The final chapter

Bangkok revisited

Between the week I stayed in Bangkok before heading to Bang Saen and my final week after leaving Pattaya, I spent about two weeks in Thailand's capital city, where we had first landed on October 17.

In that time, I learned to use the skytrain and metro without a map, I met beautiful and dangerous people, and I became well-acquainted with the vast city, from the tourist ghetto in Banglampu to the Silom drag show, from the yaa-dong whiskey stand to the ultra-high-so supermall utopias.


Banglampu

Also known as the Khao San Road district, I think an easy shorthand to describe this area is a list of the most common streetside shops: electronica CDs, Jimi Hendrix/Radiohead/Scarface T-shirts, pad thai, swimwear, banana roti, day-glo velvet art, tuk-tuk sculptures made from crushed Chang beer cans.

I'm not going to lie and say that I liked this place. I spent most of my time trying not to judge everyone, not to assume they were just vacant stoners who were only there to get drunk with other hippies and buy a token of (fake) Thai culture as a joke or something. Meanwhile I was walking around in sandals, khakis, and a Bob Dylan T-shirt, eating spring rolls and roti, and by appearances could have easily evoked the same sort of disdain from myself.

While Mike and Jeremy were still with me, we stayed across the road from Banglampu, on a little canal. One thing that did interest me about this part of town was the uncanny presentation of trash. Thailand at large had garbage issues, but in parts of Bangkok there was so much of it that it became not an obstruction but its own sort of artifact.

I remember one collection in particular, an abandoned lot between two streets. The ground, high with rubble, was strewn with fliers, bottles, and everyday trash of all sorts. In a way the lot seemed like an authorless, self-conferring sculpture with a hive-life all its own.
The maw of an old vacuum cleaner gaped after a bitten pear, wasted bamboo leaned lattice-like against a half-wall, and transparent snack wrappers whirled together in a little twister. I almost felt like I shouldn't walk across it.


Chinatown

The sky overhead is so polluted that stormy weather seems imminent all the time. Through its veneer the sun looks like the moon.

The streets are lined with produce stands, clothing outlets, and gadget shops. Great vertical signs in red Chinese characters advertise warehouses and restaurants. Smoke rises from squid grills. The sidewalks crash with people, but human shouts are tinny under the noise of the motorway.

There, trucks, taxis, and jalopy motorcycles fight for forward motion, and I don't think Thailand has any kind of muffler standard. The raucous tuk-tuk, whose name is onomatopoeic, clamors over all the rest.

The sound is constant and everywhere, so that you look down the street and the whole cityscape -- buildings, people and the space between them -- seems to rumble and thrum and growl like a restless monster.


Center World

A flute melody charms me along its wispy path, through sets of glossy black couches accented with chrome furnishings, beyond an array of plasma screens on which wild horses run through vivid meadows, and past beautiful women with impossibly smooth faces holding jewels or perfumes. At the store's exit, a man from Panasonic is demonstrating the first battery-powered personal car.

I emerge onto the fourth-floor concourse, where a curtain of huge green pearls hangs from the ceiling three floors above, catching golden sunlight from the western window. I feel lighter than air. I feel non-existent. This place is designed to ease the pain of shopping, but, like morphine for the unafflicted, the effect on the penniless is plain bliss. No one knows that I’m not here to buy anything! While part of me is worried that I’ll be found out and ousted – or worse, jailed – another part is mourning the passage of time, because with it comes night and the closing of Center World. Its big sister, Paragon, shuts down just an hour later.

I try not to think about this as I drift toward the glass wall behind the escalators, where the newest Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and Ferraris are on display. In my travels so far, it’s been the lowest of everything – the barest room, the cheapest restaurant, the darkest bar – but when I arrived at the Silom Center shopping district, I was flung straight to the top. Maybe that’s why this is so overwhelming. The best of the modern world, all being presented to me as though I deserve it.

And the scale of everything. I feel as though I’m in the presence of some vast, cutting-edge, superficially good deity. An ivy-strewn waterfall covers seven floors of the northern wall. In the atrium, three towering, orange-glowed letters spells out “ZEN.” And outside, the glossy face of a Thai girl smiles down from a screen in the sky.

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During my last stint in Bangkok, I finally got to be around money. I made some high-so friends who changed my clothes, took me to posh restaurants, and bought me cosmopolitans. One was the owner of a Silom nightclub and a modeling agency. Another was the former Miss Thailand. The most imposing was champion strongman and action-movie star Nathan Jones. He was General Boagrius in Troy. Thais know him as the foreigner in the hit martial-arts film Tom Yum Goong. He is enormous.

Walking around the movie theater with Nathan, or standing in the elevator with him, something seemed incorrect. Art often imitates life, so that movie scenes blur with our personal memories, but there are certain things that you know exist only in cartoons or special effects: dragons that breathe fire, steamrolled faces that blink twice, and human behemoths. Yet there he was, bumping his head against the ceiling of the elevator, making movies seem all the more lifelike or reality seem all the less real.


Coming home

One of the most striking things about arriving at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., was the American conversation happening all around me. In certain parts of Thailand, English speech was normal – that was how Europeans often spoke with each other or with Thais. I even overheard an American accent every now and then. But they were speaking about Thailand, or speaking about home as a place that could be abstracted. It wasn’t the verbal exhaust of everyday life, as natural as breathing.

I wrote down a scrap I overheard soon after arriving, a Virginia mother talking on her mobile phone: “Band teachers are saints. They’re all saints. They should all be sainted…Okay. Yeah. Oh I’m having a Valentine’s Day potluck on the fifteenth.” People cursing to themselves. Thoughtless exchanges with service personnel. Black people talking. I’d seen almost no black Americans in Asia, and now I was in Washington D.C. There were even sorority girls, twittering away at a speed that would be inaudible to foreigners.

There was a downside to this. In Thailand, the sound of other people’s conversations, of PA announcements, of song lyrics, had about the same relevance to me as the sound of distant hammering. Ambient speech was a sort of silence, in the sense that I could remain absorbed in my reading or in my own thoughts because my brain never processed the words. Even if they were in English, the accents were often thick enough that the words did not have easy passage to my listening center.

At the airport, everyone was having American conversations in American English all the time. When I sat to think or read, I was surrounded by what I now recognized as a frenzy of meaning, a patternless web of expression that my unconscious was curious enough to get tangled in.

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Because United Airlines screwed me over, they put me up in a D.C. hotel on the night that I was supposed to fly to Miami. It was a Holiday Inn, but damned if it didn’t seem like a palace. I was used to a closet-sized room with a hard mattress and a table fan.

I sat down on the hotel bed and my bottom sank for what seemed like forever. I had two pillows, and they came with a menu that offered extra pillows in four consistencies. There was cable TV, body wash, climate control, a razor, a blowdryer, hot water, and a shower head that let you select from six different spray shapes. I drank the tap water!

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So now I’m in Gainesville, and I spend most of my time in disbelief that I’m actually here. At times I feel like I’m in a dream that I had while I was in Thailand, a dream about home, because I had many towards the end. Or I feel like Jan. 31, 2008 came right after Oct. 16, 2007, and I’ve been here the whole time. I have a very hard time reconciling the two lives. I fear this present life burying the other under mounds and mounds of time.

I don’t have any final thoughts. When people ask me what my trip was like I just say something meaningless. Pretty soon I’ll start to look for a job. Maybe if I was smart I would just wrap myself up in my arms and do as Beckett said: “Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, all tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.”