“Nobody here does yaa baa,” the headman says reproachfully. “That’s a killer drug.”
I take a cab to the river and ride back to my project in a small longtail boat empty except for me, the boatman and two monks; we roar past other longtails and rice barges almost invisible in the night. I let the monks go first when we arrive, watching the older one carefully arrange his robes so they do not catch as he clambers onto the ancient wooden jetty which lies in darkness except for a single gas lamp blazing from one of the woodpiles. The monks pass through this magic circle of white light and disappear into the darkness beyond. I walk on unpaved paths between squatter settlements until I reach my project.
The kid is there lounging under the awning, but one of his friends speaks to him when he sees me coming. The kid immediately jumps up and follows me into the building. I pay him twelve hundred baht for three yaa baa pills, even though he offers to give me them for free. I tell him I’m not that kind of cop as I hand over the money. Outside, there is a roar of a bike more powerful than anything the motorbike chauffeurs own, and the kid and I both step out. The kid’s jaw drops at this vision of an equivalent tribesman from the distant future. The rider is all in black leather with upholstered knee and shoulder pads and a tinted full-face helmet that looks like he bought it this morning, on a 1,200 cc Yamaha that probably does a hundred in second gear. His back bears the Day-Glo insignia of Federal Express. He doesn’t need to say anything as he gets off the bike and pulls off his helmet, he is the man. A little of his glory rubs off on me when he makes it clear that I’m the reason he’s here.
The bubblepack I sign for is A4 size and comes from the United States Embassy. Inside, a thousand-baht note wrapped around a Motorola cell phone with its battery charger and manual and six three-by-five photos of Bradley. On the back of one of his cards Rosen had written: “Date confirmed. Figured you and I would both benefit from the cell phone and I guess you forgot to ask for the pix. The new help arrives tomorrow. Keep the phone with you. Tod.”
The kid says: “Check how many units it’s got.” I don’t know how to do that so I give it to him. He presses a few buttons and shrugs. “Only eight hundred baht. Don’t call San Francisco.” I try to kick him but miss as he walks back to his sun bed.
10
Back in my room, the desolation hits me like a brick in the face. I stand in front of my picture of His Beloved Majesty the King and burst into tears.
Why did Pichai decide to ordain? While he was alive I never asked myself this question, his progress on the Path seemed so natural, like a tree growing. And yet, even in Thailand it is not common to lose a cop to Buddha. Now that I am looking back at his life I see the pattern.
Sons of whores learn about manhood from our mothers, especially farang manhood. For my mother the farang was a Discovery Channel of exotic foreign travel, cuisine so mysteriously bland you had to concentrate to taste anything at all, and above all a great experiment in psychosexual manipulation which she perfected to a form of high art, eventually achieving through an almost imperceptible alteration of tone the kind of cash bonus that in lesser practitioners would have required at least a tantrum.
Not so Wanna. More traditionally Thai than Nong, Pichai’s mother went to work in the bars soon after dumping Pichai’s Thai father for being a “butterfly” (a technical expression amongst our women meaning he screwed anything that moved). She vomited the first time she slept with a farang and beheld that whacking great erection more suitable for a female water buffalo than a woman, and never really developed her skills to their full potential. Nong teased her that she belonged to the “dead body” school of seduction. Not that it mattered. Petite with pale flesh that was a gourmet delight to the touch, Wanna was-still is-exquisite to look at, and your farang is a sucker for the visuals.
Pichai divided his mother’s customers into Masters and Slaves. What was peculiar, in his eyes, and gave rise to a profound doubt as to the soundness of the farang mind, was that his mother never altered her attitude of unconquerable indifference. A White Master who sought to protect her and dominate her (with assurances that her life was now saved) she rewarded with exactly the same shortlist of grunts and moans as a White Slave who would declare himself on the brink of salvation when she permitted him-quite literally-to lick her ass.
As her English improved she reported back to Pichai the substance of her customers’ love babble. To look for nirvana in someone’s crotch, now that really is dumb. For Pichai the horror was that these spiritual dwarfs were taking over the world. I think it was the profound disillusionment which arose from these insights that drove him onto the Path. He had about him the noble soul’s willingness to act on even its most bitter perceptions; unlike me, he was never afraid to slash at the bonds, once he saw them for what they were. Maybe he didn’t love me as much as I loved him?
11
Don’t ask me when I first mastered the obvious. Here I am back on Sukhumvit in an Internet café, having tapped out “Bradley/jade” on the AltaVista search engine. The web site is called “Fatima and Bill’s Jade Window” and consists of a black background with white text, a slowly turning jade artifact in an oval in the center of the screen. One William Bradley confesses to being owner of the site.
The artifact is a parabolic phallus which glows softly with a green-gold light, a perfectly balanced shape rising from crude rock, tapering elegantly until it reaches a smoothly polished head. There is nothing more to Bradley’s web page except an e-mail address and a short text extolling the mystic qualities of jade. The same text appears in Thai, above the English.
It is the finest penis I have ever seen, whether in stone or flesh. Now Bradley is beginning to intrigue me. Jade is the most spiritual of stones. Properly worked and polished, it gives a mystic glow which seems to come from its heart, an echo of nirvana. How would an American marine understand such a thing? True jade lovers tend to be Chinese.
It is easy to trace the Internet service provider, who is based on the other side of town, in Kaoshan Road, but it is three minutes to midnight on the day of Pichai’s death and I need to drown myself in people. In the narrow soi outside the Internet café tarot readers sit cross-legged over the cards which their clients-invariably anxious girls who are not having much luck tonight-have drawn. I walk smartly past them to Nana Plaza, which is transformed. I cannot believe that Bradley was not a regular here, and who would forget a man like him?
“Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in a black tank top calls as she leans over the palisade of the first bar, when I’m turning into the Nana courtyard from Soi 4. The plaza is flooded with white men and brown girls. Australians with guts so huge they look about to give birth stand grinning with arms around girls no bigger than their legs. Americans reminisce loudly about the night before, Germans keep saying ja, ja and Dutch walk around like old hands. There are plenty of East Europeans and Russians, too; Siberia is directly north of my country, and ever since the fall of the USSR there has been a steady stream of men and women with pale skins and heavy vodka habits. The men come to buy and the women to sell.
“I don’t like work here, but papa me have car accident, must send money,” a girl is saying to a tall, skinny Englishman. “Oh, that’s awful,” he says, as he pats her butt.
The atmosphere is something between a festival and a hunting lodge. It’s that time in the evening when the girls make an extra effort, before the 2 a.m. curfew when the cops close the place down, and the men sense the increase in intensity, like wildebeests sniffing lion. Everyone is drinking Singha or Kloster beer ice cold straight from the bottle, and wherever you look there are television monitors. Larry King’s suspenders scream from a lot of them. Even the guy who sells fried grasshoppers from a stall near the Buddha shrine owns a TV monitor on which he plays old Muhammad Ali fights and scenes from the siege of Stalingrad. Mostly, though, the screens show Manchester United playing Leeds to the boom of every kind of music from a thousand speakers.