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.