Pat Pong show, Bangkok

Important disclaimer: If you're ever disturbed, whether easily or with difficulty, you might not want to read this post. It covers a certain show involving certain talented ladies working off a dark road in Bangkok. The experience was interesting, and our curiosity was satisfied, but we were made to squirm -- first in our guts, and later, at the final act, in our souls.

(This disclaimer is directed explicity at our parents and other relatives. If you're one of our necessarily perverted friends, please read on, and I'm sorry for the delay.)

We sat down in the front row and a couple of working girls, their parts barely covered, sat beside us and tried to siphon away our money. The room was small, and the rest of the crowd was mostly European. About forty percent of it was female. On stage, a woman lay on her back, puffing excitedly on a cigarette with her vagina. I never saw her face.

The bargirls deserted us quickly. Apparently, our boyish charm did not make up for our frugality. A new woman took the stage and began slicing bananas into chunks. "Banana Boat Song" filled the room. She propped her feet up on a pole and, with a wet "thwuk!" each time, she launched the chunks into the air, sending them over her head behind her reclined body. To my disappointment, she made no effort to time her shots with the exclamations of the song ("Six foot, seven foot, eight foot, bunch!/thwuk!").

She then pointed to someone in the room and indicated that he should open his mouth. He refused, and she tried several others to no avail. I pointed to Jeremy, who was sitting to my left. She prepared to launch, and Jeremy dove behind me, clutching my shirt, which is all stretched now thanks a lot. The banana went behind us somewhere.

The next act was a younger girl, and her expression invoked a high school sophomore reluctantly at band recital. The crowd was becoming rowdy and self-involved. The girl looked around insecurely, then seemed to get a cue from somewhere. She itched at her labia and from between them produced a string of bright-pink flowers.

The girl scanned the room again, and I saw disappointment strike her face as she observed that no one was watching. She continued pulling on the string, which yielded a rainbow of day-glo colors. Still no response. She waved her hand like a magician and quickly left the stage.

A taller, meatier girl came on next, carrying two bottles of soda water. My first thought was, "How is she going to open those bottles? I don't see an opener anywhere," and my second thought was, "I am far too delicate to be here."

The fifth act began curiosly. She held a folded piece of paper in one hand, and with the other, she pulled from her vagina a string that was hung with charms. Dido sang from the speakers: "My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why-yy..." The girl took one of the charms between her fingers and I saw that it was in fact a razor. With the boredom of a schoolgirl, she began cutting the folded paper into a snowflake. Mike still has it, which means that it's somewhere over eastern Siberia right now.

Next was the girl who, using a small pipe to direct the puffs, blew out twelve candles one by one. This was impressive, but not so much as the last of the solo acts, performed by the oldest and most wizened member of the crew.

After laying out her drawing paper on the stage floor, she inserted into herself the butt of a blue dry-erase marker. She was waiting for a cue from another woman, who was taking drink orders from a group in the back of my room. Wearing an expression of pained impatience, she barked at the girl in Thai. I couldn't understand the words, but I imagine it was something like, "What's the holdup? I'm clenching a fat marker in my goddamn vagina."

Finally, the other woman gave her the okay. "What's your name?" the performer called out to a man at our left.

The man was wearing a white linen suit with a pink handkerchief in the pocket, and his head was tortoise-like. Beside him sat a young and polished blonde, whose bejeweled hand lay on his thigh. In a thick Mediterranean accent, the man croaked out a response that even I couldn't understand. The Thai woman asked him to repeat several times, then decided to go with what she heard.

Supporting herself with her hands, she moved in midair like a gymnast, the fat of her buttocks brushing against the paper. When she was done, the second girl looked at the paper and said something in Thai, which I can guess was, "I can't read this shit. This isn't even English." This girl approached the old man and asked him to write his name down. Then she took the message back to the performer, who began to write again. When she finished, she showed her work to the crowd. We all applauded. The paper read, in perfectly formed English, "Welcome to Thailand Vittorio." Two girls brought the paper back to Vittorio. He accepted with a little nod, then handed it to his beautiful girlfriend.

After this act, the lights dimmed, and a romantic air began to play. A man walked out in briefs and started rubbing his crotch, glancing here and there. What now? I asked Mike. We hadn't heard anything about a man. Murmurs of uncertainty filled the room.

Then his partner came out wearing lace, and they both undressed. Quickly he took her in his arms and laid her down on the floor. I first mistook their speed and fluidity for that of ballet dancers and not, say, professional movers.

The man was paunchy, and the woman was sickly-looking, with prominent ribs and pelvis. They moved through every major sexual position: her leg vertical, he standing behind her, and at the end, the two of them hanging from rings on the ceiling. It was like an instructive demonstration of sex, though entirely passionless. They changed positions every three measures if you counted four beats per. Once or twice I saw her fidgeting her hands, touching his chest maybe. At first I thought it was actual female pleasure or an imitation of it, then I realized that she was just making false starts before the time to rearrange.

I consider myself pretty blase about things like purity, sanctity, blasphemy. I believe, maybe naively, that anything powerful enough to be sacred is too powerful to be marred by a little abuse. Still, I found myself diverting my attention when the sex demonstration began for the second time. I think that was silly now, but I'd never watched other people having sex before, and I'd imagined my sex life henceforth changed after seeing the act reduced to begrudged choreography, thick slapping sounds, and the restrained grimace on a face whose cheek is pressed against the floor.

Sun of the beach photos

Koh Turatao was overrun with monkeys, I caught this one in the act of stealing a girls sandal.

Cooking crabs on our driftwood fire.

Arriving on Koh Turatao, the water is crystal clear.

A monk finding solitude in the still water.

The island-scape of the Andaman Sea and Turatao Marine National Park.

The port in Pakbara.

I couldn't decide which of these two I liked more.

A man bathes in the Andaman Sea.

This area was hit hard by the tsunami and now there are many signs telling you which way to run if you see a wall of water.

One of the brothels that fronts as a karaoke bar in Haat Yai. This was the view from our hotel room.

Justin tries to decide what size cobra he wants to eat at the snake restaurant.

Caged song birds for sale.

Justin and Jeremy, seen in the mirror, try to decide if they want a massage.

Street food for New Years in Haat Yai.

Sun of the beach

We had just finished a few drinks at an open-air restaurant, the night was ripe, and Jeremy announced that he wanted to spend some money on a lady. This southernmost city, Haat Yai, had at least one brothel on every block, usually under the marquis "Karaoke" or "Ancient Massage." There were a few prostitution supercenters, like Pink Lady Complex and Turkish Bath, which had numerous floors and rooms, each specializing in a different service.

The first place we tried was Piano Bar. Here, the girls sat on a tiered platform behind a glass wall, brightly adorned like tropical fish. They preened aloofly or winked at us while patting their bodies.

Each wore a number, and you had only to tell the manager which number you would like to order. The three-digit girls were about $30, and the two-digit girls were about $25.

We visited several shops with a similar layout. Others had no aquarium; instead a bevy of girls greeted you when you walked in. They tried to win your favor while the manager discussed business with you. To keep up the ruse, someone often sang dischordant karaoke in the back of the room.

At each place, Jeremy would ask the manager an assortment of questions. "What for all the presents?" when there were large gift boxes stacked behind the girls in one aquarium. "Why I cannot have for all of one day?" because he had heard this offer earlier that night.

He would haggle over the price stubbornly, then back out when the manager finally agreed on a discount. When we showed him our puzzlement, he would wrinkle his nose and tell us he didn't like any of the girls.

We literally visited every shop in town. It took hours. We knew we couldn't go back to any of these places, or walk by them without shading our faces.

It had been the same when I went shopping lady with him in Mueng Laa, China (fruitlessly, if it matters to you). I think the thing is that he wanted a girl, but he didn't want to go through the disreputable process of paying her and following her away into some dim and overly efficient room. It was enough to look and be on the brink of the actual event, or to be fawned over by the girls and enveloped in their auras of guaranteed sex.

Once, though, at one of the aquariums, he came very close. She was an absolutely stunning girl in a coral-colored dress, seated with her legs crossed at the edge of her row. She had lustrous black hair, cream-colored skin, and lively, smiling eyes. Her number was fifty-eight. Its clunkiness seemed to make her more accessible, which was some trick considering the fine liquidity of her contours and the grace of her gently nodding leg, of her blithely turned head and the swish of silken hair that followed it.

Jeremy had the sense not to duck out this time, and he ordered her. I'm sorry, the manager said, she has already been requested by that gentleman. He pointed to a Thai man sitting at a table and drinking a cocktail. Why he hadn't taken her yet, I'm not sure. Perhaps he was savoring this anticipatory gaze, which was sure to be better than the necrophiliac automation to follow.

New Year's Eve, new ways to party

Do you remember on Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Larry has a whiskey-and-coke in a coke can, and he tells this guy to try his coke because he thinks it will be funny, and the guy is like, "What is this?" because it turns out the guy is Muslim and forbidden from drinking liquor? No? Oh right, that was just my life.

We were on the top floor of our hotel, which we shared with a group of teenagers from Satun province, close to the Muslim nation of Malaysia. Most of them looked like emo kids in America, but grungier and meaner. Their T-shirts promoted bands like Nirvana and the 80's hair-metal sensation The Scorpions.

They were pious about liquor, but they joined us in throwing crude Chinese explosives out the window for New Year's, they tried to steal my T-shirts, and the girl among them tried to seduce me into buying her a Fanta.

For the actual crossing into 2008, we went to Blue Kiss Disco. It was so hip that at the back of the club there was an ice bar, a room where Thais could experience actual cold temperatures. In the anteroom they put on parkas and woolly boots. The room is made to look like it's cut from ice, and vapor comes from your mouth and rises off your skin. Thais venerated Mike when he told them that his hometown was like that all winter long.

The room was mostly empty though the club was packed. We wore our short sleeves and let the cold air feast on our skin as we danced in the new year.

Solitude

After Haat Yai, we took a minibus to the coast and then a ferry out to the island of Ko Tarutao, a large and still-pristine island in the Andaman Sea.

At the pier, there was a visitor's center, a small restaurant, and a shop that sold supplies. We stocked up on food, then hiked about four kilometers to an isolated beach. To our left was a large rock formation whose jungle trees shook with monkeys, and to our right stretched endless sand and sea. We took rest for a moment, then went exploring.

The day was clasped in the arms of what some would call poor weather: a low bank of clouds, grey light, and cool, electrostatic wind. A fine rain could be felt but not seen. After walking through the interior Ko Turatao, we followed a white path out onto a bright green peninsula, an island of lucidity amid the dream of grey water and drizzly haze. Likewise, our stark waking minds were ringed all around by the drone of cicadas. The sound cleared for us a silence in which we sat side by side between the palms.

We reflected on Ko Pha Ngan, on what some call the "laid-back" or "anything-goes" environment of southern Thailand's traveler culture. You can dance how you want to, you can compose paragraphs outside the 7-Eleven, you can go around with whatever guy, girl, or body part you fancy. Nothing is strange or taboo. At the full moon party, for example, no one looks twice at sex on the beach, berserk dancing to no particular music, or at a lone man weeping in hunch.

We began by talking about societies, how any society, as well as any frendship or relationship, is characterized by commonality, and commonality breeds conformity, which entails restrictions on behavior. At Ko Pha Ngan, there were literally hundreds of disparate societies mixed together. Commonality, and with it restrictive conformity, broke down.

Survival

It was late into sunset when we returned to the campsite, and we set to work. Jeremy and I found a broken crab trab buried in the sand. We unburied it, stitched it up, and fixed weights to the outside.

Meanwhile, Mike had sharpened a stick and gone hunting for crabs beneath the rosy sheen on the water. He caught three. We smashed the shells of the small ones and put them in the trap. The third we steamed over the fire. Mike and I shared the meat because Jeremy didn't think it was "comestible."

Jeremy and Mike made their beds on the sand, by the fire, and I hung my hammock in a cluster of trees farther inland.

By the afternoon of the next day, it became apparent that the food we had purchased -- rice and canned fish -- was not only insufficient for three nights but was no longer appetizing even to a very hungry boy. So, I collected a potful of snails, and Mike caught a few more crabs. There was even one in the trap. Jeremy fashioned a bow-and-arrow for hunting monkeys.

This was something to watch. He would approach the family of monkeys, and they would scamper to observe him from behind trees or from a safe distance on the beach. Then Jeremy would hurry toward them in jaunty French leaps and launch his arrow, which veered quickly like a Nerf dart into the sand.

Jeremy also helped us catch minnows from the river with a mosquito net (I fried them in the oil from mashed peanuts.). He was keen on making weapons and hunting animals, but he never wanted to eat them. He would take one look at what we had in our pot -- rice or snails or whatever -- and say, "Okay I go at the restaurant now."

I suppose I could mention here that on the other side of the rock mountain that blocked off our beach, there was a small and overpriced bungalow complex with a restaurant. By the inland trail, it was about three hundred meters. Jeremy made this trip regularly.

By nightfall on the second night, we had no water left, so Jeremy and I made an expedition to the restaurant. We carried heavy, flaming sticks because Jeremy claimed to have been chased back by wild boars the last time he went.

When we arrived, all was black, and the restuarant was closed. The lock on the cooler, though, was unhinged. Jeremy went in, using his lighter for illumination, and I waited on the sand.

When he returned, we went down to the coast and surveyed his booty: one can of Coca-Cola and two cans of beer Chang.

"There's no water!" I exclaimed. "We need water."

"One person, I cannot take my fire for choose all what I want."

"Okay fine, let's go back."

We went back and, as quickly as we could, grabbed some more items from the cooler. "Don't be stupid," I hissed at him. I took two bottles of water and left a twenty-baht note on the railing. On the beach, Jeremy lit a flame and we took inventory again. It appeared that Jeremy had taken another beer and a Pepsi.

"What the fuck?" I said. "You didn't get any water."

"It's okay," he said. "You want to go back?"

"No," I said. "Let's just go."

We scurried down the path in the dark. When we were almost clear of the last bungalow, from which a silhouette appeared to be watching us, Jeremy said in a harsh whisper: "Are you sure you don't want to go back? More Coca-Cola, more beer."

"No," I said. "You're crazy."

"You don't want to have this beer?" he said.

"Okay, yes, thank you," I said. "But let's get out of here."

When we returned to the campsite, we had soda pop and beer, but still only modest portions of food. After a pot of noodles, we sat watching the water in unsated silence. Boat lights, or just the glow from them, dotted the horizon. Closer to us, a long boat was shining a light into the water. We watched the boat and it's pool of lit ocean pace back and forth.

The other two figured it was a squid boat, so they sent me swimming after it with a plastic bag and thirty baht. When I arrived, the men invited me on. They were pulling in crab traps, not catching squid, and the crabs were the same size as ours.

Like most Thai people, they had a fearful respect for sub-tropical temperatures, including that of the sea at night. They seemed to think that I had endured great hardship to reach their boat, so they filled my bag with crabs and wouldn't accept my money. I bid them good luck in the new year and swam back ashore. We ate three steamed crabs each.

Voting ourselves off

The next morning, Jeremy leapt from his sleep blubbering in terrified French. He thought he had rolled into the fire. He had not. It was the air itself which was on fire.

We stayed in the shade for the next several hours. When I went into the light for some errand, my skin would shrivel and peel back before my eyes. Finally, at around three o' clock, some cloud could watch no longer and stepped in front of the sun, probably to be dissipated in anger by our torturer.

By that time, we had but one hot beer between the three of us. I boiled two bottles worth of river water in the pot, which I cleaned as best as I could. Still, my water was spicy and sooty to the taste, and clouded with food bits.

"But I don't understand," Jeremy said. "The restaurant is just 'eer!"

Soon after, we hiked back to the port. According to Jeremy and the other Europeans we met at the restaurant there, our behavior at the camp site was distinctively American. Frontiersmanship, et cetera. I don't know. I'd say that smacks of Euro-condescension. Personally, I didn't think the food at the restaurant was that good.