The Price of Peanuts--by Alexander Turner

[Central Scrutinizer]

The Price of Peanuts

 

Clip joints offer the casual tourist that little something extra. A twist of adventure which can be embroidered into some grand heroic tale usually involving a fight with burly henchmen and some business with shooters.

The clip joints of Patpong are among the most famed in the world. They offer such tales that extra piece of far eastern exotica. Patpong henchmen don't just insist that you pay the bill or get duffed up. If you fail to pay a Patpong bill the net value will be extracted in the shape of your liver that will then be sold to a cirrhosis suffering millionaire. That's how the stories go anyhow.

The disappointing reality of Patpong clip joints is that they seldom resort to such methods. Normally it is enough to rely upon the drunken stupidity of customers who won't even notice how much they've been overcharged until they are paying their third visit of the evening to the local bureau de change.

My first head on encounter with the clip joints of Bangkok came in late 1991. At the start of an evening I could often be found sitting outside the Pattaya bar on Patpong 2, the beer bar outside the Pink Panther next to a load of parked motorbikes. My life had become very confusing very quickly and I enjoyed having six or seven places I could go to regularly where everybody knew me and no-one was trying to loan me their body.

It was here that I met a fellow Englishman called Dick. I can't remember if his name was really Dick, but as I can't remember what his real name was, I'll call him Dick here. Dick sounds plausible enough. Now Dick was an interesting man. He had a philosophical take on life which led him to quote philosophical aphorisms when he wanted to illustrate a particular point or idea.

Dick had a Filippina wife and, I don't know how he'd worked this out, but he'd arranged it so his wife would spend the whole four weeks of their holiday in the Philippines while he would spend the first two and a half weeks in Thailand and join her later. Maybe they had agreed that four weeks with in-laws was more than any sane man could take.

Within about fifteen minutes we'd become great friends and were drunkenly discussing all the things that were right and all the things that were wrong and all the things that didn't matter for shit. In fact within about twenty minutes we had decided to spend the rest of the evening on a major bar crawl. The idea was to keep going until dawn without getting taken down by the harpies and sirens.

My first true challenge to this objective came in Topless. Some hot bodied creature wearing a g-string and nothing else sat upon me and before I could object had worked her hands under my shirt and was caressing my chest as if applying Vicks Vapo-rub. As she nuzzled her head into my neck and started tracing my skin with lips and teeth I felt a perceptable rise in the room temperature as if someone had just turned off the air-con.

Dick peered over the top of his glass at this sorry display and said "Thererfore with the necessity with which a stone falls to the earth, the hungry wolf buries its fangs into the flesh of its prey, without the possibility of the knowledge that it is itself the destroyed as well as the destroyer."

"Eh?" I said.

"Schopenhauer." He said.

I felt a slim fingered busy hand working its way into my trousers.

"What are you doing?"

She smiled like a naughty girl "My name Ping."

"Ping."

"I want go boom boom with you."

"Really?"

"Yes. I like you."

"You like me? Are you sure?"

She gave a little laugh that quivered through her body and whispered in my ear as if it was a great secret "I want to fuck you."

The combination of her hot breath on my ear and her hot hands rooting about in my trousers was intoxicating. She kissed me and I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper.

Coming up for air for a moment I said "We were just having a debate on Western Philosophy. You ever read much Kant?" She looked at me a little blankly for a mili-second and then buried my head in her breasts, then for some reason she started shaking them about so I was in danger of getting my eye put out by a nipple. She then sat astride me so that we were almost having penetrative sex through my trousers and her g-string.

For a moment I looked across at Dick hoping for some kind of moral support but some girl had spread herself across his lap and was stroking his inner thigh.

Had it not been for the rhythmic clapping of the girls on stage which meant their three songs were up and it was time for Ping to dance I think I would have been a goner. Keeping to our oath to drink until dawn we called to check the bill. Ping saw this from the stage, leapt off the stage and grabbed the bill.

"You not go. You stay here."

She hid the bill behind her back.

"I've got to go."

"Have to stay." She giggled.

"No. I really have to go."

"You not like Ping?"

"Of course I like Ping but

I've got to go."

"You come back."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe."

"Yes I come back." I lied. Bangkok brought out the liar in me.

So we staggered out into the Patpong night smelling of lipstick and baby oil. Both the worse for drink and women. It had rained while we were in the bar and reflecting lights gleamed up from the pavement. A girl wearing nothing more than a bikini but carrying a multi-coloured umbrella darted in front of me and dashed into the chemists at Foodland. Expensive ladyboys dressed in expensive lingerie flashed their expensive new breasts at passers by. The fish on the stall outside King's Corner seemed to be jumping. The bound up crabs and lobsters too were trying to escape their fate as somebody's dinner sawing at their strings with the rough edge of their pincers. The repeated calls of "Come inside please Sir. Just one look."cut through a dozen different drumbeats. If I was walking I felt like I was floating.

Dick was obviously not as taken with the phantasmagoria of the whole thing. He said

"Want to hit an upstairs bar?"

"Upstairs. Downstairs. Anywhere."

"What about that one." He pointed to the bar opposite King's Lounge.

"That one's a bit of a problem. I know some people in that one."

"Where then?"

I pointed towards the market on Patpong 1. "I don't know anyone that way."

As soon as we walked into Patpong 1 we were accosted by digital watch salesmen, gameboy salesmen, leather accessories salesmen and fake polo shirts that would be less than a third of the price if we walked a hundred yards down Silom Road salesmen.

Out of sheer exhaustion we finally settled upon a bar called Funny Girls. That's not funny as in funny ha ha, but funny, as in that yoghurt three months past its sell by date hiding out on the top shelf of your fridge behind some wizened aubergine.

"Look for free. Look for free." Said the tout at the door.

"How much for a beer?" Asked Dick.

The tout looked as though nobody had ever asked him that question before and then said, with confidence, "Sixty Baht. No cover charge. Pussy smoke banana. Fucking show. Two ladies two bananas. Two smoking ping pong bananas and a lesbian balloon..."

"Yeah. That's great." Said Dick.

So we went in and clunked up the stairs. It was a smallish bar but what it lacked in size it also lacked in personality. Not that this seemed to bother the man who resembled Egyptian millionaire Harrods owner, Mohammed Al Fayed. He was too busy pawing at his ladyboyfriend and enjoying the casual popularity that a table full of lady drinks bought him.

On the stage two women were attempting something like a lesbian show. One was young and a little overweight. The other looked about forty three and kept her bra on for obvious reasons. Otherwise both were naked. I noticed the young one had some terrible looking bruises on her shins. I wondered if this was due to some shin kicking fetishist boyfriend or if she had merely been clumsy around coffee tables.

We sat down at a table a couple of yards from the stage and were made to feel immediately unwelcome by a surly looking waitress who took our orders for beers. The beers arrived promptly accompanied by two wicker bowls full of peanuts. Okay, I thought, peanuts, a bonus. Of all the bars we had been to earlier in the evening this was the first one with nuts. The others may have had friendly staff and beautiful girls trying to get you interested in sleeping with them but this bar had peanuts.

The forty three-ish woman attempted an what I have always believed an impressive cunnilingual feat. She arched over backwards in an effort to lick her chubby opponent between the thighs while exposing the maximum amount of labia possible to the assembled audience of five. The attempt didn't quite pan out for her, though, as her leg gave way from underneath her and she crashed on to the hardboard stage with a sickening thud followed by the smack of her fellow performer landing on top of her. Not that this fazed them at all. They just carried on as if nothing had gone wrong. Maybe that was part of the act.

"Uh....Do you want to move on?" I said to Dick.

"I don't know. I want to see how they're going to do for an encore. I like places like this." He said. "You never know what's going to happen next."

The Fayed look-alike paid up and gave out tips to everyone. Not bad tips either. A purple here a grey there. I go the impression that the staff liked him and wished that customers like us were more like customers like him. His ladyboyfriend seemed very content. As he left whatever pocket of life and warmth the bar had left with him. The other customers all seemed to be paying up and leaving. I got the impression that they knew something we didn't know.

The lesbian show came to an abrupt end and with it the music changed from Hotel California into the, then popular Thai hit, Mee Aray Ruu Plao (approximate translation: "You got some fucking problem pal?"). Within a minute or two we were the only farang left in the bar.

"Actually." Said Dick. "I think this might be a good time to make a move." As the waitress was nowhere in sight we went to the bar to pay the bill. Of course we hadn't spotted that our beers didn't come with chits so it was up to the guy behind the bar to figure out what we owed. He wrote the result of his work out on to a piece of paper and showed us what he had written as if incapable of uttering the words. One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty Baht. We both laughed.

"Come on." Said Dick to the barman. "The real bill."

"This the real bill."

"We had two beers."

"You have problem paying bill."

"Damn fucking right we have a problem with paying bill. We had two beers."

The barman nodded to someone behind us.

I looked around. A man just out of his teens with a permanent looking sneer came sloping up to us while another larger set man bolted the door.

"You drink. You look show. You pay bill."

Dick said, quite calmly, "Yes. We'll pay the bill.....But not this one. This bill is bullshit. I may be a tourist but I'm not a complete fuckwit. Now be a good boy and give us the bill for two beers."

The man started pouring out insults in Thai. The man by the door and another man who had just appeared started shouting in a combination of English and Thai.

"You pay bill or you stay."

"I'm not paying this bill. Now you get me a new fucking bill or you can go get the manager. I'm sure we'd all enjoy discussing this with the tourist police."

"Hah. Tourist police." He laughed and his friends joined him in the laughter. I didn't wonder too much at this as I was looking around the bar. I noticed that the girls did not seem very interested in this exchange. They were just sitting around at the other end of the bar pulling at their underwear, smoking cigarettes, chatting about their gynaecologists halitosis.

Another man came from nowhere. He seemed to have a bit of authority. He walked very slowly and looked at us very slowly and his eyes had a very slow quality. It was as if at some point in his life his dear old dad had said "The trick in life is to do everything slowly. Then people will be afraid of you."

He took the bill and slowly looked at it as though it took a while to read One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty Baht. He smiled and laughed slowly. Then quite out of the blue he yelled at the barman. The barman looked completely unaffected by the yelling which gave me the impression it was all part of one big routine. As he rewrote the bill, he said, in near perfect English, "I know some farang have to worry about their pennies." And I thought "Damn right, you cheating slow eyed fuck."

The new bill was a hundred and forty baht. Still a bit pricier than the sixty per beer we'd been quoted but Dick paid up and even left a Twenty baht tip. "That's for the entertainment." he said.

We made to leave. But the sneering man stood between us and the bolted door.

"You still owe money."

"What for?" Said Dick.

"You don't pay for nuts."

"What?" I said. "We didn't order any nuts."

"But you eat nuts."

Dick said "How much are the nuts?"

"Hundred baht."

"Isn't that a bit steep for nuts?"

"Okay. Fifty baht." Said the man.

We said nothing. All three Thais were trying to look hard and doing a pretty good job.

There was a banging from the other side of the door. More customers on their way up.

"Okay," Said the man losing the sneering hard man veneer. "Ten baht for the nuts."

Dick took out a ten baht note.

The door opened. The man smiled and almost had his hand on the ten baht note. But, as American tourists came through the door, Dick said "Leg it."

Pushing the tourists out the way we bolted down the stairs. A voice rang behind us "Wait. What about the nuts." Actually it might have just been "Wait" but I like to think they yelled "What about the nuts?!"

Dick and I went to a couple more bars on Patpong and ended up walking to, first the Malaysia, then the Grace Hotel. I think we might have hit the Thermae later. I know we succeeded in our quest to be still drinking around dawn. But after all that we went back to our respective hotels and never met again.

I did, however, see one of the heavies from Funny Girls at a somtam stall a couple of days later. He joked about me coming back to his bar for a bowl of nuts. I said I'd like that but was waiting for Hell to freeze over first. He laughed good humouredly enough but I'm sure he didn't know what I was talking about.

I did return to Funny Girls about a year later. I was on another epic bar crawl, this time with an Aussie bloke called Pete. I warned him about the place being a clip joint but he took this as a challenge. Maybe he was after a story for the folks back home. I went along either because I felt responsible or because I was too pissed to know any better. The bar was still the same type of bar inside, but the whole mood was completely different. Everyone chatted. Nobody hiked up the bills. The girls were friendly. We stayed there way past closing time and the barlady slipped fresh beer bottles in our condoms after the bills were paid. In other words it had become the opposite of a clip joint. It was a get stuff free joint.

We hung out there for a while. The free beers came again and one of the women took a fancy to Pete. As I left he seemed to be getting a blowjob. "She like young man." said the barlady. I didn't know what that meant but I asked her if he'd be okay there? She said he would.

I never saw him again either.

Alexander Turner

[Central Scrutinizer]

37/1

7/17/03

[chilli13]

hey free peanuts - great deal

gotta love the pong for it's sheer variety