Lalita is in an asymmetrical YSL fake in black with dipping back and plunging cleavage, revealing her beautifully enhanced bosom-tastefully done by a skilled surgeon, nothing too exaggerated. She is very gifted and has already built a fine two-story house with carport on a piece of land in her home village. Last week her earnings permitted her to purchase two more water buffalo for her parents to rent out. Her opening line to all newcomers: “I loved you from the moment I saw you walk through the door.” I still smile to myself at how often it seems to work.
Wan and Pat, close friends, are wearing identical hot pants with tit-hugging tank tops and high heels. They are not from Isaan, which is in the Northeast, but Chiang Mai province in the far Northwest, where the weather is cooler and the opium fresher. They come from a hill village belonging to the Hmong tribe, where they grew up expert in poppy cultivation. When compulsory crop substitution made them redundant, they graciously switched vices to enable their families to make up for the reduced income. They plan to open a beauty salon in Chiang Mai as soon as they’ve scraped the money together.
Om, with a naturally boyish figure, has cut off her denims at the crotch and leaves cotton strings wherever she sits. She is from Phuket, where tourism has made everyone rich. She grew up without want but got bored with the family minimarket and came to Krung Thep in search of adventure. For her, prostitution is mostly a sport in which the huntress uses charm, guile, and the power of sex. The object is for the john to voluntarily transfer the cash in his wallet to her purse without noticing what a sucker he is.
Ay is in a bikini and high heels, revealing the silver insert in her navel at the center of her flat brown stomach, not to mention the leaping swordfish whose sword peaks just above her panty line. She is a true child of Isaan, where she grew up unlettered. As is often the case with the illiterate, she owns a photographic memory and never fails to recall a john’s name, even if she hasn’t seen him for a year: a powerful charm in this line of work.
Here is Bon. She is more global than the others. She uses us as a base but prefers the more lucrative destinations of Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is a visa expert and offers free advice to any of the girls thinking of relocating overseas. Her English is all but perfect, and I’m told her Japanese is not half bad. She runs her own web page, which brings her a certain amount of work and enables her to keep up with her foreign customers. Way ahead of the curve, she owns her own small business in her home village that her mother manages.
Ah now, here is one of my favorites. Urn is from the poorest part of Isaan, next to the Cambodian border, a genuine country girl who will not defile her identity by learning to read and write or by learning English beyond the skeletal vocabulary necessary for trade. She is slightly flat-footed from a childhood spent in the rice paddy and likes to roll her trousers up to her calves as if she were wading through a swamp. She is reflexively superstitious and never omits to wai the Buddha or to take her shoes off when she enters the bar-for which the others never cease to tease her. She speaks Thai with a hayseed accent and a maximum of vulgarity. She also owns an exceptional figure and a brilliant smile, so she does not starve.
Su: nothing special to look at, but both my mother and I are in awe of her true Thai indolence. As an experiment the other day, I sent a missionary over to her. (We get them from time to time: white shirt, black tie with tiny knot, the sad courtesy of the professional sin-buster, Bible in quick-release shoulder holster-I’m afraid they all look the same to me, the men and the women.)
Missionary to Su: “Whatever you earn, I’ll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning.”
Su (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): “Couldn’t we just fuck?”
Farang, tell your evangelists not to bundle salvation with the work ethic. It really doesn’t play in the tropics. Even the Muslims and the Catholics know better than that, and we Buddhists have bagged ninety percent of the market by peddling inertia for two and a half millennia.
Sonja: she is not with us anymore, but in her day she was quite the most beautiful girl in the street, a small star-shaped scar on her left cheek notwithstanding. (Motorbike: ninety percent of the scarring on Thai flesh is due to taking a corner too fast while drunk.) Her life changed when she saw a B movie starring Ronald Reagan in which the heroine, also scarred, came out with the immortal line, which Sonja immediately committed to memory: “Oh, how can any man love me when I am so hideously disfigured?” The ploy proved so fetching, she had to produce a short list of suitors, which consisted of an Englishman, an American, and a Chinaman.
The Englishman: “But darling, it only makes me love you all the more.”
The American: “Come to the States, I’ll have someone take care of it.”
The Chinaman: “I want a ten percent discount.”
Naturally, having been trained by my mother, Sonja chose the man most likely to make a fortune in this lifetime and went to live happily ever after in Shanghai with the Chinaman. (It’s your system, farang.)
And so on. Not a one of them whose combination of calculation and naÏveté could not defeat the hardest of asses-unless the hardass has God on his side, of course. The dark young stranger has not ceased to squirm and sneer since the girls came trooping in. The moment is saved by the Australian, thank Buddha, who trips on the threshold with his habitual curse.
8
Slim and wiry, about thirty-six, his inevitable name is Greg, and he has been a regular these past two months. He sits next to Ay, who immediately and expertly shifts on the stool so she can hook a leg over Greg’s walking shorts. Greg appears not to notice.
“Gimme a Foster’s, Sonchai.” A cock of the head. “Thirsty weather, mate.”
“You buy me drink,” Ay says.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
“Better give her one, Sonchai.”
The young Muslim is watching.
Ay finishes her tequila in one, then sucks on the salt-encrusted lime. Nobody knows what swarthy fellow in a sombrero first introduced our working girls to tequila (okay, it was probably a Chinese entrepreneur), but history will reveal this act of marketing genius in its true glory.
“You pay bar?” Ay wants to know, now massaging Greg’s member, which has begun visibly to swell under his shorts. The dark stranger turns away in visceral disgust to stare at the wall.
“Let’s go back to my hotel-at least there’s enough space to turn around in.” He takes a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and holds it up to the light. “Or maybe we’ll have a few more, what d’you say?”