C-c-changes

Astute readers (all three of you) noted I'd recently posted a blog entry ('Dark End of the Street') about the unexpected death of a British guy I'd come to know and enjoy here in Hua Hin, only to see it gone when you next checked in - probably hoping for some lighter fare.

For those who didn't ask but wondered (all 1.3 of you) it was a slapdash memorial of sorts to someone who'd all too briefly touched my otherwise fairly uninspired life in this seedy little piece of Thai paradise and my regret and sorrow that he was suddenly gone. It unintentionally touched a nerve, however, among some first-time - and I'm sure by now last-time - readers, who included some relatives in the UK offended at the description of how he died. It wasn't pretty but it was honest, and honesty was one attribute I really enjoyed when it came to him.

What was I thinking?

Here's one of the comments: I'm really close friends with his daughter and i agree with what she said. You ARE a sick fucker and i think you should remove this post. I didn't know him personally but I Know for sure that he didn't deserve some faggot like you to speak about him in this way. fucking remove this or you'll definitely be reported.

Most others were in that same civil, restrained and understated British vein. Though, once I realized I'd hurt some hearts I had no desire to injure, this comment - just due to the basic polite tone - had me hitting the "save to draft" button for the entry immediately. I could relate and understand. And at least he didn't call me a sick fucker, he only had an momentary urge to stomp me on the sidewalk.

X's brother says he would appreciate it if you would remove this posting. Show some respect not just to X but to the rest of his family. The way i feel about you at the moment for posting this at this traumatic time is as though i have just trod in you on the payment.

Thus I was keeping a low profile at one of X's wake's last night, one of about three that have gone one in various bars since his Buddhist-style funeral and cremation. Kind of an extended after-life pub crawl that culminated in a generally bittersweet send-off amid beers, memories, songs that the deceased enjoyed and an amazing culinary spread provided gratis by the only foreigner in Thailand who owns a private butcher and meat catering operation.

I talked with X's wife for awhile about how they met and his amazement that he'd found a Thai woman who appreciated Aretha Franklin as well as Stone Roses, and tried to fend off the pressure of a party-crasher, another Brit who upon learning that me and a coworker were both journalists tried to tell us that we should write a story about a short boat voyage he was planning. It was thoroughly unremarkable, though he was convinced otherwise, mostly I think, because he was a participant.

My coworker, an experienced sailor here as well as other climes, politely played the salty mariner card to no avail.

"It is a story," the party crasher insisted. "It is 'cuz I'm telling you it's one!"

"It's not a NEWS story," we said. "Sorry."

"It is!" he replied. "And, and...(pause for dramatic effect) we're sending a tape to the BBC!"

"Go ahead. Good luck with the Beeb," I said. "But. Not. A. Story."

I left the wake and my next opportunity for a Pulitzer after saying goodbye again to X's widow and a couple of his friends who had seen the blog but hadn't taken offense, and caught a motorbike taxi back to my new neighborhood, a studio apartment with an "ocean view".

Goodbye to former felonious psychobilly roommate R and Faulty Towers, yes.

The ocean view is a small levy about two blocks east facing the Gulf of Siam and flanked by two upscale Thai-foreign eateries and a Thai sidewalk diner. The rest of the area is quiet and close to services I need, like two small mom and pop stores, an ATM, my bank, my office, a "Mormon" 7-Eleven (no cigs or booze, cuz it's close to a school, an oddity here) and what appears to be a combination OBGYN/aroma therapy/Thai massage clinic. Regrettably there are no roaming cattle herds and few soi dogs but it's a largely Thai neighborhood, though tourist season is in full swing which means scads of elderly, large, creaky white haired, bald headed Scandahoovians and Germans filling the sidewalks with their guttural utterances, lumbering gaits and demands for fresh surströmming, frestelse und KROG!

Actually, it feels a bit like Miami Beach if Germany had won the war.

Take a Letter, Maria
Soi dogs yawping, people chattering - their voices mingling with the mynahs and other birds - and most of all the rhythmic thrumming of thousands of frogs woke me again this morning at 6. Outside Thailand was beginning to stir, oblivious to the fact that the Colorado Rockies were shortly taking the field against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway for their first World Series. I was unusually jazzed for a Thursday morning and stumbled down to the TV, fired up the tea water, found the remote and hit the switch looking for the ESPN feed.

Four hours, five innings, one Rockies, and 13 Red Sox runs later it was clear my optimism for Game 1 of the 103rd Series was entirely unfounded. I surrendered the remote to R who was obviously and pathetically grateful that he could now watch WWF wrestling ("A real sport!") and began my daily "death commute" to work. Thailand can be an idyllic and overwhelmingly beautiful place when you have nowhere to go and nothing much to do. but I am one tense, sweating, uptight white knuckled, white skinned mofo everytime I have to cross a road and/or ride on the back of a motorcycle cab.

I often think of a guy I never met on these journeys. He was an English journalist who held the same position I would later inherit in Hua Hin for only about six weeks until he died when his 115CC Suzuki and crash helmet didn't get the better of a truck load of migrant workers and sacks of concrete mix that pulled suddenly in front of him on a badly paved rain-slick road.

According to office lore, the only relative they could locate was a sister in the UK who had no interest in claiming and burying her wayward expat brother, who had also had the bad form to expire with only a month's salary to his name. In addition to a paucity of traffic laws and lights, and minus an efficient and incorruptible police force, Hua Hin also lacks a public morgue, so his remains were stored in a refrigerated locker owned by the local "wat" (monastary) for such purposes for a fee that was three times the standard rate because the dead guy was a "farang" and thus could presumably afford the fee hike. More overseas queries were made...

Then the monks pulled the plug prematurely in an apparent attempt to wrestle more baht from his dwindling bank account ... Suffice to say, I don't want to end up like this guy mourned hastily by coworkers who barely knew me and cremated quickly because I was beginning to smell.

Which brings me to the office where the decaying stench of a new batch of Letters to the Editor awaited me. I have a new duty due to a series of abrupt, unexpected staff changes here and it is overseeing, editing or simply deleting without comment the 12-20something pithy editorial missives e-mailed to us daily from around the world. Most of our 100,000-plus daily readers are in the US, but there are equally devoted and/or outraged voices in Europe, England, China, India and Pakistan - as well as the daily pleas, prayers and promises we receive from the Australian Defence Force, helpful Nigerian banker Mr Eibraham Soto and from "陳蕙菱" concerning 讓清純可人的妹妹解開....鈕扣!! and the ever popular, "MAKE MONSTER BIG PENNIS FASTEST!"

We have a core group of correspondents, however, many of whom don't seem to have jobs, social lives or any other interaction with the world beyond firing off passionate, generally political prose regarding current events, as well as real and imagined intrigue, in their backyards. Some of most heated comes from India and Pakistan where they employ a unique English language style that combines mangled cliches and metaphors not heard since the British occupation along with their local idioms. For example:

Editor Sir, Please to promptly publish my letter! It is something of a sticky wicket we are finding ourselves in lately! I blame Benazir Bhutto for the aftermath of stomach churning carnage of the early hours of 19 October resulting in the death of over 140 innocent Pakistanis. I do not believe she has her horse in gear and further evil meddling on her part puts a distinct chill where the sun does not wish to rise and shine! We have a saying in Pakistan: "Billi soo chuhae kha ke haj to chali!"( A cat after eating hundred rats went to perform Haj for redemption). Thank you! Sincerely, KJ, Karachi.

And there are the stone crazies; one in particular who - apparently depending on his medication ingestion writes daily either about the US government's mind control experiments and why they won't give him a passport or ... this.

Dear Editors, The year 1808. A constitutional provision was also were laid out. Soon enough the kaurava hero hundred thousand cooks to distribute excellent behold anything, for with human eyes nothing can into the roaring river several hundred
feet below moments. I was ready to barter my whole life for for you to assure you that i had no knowledge alive to the slightest violations of decorum.

Of course, I can relate. When I find I am on a sticky wicket, I merely remind myself that even in Thailand with the Rockies in shambles on the other side of the planet, I have no knowledge alive to the slightest violations of decorum. Or as they say, "Billi soo chuhae kha ke haj."

Romeo and Juliet

Some of my more discerning readers have learned that my roommate is a convicted murderer, a Cockney, whom I'll call "R". Not that this has anything specifically to do with Thailand, but it's part of my current reality and it occurred to me that you might want to follow a recent evening timeline I'll call: R Goes on a Date

Friday, 6:43pm. I arrive at Faulty Towers II from work. On the couch watching
WWF Wrestling on TV is R clad only in the same black nylon bikini briefs he was wearing when I left him watching WWF Wrestling from the couch at 10am. The only difference is that the pile of empty 32oz Singha beer bottles has gone from about four to eight or nine. R is talking to himself and the wrestlers in incomprehensible Cockney gibberish (ICG). The room reeks of Tiger Balm which he applies liberally to himself about every 20 minutes. Empty tubs of it dot the pile of empty Singha bottles.

Me: "Hey R, did Triple H get his title back, yet?"

R: "Hey, my son...lapses into ICG...bastah, ya know?"

Me:"Uh..yeah. Me, too." I go to the kitchen and begin preparing my dinner. Returning to the living room where I see R has risen and is now intently focused on assembling and loading what looks like a large handgun. "Uh, expecting trouble, R? And, uh, that's an air pistol ... right?"

R: "(ICG)...You didn' see anythin'...(ICG)...Meetin' a lady." Slams banana clip looking thing into pistol handle with a smack. Sights down barrel at a soi dog outside. "Yeah...air gun, C02, bloo'y powerf'l."

Me: "Lady? A date? You're going on a date with an air pistol?"

R: "You didn' see anythin' my son." Sits down on couch, changes channel to Cinemax offering of Steven Seagal Under Siege on Deadly Ground IX. Smears more Tiger Balm on his knee, thighs and stomach.

7.15pm, R smokes a joint, snorts some white powder, drinks half a 32oz Singha and makes call on cell phone, apparently to his intended. "You come ride me take you same-same but different?" More Tiger Balm. More beer. More powder.

7:53pm R rises and wobbles to his Bat Cave with pistol and beer. Slams door.

8:17pm R emerges in old white Ralph Lauren knockoff dress shirt and same nylon black briefs. Sits on couch, finishes beer, calls Steven Seagal "a bloo'y stupi' bastad" for no appreciable reason, though I can't say I disagree.
Me: "So, what time's your date, R?"

R: "Seben thir'y."

Me: "Uh, it's almost 8.30..."

R: Grunts. Picks up air pistol. Puts down air pistol. Lights another joint, offers me a hit. I decline. Picks up cell phone and after two or three mis-dials has his lovely on the phone again. "Hey luv. You take me ride you boom-boom number one same-same, but different...(ICG)." Hangs up.

8:53pm. R rises and disappears in Bat Cave again. Emerges at 9:20 with dirty jeans to compliment the clean fake Ralph Lauren white shirt. His balding hair is wet. He begins rubbing more Tiger Balm on under his shirt. Rattles through a cabinet drawer, plucks out an old electric razor and plugs it in. It doesn't work. Unplugs razor, throws it on floor cursing and disappears into Bat Cave.

9:15pm. R reappears with another electric razor and begins shaving his ratty goatee off in front of a hallway mirror. His whiskers fall to the floor and mantle. Examines himself in mirror, appears satisfied. Grunts. Finds some hair gell and greases down his newly washed bar code-like combover with gell. Sits on couch, changes channel to Oprah rerun.

R:"Bloo'y bitch."

9.40pm. R finally heads out the door, air pistol stuffed into jeans at the small of his back. I hear his motorbike cough and roar, the rusty gate rolls back. Love is in the air.

10.57pm. I hear the gate again and R's bike chocking to a close. Looking up from my book, I see him walk in. Shirt torn, limping, no air gun. "How was the date, R? Little rough?"

"You didn' see nuttin'."

One Night in Bangkok/My City Was Gone

Waking up in the torn and frayed 500 baht/night "Royal Hotel 28" just outside Bangkok's notorious Soi Cowboy sex alley at 10.30 Sunday morning I felt a bit like Martin Sheen's Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now. Like Sheen/Capt Willard I was alone, hungover, under a barely wheezing fan in a rat's nest, sweating and well, let me play on some of the Apocalypse dialog, though there was no ominous Doors' The End playing except in my aching head.

Mitchell, voiceover Bangkok ... shit; I'm still only in Bangkok ... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in Boulder, or maybe Hong Kong, Lincoln, Nebraska or Shenzhen, I'm still here. I'm here a night now... waiting for a story assignment, maybe even a decent blog item ... getting softer; every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute my editors and creditors squat in the bush, they get stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

The walls were a real problem. Bad silver and red MC Escher cubes, the kind that if I'd been under the influence of anything stronger than beer would've driven me screaming off the 6-foot balcony to permanently disable - but not kill, unfortunately, myself. Instead I contented myself with phony kung fu moves, dancing around like a wobbling fool, breaking a glass, cutting myself and then wrapping myself in the dirty sheets, no, wait. No sheets. No glasses either. Whattaya what for 500 baht/night? Toilet paper, too?

Snatches of the night before were, uh, making me wish the squid fishing expedition I'd originally planned at an unspoiled fishing town about 25 klicks south of Hua Hin had succeeded, but weather had put the kabosh on that and I'd taken Plan B. Meet a coworker from HK who has been reassigned to Hua Hin, spend the night, hit some sleaze pits and go back to Hua Hin on Sunday afternoon. We'd contented ouselves with his Thai wife in tow at one fetish bar that catered to Japanese tourists who got their jollies gaping up through a clear plastic floor at exposed lower sections of Thai women in school girl dresses. Then to a live lesbian show and ... well, not much else to say. Fade to black.

Bangkok had changed a lot since I was a child, though I had enough time and one family-friendly, semi-culturally redeeming idea that didn't involve Japanese voyeur fetish tourists or lesbian stage encounters to play with. I'd learned that my Bangkok boyhood residential soi was within walking distance of Soi Cowboy and I was determined to see if anything I recalled circa 1963 or so remained.

I'd been braced for the worst. A couple people who'd been here previously and who had tried to find it had said nothing remotely residential remained. One had reported it was now a mega mall called Emporium. Another had been less specific but just as discouraging. I'd also learned that I'd mispronounced the address I'd thought I'd remembered so well and so had some hopes that something, anything might still be there.

The soi itself was there, about as wide as I recalled though the main road outside it seemed to have shrunk in width and grown in height as Bangkok's transit system SkyTrain now ran above it. The site of our old house was also there - Bahn Nung (House No. 1) though no trace of a home remained, only an enormous, gated sterile office complex of sorts called "Lighting Centre."

Looking down the soi I saw no homes but a posh Novitel hotel and plenty of restaurants and bars my parents would've given their passports to have dined in in 1963. Italian, Japanese, British ... "New Managment, New Girls!" said a sign outside one club. I remembered that our school teacher friend, a young, sophisticated, English fluent woman named Vitchitar had lived somewhere close to "New Management, New Girls," just down from other bars inexplicably named after artists: The Dali, the Monet, the Van Gogh-Go, the Goya... My late mother, an artist herself, would've laughed and then puked, though she could never abide Dali.

I misted up a bit still looking for something, anything that might've survived 40plus years when I found myself up a side soi along a route I thought might have led to the one western-style restaurant we favored at the time, a Filipino place called Nippa Hut. Kind of bamboo and log style building that I recalled was decorated with an enormous python skin nailed to a wall upstairs and some old entertainment posters. Good cheeseburgers, too. I stopped in front of a small Japanese restaurant, housed amid some newer apartments and so Japanese it had no English or Thai signs.

It was open, there were English menus and I ordered a ramen and pork lunch, a bottle of Asahi and began to look more carefully around. It was logs and bamboo. The layout was smaller than my Nippa Hut memories, but similar and amid the Japanese motifs were framed vintage posters for ancient US R&B acts such as Etta James at "Shirley's Orbit Room," Jimmy Reed, and Lowell Folsom and old movies, Law of the Tropics, Paris Underground ("Where a kiss can be more deadly than the sword!")and Hell in the Pacific. No snake skins, though.

I asked for toilet directions and was directed up some steep, rickety wooden stairs to a small closet toilet area amid what had been a dining room and was now storage for a staggering amount of old restaurant equipment and furniture. Then I saw it. Nailed a wall blocked by several stacked malfunctioning gurneys was a long, almost rotted-into-the wood, faded black and yellow boa or python skin. Not the 20-foot long, 4-foot wide wonder that my 10-year old memory had enshrined. It was about 5-feet long and a few inches wide. I walked quickly over and leaned almost painfully across the stacked gurneys to try and touch it without toppling them and alerting the bored wait-staff below. My fingertips brushed a few scales; virtually dust they crumbled and fell.

"Hello, again," I said to it. A foreign idiot talking to a decaying snake skin. "It's been a long time. Rest easy."

T for Texas, T for ... Thailand?
A recent visitor, a native Greenwich Villager who nonetheless made the inexplicable decision to go to school at Rice University in Houston, made an observation during a hangover ridden Sunday morning as we blearily watched a three wheeled covered 'tuk-tuk' pass sporting a large, red and white "Hua Hin Detox Center" sign on its rear. He's a world traveler. No local yokel, currently residing in mainland China with his equally well traveled Dutch galpal.

"You know, Thailand reminds me more and more of Texas," he said. "I think there are some distinct similarities." We'd spent most of the previous evening at what can only be described as a Thai country music bar, a large, log cabin-styled affair virtually visually indistinguishable from its American counterparts save the neon beer signs for Chang, Leo and Singha instead of Coors, Miller, Pearl or Lone Star. Pickup trucks and choppers had jammed the dirt parking lot and there was even been a photo of Sitting Bull, or "Famous American Indian king," as I explained to a Thai companion. The music was Thai country, Issan province passion, provided by arguably the slickest hardest working house band I've ever seen. Four-plus hours of nonstop sweat, rhythm and soul with a lotta Santana stylings. No Willie or Waylon or Hank, but that's not what we came for. But It was nice to see Sitting Bull still looking solemn and stolid halfway across the world from his Hunkpappa home.

A week earlier we'd been at a local road rally where we'd chowed down on some world class ribs, swilled beer and watched Mad Max-type vehicles along with off-the-showroom floor hump and bump and roar over a mess of hastily constructed dirt obstacles while the emcees screamed encouragement and hyped for Chevy, Ford, Dodge and Toyota in Thai.

I could kinda see my friend's point. To stretch the point further I noted in a recent English language rag that Hua Hin recently enacted a "No Weapons Zone" ban for the "primary tourist areas." In other words: No handguns in the Hilton.

Other superficial similarities fall apart, though. No big hair, no big hats, few shitkicker boots except on occasional German touristas, no "big" anything except Buddhas and wats, and really - that part of the parallel also fails - little of the outright "Don't Mess with Texas" mentality that I picked up on while living there in the army and later during during more enlightening visits to the annual SXSW Music confab in Austin. Corrupt politicos, though. A no-brainer, though they exist everywhere, but certainly no one as purely shameful as Dubya, say, in Thailand despite the generals, exiled former prime minister and other rascals.

There's certainly a frontier, kinda Deadwood, Tombstone feel (I know, neither are Texas) certainly to Hua Hin. Sleazy speculators, myriad roadside taverns and eateries, hookers, hustlers, stray wild dogs, con artists, all despite the benign peaceful ambiance of a great little train station and the Royal Summer Palace.

Food for thought. Gonna go check in my Colt at the door, now, and eat me a mess of Khanom chin namya and maybe some of my favorite fried chicken here, from a sidewalk stand prepared by the world's oldest, homeliest ladyboy.

I call it Colonel Sandra's Fried Chicken. Fried chicken from a balding, aging transvestite probably wouldn't fly in Texas, but, that's another reason I'd prefer Hua Hin to Houston.

I Wanna Be Your Dog
One of my most disturbing memories of my short Bangkok childhood was being in a dusty wat/temple courtyard with my parents on a hot afternoon. The saffron robed monks were lazing placidly about, flies were plentiful and while I can't recall why we were there, what I remember painfully was the anguished howls and whines coming from a small dusty gray short haired mutt trying to drag itself slowly with its front legs. The back legs were useless because its back was clearly broken.

I asked my father why the monks didn't put it out of its misery. The howls were soul searing, bouncing off the courtyard and making the dog's agony all too evident. My dad explained that it was against Buddhist belief to kill an animal, even if was suffering. I found the explanation not entirely satisfying and briefly contemplated finding a brick or rock in an attempt to mercifully smash its head. But, no. We left and I could hear the howls for minutes after the temple was out of sight. It still haunts me today...

Which is probably why I've got a new pal in Hua Hin, a white and brindle, short haired "soi dog", one of seemingly hundreds feral mutts roaming the city and dozens in my benighted neighborhood.

I haven't named her, afraid of getting too attached, I guess, but since I tossed her some dinner scraps about two and a half weeks ago, she's been hard to shake. Faithful, friendly, flea bitten, I don't allow her inside or even through the gates, but her attachment based on the few eggs and scraps I throw her way several days a week has become something of a joke among a couple Thai employees at Faulty Towers.

"We never see you with Thai lady," said one. "But now you have dog. You like dogs, not ladies?"

"Heh," I respond. "Umm, I like ladies fine. But mine is in China. Dog's are easier, too. They don't ask if their butts are too big. They just sniff each others."

"Why you nice to dog? She dirty! Don't feed!"

This is the part I don't comprehend. Yeah, she could use a bath and delousing, but what does a little pat on her head and doggy baby talk and a few scraps cost me? What about making merit? Thais regularly give free food and gifts to monks to make spiritual merit. But I've also seen monks with cell phones and one with what appeared to be an iPod. Meanwhile the dogs are unsightly, loud, yes, but I'd rather make small merit with a soi dog. Maybe because of what I saw so long ago...

Mystery Train
The mystery is why am I such a sucker for hard luck cases? Inspired by the idyllic glow cast by the Hua Hin train station several weeks ago, this weekend I determined to hop a car south a few hours to Chumphon, a smaller beach town I'd never been, just for the helluva it. In the meantime, M, the hardluck case Cypriot/Brit who'd introduced me to the station's joys had reappeared.

He's been living penniless, without a valid visa with a poor family of "forest people" on the outskirts of Hua Hin where he says they've been feeding him "fried tiny frogs and beetles". I don't doubt it. But I made the mistake of mentioning my weekend plans and after telling me he just wanted to meet me at the station for a "little chat" he showed up with a ratty backpack and hopes I'd take him along.

Sigh. I sprung for two tickets and since then have regretted every minute, beginning from his inability to keep ahold of his ticket within 3 minutes of almost missing the train because he was rolling a (yes, tobacco) cigarette. After I found his ticket on the floor where he'd dropped it, seconds before the conductor almost booted him, he fell asleep snoring and coughing loudly to the disgust of our fellow passengers. But not before he'd seen a young Canadian watching a video iPod near us and asked loudly, as if he'd just arrived from a cave in 19th century Mars, "Wos' 'he wotchin' wha' the bloo'y 'ell is tha?" He'd never seen an iPod though he's 10 years younger than me.

"Well, you know a Walk-Man?" I said slowly as though talking to a mentally challenged 7-year old. "It's an I-POD. I-POD. Like a Walkman only with pictures, video." I didn't even go into the whole tape-is-dead deal.

Our train was late and upon arrival at about 12.30am vs the original 9somethingpm, I disembarked ahead of M who stumbled off completely disoriented, demanding to know where we were and why we weren't in Hua Hin. No, he wasn't stoned and had only had a couple beers. I couldn't account for his confusion and after 20 minutes of first patiently explaing, then screaming that we had: "GONE FROM POINT A. HUA HIN. AND NOW WE'RE AT POINT B. CHUMPHON. PERIOD."

"Bu' I don' unnderstan'" he said. "Sto'p shoutin' a'me."

Nothing like wandering the dark, nearly deserted streets of a strange Thai beachtown at 1am with an impoverished moron who mystically dropped 50 IQ points on the rails in 3 hours. We wandered and finally found a guesthouse. The good news is that it's small, inexpensive, clean, has a working Internet connection, and the staff, including a 20something year old transsexual "lady-boy" with possibly the best breasts I've ever seen, are friendly. The owner is a rotound, chatty, young Thai woman who calls herself Kay and speaks better English than M. The bad news is that Kay just had to leave suddenly: "A cousin's mother has swallowed poison! I must go to hospital."

The road goes on forever and the party never ends...