Bob's Magical Mystery Trip

October 1, 2003

?The Girl From Ipanema? was being strangled by the local house band as I knocked back a large whisky. Women were sitting at various corners of the room looking all ?Come and have a go if you think you?re man enough.? I watched them getting irritable and frustrated as they slowly realised that none of the ten or eleven of us men silently drinking or chatting were going to. Personally I found the second rate malt I was drinking far more alluring than any one of them. When it comes to the fairer sex I think I prefer them desperate and eager to please. If they want me to make an effort I do kind of lose interest. This is how the attentions of cheap hookers can ruin a man.

I?d arranged to meet Bob. Despite having a different notion about what counted as ?the fairer sex? he was one of the best friends I had here and, after showing I was adventurous enough to take a look at a strangely upmarket katoey bar, he had promised that he knew a few other interesting nooks and crannies to Bangkok that he would be only too happy to show me if I was still feeling reasonably adventurous. I wasn?t really. I had this terrible hankering for the safety and security of a go-go bar or a coffee shop where I could silently drink myself into oblivion as women threw themselves at me but I didn?t want to seem like I was backing down now. And, anyway, the more I drank the more I felt prepared for anything.

Bob arrived about fifteen minutes late. I was on my third whisky by then. Even the band playing ?Light My Fire? as if it were a funeral dirge didn?t sound so bad. A couple more whiskies and I?d have been happy to hear them attempting Prokofiev?s 1st Violin Concerto re-arranged for electric guitars, base and drums.

?So what?s on the agenda tonight ?? I said.

?Something amazing.?

?Amazing katoey amazing or amazing something else.?

?Well... Amazing enough for you to need another drink.?

?Are you getting them in then.?

?Absolutely.?

?So what are we talking about.?

?We, my dear Turk, are going to see a psychic.?

?A psychic ? What sort of a psychic ??

?If I told you you?d think I was full of shit. You have to see her. I promise you. You?ve never seen anyone like this in your life before.?

?What exactly are we talking about here ??

?All I can say is that you will see things tonight that you have never seen before.?

His eyes lit up like some fifteen year old boy describing his first forays into the world of psychotropic substances.

?Well... I?ll take your word for it.? I said

?You won?t have to.?

?At least it?s a woman. ?

?Kind of? he said and smiled an enigmatic smile leaving the subject hovering in the air in a theatrical way that I knew meant he didn?t want to say any more. He wanted to have me live through a mystery play.

We drank up and stopped off for a bite to eat where Sawannii and her brother were waiting for us. I have to admit that Sawannii still made me feel uneasy. It wasn?t that she was a katoey. I think it was that she was a katoey who was pretty and charming with large perfect breasts and an enormous penis who, I knew, was having some kind of very strange sex with Bob. I didn?t really like to dwell too much on it. Sawannii, to her credit, knew how to deal with borderline homophobics like myself and was never anything less than the perfect ladyboy. She talked about very unladyboy-ish things like the comparative price of certain dishes here in a swish restaurant and in her home town.

Sawannii?s brother was, like a lot of Thai men I knew, very quiet in the company of farangs. He was pleasant enough and made a few light attempts at conversation, mostly involving football and snooker. But for the better part of the meal just smoked and drank and looked around at the rich people as if wryly amused. As Bob had taken us there he paid the bill and we walked about half a block to where Sawannii?s borther had his car parked.

I sat in the front with him and watched the world racing by in front of my eyes. As we turned on to the Expressway I watched a woman plucking chickens in the back of a truck and throwing the freshly plucked carcasses in a pile. We turned off the Expressway and I had no idea where we were. My knowledge of Outer Bangkok is severely limited. As we turned from a wide road to a narrower one and then a narrower one still it felt as if the car would soon be scraping the walls on either side. But then, coming to the end of a road, we drover off on to a gravel path lit only by the headlamps of the car.

?Tung laaw.? Said Sawannii. Here already.

The headlamps turned off and we were thrown into pitch blackness. The doors opened and we stepped out and stood there. Standing in the dark like that I suddenly felt a profound desire for another drink. We didn?t have to wait long. A young boy, of about thirteen, came through the darkness waving a torch around. Without a word he led the four of us through the darkness picking out small details of the place we were in with the beam. The wooden slats of some derelict house. A large rat scurrying away from our approach. Another car parked by a small shack that looked abandoned. An old man with one completely opaque white eye washing himself with water from a bucket saw us and smiled a toothless smile. ?Aaaah. Falang maa laaw.? He said and joined the boy to help him lead us wherever we were supposed to be led. Soon the beam spread a thin light over a house that, unlike any other place we had seen, looked expensive and lived in. None of the lights were on. We were led around this house and then we could see a group of people gathered around a fairly large wood fire that sent sparks into the night and smelled something like a funeral pyre.

A small elderly woman came running from the group toward Sawannii and her brother. She gave each a big hug like she was their mother and hadn?t seen either for an age. After disentangling herself from each in turn she turned to me and Bob and gestured for us both to join the crowd around the fire. There were about twelve people sat around it but it seemed like more. There was something odd about them all. It was hard to identify them as either rich or poor. One woman caught my eye. A middle aged woman with a large mole on her chin from sprouted an annoying long and wiry black hair. She smiled at me as if she knew me. And, I had to admit, there was something familiar about her. As I looked around the rest of the faces in the group they all left me with the same impression. That they were people I might have known from long ago. But then this was impossible and I knew it. It was just one of those weird feelings you get sometimes. They greeted me with a pleasant but unexcited familiarity too. As if I was a family member who?d just popped down the offy to buy a couple of six packs. I looked at Bob for a sense of perspective but his was the one face that looked out of place here. He was smiling but his smile, like the smile of most farangs in such situations, was less comfortable. He had been here before but this wasn?t like the katoey cabaret where he felt completely in his element. He didn?t know what was coming any more than I did. Not specifically anyway.

?Nang. Nang.? Said the old woman seeming to follow the old adage that the best way to make someone understand your language was to speak it loudly and quickly. We both sat down joining the fireside committee and everyone around seemed to approve especially when the smoke got up my nose and made me start coughing. I looked around to see where Sawannii had gone but she was nowhere about. At the other side of the fire from me I noticed that a woman who was probably about my age was stirring a pot and ladling out bowls to everyone there. It looked like some kind of fish soup but had that overpowering smell of coriander that, I?m afraid to say, puts me off quite a few Thai dishes. Someone handed me a boel and mimed that I should drink from the bowl. I looked around and saw that everyone had a bowl but they were all waiting on me. Maybe this was because I was the newcomer. I took a small sip of the soup. It was delicious but in a way I couldn?t quite explain. It tasted like a mixture of prawn, liquorice and marmite. Once I had a taste of it I drank some more and soon finished it. It wasn?t until I?d drunk the last drop that everyone else started drinking it and someone took my bowl and ladled me out some more.

After this everyone started talking in a very familiar way and included me in the conversation even though I only half understood anything that was being said. I felt slightly drowsy and the conversation lulled me, even out here, into this sense of feeling completely at home. I nodded and agreed when I thought this was appropriate although I had no idea when anything was appropriate. Someone mentioned David Beckham and Ryan Giggs and there was general approval.

?Which one is the psychic ?? I said to Bob.

?She?s not here yet. Sawannii has to bring her from the house.?

Almost on cue the boy with his torch appeared again with the old man and shortly behind them came Sawannii holding on to the arm of one of the strangest looking people I had ever seen in my life. I don?t know how to describe her except that she looked like some kind of disabled fairy, but I couldn?t figure out exactly what was disabled about her. Sawannii was taking her weight and walking very slowly and carefully with her toward us. Instead of normal clothes she seemed to be wrapped in some kind of near translucent silk. The skin that was visible on her face and shoulders and arms was mottled with white patches. It gave her the appearance of having a map drawn upon her. But what really made her look strangest was her eyes. They were slightly too large as if she were part alien or something. The pupils almost filled the whole of her eyes and yet the effect, as odd as this might sound, was that of someone who was abnormally beautiful rather than that of a freak. The firelight seemed to dance in those huge eyes. The rest of her face, despite the shifts in skin colour had the feminine softness of Leonardo?s Virgin on the Rocks. She just seemed this embodiment of feminine compassion. As she came closer I was able to see the rest of her body. It looked somehow underdeveloped. Slim beyond slim. It wasn?t that she looked childlike. In fact I found it impossible to put any kind of age to her. But it was as though her physical development had been arrested at some point in puberty and so she had grown up without every part of her growing up.

The whole situation seemed surreal and I did feel drowsy. Maybe there had been something in the soup. Maybe that was what magic soup felt like. I almost wanted to laugh at the idea that I might have been slipped a mickey out here in the middle of God knows where. But then I didn?t feel that I had. I had nothing but good feelings about all these people around me. I just didn?t know why.

?Maa laaw.? I heard someone say as if they?d just spotted her coming. There was a general parting of people as they made room for this strangely beautiful creature. There was already a large and comfortable looking cushion for her to sit on. Helped to it by Sawannii she sat next to the fire and gazed into the flames. She sat like this for a while and everyone sat in near silence watching her. Then she looked at me. I say looked at. This is the wrong thing to say. She didn?t look at me at all. She looked into me. It was as though, with one simple glance at me, she could play the events of my entire life before her like it was a psychic movie. All the various deeds and misdeeds of Turk Fist unravelling like some cheap and low-life movie-of-the-week. She smiled a smile that seemed to understand me completely without judging me at all. She said something I couldn?t make out at all in a dry croaky voice. Everyone laughed as if they too already knew everything there was to know about Turk Fist. The essential comedy of my life a cause of great hilarity. This sounds embarrassing or uncomfortable but it wasn?t at all. My life was comic. I wasn?t a great man or an evil man. I was a fool stepping from one ludicrous situation into another. That was what I had been born to be. And this even before the really weird stuff was like a moment of crystal clarity.

Some of her silk fell away but this didn?t seem to matter to her. She was basking in the firelight. Taking some sustenance from it. Her breasts became visible. Like so much else they were undeveloped looking. Like the half way breasts of katoeys taking hormones but foregoing implants. And suddenly it struck me that she was not female at all but was somehow linked to Sawannii by being something in between male and female. She wasn?t a katoey though. She was something else. I found myself involuntarily looking down at her crotch and her large eyes caught me and she smiled at this too. She parted the silk for me to see her. There was no hair but this slightly deformed looking vagina from which a tiny penis head protruded. She quickly covered this up again and I wasn?t sure if I?d seen it at all. I doubted that either kind of sex organ worked for her. I doubted that sex would ever be a part of her life. Or his life.

Sawannii took my arm. Suddenly I didn?t feel remotely uncomfortable about Sawannii. Sawannii, now, was my good mate. She came from the world I understood. The world of go-go bars and katoeys and base intentions. It was my world and Sawannii was here to guide me into something else. She stood me up and led me really really close to the hermaphrodite seer from another universe.

She raised her hands as if they were lifted by some invisible puppeteer. The hands touched my shoulder and my neck as she examined my face closely. It seemed as though she loved me completely. Loved me and loved everyone here. Everyone who was placed in front of her. Her saucer eyes scanned me for lines and creases of character or signs of age and then she looked into my eyes again. This time her hands raised in front of my face hovering over me feeling the heat from my skin. She nodded and then touched her fingers against either side of my head and seemed to put them through my temples and into my head.

There was a sudden strange sense of light coming from her and into me. Then I don?t quite know what happened. Either there are things in this world we have no awareness of or the active ingredient of the soup kicked in.

I wasn?t looking at her face. I was looking at my own. I was sitting right in front of myself and I could see myself completely. This stupid mug staring back at me didn?t seem inconsequential anymore. I could see myself as a kid. An adolescent. An adult. Now. Then I was seeing myself as an old man ready to die. It was like the ending of 2001 all over again. I saw moments from my life. Moments I recognised and moments I didn?t. And then time itself ceased to mean anything. I wasn?t looking at moments of my life. I was looking at the entirety of my life with the same kind of scope from which you can see the whole world in a satellite photograph taken from a point in space. My whole life, birth and death was this one object and the moments of it were no more separate from each other than one place on the Earth is separate from another when viewed from a distance. Yet it was not a half detailed map. Everything was there to see. It was there to see quite clearly. It was just that there were certain places I didn?t want to look. And then I started to see everyone around the fire in different stages of their lives. The old lady who had been the first to greet us was suddenly this young beautiful girl. The woman with the hairy mole was a child. They kept shifting and changing.

Suddenly I felt alone and I saw every attraction and repulsion as a trick. I saw a dying woman shitting herself to death and her daughter wiping away the shit with no disgust. I saw men lying in pools of blood still and staring at the sky. I saw women writhing nakedly offering me their cunts and then suddenly becoming aged crones still offering me their same cunts and then as corpses still in that same position. I saw red men engaged in some kind of violence tearing away the head of an animal that I couldn?t recognise for gore. I knew I was supposed to be neither repelled or frightened or attracted to any of these things I was seeing. I knew that to feel overly affected by these images was a road to madness.

Then I was suddenly back with the hermaphrodite seer. Her compassion seemed to almost drown me. As if I?d been closed off to everything for some kind of weird fear. And she took me in her withered and undeveloped arms and held me like a child. I realised that I was now hallucinating (I hadn?t been sure before) and I saw her become Leonardo?s cartoon of the Virgin on the Rocks my mother had had framed on the wall when I was a child. But even though I sensed this wasn?t real I went to sleep in the arms of the Virgin feeling as small as a baby.

The sky exploded and I could see yellow green rays streaking across it but it was okay because I was safe here. I was safer than I?d ever been.

I became aware of the first sight of dawn and saw the psychic being led quite swiftly away to the house by Sawannii.

Bob was just sitting on the ground looking at his feet.

?You okay ?? I said.

?Yeah. I was just talking to my dad. He said he was fine. He said being dead was okay as long as you got in with the right crowd.?

?What the fuck was in that soup ??

?It isn?t the soup.? Said Bob.

I watched the frail shaped creature going up the steps into the door. ?I don?t know what happened. I don?t know what I saw.?

He laughed. ?Come on. Let?s get back to town before the morning traffic jams make it impossible.?

I slept for the rest of that day and had to make a couple of grovelling phone calls. But there were no other ill effects. I?d been expecting another of Bob?s excursions into androgyny but what I got was something amazing.

Course I tried to put it behind me. I found that for a couple of nights the old drinking and whoring Turk had a bit of a spiritual delay button but I soon got back to normal. But I still have times when I see her face and the way she looked into me and I know that if I was just willing to look I could have seen things that would change me forever. Like the manner of my death.

I thought about the seer. I never asked about her. I didn?t like to. But I thought about her (or him depending on your point of view). Sometimes, in sceptical moments, I even wonder if her appearance was some psychotropic hallucination brought on by whatever was in the soup and that, in reality, she was just Sawannii?s slightly deformed cousin who did a good mind reading trick.

Who knows ?