They wore the girls out, who started to leave in droves. My mother had promised full satisfaction and she hated to disappoint, which left us with no recourse but a relay system. One horny old codger could get through five or six healthy young women before the drug started to fade and he allowed himself to be carried back to his hotel in a condition best described as ecstatic catatonia (or rapturous rigor mortis). Profit margins shrank to paper-thin.
Something had to be done. At an emergency board meeting it was agreed to delete “satisfaction guaranteed” from the advertising and to appeal to a broader market. Overworked young men suffering from stress-related impotence were favored. We continued to be the destination of preference for the Western raver on a pension, and at the same time the more traditional customer began to favor us (Western ravers with no pension, basically), but we had lost our market niche. We were hardly different from all the other bars and as such suffered the seasonal downturns, not to mention the recession in the West. Suddenly we were running at a loss in a bear market. It was Nong who suffered most, for the club was her pride and joy, her brainchild and the vehicle by which she was to prove to the world that she was not merely an exceptionally successful whore (ret.) but also a full-fledged twenty-first-century businesswoman of international quality. She grew unusually religious, meditated at the local wat every day, and promised the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po two thousand boiled eggs and a hog’s head if he would save her business. Even Vikorn burned a little incense, and I went further in my meditation than ever before. With such mystic brain power working on our behalf, a miracle was inevitable.
Her name was Chanya, and I still remember the day she walked into the bar asking for work. She spoke English fluently with a slight Texan drawl (but enough Thai in it to keep her exotic), having spent nearly two years in the United States until 9/11 forced her to come home. Post 9/11 was no time to be traveling on a false passport in America. You had to have grown up in the business to recognize her genius. My mother and I saw it instantly; Vikorn took a little longer to catch on. Within a week we were boiling eggs like crazy and taking them and the roasted hog’s head to Wat Po, where the monks ate them or gave them to the poor. Let me explain.
First, farang, please dump those childish notions you harbor about our working girls being downtrodden sex-slave victims of a chauvinistic male-dominated culture; take it from me, there’s nothing your media won’t do to comfort you in your postindustrial despair to make you believe your culture is superior to ours. (Are they kidding?-I’ve been in Slough, England, on a Saturday night-I know what atomized basket cases you are.) These are all country girls, tough as water buffalo, wild as swans, who can’t believe how much they can make by providing to polite, benevolent, guilt-ridden, rich, condom-conscious farang exactly the same service they would otherwise have to provide free without protection to rough drunken whoremongering husbands in their home villages. Good deal? Better believe it. (Don’t look at me like that, farang, when you know in your heart that capitalism makes whores of all of us.) Most of the girls, being the sole breadwinners and therefore matriarchs, dispense the whole gamut of family business through the medium of the cell phone (generally in our staff toilet while changing into their working gear), from care of the sick to rental purchase agreements, from the chastisement of miscreants to the number of water buffalo to invest in this year, from marriages to abortions, religious duties, and grave decisions as to who to vote for in local and national elections.
But chemistry is at least as important for commercial sex as it is for the more art-house variety, which is where you start to differentiate between the supporting cast and the superstars. Here’s the secret: your superstar makes the chemistry. She is a tantric master in a G-string, a topless sorceress, a dancing dervish with wicked allure. She knows how to turn herself into a mirror that reflects the many and varied fantasies of the men she seduces. Guess how many have come up to me to confide they’ve finally found her at long last, the woman of their dreams, the girl they’ve been waiting half a lifetime for, the one they are so sure of they will marry her tomorrow if only she’ll agree, the saintly Chanya? Answer: roughly fifty percent of Chanya’s customers. We have even employed a bouncer (known as the Monitor-like me, he doubles as a cop during the day) to protect us from attack by the brokenhearted. In short, Chanya saved our business, and we are not about to desert her in her hour of need. All genius has its dark side. In our preatomized society personal loyalty is still important, which is why even the wily Colonel Vikorn did not hesitate to interrupt his Saturday night in Bangkok (as the song says, it makes a proud man humble-and occasionally dead) when he realized our superstar was at risk. So here’s what really happened.
I spotted him the minute he walked in the door. We are between mamasans at the moment, a lamentably common state of affairs, which means that as junior shareholder I have to fill in as papasan pending approval of a replacement by my somewhat demanding mother. (Like all ex-whores she has an inveterate loathing for mamasans and can never find the perfect one. I suspect her of manipulating to keep me as papasan.)
I have already described his face, which was not much improved when inhabited by his spirit. A nasty piece of work with the ridiculous arrogance of an iron-pumper. The girls all took the same view and kept away from him, leaving him isolated at a table on his own in a corner, growing ever more volcanic as he observed the girls favoring men older and less muscular than himself. He was drinking modestly (Budweiser beer, not Mekong whiskey, but one does not defile Vikorn’s brilliant narratives with minor quibbles). I was loath to waste Chanya’s porcelain talent on this earthenware vessel and really only intended for her to charm him out of our bar and into someone else’s. We are fond of each other, Chanya and I, and understand each other. It took no more than a shift of my eyes for her to grasp what I wanted. At least (this moment in the narrative requires needlepoint accuracy) I think it was the shift in my eyes that sent her over to his table. Within a minute or so his mean little mouth was stretching itself into a smile of sorts, her hand draped lazily over one of his rocky thighs, and when she leaned forward to sip at her “lady drink” (a margarita with extra tequila), he fixated on her breasts. Yet another proud man was in process of being humbled.
He was the type whose libido required secretive intensity before it could switch to full alert. Chanya adapted herself in a second, and now they were talking conspiratorially (and intensely), almost head to head. To make matters worse, Eric Clapton was singing “Beautiful Tonight” on the faux jukebox. This irresistibly romantic song was the final straw. The iron-pumper’s hand found its way to Chanya’s nearest thigh. I checked the time by the clock on the fax machine. Less than five minutes had passed, and Iron Man was molten-something of a record even for Chanya. I decided to help her out by playing the Clapton song over again-or was I simply curious about the effect of an encore? Tiny tears appeared in the corners of his abnormally blue eyes, he swallowed hard, and the words “I’m so damn lonely” were recognizable as they emerged from that mean mouth, even at a distance of thirty feet, followed by the unbelievably inept “You look beautiful tonight, too.”