Entry 8

[khunsanuk]

FIRST TRIP, FIRST LESSON

 

I'll never forget my first night in Bangkok. It was one afternoon in November 1998 when I arrived at the City Lodge near soi 9, quite pleased with myself that I'd successfully negotiated the bus trip from Don Muang to Sukhumvit with a minimum of fuss following my two long-haul flights. At that time the City Lodge was doing a 'three nights for two' deal which worked out at 800 baht a night. This may have had something to do with the fact that they were building the skytrain outside, and I could expect to be rudely awakened when the workers started their early shift. The Lodge wasn't quite guest-friendly either, but I had yet to discover this, or its importance. So after a brief rest and armed only with a copy of the politically correct Rough Guide '...the heroin-white faces of the girls in Patpong bars...' etc. I ventured out around ten o'clock into the hot Bangkok night.

 

Chance always plays a part. My first stop was the Biergarten on soi 7 - what a nice place ! Several foreign men sitting around the bar drinking beer from bottles housed in plastic tubes, many times more pretty young Thai ladies smiling at them and at me. They all had petite figures, long dark hair, flashing smiles; none of them were drinking, with the occasional exception of a long-nursed coffee or an ersatz orange juice. Nor were any smoking that I noticed. How things have changed !

 

The tall man beside me approached me for a match. Willy was from Lille, had a Thai girlfriend, and was out on the town himself that evening. Would I like to join him ? We shared a taxi to a place called Soi Cowboy, which looked like a garish amusement park, and went into a bar called Apache. Willie seemed to know all of the girls, as they crowded around him as soon as we sat down. He suggested that we try a local 'whisky' called Mekong which came in a small bottle along with a litre of Pepsi and a bucket of ice. Frankly, I never put ice in whisky, and certainly not Pepsi, but I went along with this just to be sociable. The girls were similar to those in the Biergarten, but if anything were more beautiful. Two or three girls in revealing bikinis were dancing slowly on the stage, and when they looked over and smiled their teeth seemed to glow in the light from the bar.

 

The girl nearest to me at the table leaned across and her legs accidentally brushed against mine. Her skin was unbelievably soft and cool. She joked about the hair on my legs - Thai men don't have any apparently, and the girls see it as a sign of virility. Her name was Noi, which means 'small', which indeed she was. She spoke very good English, chatting about where I came from, how old I was, was it my first visit and so on. She asked me for a drink and I offered her one from our bottle, but it was almost finished and in any case Willy said it was time to move on.

 

We stepped outside and ate some small kebabs cooked right in front of us for a few baht. The whole street was lined on both sides with pulsating neon; the air felt thick with the night's heat. It was almost two am and Willy said we should go to Thermae next.

 

When we walked in I felt like it was the last night in Saigon and I was the only helicopter pilot in town. There must have been about three hundred girls and about forty farang. We continued to drink Mekong Coke, which was starting to grow on me. Willy got talking to a lot of mad characters including a German with a shaved head dressed in black, who said he had been 'on the run' for fifteen years. He told me that several of the girls there were working for him. Even more girls began to arrive, many of them wearing inappropriate long leather boots, presumably to make themselves taller. It was impossible to move without a girl saying hello to me, but by this time I could make no decision about which girl I liked best: there always seemed to be one more to look at, one perhaps even more attractive.

 

Around five am Willy suggested we go round to the Grace. This was the dullest part of the night, as the jet lag was starting to tell on me, and I may even have dosed off at one point in the coffee shop. We seemed to have missed the best of the girls there: many were a little plump and white-faced. Some may even have been ladyboys. I noticed one woman who sat with us was wearing pantyhose, which I thought unusual. When she passed out on the table I felt that it was time to go. We walked round to the Foodland supermarket and had two American breakfasts each. This revived me a bit, so I agreed to have a last beer with Willy back in the Biergarten. This morning the scene was a lot different from the night before, but there were still a few attractive girls about. One in particular caught my eye, a girl in a white miniskirt carrying a small kitten who kept walking around the bar, sucking what appeared to milk through a straw (the girl I mean).

 

Willy had advised me not to pay more than 1000 baht, so I stopped the girl on her circuit and said '1000'. I felt a bit clumsy (although the drinking was my excuse) but she said ok and we walked out together, after saying I would see Willy later that night.

 

Round at the City Lodge I got a hard look from reception but they said nothing so we slipped quickly into the lift. In the room Noi (coincidentally the same name as the girl in Apache) grabbed a towel and locked herself in the bathroom. When she came out her hair was tied up and she had the towel wrapped around her and somehow tied in a kind of knot. I took a shower, hoping it would revive me a little (those days were pre-Viagra). When I came out Noi was ransacking the mini bar and had already opened a couple of snacks. I noticed that they were all 'fun-sized', as were the miniatures of whisky and so on. I took out a Mars bar for myself, for energy

 

Next thing I was lying on my back and Noi was cleaning me carefully with a corner of my towel. She said 'Smoke ?' and I didn't know what to say, but she went down on me quickly, blowing some life into me. It felt great, distracting from my developing headache, which was made worse by the dazzling sunlight now streaming between the ill-fitting curtains. Soon I was feeling a lot more confident, and happier. I pulled Noi over into a 69 position and tried to loosen her towel. She resisted a bit, but finally let me do what I wanted. She was amazingly soft, clean, with little hair. Then I saw the Mars lying on the bed.

 

Now like many I'd heard the story about Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and the snack that helps you 'Work, Rest and Play', but I never knew if there was any truth in it. I pulled the wrapper off and quietly brushed it across her lips to see her response: she looked back at me between her legs and smiled. Chocolate melts at body temperature, and Noi if anything was hotter than average, so I set to work slurping the chocolate trails left by the bar, as they trickled messily down her inner thighs. I then tried teasing the tip between her lips. She wiggled a little,and moaned faintly, engrossed in the job she was doing.

 

With the chocolate melting away and the caramel starting to soften the already undersized bar was distinctly smaller, and it slipped inside with her lips closing tightly behind. I continued to lick away as the last of the chocolate and caramel dripped out over my face, but started to panic a little as I realised that the slippery nougat centre was slipping in deeper. Noi must have sensed quickly that something was wrong, as she stopped what she was doing, and sat back, squatting over my face and working at herself to release the bar. No luck. She held herself open as far a possible, but every time I thought it was within reach it slipped further up.

 

It was at that point that I saw a construction worker peering through the gap in the curtains, his eyes wide with horror at what was unfolding. I shuddered at what he might be thinking, so I scraped some of the caramel and chocolate from my face and put it in my mouth, licking my fingers and indicating that it was ok. His response was to shout something out in disgust, which alerted Noi, who saw him and ran shrieking into the bathroom.

 

She wasn't in there long, and I just had time to press some money into her hand before she hobbled off down the corridor. I saw her a couple of years later, in the Biergarten: she moved away as soon as she recognised me. I never saw the construction worker again, thankfully. The City Lodge is no longer 'guest-friendly'.

 

But I learned a valuable first lesson, and I have profited from it ever since: you can take the girl out of the bar, but you can't take the bar out of the girl.

[Pom Michael]

::

[Hugh_Hoy]

Kind of long to get to the "punch line". Leaving out some of the middle might not detract from the story.

 

HH

[Shit-Spattered Dog]

Decent and entertaining.