“I see.”
“There is really no comparison between the destinies, mind-sets or lifestyles of these different women, but because they are all prostitutes we inadvertently find ourselves talking about them as if they were in the same plight, which they are not. The truth is that prostitution fulfills many functions. It is a substitute for social welfare, medical insurance, student loans, a profitable hobby as well as being the path to that wealth which many modern women expect from life. It also brings an enormous amount of foreign currency to our country, which means the government is never serious about suppressing it.”
“I see,” Pisit says again, in an unusually somber mood. “And we are talking about a significant proportion of Thai women?”
“Huge. When you consider that many women are ineligible by reason of age, or lack of physical charms, it begins to look as if perhaps twenty percent of women in Krung Thep who are in a position to sell their bodies do so. If you include the sugar daddy phenomenon and the overseas industry, which is very very big, the figure must be even higher.”
“Are we as a nation dependent on this trade?”
“I don’t want to exaggerate or paint these women as heroes, but it’s true that without their work we would all be a little bit poorer.”
“Is there something about Thai women that leads them so easily into the trade?”
Laughing: “Well, farangs especially say how beautiful we are and we don’t seem to have the same hang-ups as many Western women. The West tries to turn the act of sex into a religious experience, when to us it is no more than scratching an itch. I’m afraid we’re not as romantic as we seem. And perhaps we are a little strange. In other countries such as Japan and South Korea, prostitution declined dramatically as the economy improved. When our economy improves, the number of prostitutes tends to go up rather than down.”
I switch Pisit and his guest off when the cab arrives but find myself haunted for a moment by the rice grower from Isaan. I can see her, uncomfortable without her sarong in the short skirt or black leggings and black tank top which are almost a uniform of the trade. Perhaps her legs are short and muscular, her ass a little on the wide side, her expectations wildly out of whack with reality as she stares at passing white men, wondering which of them will be her savior. She owns the broad open face and smudge nose of the northern tribes. I experience her astonishment when her first customer tries to initiate her into the black art of fellatio, her disbelief that he could be serious, that people really did that sort of thing. In my mind’s eye I follow her all the way to the terminus, share her disgust with the city while she waits for the bus home. I find I love her, though I’ve never met her. If we are to be saved it will be by the likes of her.
On the way to my own hovel I meditate on my penis. Not only mine, my thoughts encompass every owner. Sooner or later one comes to a forked path: make it the centerpiece of your life, or put it away to be used in tumescent mode only on special occasions. Those who take the first option must surely reach a point where the sole function of one’s lovers is to serve the organ in all its glory? You might put it anywhere, share it with anyone, so long as it’s running the show. I find I’m not thinking about my cock at all, I’m thinking of Bradley’s: the man who sported a perfect phallus on his web page. And what of his strange bedfellow Sylvester Warren, the man who played so rough only Siberians would partner him?
28
I was twenty-one and already a cop when I visited Fritz for the second time. I went alone and never told Nong of what was to be an ongoing mission of mercy. By then he had been in the jail for more than eleven years and the transformation from suave young European to wizened sewer survivor was complete. He was entirely bald apart from a couple of tufts, with wrinkles which crossed his white shiny dome. A hypersensitivity to nuances of body language gave the impression of extreme cunning bordering on insanity. If I touched my ear, rubbed my nose, coughed or looked at the ceiling I triggered responses vital to his survival. I had come on a whim, no doubt in my usual pathetic search for a father; he emerged in chains from behind the endless warren of bars into his side of the visitors’ room in the hope of finding a savior who might somehow get him out of there. No two men have ever disappointed each other more; after five minutes we were laughing like drains. His family had disowned him, his close friends had been rounded up in Germany after his bust and prosecuted for trafficking in heroin. Their incarcerations had passed more quickly than his-he was in for life-but none of them wanted to visit him. I came away with the clear certainty that I was the only person in the world who could save his mind.
Eleven years later I am making my sixty-first visit. Just before we reach the watchtower I have the cabdriver stop for me to buy six packs of two hundred cigarettes. Fritz smokes local brands himself, but 555s are the more valuable currency in the prison economy. In addition I buy a packet of Marlboro Reds and have the driver stop again near the prison while I work in the back of the cab. Fritz has money-by Thai standards he’s quite wealthy-but translating this into prison power is not so easy as all that. Every prisoner can open a prison account if he likes, but the amount he can take out of that account from day to day is strictly limited. At first I brought Fritz some of his own money in the form of thousand-baht notes folded and compressed so small I was able to simply flick a couple through the bars in the visiting area whenever I came to see him. The problem here was that in the jail he needed small denominations. A thousand-baht note was unmanageable and made the temptation to murder him and steal it irresistible to some of the inmates. Now I clean out the insides of ten Marlboros, slide a few tightly rolled hundred-baht notes inside each one, pack the end with tobacco and play the rest by ear. We’ve never failed yet. At the prison my police ID lets me get away with a light frisk. Other visitors, especially farangs, are body-searched.
There is always a moment of suspense while I wait in the visitors’ room for the duty guard to look for him. Is he still alive, or did the last beating finish him off? Is he sick in the hospital building, perhaps with HIV from sharing a needle, or from one or other of the fatal maladies that affect the inmates? Has the King agreed to pardon him this year? Here he comes, holding up the heavy chain of his leg irons with a piece of string in his left hand, as if he were taking a dog for a walk. Officially there are no leg irons in Bang Kwan anymore, but the message never seems to have reached the guards on Fritz’s block. He sits in a chair on the other side of the bars and drops the chain with a dull clank on the floor.
Amazingly, he has heard about Pichai and tells me how sorry he is. The aging process which accelerated so dramatically in the first years of his imprisonment came to an abrupt halt some time ago, as if it were aiming for a specific state of reptilian cunning. Now he is a wrinkled tortoise, anywhere between fifty and two hundred years old. He thanks me for the 555s, which the guard has already inspected and handed over, and scans my face. I know that he is not an ordinary man, will never be an ordinary man again, much as he would love to be one of the millions of middle-aged mediocrities living nondescript lives whom he once despised. I feel him probing me with that hyperalertness and know that he has read my mind, not through any supernatural power but simply through having developed the ability to read faces to a monstrous degree.