“Third, never touch a Thai person on the head.”
“Okay.”
“Fourth, if your feet are lifted off the floor, never allow them to point at a Thai person. That’s very insulting.”
“Okay,” I said. Personally, I thought that these circumstances were pretty unlikely. I told Davis I thought I could get through my visit to Bangkok without breaking any of his injunctions.
“I doubt it,” he said, gloomily. “I just hope you don’t break all four.”
Next he instructed me in how to say my street address in Thai. I was staying at Davis’s house; he explained that I had to be able to tell a taxi driver where to go, and since the driver wouldn’t understand English or read Thai writing, there was nothing to do but commit the oral address to memory. I still remember it: Sip-jet, Sukhumvit soi yee-sip.
Davis’s house was beautiful, all elegant polished hardwood, opening onto a lovely garden in the back, with a swimming pool. I was introduced to the servants, reminded to remove my shoes at the front door, and shown to my bedroom on the second floor.
“Now, the Buddha in your room has been moved,” Davis said. “We’ve put it on top of the armoire, which is the tallest piece of furniture in the room, but in your case I don’t know if—ah, no, you see, you’re still taller than the Buddha when you stand. That’s not good. I’ll speak to the servants.”
“What about?”
“Well, I think they’ll agree to make a special case for you, since you’re so tall. But it would help if you would sort of hunch over when you’re in the room, so you won’t be taller than the Buddha any more than necessary.”
I thought, This is a single bedroom. No one is ever going to see me in here. I am all alone in here, and Davis is telling me to stay hunched over because of the Buddha. It seemed a little crazy, but I said I would try.
I thought perhaps Davis was kidding me, but he wasn’t. The Thais are wonderful, easygoing people, but they take their religion seriously, and they are not, in these matters, tolerant of foreigners. I later saw a Thai-censored version of a Peter Sellers film, A Girl in My Soup. To watch the movie was a bizarre experience: Peter Sellers would stand up from a table, and suddenly the Buddha statue in his wall niche would explode like a black-ink sparkler, which continued until Sellers sat down again. Then you could see the peaceful Buddha once more. The Thai censor had inked out the image of the Buddha, frame by frame, whenever Peter Sellers was higher than the statue.
So the Thais were serious, all right, and the servants were spoken to, and I stooped in the privacy of my bedroom. But, technically, one of the four rules was already broken.
The next day we were walking down a Bangkok street, and we passed some young kids. They were cute and friendly as they clustered around us; I patted one on the head.
“Ah ah ah,” Davis said.
Two of four broken.
“Buddhists,” Davis explained, “believe the head, the highest part of the body, is sacred and shouldn’t be touched. It’s barely acceptable with kids, but don’t ever touch an adult that way. I’m serious. In fact, it’s better not to touch an adult Thai at all.”
Chastened, I said all right. That night we were at a dinner party, and I was talking with a Thai cameraman who shot commercials for Australian companies, as well as feature films for the Thai market. He was a very interesting fellow; we talked about crew requirements and methods of working. Then the hostess called us in for dinner. We walked together, and when we came to the door, I gestured for him to go through first, and put my hand on his shoulder, to ease him through. It was a very natural, casual gesture. The cameraman stiffened for a fraction of a second, then went through the door.
I looked over. Davis was shaking his head.
So, this second rule was more difficult than I had imagined. I had to watch my natural tendency to touch people.
After dinner, we sat on pillows, around a low, round table. There was a Thai woman across the table from me. She was rather aloof, talking to someone else. As the night went on, she began to give me dirty looks. Later she’d break off her conversation at intervals to glower at me. I didn’t know what her problem was.
“Michael,” Davis said. “Ah ah ah.”
I looked down at myself. Everything seemed okay.
“Feet,” Davis prompted.
I was sitting on a pillow, leaning back on my elbows on the ground. My legs were crossed. My feet were fine. No holes in my socks.
“Michael …”
Because my legs were crossed, one foot was off the floor—and pointing at the Thai woman. She was giving me dirty looks because my foot was pointing at her.
I uncrossed my legs, put them flat on the floor. The woman smiled pleasantly.
“Try and keep your feet on the floor,” Davis advised. “It’s really the only way.”
Three out of four rules broken.
Meanwhile, I was making all sorts of minor mistakes as well. I could never remember to remove my shoes when entering people’s houses. Also, I became enamored of the Thai greeting in which you bow and make a temple of your fingers in front of your face. This is called a wai. I liked to do it, and the Thais were amused to see me doing it. One day a little kid in a tailor’s shop did it to me. I did it back.
“Never wai a kid,” Davis said.
“Oh God,” I said. By now I was becoming accustomed to my clumsiness. “Why not?”
“To wai an adult is a sign of respect. Wai a kid, it shortens his life.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Never mind, the parents didn’t seem too upset.”
At least I didn’t break the fourth rule, about climbing on a Buddha in a temple. Tourists are jailed in Thailand for that. The Thai temples are exquisite, beautifully maintained. Often they sit as tranquil, gilded oases amid an ugly expanse of roaring traffic and gray concrete buildings.
Thailand was the first Buddhist country I had ever been in. I was surprised by everything—the gaudiness of the temples, the way people behaved inside them, the flowers and the incense and the yellow-robed priests.
But I also found that I liked being in these temples. I wasn’t sure what I liked, certainly not the exhausting ornateness, but something. I liked the feeling. I liked the way the people behaved in a temple. I knew absolutely nothing about Buddhism. I didn’t know what the religion taught, what its principles were. In one of the temples, a Thai who spoke English told me that Buddhists didn’t believe in God. That seemed pretty extreme, a religion that doesn’t believe in God.
I found it interesting, that I liked this religion, because for many years I had been vociferously atheistic and antireligion. But here in the temple it was just … peaceful. I went to a bookstore and started to read books on Buddhism.
Other things were happening, too. Davis had a dinner party for Peter Kann, who was then the Asia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. I had known Peter from the Harvard Crimson many years before. He was still easygoing, funny, very smart and very competent, but now there was also a tough, worldly quality that I admired. Peter had been a correspondent in Vietnam and had remained in Asia after the war was over. He could wear shirts with epaulets and get away with it.
At the dinner party, I was seated next to an English hairdresser whose hair was dyed red on one side of her head and green on the other. I suspected this might be the latest thing in London, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t even know whether I should refer to it or not, so I kept my mouth shut.
Conversation at dinner was desultory until someone casually mentioned that Peter had been to Hunza. Instantly the table became charged with excitement. Hunza, really? How incredible. How fantastic. Nick Spenser, a neighbor of Davis’s, was full of questions. “Did you go to Gilgit, then?”
“Yes,” Peter said.
“Fly to Gilgit?”
“Yes.”
“How long did that take?”
“A week in ’Pindi.”
“Not so bad.”
“No,” Peter said, “it was
all right.”
“And Chitral as well, did you?”
“No, not this time,” Peter said.
I was trying to figure this out. Hunza, Gilgit, ’Pindi. Hunza was obviously some geographic location. But I was very much at a loss, and I couldn’t imagine how everyone at the table could know so much about a place I hadn’t even heard of. What was the appeal of Hunza, anyway? Some sort of local resort?
I never found out, because the conversation moved on. “Been to Bhutan as well?”
“No, never,” Peter said. “Can one go?”
“Billy’s been to Bhutan.”
“Has he! Never mentioned it to me. How’d he manage it?”
“Knows a friend of the ruling family. Did it from Darjeeling.”
“What about Nagar?”
“Yes, well, see Hunza, might as well go to Nagar.”
The conversation continued in this way, affording me no deductive opportunities. I listened in silence for about fifteen minutes. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I turned to the hairdresser with the red-and-green hair, and said quietly, “What are they talking about?”
“Countries,” she said.
I was ready to collapse. They were talking about countries and I hadn’t heard of any of them.
“Bhutan and Hunza are countries?”
“Yes. In the Himalaya.”
Well, I felt a little better. Who knew what was tucked away in the folds of the Himalaya? I felt my ignorance could be excused. But as the conversation continued, I realized that the world I inhabited was a world where, if I did not know everything, I had at least heard of most of it. My ignorance about Himalayan states, on the one hand so embarrassing, was also in its way enlivening. I’d certainly do some reading when I got home.
Davis’s friend Ed Bancroft, a handsome investment banker living in Bangkok, was a rake. He was the only rake I had ever met. As the dinner guests departed, Bancroft announced to Peter and me that he was taking us to see the famous nightlife of Bangkok. Davis begged off, pleading fatigue.
In Patpong, once a Vietnam R & R district, there were clubs with names like “The Playboy” and “The Mayfair.” In The Playboy Club we saw Thai girls demonstrate varieties of muscular control with cigarettes and bananas, all done under ultraviolet lights while the crowd shouted and screamed. The spectator appeal of this activity struck me as limited unless you were really drunk, as most of the spectators were.
We visited several more bars, and then went to a massage parlor. It was a gigantic modern place, the size of a hotel. Ed Bancroft suggested that, as out-of-towners, we might like the full-body massage, where the girl slithers all over you in a soapy bathtub.
We were taken to a one-way mirror where we could look into a room full of girls, all wearing starched white uniforms and number tags. The girls were all looking in our direction, because there was a television mounted just beneath the mirror. The idea was, you picked a number and the manager called the girl out to give you your massage.
Because he spoke Thai, Ed talked with the manager at the window and second-guessed our decisions. Apparently certain choices among the girls were not desirable; I never did figure it out.
The whole business of standing at the mirror was very bizarre. It was a little too much like the slave trade or the auction block or outright prostitution for my taste. Yet nobody was treating it that way. There wasn’t any sordid, sinful feeling; it was exactly like a massage parlor, sort of healthy and straightforward. I retired with my girl to a fully tiled room that had a low circular tub sunk into the floor. The girl made a bucket of suds, put a little hot water into the tub, and got me to sit in it. She scrubbed me with a rough brush, which was nice in a masochistic way, and gestured for me to lie on my stomach. Then she took off all her clothes, soaped her body, lay down on my back, and writhed with the soap.
I had a few problems with this. For one thing, I didn’t fit in the tub: my legs hung over the edge. So when she lay on top of me it was extremely painful on my shins. Also, because my back was arched, we didn’t have good contact; she kept giggling and trying to push me into a better position, but there just wasn’t room in the tub. Then soap got up my nose and I began to cough.
We decided to call it a day. She rinsed me down, and I dried myself and got dressed and headed back upstairs.
“How was that?” Ed said. “Wasn’t that unbelievable?”
“Unforgettable,” I agreed.
Peter showed up, and we were off again, Ed with a peculiar gleam in his eye. He was building up to something. “A whorehouse?” he asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
Peter made noncommittal noises.
“Just a look,” Ed said. He was showing us the town; he was the resident expert; he didn’t want to stop this wild ride.
“Okay, just a look.”
But the mood in the car was declining. My shins still hurt from the slippery massage, though I’d never admit to the others that I’d anything but unalloyed delight. Peter was saying nothing at all, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window. We were getting into that funny territory that men can share in A Night on the Town, or Chasing the Broads. A situation that says much more about the men being together than about any broads. What was happening, at 2:00 a.m. on a muggy Bangkok night, was that nobody was willing to be the first to quit.
But Ed, our guide, took the silence to mean we were bored with his itinerary thus far. He perceived us as especially jaded, requiring a special stimulus.
“I know what,” he said, snapping his fingers. “A child whorehouse!”
“Ed,” I said, “wouldn’t just a regular whorehouse be adequate?”
“No, no, no. A child whorehouse, absolutely. Listen, this place is incredible, you have to see it.”
And off we drove in the steamy night.
I’m thinking of Justine in The Alexandria Quartet, exotic episodes in exotic foreign countries.
Peter still stares out the window. I’m noticing the epaulets on his shirt again. I say to him, “Have you ever seen a child whorehouse?”
“Not personally,” he says. Very cool.
Bancroft pulls up a back alley into one of the indistinguishable gray concrete structures of Bangkok. There is a guard, and a central courtyard. In the courtyard are parking stalls, with curtains in front of each stall.
“That’s for the cars; you pull the curtain so people can’t read the license numbers,” Ed says. “Politicians, really important people come to this place. Wait here.”
He jumps out of the car, is gone. Moments later he is back.
“Okay, it’s all right.”
We go up a broad flight of stairs from the street. Then into what looks like a single large apartment. A long hallway, with doors opening off each side.
“We’ll just see what they have here tonight,” Ed says. We are led down the hallway to the first door.
Inside, a room draped with gaudy Indian fabric, pinks and reds. Harsh lighting. Sitting on pillows in the room, watching television, women with crude, heavy makeup. They don’t look like children to me.
“Pretty old,” Peter says, grinning at Ed. Needling him.
“Old! Christ! Ancient!” Ed says something quickly in Thai to the man beside him.
“I wonder how old they actually are?” Peter says. Now he has his reporter’s voice, his correspondent’s voice. So-and-so many women, such-and-such an average age.
We go down the hall to another door. Another room draped with cheap cloth. Women in negligees, bra and panties, garter belts. The bordello effect is spoiled by the fact that some of them are cooking food in a corner of the room. These girls are somewhat younger.
The man looks at us, questioning.
“I don’t know what this guy is thinking of,” Ed says. “The last time I was here, it was with”—he names a distinguished person—“and they had seven- and eight-year-olds here. Really. Extraordinary.”
We go farther down the corridor, to still another room. Eve
ry time I move down the corridor, I feel more claustrophobic. There are funny smells here, masked by incense. The corridor is getting narrower all the time. Short women stand in the corridor, clustering around us, trying to get us to choose them instead of the women in the rooms. In their dirty underwear, their garish makeup, they pluck at us, tug at us. When they smile, they have missing teeth.
“Ah, here’s the room,” Ed says.
The door opens. We see a handful of prepubescent girls. They look ten or eleven. Their eyes are dark and smudged. Their postures are coy; they strut and throw glances over their shoulders. One girl walks unsteadily in high heels too big for her.
“What do you say, guys?” Ed says. He’s grinning with excitement.
I just want to get out of there. I don’t care if they think I’m effeminate, I don’t care what they think. I just want to get away from these poor children and these reeking corridors with people pulling at me, touching me, little fingers reaching up for me. “Mister … mister …”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say. “I’m a little tired.”
“Hey, you don’t see what you like, we can keep looking.”
“No, I’m tired. Really. I’ll wait for you outside.”
“Okay. Suit yourself.” Ed looks at Peter. “Peter?”
This is another classic moment from Night on the Town. One guy has just crumped out, he’s tired or guilty or thinking of the wife or whatever, and now let’s see which way the rest of the evening is going to go. Are you in or out?
Peter says, “I want a cigarette. I’ll wait outside, too.”
“You guys,” Ed says, shaking his head, disappointed in us. “You don’t know what you’re missing here.”
“I’ll have to take that chance,” Peter says.
Peter and I go outside and sit on the bumper of Ed’s car and smoke cigarettes and talk about what has happened in our lives in the ten years since we have last seen each other. We suddenly have this camaraderie, because it is the middle of the night and we are tired and we have both decided to pass on the child prostitutes and we want to make sure the other guy doesn’t think we’re chicken or something. We have a really nice conversation, and then Ed reappears.