I follow her out of the dressing room and back down the corridor full of breasts and buttocks. I continue to follow her out of the bar onto the terrace and call her name. She turns and I make a face. Her features harden, but she delves into her black backpack and takes out a card. Without looking at me she scribbles an address on the card and gives it to me. She turns to smile. “I live way out in the sticks these days-city rents were killing me.” She walks quickly away from me.
The card is printed in Thai and English and reads: “Kat Walk Enterprises, Private Entertainment, Floor Shows, Cabaret with a Difference.” There is a telephone number which carries the local prefix and is probably that of her agent, and her web page address. The address she has scribbled on the back is of a very distant suburb, hardly Krung Thep at all.
I walk along the balcony which looks over the courtyard. The bar on the corner is dedicated to transsexuals, who like to make up in public at mirrors on a table on the balcony. I catch a glimpse of a long feminine neck, softly molded moon face, hard bitchy eyes as I slip past and down the stairs to the courtyard. There are so many half-naked bodies now, white male and brown female, it is difficult to move. “Hello darlin’, how are you? Are you lonely?” It is one of the transsexuals, full-bosomed and pouting. I shake my head.
Lonely? An incurable state, unfortunately. I push past sweat-drenched T-shirts to the street, consider with weariness the task which lies ahead. Nana Plaza is only the seed at the center of the mango; there are thousands of bars in side sois and disused lots in every direction, particularly on the other side of Sukhumvit all the way to Asok, which is to say one stop on the sky train: about five acres of brown flesh for rent to a similar quantity of white. East meets West. How can I disapprove when I owe my existence to this conjunction?
It is forty-one minutes past 1 a.m., hot, muggy. With resignation I take one of the yaa baa pills from my pocket. I’ve lost touch with the market, but as far as I can remember the blue pills tend to be laced with heroin and give a pleasant, opiated high. The crimson ones are mixed with fertilizer and produce a lot of energy at the expense of making you more than a little crazy, with a poisonous hangover the next day.
I return to the plaza to order a bottle of Singha beer, which I use to swallow the pill. It’s crimson. There’s a lot of night left.
12
They came from the north and the south, the east and the west. Krung Thep was not only the biggest city, until recently it was the only modern city we had. They came from the plains and the hills. Most were ethnic Thai but many were tribespeople from the north, Muslims from the south, Khmer who sneaked over from Cambodia, and plenty were technically Burmese who lived on the border and never paid it any mind. They were part of the greatest diaspora in history, the migration of half of Asia from country to town, and it was happening at an accelerated speed during the last third of the twentieth century. Men with iron muscles and the dogged heroism of unmechanized agricultural labor, women with bodies ravaged by continual pregnancies, they possessed in full measure all the guts, all the enthusiasm, all the naÏveté, all the hope, all the desperation necessary to make it in the big city. The only thing they left out of account was time, of which they knew very little apart from the rhythms of nature. The sadistic vivisection of life into hours, minutes, seconds was one of the few hardships never inflicted by the soil. Deadlines, especially, were the source of a new kind of anxiety. Stress? Its urban version was strange, alien, insidious and something they had no way of dealing with. Yaa baa was a poison whose time had come.
The fishing industry was the first to succumb. No longer a question of bringing fish to predawn markets for people to take home and cook, these days the fight to net the fish was only the first step in a semi-industrial process that required critical timing to ice it, pack it, freight it; the most lucrative fish were those kept alive and flown to restaurants in Japan and Hong Kong, Vancouver and San Francisco. The job of scaling fish for local restaurants was another of those peculiarly stressful tasks which had to be completed between 1 and 5 a.m., just when your body rhythms told you it was time to sleep. The job couldn’t be done without yaa baa.
Truck drivers were next. The brave new world required nonstop driving the length and breadth of the country, with Bangkok as a hub, and sometimes interminable journeys down south, over the border and down through Malaysia as far as Kuala Lumpur-a journey of more than a thousand miles. Nobody thought of doing it without yaa baa. Construction workers, too, felt the call. Hard work was not the problem, it was the pressure, the deadlines, the relentless weight of money that pressed on all projects, the night work, the dangers at high levels, welding with gas at night on the thirtieth floor of some new office or luxury apartment building. Safety regulations were primitive and not well enforced, you had to stay awake to stay alive.
Other industries followed. Bar girls whose job it was to dance from 8 p.m. into the small hours of the morning, policemen on night duty, students needing to stay awake for exams-this stress was alien to the Thai way, and required chemical treatment.
Now progress took the form of inexplicable homicides. In Krung Thep a group of construction workers mutilated passersby in a rabid slashing spree. In the northeast an addicted monk raped and killed a tourist. Truck drivers drove ten-wheelers into ditches, pedestrians and each other.
The official figure is about a million addicted to the drug, but I guess the reality to be double that. Many employers openly admit they have to purchase yaa baa at wholesale prices in order to distribute it to their workforces, who could not afford the retail price and could not work without it.
Yaa baa means “mad drug” and refers to methamphetamine produced from ephedrine. It hits the blood in a rush and shoots into the brain stem. When it is smoked its effect is even more powerful-often violent.
Yaa baa is much easier to produce than heroin, an amateur can learn the chemistry in an hour. In a day he can use a pill compress to produce a hundred thousand pills, usually from a mobile factory. All he needs is the raw ephedrine, which is usually smuggled in from Laos, or Burma, or Cambodia. Do you have a private army perpetually in need of a war chest? Khun Sha does, lord of the United Wa. So does the Red Wa, so does the official Burmese army itself, come to that. Well, here’s what you do. You build a yaa baa factory right on the Thai border, guard it with your troops, most of whom are already addicted to the drug, staff it with uneducated peasants and local tribespeople to pull the handles and press the buttons, and-here is the delicate part-find the right connection in Thailand to take care of the distribution.
Which explains why I am dancing in a club in Pat Pong at 3:29 a.m.
This is the most venerable of our red-light districts, where my mother worked most of the bars at one time or another, changing employment regularly according to her luck in finding customers, her relationship with the boss and the mamasan, or simply out of boredom. This is home, which I suppose is why I’ve come for comfort, as I used to as a kid. Often I would come in the early evening before she changed into her hideous bar-girl costumes (I loved her most in blue jeans and T-shirt, she looked so young and sexy). Or sometimes in the early hours of the morning when I’d been unable to sleep, because of the ghosts. Then I would take a motorcycle taxi all the way from home, racing through the night. If Nong was busy with a customer, the mamasan would find me a place to sit, some food and a beer.