The Man Who Sold The World

Thailand

One night in Rome, perhaps one of the more precarious nights of my life, I went to a bar with a Danish girl and two American boys I barely knew. It was across town in a different district from where I was staying. I wanted to go back because I had enjoyed myself the previous times I had been there. We took a cab and no one spoke on the ride. Earlier in the night, I had the option of a taking a motorcycle ride back to Jessicah’s apartment but I’m glad I didn’t because that night, as I later discovered, the driver of said motorcycle was in an accident and broke his arm.

At the bar we ordered drinks. Then I realized something was wrong: The Danish girl had disappeared. I asked the guys if they knew where she could be.

“You speak English,” they questioned.
“Uh. Yes, I do. I’m American.”
“No way. NO WAY,” the other guy stammered. “You are TOTALLY Danish. Or Thai.”
“Yes!” The other one screamed. “Say something in Thai!”

I felt really uncomfortable. Are they making fun, I thought. I started to walk away.

“Where are you going? We’re about to watch the sunrise.”
“I’m not Thai,” I insisted. “I’m American.”
I wasn't embarrassed by the comparison, nor proud to be a patriot.

I never found the Danish girl; I was abandoned with two acidheads, no Italian, no taxi, a sunrise over some ancient ruins contemplating a question I have not forgotten: Can I pass for a Thai lady?

I learned I cannot pass for a Thai lady my first day in Thailand.

In appropriate fashion, Thailand commenced with a first: a Singha Lager in the Bangkok airport. We had a three hour layover before the island of Phuket with very little to keep us occupied. My partner-in-crime, Smith Scarborough and I agreed Singha is better than Tiger Beer and Tiger Beer is better than Chang. My friends laughed at my physical contrast to the Thai lady trying to sell me jasmine massage oil in the Duty Free. “Ah, you tall lady.”

I brought along Paul Theroux’s “Fresh Air Fiend,” and while waiting, I read something remarkably allied to what I’ve been experiencing lately. He says,

“It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience an intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however; in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past—Medford dreamed in Mandalay.”

That night in Phuket, after settling into our white linen beach resort and while digesting our first authentic Thai dinner, our waitress told us to go to her favorite “hotspot.” We later found her on top of the bar, straddling a pole. And this, I feel, is an appropriate time to say my time in Thailand got progressively more and more, for lack of a better word, bizarre.

I had some (but not enough) beforehand knowledge of Phuket thanks to restless nights and the lulling comfort of the Travel Channel. The program “21 Sexiest Beaches in the world” claims Patong Beach is one of “ top sexiest beaches in the world.” In the whole wide! Tthe beach is nice--Bombay blue water, champagne sand- but the district of Patong is too crude for words. Fat Austrian men and baby Thai prostitutes? Not sexy. For example, the bar where we found the waitress was called Penitentiary Bar. Her “hotspot” was next to the G-spot Bar, Wet Dream Bar, Pussy Galore Bar (I could go on.) We walked the streets with those who do it professionally. We maneuvered through the hundreds of bars all stacked on top of one another like Janga blocks. I played a few games of Janga and Connect Four with a prostitute. I lost. She was a professional.

The next morning, three hours after Bangla Road, I woke up for a boat ride to Koh Panak (or the James Bond Islands.) My personal guide, clad in a baby blue Playboy shirt and silver teeth, rowed our inflatable canoe through a cave of bats. The cave got increasingly smaller and smaller until I was lying flat, praying that the limestone wouldn’t scrap my nose off. At the end of the cave, we were greeted by the light emanating through the hong: an open-air, cliff lined, cylindrical tidal lagoon connected to the outside world only through stalactite-filled caves.

We paddled around the mere and I giggled at the monkeys on the rocks. They sat an arms length away and I wanted so badly to shake their hands. I climbed onto a Thai rowboat and the fishermen let me conduct taxonomy on the multi-colored crabs. I sat criss-cross-apple-sauce on the rowboat bench because there were stingrays swimming in the puddles of the boat’s floorboards. We paddled through the Mangrove trees. I would’ve etched my name + blank into the bark had I my pocketknife. Instead, I watched my guide (who I referred to as Number 2 because there were two of us and we were in James Bond territory) reach into the water, collect clay off the rocks and rub it on his face. I was really enjoying myself; it was nice having some peace and quiet. But of course, there comes a rising action with a rising tide.

I suppose Number 2 and I drifted too far because by the time we got back to the aperture in the sea cave, the tide was up, and we were trapped. Our exit strategy, as Number Two pantomimed, was to first deflate the canoe, suck in our respective ribcages and pull ourselves through. It didn’t work. I jumped ship. Initially, I wouldn’t have minded the impervious pea-soup swamp had Number 2 not muttered his only English of the day: piranha. I quickly dove under water and swam through the cave opening. When I surfaced, I was in the dark, holding my breath from the stench of guano. There is a scene in the movie Anaconda where a parasite swims up the urethra of a man wading the Amazon. If I said I had no anxiety about the water I would be lying. Another canoe had made it, and with the help of those on board, I climbed onto the lightweight boat just as Number Two pulled ours through. We made it out of the dark and out to sea, where we sculled through floating ocean garbage that I had mistaken for chum. As we drifted through beer bottles (perhaps Namibian), I pulled a few leeches off my arms, and counted the bug bites on my legs: 5.

On a separate island, I went beachcombing and pocketed some keepers (sadly no conch shell.) The molting layer process of the ecdysiast by the crustaceans reminded me of the striptease the boys oogled over the night before. Smith perfected the art of shallow water handstands. We laughed at the overweight Germans and their itsy bitsy leopard print bikinis. I kept the figure in mind. The salinity was too intense for my eyes. I opted to cannonball off the boat and swim along the rafts like a water dog. I may or may not have seen a shark fin.

That night, Austin, Whitney, Smith and I sat down for crab curry at a hole in the wall restaurant that served bloody marys in body shaped-glasses. Not long after ordering, the dinner party was caught in a Thai monsoon. One hour and a couple margaritas later, the bartender laughed as she caught me put 7 beer cozies in my purse. The various $8 Thai massages were catch-as catch-can; we sang-along to catchy songs while drinking Hong Thong. I crowned Steven Tyler and Akon the Kings of the Wild Frontier because their music is the world over. I did, however, escape Michael Jackson in Thailand and I was (and still am) incredibly grateful for that. I closed my eyes when an audience member caught a banana at a local “performance;” we unknowingly walked into a three-story brothel and we probably caught the clap just from breathing the stuffy air; I caught a cold after moonshine skinny dipping in the Thai sea; I swam to a floating heart trampoline and watched fireworks; I caught my dress on the door of the hotel roof; I caught some fried fish at late night food stands; in the early morning swimming pool, I was caught by hotel security and reluctantly dragged by exhausted butt to bed. When in Rome, right?

The following morning, I climbed upon the back of a 40-year-old elephant and embarked on an all day jungle safari, through the Karst topography, the lush mangrove forests, the limestone mountains, the plants, rivers and animals. The jungle rain was beautiful, but callous. I stopped and watched sap drip from the rubber trees for ten to fifteen minutes though it only felt like a minute or so. The rubber, as our guide informed me, is sold to the factories that make us our Nike Dunks and Trojans.

In Thailand, you can sell, or buy, anything. “Who actually buys this sh-t?” I initially questioned. I bought some over the counter cold medicine at a Thai pharmacy that made my eyeballs flip and gush. The med was going to be my only purchase but the street vendors were relentless.

“Good buy. Same, same,” the vendors insisted.

I saw some interesting stuff. Here is a short list of stuff for sale: ping pong balls, laser pointer, thongs, big-belly Buddha statues, porn, batteries, Billabong t-shirts, silk boxers, CD cases, vibrators, luggage, henna tattoos, hemp purses, magnets, Jergens lotion, knives, nail polish, leather shoes, mascara, Nerf footballs, pookah shells, dried maggots, your sister.

What ever happened to the Buddhist objective of nonattachment? I would love to practice some form of material emission but I know that is only a pipedream. I suspect that after anyone visits a Buddhist country, they too, are drawn to the religion in one way or another. Nirvana would be nice, but I hold onto somethings too tightly.

At the Thai Royal Palace, I was told not to point my feet at the bronze statue of the Buddha, and because I felt a strong affinity for Buddhism that day, I obeyed the rules for once. I even bowed towards the Man like the real worshippers and silently sat in Buddha hood. “I am,” as it goes, “an ever changing aggregate of feelings, discriminations, compositional factors and consciousness.” The more and more I encounter the “bizarre,” recognize metaphysical connections, visit beautiful sites, survive near fatal mistakes and lose my inhibitions and my mind, the more and more I believe in a higher power.

Alright, alright, alright
Oh Jesus
I love You and Buddha too
You are un-nameable
You are unknowable
All we have is metaphor
That's what time and space are for

Here goes my Deus Ex Machina.

My first impression of Jesus Christ was on TV. I remember watching the crucifixion one Easter morning and it horrified me. Ever since, I’ve avoided religion altogether, which I find unfortunate. My dad told me that when he went to Catholic school, a little girl pissed off a nun and was consequentially beaten with a yardstick. The girl, though badly wounded, laughed uncontrollably. I am starting to feel like that little girl who doesn’t know how to appropriately react to an inappropriate situation; I am in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

One night in Bangkok, I was looking to buy fried worms from a street vendor when I saw a man on a motorcycle skid on the wet pavement and flip off his bike. I didn’t know what to do. “That guy just ate sh-t on his motorcycle,” I said. He got up and walked away unscathed. Everyone was horrified. But I didn’t do anything. I think it’s because these days everything I do is so thoughtless. I'm horrified by that.

This is an argument widened by my oblivion to those things I’m not looking for. For example, while hunting for personal abstractions, wandering the midnight streets, I passed a baby elephant and a congregation of lady boys not noticing the exotica until my friends pointed it out. “You just walked past a baby elephant. And lady boys!”

Last night I saw upon the stair A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today Oh, how I wish he’d go away...

-- “Antigonish,” Hughs Mearns