing that nothing horrible has happened to them…yet. It’s one of the things that makes crime novels and movies so appealing to people.

I can do that, thought Veneer. A way to keep immersed in something that I enjoy, and avoid the anonymous, boring lives of most people. I want to do something meaningful. To know that I have affected people the way Thompson and Chandler did. OK, he thought, I might not reach the heights of legendary crime noir status. In fact, I’ve got a much better chance of writing a true crime book. But I’ve got to try.

He liked some of the classes and he enjoyed the other students. But in the end he couldn’t see how it would help him accomplish his goal of writing a true crime masterpiece. The visits to the prison were more valuable. The fear and loathing radiated off the human filth that he interacted with during his visits.

The insights they longed to share with him crackled with realism. He assumed that the convicts wouldn’t attempt to impress their fellow inmates in quite the same way. He wanted to be the closest thing to a confidante that they had.

As the research visits continued, Veneer started engaging the prisoners in wide-ranging conversations with the hope that he would glean the kind of compelling information that he could write about. He did many of the visits alone now, and this gave him the opportunity to search for that narrative that he could spin into a true crime book.

But as interesting as his interactions with prisoners were, they weren’t providing the kind of material that could be spun into entertaining reportage. Sure, it was nasty, sociopathic stuff. Like the tale a convicted murder told him of slicing open his victim’s belly and then eating the undigested spaghetti out of her stomach with a fork. Vile pieces of filth like that were simplistic animals and their stories were brutal vignettes with no rhyme or reason. He needed a narrative, a story that stretched over years and a central player who could at least elicit some sympathy from readers. An anti-hero. The kind of criminal who people secretly envy.

But Veneer kept looking for that one individual who would provide the kind of twisted tale that would motivate him to put it all together.

Then, one day he found it. He got the heads up on an interesting character at the prison that he visited. A prisoner named Vic Streeter. Life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years and he was on year 12. More than a decade stretched out in front of him, and the prospects of any semblance of a life when he got out dimmed by the day.

Veneer heard about him from a convict named Calvert Slopski. Another murderer. The murderers in the same prison all seemed to know one another. Maybe it gave them something to talk about when they met each other in the prison yard.

Slopski told Veneer that Streeter was a hard case who had spent years traveling and living in south east Asia. Apparently he was involved in heroin smuggling, spent time inside one of the toughest prisons in Thailand, the infamous Bang Kwang prison in Bangkok. Also known as the Bangkok Hilton.

Veneer knew about Bang Kwang. He had read a number of books about westerners who tried smuggling drugs in and out of Thailand, had been caught and sentenced to time inside. There was a sub-genre of books in the true crime field that specialized in their exploits. Universally horrid books though they contained the kind of details that Veneer loved to read about.

Yes, something there. I have always dreamt about traveling to Asia. And the potential for writing about someone with experience in that part of the world could be what I am looking for. I have got to research this Streeter character, thought Veneer. Got to find out whatever I can about him. Impress him with my knowledge of what he has done.

Veneer looked online and found nothing. Perhaps his crimes predated the internet. He did a scan of the microfiche database at the local library. Also nothing. What was he thinking? Just because some murderer dropped this name to Veneer did not mean a thing. In fact, if he found something on Streeter, it would have surprised him.

Veneer applied for the visit with Streeter before he left the prison the same day he had talked to Slopski. Veneer let on to the prison officials that the interview would be related to the research his professor was conducting.

The word came a few days later that Streeter agreed to the visit and the prison granted the pass. Veneer realized he had nothing to go to the interview with. No clue about who this Streeter was other than what Slopski had told him.

But Veneer remembered something that his professor in one of his criminology courses told him about interviewing people:

“People always answer in a superficial way at first. You have to probe beneath the surface to get at the things that are really interesting. The superficial response isn’t necessarily a result of a conscious attempt at deception. It’s the default response, and an indication that so many of us think in clichés and have few good listeners and askers who motivate us to do otherwise.”

The professor had interviewed hundreds of inmates during his career and Veneer had stayed after class many times to get more tips from the professor.

When Veneer arrived at the prison check-in area on the day of the visit, he provided the information that the prison authorities required of visitors. Proof of identity, his signature on various forms, one of which indicated that the information that he intended to take away was for research purposes only.

The forms complete, Veneer walked with a guard out into a low hallway that led into the visitors area.

Let’s get a look at Streeter. Look into the eyes of a man who is going to spend the next 12 years behind bars. See if there is anything that tells me what kind of person he is. But Veneer would be wary during the interview. It took him a while over the course of the time he had visited prisoners, but Veneer had learned that cons were excellent at reading emotions. If you were trying to put one over on them, or act in a way that wasn’t your true self, they knew.

The guard who was walking with Veneer lightly grabbed his arm and guided him into the room where Streeter was waiting. No glass partition and talking through phones like in all the prison movies, Veneer thought, as he often had when he met prisoners here. A room with the prisoner handcuffed to a hook welded to the metal table where he sat.

Streeter looks like a librarian thought Veneer. He was lean, not imposing at all. He had limp hair that hung uniformly around his face and the side of his head.

“Hello, my name is Vic Streeter,” he said. He leaned forward in his chair and offered his shackled hand. Veneer shook it. Firm grip, but not the strength he expected from such a supposed hard case.

“Nice to meet you. My name’s Sal Veneer.”

“I met a lot of strange characters when I lived overseas,” Streeter said. Launched right into his story. No small talk. Veneer had told the other convict, Slopski, why he wanted to interview Streeter. That he had ideas of writing a book. He was sure that Slopski had passed on the information to Streeter.

He’s got that gaunt, skull-head look, thought Veneer. Former junkie? Current junkie?

Veneer fumbled to get his notebook out as Streeter talked. “Mind if I tape record our conversation?” Veneer asked.

Streeter stopped and looked at Veneer with a calm, deliberate stare.

Fuck. Have I committed some jailhouse faux pas for daring to ask about the tape recorder? Veneer paused his hand inside of his backpack clutching the tape recorder. He looked straight at Streeter and waited.

Streeter held his gaze for a moment.

“Of course you can!” Streeter said. A smile crossed his face. Veneer breathed a sigh of relief and placed the tape recorder on the scratched metal table.

“So, I’ll keep telling you about some of my exploits and you tell me if you can use any of it,” said Streeter before he continued talking.

“When you go overseas, it’s like you see things again for the first time. You’ve been walking through life in various stages of numbness since you were a child. Maybe you don’t even know it. But when you get somewhere that is so different, it’s like a temporary revelation. Everything is new again.

“But, just as we become numbed to our most familiar surroundings, we also become more familiar with the new country that we are in as well.”

Boiler-plate stuff. Let him get warmed up. But if he doesn’t get to something interesting soon, you’ve got to hit him with some hard questions.

“But that buzz of life in a place like Bangkok can sustain you for a lot longer than life in a relatively sterile shit-hole of a city in Canada.”

Veneer jerked his head up from the notes he was scribbling and looked at Streeter at the evocation of that strangest of metaphors. Streeter smiled and recognized his own absurd imagery.

“But the greatest thing for me was the number of situations that a person could get involved in. Unlimited opportunities. I met other like-minded foreigners like myself. A sense of disconnect is part of the experience. And the weird sense that you…can get away with things. An incredibly naïve way to feel, but every other foreigner who I met in Thailand, the ones who wanted to get a situation going, felt the same way.

“Just as many ways you get can tripped up over there as here. Just different ways. First day there I ended up in a bar frequented by expats and travelers. A lot of hard cases in there and wannabe hard cases. It was pretty easy to determine who was who. I sat down beside a quieter older Brit who seemed to have an aura of calm around him. But what drew me to him was the fact that a coterie of little sycophants surrounded him. He obviously had something that they wanted.

“Brits are some of the nastiest characters in that part of the world, foreigners who set up their own little underworld full of scams, heists and plenty of violence. If you play the game right, you can join in their fun and games and get away with a lot.”

“What was it that you got away with?” asked Veneer. He looked around the grim room and the guard standing at the door and then looked back at Streeter.

“Sure, I’m sitting here for a good chunk of my life. But what I’m in here for has little to do with what happened over there. “

Streeter pulled out a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket and started rolling a cigarette.

“What I got away with, for a good while, was being part of one of the biggest drug smuggling operations working out of that part of the world. Heroin that comes from Burma and is shipped out through various avenues. Big shipments.

“I got to know…let’s call him The Brit, and paid close attention. At first, he needed people to help him who weren’t afraid of different situations.”

There was that word: situations. The way Streeter said it with a knowing sneer made Veneer laugh to himself. A single word loaded with memories for this old con.

“It mostly involved setting up transactions,” Streeter continued, “arranging shipments, pressuring various people into carrying out their end of the bargain, and yes the occasional flash of violence. But most of all, it was about watching and observing how things worked.”

Streeter struck a match and lit the roll-up cigarette that was hanging from his lips. “I understand you can no longer light up a cigarette just anywhere out in the real world,” said Streeter.

“Yes, smoking bylaws have toughened up in recent years,” said Veneer. He didn’t add, “Thank fuck for that.”

Interesting back story thought Veneer. But he hasn’t given me anything that I can flesh out as the beginning of a longer narrative. Some self-aggrandizing stuff as well. But who doesn’t engage in that when they are telling the story of their life? Got to get at some of the details. Damn, great writers take a nugget of something and run with it.

“Can you get into the actual machinations of how some of these deals happened?” asked Veneer. “I mean…just a summary version, beginning, middle, end, of exactly what happened. That’s the kind of thing that people want to read about.”

And it will give me an idea of is this is worth pursuing.

Streeter seemed to analyze the history of some incident in his mind. As if he was looking on from the outside and trying to place himself inside the past drama.

“Hmmm…yes, the big operations that I was part of. Those kind became less frequent after I was there for a while. Smaller, easier to organize undertakings became the standard. The big ones were too dangerous. Too many people had to know too many things. Smaller scale allowed us to change plans quickly, to abandon things if something seemed off.

“We always tried to bring in a few younger types who we could get to do the most dangerous things. Sometimes we trolled through the bars and guest houses of Kao San Road to find the right kind of person.”

“What qualified as the right kind of person?”

“Someone who was stupid enough to not know how dangerous bravado can be, and someone who was young enough to not have suffered because of it.”

“So basically you’re talking about drug mules?” asked Veneer.

“No, more like a canary in a coal mine,” said Streeter.

Veneer looked up and saw the guard who was at the door. The guard was looking at him and Streeter.

Streeter was relaxed in his chair. The roll-up cigarette was in his hand, hanging at his side. A wisp of that sweet-smelling pouch tobacco smoke curled up around Streeter’s face, giving him a calm, ethereal look. Veneer could see him in that bar in Bangkok, calmly talking to The Brit and making it clear that he wanted to be part of some situation. He was probably just as good at sidling up to the young backpacker type who he wanted to pull into their drug running schemes.

He seems to be holding back a bit thought Veneer. I’ve only got about half an hour left of my allotted time with him.

“Is there anything you can give me that I could really spin into an article? Interesting stuff so far, but I need something more concrete.”

Streeter reached inside his shirt front and pulled out some kind of medallion and let it drop against his chest in full view.

“What I can give you is a general idea of what went on during my time there. What I want you to do, is to go and find out the rest of the details on your own.”

Veneer screwed up his face and raised both of his hands in the air.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I am saying. I want you to go to Bangkok and fill in the rest of the details. I can’t give them to you at the moment.”

“Why not?”

“Because what I want to share with you is not the slightly exaggerated details of a couple of drug smuggling operations provided by an aging small-time criminal. What I learned in Thailand is far more important than that.

“And don’t for a second think that what I want to share with you could not have been learned elsewhere. But it happened to play out in Thailand for me.

“Besides, the mystique of the orient and all that related horseshit does make it more likely that it will resonate with people.”

“OK, but what exactly is it that you learned? Was it something about other people you worked with?”

The door to the room they were in opened and the guard came in. “OK, Streeter, the visit is over.”

Veneer scooped up his tape recorder and put it and his notebook in his backpack.

“What is it about? The story that you want to share?”

“It’s about death. And how people deal with other people’s death, which is the easiest part of death. But how they come to terms with their own mortality is the most difficult.

“I learned about these things when I was involved in one very distinctive operation that is likely still going on today. It involved a Bangkok mortician who specializes in dealing with families and friends of foreigners who die in Thailand and then sends the bodies back to various countries such as Canada, the US, Australia.”

A sparkle of excitement took hold in Veneer. He knew that when the right story presented itself that it would be obvious. This had something, he could feel it.

“OK, that sounds like something I could run with. But I have got to meet you again to get some more details. I don’t really see myself going to Thailand, but that doesn’t matter. Research can fill in a lot of the blanks.”

Veneer arranged another meeting time with Streeter and secured the authorization from the prison officials before he left. But he would never get the chance to meet Streeter again. Two days later Veneer was sitting in his small studio apartment that was near the campus when he received a call from professor Gletgen.

“Sal? I got a call from the prison officials in Kingston. They told me that they had to cancel the meeting you had with an inmate named Streeter. By the way, I don’t recall that there were any visits with inmates coming up. Was this something that I should have known about?”

“Uh, no. It was related to the most recent interviews we had done. I had to go back and clarify some of the information from a previous visit. I misplaced some of my notes. Anyway, why did they cancel? Did they reschedule?”

“No. That prisoner you were to meet was killed by another inmate.”

Veneer hung up the phone and considered the unlucky turn of events. Veneer stayed in his apartment all day considering what he should do.

Like so many unexpected occurrences in people’s lives, the death of Streeter solidified some things in Veneer’s mind. He really had had enough of wasting his time at the university. And he felt like the chance he had been looking for had just slipped through his fingers. Damn. Poor Streeter. Why should he care about the old con? But he did for some reason. And strange that Streeter had been going on about death.

Within a week, Veneer dropped all his courses at the university and talked to professor Gletgen. He told him that he had decided to go to Bangkok to see if he could follow up Streeter’s story and hopefully put together the beginnings of what might be a true crime book.

Veneer came clean about his unauthorized visit to Streeter. He was relieved when the professor forgave him. And Gletgen told him that he would have a word with the faculty president and make a special arrangement so that Veneer could return and pick up his studies within the next couple of years without any academic penalty. Perhaps even put the experience in Bangkok toward some credits.

The next few weeks were hectic as Veneer sold off his things and subleted his apartment. He was hell bent on making it happen. He was really pulling up roots and heading to Thailand.

Veneer landed in Bangkok at the end of April. He strode off the plane and was hit with a wall of humidity. Confusing airport. He read that the airport was less than five years old. Must have been a tough five years.

He followed the signs that directed travelers to immigration. He looked at the crush of people passing him in the other direction. Travelers, backpackers, business people. Most of them were Asians but there were many Caucasians as well. He arrived at the immigration area and saw about twenty line-ups with hundreds of people in total.

Veneer stood in one of the line-ups and plopped down his carry-on bag and looked at the rest of the people around him.

A fat older American man was standing behind him now. Veneer knew he was American. Something about his mannerisms and style of dress. He had a bloated face with thinning hair on top. He had grown the remaining hair on one side as long as possible and then had swept it over the top of his bald crown. He was wearing one of those black t-shirts with a gaudy, colourful image of a motorcycle on it. The kind of shirt that you won at carnivals. The kind of t-shirt that white trash loved to wear. He had on knee length shorts and was wearing sandals. His thin, pasty white legs seemed obscene and contrasted with his bloated upper body. He was standing next to one of the most beautiful women that Veneer had ever seen. Long and smooth, with toffee brown skin, a perfect complexion and cat-eyes.

Veneer read about these types of older, mostly Caucasian men who traveled to this part of the world and hooked up with much younger women. The woman in turn received some kind of financial security.

The woman smirked at Veneer ever so briefly and then her blank stare was back. The older lummox saw Veneer looking at his girlfriend.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” the lummox said.

“Uh, yeah,” said Veneer as he looked around to see if anyone was listening in on this awkward exchange.

“Mac Grifton is my name,” said the lummox as he held out a meaty mitt for Veneer to shake.

Hell, why not, thought Veneer. Veneer knew exactly no one else in this strange country. Perhaps this lummox would be able to give him some ideas about where to stay the first few nights. After much research online, Veneer determined that it was easy enough to land and sort things out after arrival. But a few pointers now that he was here wouldn’t hurt.

“Hi. Name’s Sal Veneer.

“First time in the country, aint’ it?” said Grifton with a big grin on his face.

“Yeah. Does it show?”

“Oh yeah! We’ve all been there. That realization that you are in a different world. And once you get to know this world, you will come back again and again.”

Mac Grifton gave Veneer some good information for getting started in Bangkok as they stood in the immigration line-up for the next 40 minutes. By the time Veneer finished the brief interview with the immigration officials and picked up his luggage, he felt ready to go.

Veneer walked into the lobby of the hotel where the taxi had left him. He looked around and took in the colourful characters and the buzz of activity.

The people waiting in a queue at the hotel check-in counter appeared outwardly calm but most were already seething. An American tourist was throwing a tantrum, as he demanded that reality be quickly and efficiently shaped to fit his world.

“This is not acceptable solution to the problem!” the man bellowed, staring down at the diminutive female who was working behind the counter. The man appeared middle aged, with shorts revealing emaciated white legs, a loud colourful, short sleeved button up shirt and a face reddened partially by the sun and partially from his rage. Next to him stood his wife, also middle aged with short hair and the thick through the neck and shoulders look that afflicts numerous women of her age and leads many people to mistakenly believe that they are bull dykes. She was glaring at the Thai woman working behind the counter as her husband continued to rail.

“We are Americans, do you realize that?” he hissed.

“Yes, I am realize that Mr. Washhead but we have addressed your complaint and…”

“That’s Washburn!” he spluttered. You have not addressed it adequately and you will have to compensate us for this fiasco! The dirty glass that was in our room would never be accepted in the US!” the man yelled as he backed away from the counter and pointed at the now frightened Thai desk clerk.

At that instant the elevator doors that were positioned a few metres to the right and led past the reception desk in a straight line directly to the hotel entrance, opened. A German tourist with an extraordinarily large stomach that had been acquired after years of continuous beer drinking came striding out of the elevator, moving with surprising speed and grace for such a large man. The American stepped backwards as he continued shouting and collided with the German’s large stomach, bouncing with a speed that shocked all those in the hotel lobby and left them open-mouthed as the American flew through the air in a twisted pile of skinny legs and brightly coloured clothing.

The man’s wife started shrieking as she ran towards her inert husband in a pile on the floor. As she ran she caught her shorts on the hook of a passing luggage cart, ripping the fabric clear of her body and leaving her bare-assed and shrieking.

In another part of the lobby, a Japanese tourist sat in a plush chair with a young Thai prostitute next to him. He was trying to negotiate an evening of pleasure but was running into fierce opposition from the girl he had chosen.

“You Japanese crazy!” she said as she started raising her voice, growing weary of the persistence of the pervert who had convinced her to come back to his hotel. He had appeared relatively normal when he had started chatting to her at the bar she worked at. When they had arrived at the hotel and the talk had turned to the raw fish he had waiting in the hotel room refrigerator she had started to leave and the cajoling from him had started. She had the price up to 10, 000 baht but was still ready to bolt because this wacko had that crazed and determined look in his eyes that she had seen before.

So this is Bangkok, thought Veneer.

The next six months were hectic and exhilarating and surpassed anything that Veneer could have imagined. Veneer tried to follow up on some of the information that Streeter had provided, but it seemed as though the passage of time had rendered those cryptic tales meaningless.

Still, Veneer set about establishing a connection to people who had information about crimes committed in Bangkok and the justice system. He lucked out one evening as he sat in a bar on Sukhumvit Road. A group of Thai men were in the same bar drinking and celebrating something. One of the men saw Veneer sitting alone and motioned him over to their table. Veneer ambled over, not yet over the novelty stage of being a foreigner in Thailand, and not realizing that he was offering himself up as a temporary clown. But Veneer was feeling like he had made a mistake in traveling to Thailand at that point, and had not made any friends since Mac Grifton at the airport. The drunken Thais presented a way to alleviate the feelings of depression.

The Thai men turned out to be police officers. Veneer decided that he would not leave until he had the name and phone number of at least one of them. He succeeded in doing just that, and as a result, his dream started to come into focus, framed by the blood and seediness of the violent lives and deaths of foreigners in Thailand.

Six Months Later

When the phone rang in Veneer’s Bangkok apartment at 3 a.m. on a Friday, night, it meant that someone else’s broken life was about to enter his world.

“Mr. Sal? This is Primchai. Something happened tonight. If you are interested, come to this address in the next hour,” the man said.

Primchai was the Thai police officer Veneer had met that fateful night six months earlier. Thai police officers saw mutilated corpses most days of the week. Gangland slayings, horrific traffic accidents, and suicides from one side of the steaming city of 10 million to the other. His call usually yielded a decent harvest of misery.

“Foreigner?” Veneer asked.

“Yes, foreigner.”

By foreigner they both meant the same thing: a Caucasian. Living in Bangkok and caught up in some bit of nastiness.

Veneer was pleased. When a foreigner was involved, it was always more lucrative. And more intriguing for him personally.

Veneer could see Primchai’s gaunt face on the other side of the phone. Gripping his mobile phone and swiveling his head to watch the other officers milling about the destruction. Probably in some serviced apartment down on Sukhumvit road. A street that seemed to be the unofficial gathering place for the doomed foreigners of Bangkok. Probably a corpse on the floor, the surreal details of a fresh crime scene taking shape.

Veneer copied down the address and rang off. He stood in his 21st floor apartment and stared out at the city. Somewhere out there something bad had happened to a Brit, an American, perhaps a Scandinavian, or maybe one of those strange Canadians.

Veneer stood up quickly and shouted out in shock. He forgot that he had been sitting naked on the cheap vinyl covered couch that was part of his furnished apartment. It felt like a giant band-aid was just ripped off the back of his arse and balls.

He gingerly strode to the bar in his sitting room and opened the stainless steel ice bucket that he kept filled at all times. He dropped a few cubes into a crystal tumbler, splashed some whiskey into the glass and poured in some soda water. He took a gulp and braced for whatever the night had to offer.

Veneer paid the cab driver, got out and surveyed the building in front of him. A few police cars parked outside. The humid air of Bangkok clung to him, even at this early hour. Veneer looked around some more. High, white-washed concrete walls. Round the clock security. Expensive cars parked in the parking area under the condos. The people who stayed here had money.

He phoned Primchai’s number.

“I’m here.”

A few minutes later Primchai exited the building closest to the front gates and walked toward Veneer.

Primchai’s lean, whippet body, high cheekbones and dark skin came into focus in the light from the condominium gate. Primchai reminded Veneer of a darker Bruce Lee with a scar down the right side of his face. Someone you wanted on your side.

“Mr. Sal,” Primchai offered as greeting. “We go with the usual story?”

“Yes, I’m a visiting crime reporter from Canada. Doing some research for a novel that I’m writing.”

Not too far from the truth either.

They walked up to the entrance of the building that Primchai had come from. Veneer glanced up. About 20 floors in each building. Sliding doors that led out onto spacious balconies.

Primchai took out a swipe card and opened the door to the building. They headed for the elevator. Primchai stabbed the button for the 16th floor.

Veneer started moving his head from side to side, getting jacked up about what he was about to witness. He was about to get a look at the results of some mayhem. He wondered if the scene that preceded the killing would rise up in his imagination like it often did. A surreal patina of almost-reality drawing him in and providing the kind of motivation and temporary obsession that would turn him into a machine for the coming weeks until he milked the situation for whatever it was worth. Veneer looked at Primchai as he kept rocking his head from side to side, a freakish grin on his face.

The elevator door opened and they walked into the corridor. White tiles and fluorescent lights gave the corridor an unnatural glow. It reminded Veneer of the Bangkok morgue.

Two police officers stood outside the door to room 1604. Primchai nodded at them and motioned towards Veneer. Stone faces on the police gave nothing away as Primchai and Veneer walked through the door.

A coppery smell hit Veneer in the face as he entered. He scrunched up his face and ran his hand through his lank mop of hair. A short entryway opened into a kitchen on the right. The entryway led to a small corridor at the end of which was a bedroom door that was opened. To the right of the bedroom door was the main living area. A well-lived in apartment thought Veneer. On the bedroom door was a poster with a scantily clad woman and a look that said she made a career out of staring blankly at cameras in hopes of offering up some kind of simplistic fantasy to the fools who stared back.

Veneer followed Primchai as they rounded the corner into the living area. Blood was splattered around a lifeless body on the floor. Blood. That was the smell that hit Veneer when he first walked into the place. The average-sized human body contains about five and a half to six pints of blood. It looked as though every last drop had been blown out of the carcass on the floor.

A man in civilian clothes was crouched in front of the corpse. He was examining the body and writing notes in a small notebook. He prodded the face of the corpse with some kind of instrument. He pried up the eyelids. He was immersed in his work and was not likely to look around. Veneer loudly shifted his feet on the tile floor. The man glanced quickly behind and looked at Veneer and then looked back at the corpse.

“Who is the foreigner Prim?” he asked as he continued to work on the corpse.

“He is a writer from the Canada He is taking notes for a book that he is writing,” Primchai said.

The man with the notebook scrunched up his face as if to say, “Who the hell are you trying to fool?”

Veneer stuck out his hand and held it there. Both Veneer and the man looked at Veneer’s hands and then at the rubber gloves that the man was wearing. Veneer withdrew his hand.

Veneer now looked closely at the body on the floor for the first time. The man turned away and went back to his work.

Veneer took out his camera, flicked off the flash, and started taking photos of the scene. After he returned to his apartment later that night, he would upload the photos to his computer and select the best of the lot. Then he would start putting together a narrative about the life and demise of the corpse that lay twisted on the floor.

He would then reach out to the contacts he had made in the last year or so. A second tier newspaper in Hong Kong, another rag in Korea, and a couple right here in Bangkok. All on the lookout for gruesome photos of bloody crime scenes. And crime scenes with Caucasian bodies brought an even higher premium.

The hardest part for Veneer was contacting the family of the dead foreigner. They were often angry and abusive towards Veneer. He didn’t blame them. But he still had to do it. Still had to see if there was something there that he could run with. Veneer truly believed that something good could come out of a book that looked at the details surrounding a foreigner killed in Thailand. And if the individual had died in strange circumstances, then his research could potentially bring the criminals to justice.

Veneer discovered later that night that the dead foreigner was a young Canadian named John Faledon. With the help of Primchai, he got a hold of the telephone number of Faledon’s mother in Canada. When Veneer talked to her, she had already been informed of the news by the Canadian embassy in Bangkok. She sounded empty, as if the news had left her numb. She advised Veneer that she would be travelling to Bangkok three days from now. Veneer arranged to meet her at the airport. He thought of the fact that in many ways he was exploiting the death of Faledon but he also knew that with the right approach, he could honour his life and perhaps shed some light on exactly how he had died.

He didn’t know if this would become the story he had been looking for. But he was chasing down leads, gaining access to crime scenes, and writing about the filth and seediness of foreigners living in Thailand—a strange subculture indeed. He was on his way.

The Embassy Thug

He thought that other people didn’t have to deal with the same clutter in their heads as he did. He hated the self-help culture of books and talk shows where the poor little victims were trotted out for all to see. The tears and the assurances that it wasn’t their fault. There were always some people who gained some satisfaction out of the fact that it wasn’t them who had suffered. It was other people who were damaged. These idiots who unburdened themselves were only cheap entertainment for the masses.

He noticed that he was gripping the edge of the table where he was sitting. He quickly glanced around, took his hands away from the table and adjusted his tie.

Gant Pimlock answered the phone on his desk. The receptionist told him someone had come in. walked up to the emergency help section of the British consulate and asked to see someone who could help her with a serious situation. Pimlock told the receptionist to tell the woman to have a seat.

Perhaps a relative of the corpse they found on Saturday night? He picked his teeth with the end of a letter opener, used his other hand to move the mouse on his desk and pull up a website devoted to the latest football scores. Probably wants help transporting the corpse back home for a proper funeral.

Pimlock thought of the reams of freaks, wackos and assorted deadbeats whose lives he had seen the aftermath of during his time in Bangkok. You couldn’t’ make up the details of some of the detritus he had helped to ship back home after things had gone pear-shaped. Strangely enough, the family members were often pretty decent. It often seemed as though there were little connection between the filth whose lives had been cut short and the people who had spawned them.

Pimlock flicked through the list of contacts on his mobile phone and wrote down the number of Somchai Funeral Arrangements. A nice little connection Pimlock formed about two years ago and which resulted in a kickback for every Brit corpse he tossed Somchai’s way.

Embalming the corpse, having it sent back home, a makeshift casket for the transport. The family often wanted to change the casket at the last minute when they realized what shoddy quality it was. It was always too late at that point though. Everything paid up front before the body was released to the family.

Six was the total number of bodies over the last three years. Six families who had actually balked at the cost and never claimed the body after it had gone to the funeral home. The Home Office always picked up the tab in such cases and the body eventually found its way home. But to consciously analyze what it would cost to bring your dead adult child home and then decide against it.

But Pimlock understood perfectly.

Pimlock grimaced as he looked at the messages in his inbox. Subject line: quarterly report from Thailand embassy due on Friday. Sender: Nixon Grundwald. Grundwald. The sound of the name sent a spasm of rage through Pimlock. Grundwald had made sure that Pimlock was sent to the Bangkok office a few years ago. One of the least desirable of all foreign postings. And a sure mark that one’s career in the embassy was going to stall, perhaps permanently.

“I will be right out,” Pimlock said into the phone to the receptionist. He pulled himself up and strode over to the mahogany wardrobe that was in the corner of his office. He opened one of the doors and looked at himself in the mirror that hung on the back of the door. He straightened his tie, ran his hand through his hair, sneered, and closed the door.

“Good morning Ms. Shevton,” Pimlock said as he opened the locked security door that led into the secondary waiting room, the room ostensibly reserved for those who were involved in some kind of emergency.

“Shelton,” the woman said.

He saw a middle-aged woman, hair shoulder length. Held herself with some kind of pride. The sense of pride can’t be about her dead son, surely, Pimlock thought to himself. Had that drawn look of middle aged people who take up exercise and take it to obsessive levels. He moved towards her tentatively, thinking of his Yank counterparts who always mentioned the hugs they offered to complete strangers.

“I’m Grant Pimlock,” Pimlock said, thrusting his hand out.

The Shelton woman gripped Pimlock’s hand as she looked into his eyes. He pulled his hand back quicker than he should have. Clammy.

“I want to find out what happened to my son,” the woman said.

“Let’s go into my office,” Pimlock said.

He opened the door with a flourish and motioned her to sit in the chair in front of his desk. Pimlock moved behind his desk, pulled out his leather upholstered chair, and sat down, folded his hands on the desk and looked at the woman in front of him. The smell of air-conditioning and a particular Bangkok office scent filled the room.

“So, I take it that your son was John Faledon.”

“Yes. I remarried. That’s why we don’t share the same surname.”

“How long had he been in Thailand?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” she said. “I believe about three years. I was only in touch with him sporadically.”

Pimlock saw an image rising in his mind of a feckless drifter who paid no heed to his family.

“He wasn’t close with his family?” Pimlock said, tilting his head back.

“We went through periods where we were in frequent contact,” she looked through the window to her right that opened out into the garden of the embassy. The dull white noise whirr of the air conditioner filled the room. “And other times we didn’t hear from him for stretches of six months to a year.”

“Was he working in Bangkok?” Pimlock always enjoyed the voyeuristic aspect of probing the last few years of the dead expat’s life vis a vis the relative who flew in to pick up the final pieces. Very few actually broke down while talking to him. But when the questions he asked inevitably led the parent or brother or friend to get up their hopes that the embassy would somehow take an active role in “getting to the bottom of things,” Pimlock also enjoyed the speech he gave in which he informed the individual that there “isn’t much we can really do.”

“I assume so. He seemed to do all right with regard to money,” she said. Pimlock noticed that she had a faraway look in her eyes. “But money is a bit of an issue now,” she said as she turned and looked directly at Pimlock for the first time since she had entered the office.

“We can only provide assistance in making arrangements for getting your son home. And some translation assistance if you need to deal with any Thai officials.”

“I want more than that,” she said.

“What exactly?” Pimlock asked, curious as to what she thought the embassy owed her.

“Help in determining what my son did with a large wire transfer that was sent out here two weeks ago.”

“Did he receive the transfer?”

“Yes, that’s easy enough to confirm. But to find out what he did with the money. If he transferred it to a bank account here, we have to make arrangements for retrieving that money. He has no will.”

“No bank book or ATM card in his possessions?”

“No. I didn’t find any in his flat nor in the contents of his pockets that they let me look through last night.”

“Then, not much we can do really,” Pimlock said. “If you want to hire a lawyer and make enquiries at the various banks that is up to you.”

“No. I would like your assistance,” she said. “Before I left London, I sent a letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs asking for help in tracking down the money.”

A letter to the Minister, Pimlock thought. No guarantee that her request would result in any action. But it was a certainty that they would follow up on at least contacting the embassy in Bangkok.

Pimlock had some leeway in any situation. It was true what many suspected: the embassy could either do very little or it could pull strings and go as far as necessary to get something done. Different people would get different treatment. Who you knew, how much noise you were willing to make. Would she push it? Probably depended on how much money was at stake.

“How much money is at stake…what I mean is, how much did you transfer to your son?”

“Is that really important?”

“It will help us to make enquiries at various banks. If it comes to that,” Pimlock said.

“It’s enough to make it worthwhile for us to find out. My biggest concern is getting my son’s body out of here. But the money is somewhat important. In the process we may also find out what happened to my son.”

“It’s hard to say Ms. Shelton. But police tell us that they think…was your son depressed?”

Her faced looked weary at the question. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down. Was she thinking of long gone years when her son’s personality came into focus? Those early years when events can shape someone for the rest of his life? Some perspiration rose on her forehead.

“He didn’t feel like he belonged back home. He liked it here. Felt like people couldn’t read him so easy. That’s what he told me. He liked the feeling of anonymity. I don’t feel he was depressed. Just an introvert. Someone who liked to be alone a lot of the time. And he felt like he had found his place here.”

She pulled at the fabric of her dress.

She started out of her seat. Her grey pallor was in contrast to the bright look on her face when she walked in room 30 minutes ago, Pimlock thought.

“I will be in touch about any progress you may have made on the whereabouts of the money,” she said.

“But what about the remains of your son?” Pimlock asked.

She started to sit down again. Straightened up instead. “I don’t think I will need your help with that after all.”

“But we can help you arrange the transportation. Last thing you need now is to worry about misunderstandings because of language.”

“I think I have that sorted out.”

She walked out of Pimlock’s office.

Aria Shelton walked out of the waiting room and into the corridor that led to the front door of the embassy. She heard the click of her heels on the slabs of aged flooring, worn down over the years by countless people like herself. All of them looking for help while overseas in a strange country.

She felt nauseous. She pushed open the door of the ladies’ room and stumbled toward a stall. Crashed in and slammed the door behind her. She felt a surge of panic and held herself still. Silence. She put her hand on the cool porcelain of the toilet she was sitting on. She fumbled in her purse for the little glascine bag full of white powder and the syringe.

Pimlock had watched her leave the office on the closed circuit monitor in the small adjoining room that was connected to his office. Various cameras throughout the building gave him the ability to watch just about anyone who entered the building. She had looked in pretty bad shape as she stumbled into the women’s toilets on the ground floor. Probably the heat, jet lag and the pressure of the whole situation. But there was something he couldn’t quite place. Something off about her.

Pimlock locked his office door and headed out of the main office where emergency cases waited to plead for assistance. He glanced at a bloated, pasty white hog covered in chav tattoos and with a young, waifish young Thai woman seated next to him. He hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to interact with that piece of filth.

Pimlock went to the security office on the third floor of the embassy. He motioned one of the Thai security guards who worked there. “Come with me please,” he said. The guard snapped to his feet and followed behind Pimlock. Pimlock walked down the stairs to the ground floor, made his way to the women’s toilet and stopped in front of the door. That must be enough time for her to have cleared out. He knocked on the door, waited a few seconds and knocked again. He opened the door. “Is anyone in here? I am an official with the British Embassy and we need to come in for security purposes.” Again, no answer.

“Stand guard here,” Pimlock said to the guard. “Don’t let anyone enter.”

Pimlock walked in and surveyed the antiseptic room that was kept to standards that were befitting the Embassy’s reputation. Pimlock inhaled that strange mixture of scents: various women’s perfumes, cleaning liquids, and some faint, pungent earthy smell. It reminded him of the times he would wander into the women’s toilets after closing hours when he had worked part-time in a pub while attending university.

Pimlock opened the doors of the toilet stalls. Nothing. He did a double take at the last stall in the row as the door was swinging shut. He opened it again and looked closer. Next to the toilet. A syringe. He had been right. It must have been the Shelton woman. How on earth had she scored so soon after arriving in Bangkok? But yes, of course. The functional variety of addict are sometimes even more resourceful than the lowlife, street level junky.

Pimlock inhaled a deep breath and slipped into a reverie in the cool, sterile serenity of the women’s toilets located on the ground floor of the British Embassy in Bangkok. One dead son, one junky mother, some missing money. Oh yes, he was going to have some fun with this one.

The Voyeur

I met the Voyeur when I was 15 or 16 years old. We worked part-time at the same restaurant and went to the same university. As we got to know each other, we drank together and played tennis together. We remained relatively close friends for a number of years.

Although we had fun and wreaked havoc on many occasions, I cramped the Voyeur’s style somewhat. Most of his friends were high-school classmates he had grown up with. The Voyeur made an attempt to introduce me to this group of friends, but the unease from them was palpable. We talked openly about the fact that I didn’t really fit in with his other mates.

Still, the Voyeur didn’t let this affect our friendship. He and I were on the same wavelength and saw the world in much the same way. We would do things together on a regular basis for six or seven month stretches at a time. Then, for whatever reason, we would go for many months without meeting each other. I always assumed that during those periods of time when I didn’t see him, that he was engaged in activities with his private school friends.

During the time I knew the Voyeur, he demonstrated certain tendencies that led to his nickname. Life always seemed like a grand social experiment to him. He would wire himself up with a small tape recorder for kicks and record the most innocuous and inane conversations with other people and then play them back to me for entertainment. I never asked if he did the same with our conversations, but I assumed that he probably did. At times, I got the sense that he saw me as an interesting specimen and that I provided voyeuristic fodder.

I mentioned these observations to him, an indication of the fact that there was little that we wouldn’t discuss. It became a running joke with us. “Hey,” he would say, “why not treat your life as a fun experiment. Just try different things. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

And that’s what it must have seemed like to many people when they looked at my life. After I left university, I traveled and worked in half a dozen places around the world before returning to Australia. I did things and took chances that most people didn’t. They went to university, graduated, got jobs, got married, and got on with the process of accumulating things.

A few years after I returned to Australia, I hit the road again, this time ending up in Thailand. I had little contact with the Voyeur during the time I was abroad and for those few years when I was back in Australia. But as I got settled in Thailand, the Voyeur and I reconnected, the likely result of the explosion of the internet and the ease of communicating over long distances. He had done well for himself and was reaping the rewards of long years of working in low-level jobs. He had kept his eyes open for the right chance and when it came, he made his move.

Over the course of the next five years, the Voyeur would visit me three or four times in Thailand. He would spend a few days with me in Bangkok and then head off on various sojourns around the country. Sometimes up north and sometimes to the islands. During his time in Bangkok, he always wanted to visit the seedy go-go bars on various side streets off Sukhumvit Road. Those places turned my guts, but to him it was a novelty.

As we sat in one of the go-go bars that was part of a large complex with numerous similar establishments on a lazy afternoon of his final visit to Thailand, the Voyeur started to regale me with tales of how he had made it big. I was happy for him. He had reached a stage where money was no longer a concern. As the alcohol flowed, the Voyeur became extremely smug about the things he had accomplished. This had been one of the great features of our friendship over the years: we could tell each other almost anything, regardless of how crass or self-serving it might sound.

The bar we were in had filled up as the afternoon turned into early evening. The Voyeur looked around at the human detritus that had collected as we had engaged in a wide-ranging conversation over the period of a few hours. “I’m the most successful person in here,” said the Voyeur.

“What? How the hell can you tell?”

“I can just tell,” he said.

Though the Voyeur had always been a confident person, he had always counterbalanced it with self-mockery and a nihilistic view of the world. It was a bit strange to hear him come across as so full of himself. But with the booze flowing and in the presence of a friend, it was one of those asinine things that don’t get filtered out. But over the course of the next week or so, he would make almost the identical statement two or three times when we were in various bars or restaurants.

“I suppose you well could be the most financially successful person in here, but how do you really know?”

“I just do,” the Voyeur said with a smug smile.

The Voyeur spent the next 10 days or so traveling around Thailand. When he returned to Bangkok, he had a few days before his flight back to Australia . He once again wanted to while away a few afternoons at the go-go bars near Sukhumvit Road. As we were sitting and downing a few cold beers on a sweltering afternoon at one dingy little place, a young Thai woman sidled up to us and started talking.

I instantly knew what her game was, but either the Voyeur didn’t know or just saw it as a last opportunity for some conversation with a Thai woman before he went back to his regular life. It was a dreary and predictable conversation. She eventually steered the discussion to her personal life and started hinting that she would like to get to know one or both of us better. The Voyeur started urging me to follow it up. “After all, what have you got to lose?” he said.

The old bullshit that we had always joked about was somehow no longer so amusing to me. The Voyeur knew that I had a long-term girlfriend and that we eventually planned to marry. She was staying with her family outside of Bangkok for a few weeks, but I had never had the desire to be anything other than faithful to her. But the Voyeur kept up with his steady drum-beat of telling me that I should “go for it.”

Perhaps it thrilled him to think that he could convince me to do something that would have long-lasting consequences in my life. Maybe it was a variant of that age-old psychological game that so many play, called “let’s you and him fight,” in which the instigator engages in the equivalent of throwing two somewhat hesitant combatants into an enclosed area and then stands back and enjoys the inevitable fireworks.

The Voyeur took off a few days later. It would be the last time I would see him for a long time. In the interim, I returned to Australia once again, but did not live in the same region as the Voyeur.

Finally, a few years later I was back in Thailand. I hadn’t seen the Voyeur for almost seven years. It wasn’t a planned break in our friendship, but it was clear that we had moved on and didn’t really have the same connection that we once did. The fact that we lived thousands of miles apart was, of course, a big factor. But the emails didn’t come as frequently, and the responses, when they did arrive, felt superficial and forced.

The more I thought about it, the more I believed it was down to the relative success we had achieved in our lives: at least in monetary terms. Clearly, the Voyeur was far more successful in life, at least in the usual ways that people measured such things.

Greater financial success by one person in a friendship often drives a wedge between people. The person with the money seems to acquire an arrogant edge, and sees any criticism of him as “jealousy,” or perhaps even develops the nagging feeling that his sad-sack friend will hit him up for money—something I have never done, and will never do.

It’s almost an impossible accusation to refute, even if the accusation has never been stated outright. It is such an all-encompassing fact of life: the need for money, the act of chasing it, the melodramas that are centred around financial considerations.

For the friend who has accumulated the wealth, he can’t help but feel awkward when sharing his happiness at having made it. It’s only natural that he develop an aversion to the friend who is still struggling to get ahead. In all likelihood, it is not even a conscious decision. You feel more comfortable with those who are at the same stage in life and the same relative social class.

Of course, all of this avoids a couple of important factors. First, as I looked back and pondered the changes over the past few years and how the Voyeur had been affected by his success, I wondered how he saw me. What interactions and events shaped the image the Voyeur had of me?

Years ago we would have been forthright about how we perceived each other. I felt that blunt honesty was a thing of the past. The emails, when they did get exchanged, now only focused on the banal.

No doubt he viewed me with a bit of caution as well. For years I had an explosive temper. If one thing is difficult to deal with, it’s a person who is unpredictable. This trait had cost me in many tangible ways, and I had taken steps to change. But I believe the image of me as a slightly unhinged individual was firmly implanted in the Voyeur’s mind.

As I considered all these things on occasion over a period of years, a few important changes took place in my life. Life altering things that were stressful but also positive in the long run. I passed on this information to some family members who then shared the news with others in the family.

At about that time, I received an email from the Voyeur, the first in a long time. I got the immediate sense that he had been in touch with someone in my family but wanted to appear as if his email was just a random checking-in. He asked if there was anything new in my life and I quickly responded with a brief email that included the news. His response seemed disingenuous with an emphasis on the fact that he really had no idea before contacting me.

He closed out with an appeal to reach out to him if I ever really needed someone to talk to. It felt duplicitous and somewhat odd. Did he think I was at a weak point in life and would perhaps offer up some deeply personal and perhaps entertaining fodder? Some would say that such a reaction is nothing but paranoid. After all, what are friends for if not to help in tough situations and offer advice?

I sent back another longer email with more details about what I was up to and my plans for myself and my family in the coming months. In many ways, I felt more hopeful and positive about life than I had in many, many years.

I never received a response from the Voyeur. Would he have pounced on any information that hinted I was spiralling toward some kind of catastrophe? Again, the optimists would say, “of course, for it would have been more urgent and required immediate support from friends.”

I suppose our earlier straightforward interactions and the occasional incident that suggested my trials and tribulations were entertaining pablum for the Voyeur shaped my reaction.

The Voyeur was one of the best friends I ever had, and I remained friends with him longer than any other person in my life. While the name “the Voyeur” may have a negative connotation, in fact, it really only highlights something that is appealing in all friendships. We are all fascinated by other people’s lives. Despite the rankist claim by some that “smart people talk about ideas, and stupid people talk about other people,” we all are fascinated by the dramas that are part of the lives of others. What is at the heart of the obsession humans have with stories of all kinds as presented in books and movies? It is the thrill of escape through immersing ourselves in the plight of other human beings in the hope of getting at some bigger truths that govern human existence.

So too this is one appealing aspect of interacting with other people in all manner of personal relationships.

All relationships between people come to an end or change to a degree that they are not as close as they once were. In rare instances, death is the only thing that finally signals the end.

Ken Austin is a writer and language teacher based in Bangkok. In the past, he has lived and worked in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and South Africa. In his free time he studies foreign languages and posts semi-regularly on his blog, teflspin.com. He lives with his wife and daughter.