They were not the kind of people the professor is talking about. There was a war on and it was thirty-two years ago. I dismiss Pisit and his guest as unreliable and turn them off. In the silence I think of Fatima. Surely her dream life is almost the same as mine? It is hard to think of a father figure who would have fit the bill better than Bradley.
37
“No one in the market has seen the full potential of Viagra,” my mother explains over a Marlboro Red. We are sitting at a food stall after finishing a meal of tom-yum soup, fried fish, spicy cashew nut salad, three kinds of chicken and thin rice noodles on a street in Pratunam. Our table is loaded with six different dipping sauces, beer bottles, chopped ginger, fried peanuts, mouse-shit peppers and bits of lime. We are about twelve inches from the traffic jam but the stall is famous for the quality of its roast duck curry. It is so famous the police colonel in charge of the district doesn’t dare to bust or squeeze it even though its tables and chairs take up most of the sidewalk and force pedestrians to risk their lives among the traffic. Thai cuisine is the most complex, subtle, variable and generally the best in the world. It knocks the socks off fussy French and flaky Chinese, although one must give credit where it is due: during Nong’s one and only Japan trade (in Yokohama, a Yakuzi mobster with impeccable manners whose chronic migraine could only be relieved by more or less continuous sex): on my first bite of Kobe beef I forgave Pearl Harbor on your behalf, farang.
Protected by a firewall of chili, our cooking has been immune to the corruption suffered by other great cuisines due to Western influence and the best food can still be found in humble homes and, more especially, on the street. Every Thai is a natural gourmet and cops don’t bust the best food stalls if they know what’s good for them.
“I suppose not,” I yell above the traffic noise.
“I mean, everyone knows about it and farangs know they can get it over the counter at any pharmacy anywhere in Thailand, but we haven’t woken up to the new client potential which is coming onstream.”
“It sounds as if you have, Mother.”
“Think about it,” she yells. “You’re a seventy-year-old farang man and for the past twenty years your sex life has gone from extremely boring to nonexistent. You expect to die within the next ten years and you haven’t even thought about sex for the last five. You’ve thought of yourself as totally out of the running and you’ve got used to your family and loved ones thinking of you as some decrepit old fool who ought to have the decency to pop off sooner rather than later so they can inherit the house.”
My mother is remembering Florida, of course, and Miami, where everyone seemed to us to be on their way to or from an old people’s home. I blink several times as certain images of Dan Rusk pass before my eyes. It must be the work of imagination that I see a hoary old hand so huge it is capable of covering the whole of my mother’s backside; the trip from the airport to his “spread” in the U-Haul truck was interminable, as was the spread. A massive kitchen and other vast vacant spaces so impregnated with his solitude it felt as if we had landed on a planet with double the gravity of the earth, turning the most normal activities-conversation in particular-into a chore requiring superhuman strength of will. Rusk lasted a week before my mother called her only relation who possessed a telephone and invented a family emergency-I forget what dire accident her mother was supposed to have suffered, but it was enough for Rusk to drive us back to Miami and pay for the nonexistent hospital care. We were never so glad to be back in Krung Thep with its effortless vitality. “You’ve always had a positive view of human nature.”
“Then one day someone at your old people’s home mentions Viagra. Some old bugger even more ancient than you, who even you think should have the decency to pop off immediately, whispers in your ear that he recently spent a week in Bangkok and tried the blue pill and had an erection that lasted four hours which he used to sample three or four beautiful young women. Well, what would you do?”
“You’ve got a point.”
“You’d choke on your false teeth in your rush to book the next flight to Krung Thep is what you’d do. So the market can’t help but grow. There are more than fifteen million American men over the age of sixty-five, their wives and kids have treated them like shit at the best of times and after age fifty in America it is no longer the best of times no matter how much money you’ve got.” She emphasizes these startling truths by stubbing out her cigarette. “They put up with it because they ran out of options a long time ago. At least, they think they did. I have good news for them. But do they really want disco music, techno, all that frenzy-they’re probably too deaf to hear it anyway. Do they really want to watch girls in bikinis cavorting around steel poles, all that nonsense? Of course not. They want something from their own times, an environment that caters to their age group and is sensitive to their needs.”
“Oxygen on tap behind the bar? An ambulance waiting in the street? Why not add a hospital wing to your brothel?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call it that. I’m providing libido therapy to the aged. What I’m trying to explain is the matter of timing.”
“Timing?”
“That’s the thing. A young man gets an erection because a woman has aroused him, and for ten thousand years the trade has built itself around that biological fact.”
“What else would it build itself around?”
“So we’re still a primitive industry at the mercy of nature. We’re still at the stage of hunting and gathering. But with the market we’re targeting, the customer gets an erection more or less exactly one hour after taking the pill, it’s the equivalent of a steak in the fridge. We’ve freed ourselves from Mother Nature and taken control of the timing. There’s a four-hour window which he’s not going to want to waste drinking beer and listening to junk music. He might want to relax later, but his main priority is to take advantage of the drug. Especially when he has probably read that it can cause heart attacks.”
I blink at the apparent incongruity of this last remark. She lights another cigarette. “Don’t you see, in their minds this could be their last fling? They might have decided to go out with a bang, so to speak. We could be helping them to celebrate their last days on earth. They’re trading in a couple more years of limping across the linoleum and endless card games with the other arthritic goners for maybe a week of ecstatic humping with the best thing they’ve seen for fifty years. This is a service of compassion and enlightenment. I’m sure the Buddha will approve.”
“Euthanasia by orgasm must be better than lethal injection.”
“Exactly. Also, if it’s your very last party on earth, why spare the expense? If your kids are all selfish jerks you may as well sell the house to spend the money on my girls. So what I’m proposing is a telephone booking service. Just like a restaurant. The customer comes to the bar the first time, sees a girl he likes, after that he calls us from his hotel, warns us that he’s about to take the pill and expects to be rampant in exactly one hour. There’s a plus for us, of course, since we don’t have to hang around waiting for the customer to decide if and when he wants the girl. We get a fixed timetable that we can work around. I’ve discussed all this with the Colonel. He thinks we can’t fail.”
“How will you structure the advertising? Medical journals or triple X web pages?”
“Web pages, with plenty of visuals, but we think word of mouth will work for us over time. After all, there’s no one else in this field at the moment.” I think of geriatrics shuffling into the bar with crooked grins and bulging trousers, the missing link between sex and death. “So, Sonchai, what about it?”