Sleepless in Prakanong

[Guest]

Dawn breaking over Bangkok can be a beautiful sight. Splashes of colours that don?t belong on any kind of naturalistic palette spreading across the sky in vistavision shapes. The soft hued glow of that sky casting an unearthly beauty over the market stalls setting up and the early morning traffic. The trouble was that, beautiful though these dawns might be, I?d seen five of them in a row and they were losing their novelty value. Five nights where I hadn?t been able to sleep for more than a few minutes before waking up with a million unwelcome demon voices in my mind. Always feeling that irrational dread that the night can bring but which seems absurd by day. Unable to sleep, and not wanting to sit alone in my apartment I?d walked around like a sex tourist who couldn?t find the action. I got approached by every uncut masculine looking katoey in town They were looking for a drunk but I was the wrong kind of drunk.

 

I was grabbing catnaps in the afternoon but they usually lasted for all of five minutes and left me feeling worse than when I?d started. At least if I went through a day as normal on M150 and coffee I could function. One of those catnaps left me feeling as though someone had sucked all the air out of my lungs and replaced it with molasses.

 

Obviously the root cause of all this insomnia was my little visit to Nam?s place of birth. The memory of it just kind of hung there like a nagging toothache you try to ignore but can never forget. The face of a man beaten to a state his mother would not recognise and Nam standing there with that ?I did this for you tilac? look on her face. I couldn?t face her and I couldn?t face much of anything else. Should I go to the authorities and tell them about the house ? What would I tell them exactly ? Somewhere off some khlong somewhere there?s a house where, my girlfriend says, they kill the working girls.

 

I wasn?t able to get anything done. I was seeing things that weren?t there. Shadows that moved from the corner of my eye. Colours dancing around whenever I got up quickly after sitting down for more than a few minutes. And in my heart was something like lead.

 

My state of mind reached the peak of all this while walking along Sukhumvit close to Prakanong Market. I was passing the big cinema on the corner that leads into the market (I forget it?s name) and was considering taking a nap in there while all those Japanese sex and yakuza movies dubbed into Thai could keep the voices in my head at bay. Take me out of myself a bit.

 

It was while I was standing by the cinema that I caught sight of An.

 

An was one of my first girlfriends in Thailand. The first time I saw her I?d just felt like I?d been hit with a sock full of snooker balls. I?d simply never, in my life, in a movie or a magazine, seen anything as beautiful as her. She was the kind of woman who would make any man blush and start straightening his tie. When she smiled these small dimples formed just below her eyes. And those eyes, if they caught you, shone.

 

And there she was smiling that smile at me from across the road with the cars and lorries and buses passing between us. She just stood smiling at me as though we were still together. The crowds milling and moving around her seemed unreal to me. She just glowed. I wanted to call her name but, in that one idiot moment, I couldn?t remember what to call her. Instead I started trying to cross the road against the traffic as the hoots of horns and screeching of wheels surrounded me. I so wanted to see her, speak to her, spend time with her. I could have died in the attempt. But when I got across the road she wasn?t there any more. I stood there and looked around. Tried to catch some view of her in the crowds of people and the hawkers. She?d gone. I?d lost her. I sat on the pavement not caring about a thing and buried my head in my hands.

 

It just goes to show the state of mind I was in. It took me a full ten minutes to realise it couldn?t have been An at all. It couldn?t have been An because An had been dead for six years.

 

In life An had always been an enigma. She changed identities the way some people change socks. She worked for a while at Thaniya for the entertainment of the discerning Japanese gentleman. Then she?d somehow fucked that up and wound up at one of the King?s bars on Patpong. Then she?d been caught stealing or flicking her toe clippings into the Tizer or something and had had to leave there. Like so many others she?d wound up on the Soi Cowboy. She danced, well stood on the stage, at one of the larger bars on the strip. Every place she?d worked she?d had a different name. People would tell me she used to have this name or that name. If I asked her she just denied it. She was the sort of person you could catch on a lie and yet would stick to the lie with such conviction that you?d almost believe her. Because of this I decided really early on never to believe her.

 

Anyway... I didn?t approach her at first. Like most I think I just assumed I couldn?t afford her any more on the Soi Cowboy than I could have done at Thaniya. But one night she just came and sat with me and asked me to barfine her. I didn?t say no.

 

She took me to the Playboy Hotel. I hadn?t known the place before. I was like a little boy with her. She undressed me, took me to the shower and bathed every inch of my me careful to let her small breasts collided with me as much as possible. I started washing her but she said this was no good. She had to clean me... everywhere. She then got on her knees and pushed me so I was leaning against a semi-seat in the cubicle. She took the soap and whipped up a lather which she caressed along my dick and my balls and my asshole. She was extremely thorough. After rinsing me off she sunk her mouth into the area and kissed every inch using her darting hummingbird tongue on places that had never known such intimacy outside of the doctors office. Once I was having a near death experience from this she showered me off again and dried me before leading me to the room and on to the bed. We kissed. We kissed for an age and I kept waiting for the alarm to ring. I held her tightly but she slide away and left me to hold her lightly. Once I was at her pace she smiled that smile and I was one hundred percent hers.

 

Kissing down my torso leaving silvery damp traces in the trail of her tongue she held on to the base of my dick tightly and gently and worked down until her beautiful mouth took in my less than beautiful balls. As she held on to my her tongue gently pushed the testes around as if she was doing a really thorough check for testicular cancer. Then, never letting go of the base of my dick with her tight small hand she started to kiss its tip and then the shaft. It wasn?t just as if she was kissing my cock to please me. It was as if she loved it as a separate entity. She was passionate about it and took it in her mouth gently before releasing it again and kissing the side. Then she traced the rim of the bell-end with the tip of her tongue before submerging the whole of the penis in her mouth again as if it were some great delicacy.

 

When she had finished teasing my dick to a state of surprising engorgement she moved back up my body sliding her supple body against me. Her hand, again, never unlocking from the base of my penis. She slid me tightly inside her cunt. If you could write an elegy to a cunt this would be the one to get your inspiration from. Tight, responsive as a mouth and just as damp without a hint of any pain. And she got the condom on me so subtly I had to look to check it was on at all. When she made love it was as though under the control of some musical rhythm that pulled and collided at every point the right point. In every move she was interlocked with me. In every second we were, or seemed to be, at a point of absolute harmony. And seeing her face. Her unbelievably beautiful face at this moment and this time.

 

When I came stars filled my head. She held me there, inside her, and she just lay on top of me, holding me, her body against me. Lightly damp with perspiration. And as the general sense of euphoria flooded my senses and I held her there the word ?mine? kept repeating itself in my mind the way you just know it shouldn?t. She kept her pressure on the base of my dick holding the condom in place. She kissed my face. She kissed my eyes and nose and mouth and her eyes darted about my face as though drinking me in. Then she sang to me. Still holding my dick inside her she sang to me and laughed at herself for singing but then continued in a voice as soft and sweet as anything I had heard.

 

Anyone with any degree of experience of Bangkok will already be doubting the veracity of this. I know. Firstly most Thai women are never quite as beautiful as, at first, their charm makes them appear. Secondly few Thai women, outside massage parlours at least, are so genuinely attentive to a man. Thirdly, the average Thai woman, if using a condom at all, will withdraw as soon as possible after the act and either expect you to dispose of the juice filled latex or hurl it in the bin or down the toilet as if it is an object of absolute repulsion. When An did pull away from me she took off the condom and held it up for a moment before saying. ?Inside here... Maybe one day baby you and me...? She then apologised to the contents of the condom and rinsed them down the sink smelling the jism on her fingertips as if it was something off the perfume counter at boots.

 

It was as she lay there, naked, in my arms through the night that she suggested that we were well suited to each other and that she should move in with me. I was green to the ways of the cleverer Thai women as, up to this point, I?d only known your common or garden hooker here. So when she said to me, seemingly at complete and utter ease with me naked as if the whole fall from Eden thing had never happened, that she could take care of me like no other woman, that it was no good for me to live alone, that it would be beautiful and like this all the time, I am embarrassed to admit I bought it. It was no good for me not to have a woman, she said. If I went on like this I?d wind up seeing all these bargirls and they?d make me sick. Give me AIDS. If she moved in I wouldn?t need another woman. If I was with her she would make me so happy every day of my life that other women wouldn?t even exist for me. I was sure she was right.

 

It took a couple more epiphanies at the Playboy before I completely bought it. But she did come to live with me. She moved in with nothing but a single suitcase of clothes and a hair dryer. Seemed a bit spartan to me but I was like a nodding dog by now. I would have agreed never to leave the house without eyeliner and blush if she?d suggested it. And, I have to admit, for a while, things were good. Very good indeed. She took care of the food and the housekeeping. All I had to do was give her most of my money. Pretty good deal.

 

Of course, few good things last, she did these long disappearing acts. Went to the temple a lot. Then went to see her family a lot. I never saw them and I never pushed to see them. I just accepted long absences. After little more than a couple of months she disappeared for two weeks. Her explanation was that the bus had broken down and she forgot where she lived so she went to see her mum. For two weeks. And as daft as the story was her details were so minute that by the end I almost believed it and just let it go.

 

Then she said she had to go and sleep at her mum?s five nights a week. I knew this was bullshit. Then someone was dipping into one of my bank accounts to a ridiculous level. Nobody could have done this without access to my bank book. A bank book I kept hidden, I thought, in the apartment.

 

Eventually, after she returned from one of her extended absences, I called it a day and asked her to move out. She wept bucketloads and said that she loved me and would always love me and that anything she had done she had done for me. I came as close as a whisker to backing down and saying ?stay.? Maybe if I hadn?t been in love with her at the time I would have let her stay and just found a way to handle all the slipperiness for the sake of all the pleasure. But I was in love and I felt betrayed in the way you only can when you love someone. She left that day and never came back. She never even picked up her hair dryer.

 

For weeks I was desolate but then I started seeing other women. Love isn?t so much. You always keep a piece of that person inside but when they cheat you in some way they kind of make it easy for you to move along.

 

I heard a few stories about An. She took some girlfriend for a lot of money. She?d ripped off some guy who had connections and couldn?t work anywhere in the Soi Cowboy again. I heard that She went to work in one of those swish cocktail lounges for a while but she probably got sacked from there too. Someone said that she was then calling herself Ice.

 

A few months later I saw her hanging around a bunch of young Thai guys around the Thermae. She saw me and ducked as if I was one of the people who was after her for stealing. Or maybe it was more that she didn?t want the Thai guys know she?d been with a useless farang like me. Either way she hid behind a plant and then dragged them off somewhere else.

 

The next time I saw her was over a year after this.

I was walking across town... I wanted to start getting a bit more exercise as I seemed to have been exclusively using taxis for ages. I was walking through Lumphini Park dodging the sprinklers and the small swamps they created beneath all that trim and verdant grass. I saw her in an old dress sitting on a bench feeding the pigeons with the remains of a quarter pounder from Burger King. She looked run down and sick. Her face was caked in make up as if she was covering some terrible blemish or had gone mad and forgotten how to use make-up. I went to say hello and her smile cut through all that was wrong. She was still dazzlingly beautiful. The whites of her eyes were yellow and there seemed to be small flecks of blood in them. Her voice sounded a bit croaky but she was still An. Things were going well for her, she said, she had this boyfriend who was a really good man with a big house and his own business in Australia. She was going to go and live with him and have a big car and as much money as she would ever need. We spoke for a while and she kept to this story like it was absolute gospel. I went to give her a kiss for luck and she offered me her cheek. ?Now I very good girl. Not even another man can kiss my mouth.?

 

I gave her my card which had my telephone number and address on it and asked her to send me a postcard from Australia. I knew very well I wouldn?t get one. I knew that her story, which again, she told elaborately well, was pure fiction.

 

A couple of months later I got a call from a hospital off Taksin Road saying that they had a woman in there called Piow and that she only had one thing on her that identified her with anyone and that this was the card with my address and phone number on it.

 

I went there. It was a hospital I?d been to before. She lay in a bed with a respirator force feeding her lungs with oxygen. Her cheeks were sallow and I knew, before anyone said a thing, that whatever she had was going to finish her. Her eyes were wide open but she saw nothing. I?m sure she didn?t know that I?d come. Someone asked me if I knew where her parents lived or if she had any family. I?d said I only knew her as An. And, truth be told, she lived with me for months and I never knew anything more than this about her.

 

I guess that, at this time, with Nam on my mind I wanted to see An, who I had also loved despite everything, more than anyone. I wanted her to be alive. I wanted to feel that she was still in the world somehow. Not gone forever. Not just a memory.

 

Did she ever give a flying fuck about me ? I don?t know. Things get kind of complicated if you start hanging round too much with hookers. But, as a ghost, she helped me. As soon as I pulled myself off the pavement I walked my way back to Petchburi Tat Mai and knackered and sweating from the heat and the walk I collapsed on my bed and slept about twenty six hours. I didn?t even dream

[Ranger]

Turk,

 

It just keeps getting better and better!!!! It would make a great book for sure, but I suppose the political incorrectness of the main characters would make it unpublishable. Too bad. I'm glad we get to enjoy it here, though.

 

Ranger

[Guest]

Our pleasure to read

 

thank you