Toy: The MO Of A Crass Thai Hooker

Thailand Hotel Guide

• Kamalaya Resort Koh Samui
• Samui Orchid Resort & Aquarium
• Laem Set Inn
• Aloha Resort

I had not seen Mundo for several months, when, as fate would have it, I bumped into him one afternoon in the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Phnom Penh. He was his usual cheery self and full of stories about women he had shagged and loved for two hours and then said goodbye to forever (see his sole contribution to Stick’s site: The Ten Commandments of a Happy Whoremonger). Most recently he had spent a week in Jakarta’s Block M, a different girl every night, two on two of the nights when he felt a little more horny than usual; and then he had a rip-roaring ten days sampling the little known and poorly appreciated carnal delights of Surabaya’s quite extensive red-light district.

Anyway, this particular afternoon, the rain coming in buckets and not a soul in sight on the Tonle Sap river front, he asked where I’d been recently. I told him Pattaya, for a mere four days before I had to get back to Phnom Penh and someone special. A broad smile washed over his face and he fell back into the brown leather chair and said, “Speaking of Pattaya, Korski, I’ve got a good one for you. Oh do I! Since you’re a whole lot more visible on Stick’s famous Bangkok site than I am, I invite you to post this little story that I’m going to lay in your lap.” He reached into his red daypack and pulled out a manila folder and handled me copies of several email exchanges he’d had with a Pattaya hooker, a small experience he’d had not long before he’d gone to Jakarta to remind himself what makes Indonesian P4P lovelies so bouncy and delightful in bed. He went on, “Now keep in mind that I only spent two nights with this one, keeping to one of my firmest and most important commandments. Also keep in mind as you read these emails from her that she never asked me my last name, where I live, my marital status, my age, or how many kids I might have. Nothing. She asked for nothing more than my email address, which I rarely give to anyone. Why I gave it to her, I can’t honestly say. But like all mongers, I make more than my share of mistakes.”

I began reading through the email exchanges, and I must confess I could not help but laugh, not least because the one thing I know about Mundo is that when he finds himself in that rare situation where a hooker wants to take him for a ride and try to get more from him that he agreed to pay or willingly gave after the deed was done she’s going to be in for one huge surprise. More often than not, a memorable little word adventure that will leave her dizzy and empty handed, and probably mightily pissed off because he fiddled with her mind to the point of ridicule. The Mundo stories, if you’ve not have the great pleasure of meeting this always hungry monger, are legion.

“So you really want me to post these to Stick on your behalf?” I said, not sure if he was teasing.

“If you don’t mind,” he said. “Stick’s readers, I’d bet, are much more likely to read this little narrative of just how brash these hookers can be if it’s your name that appears under the title [at which point he gave me a title for this little story]. Besides, I thought you’d do me the favor of writing some comments following each email, after, of course, I give you some idea what I had in mind.” He chuckled and his eyes got large and he got this shit-eating grin on his face, one I imagine he has used as much to make hookers think he’s something special with his pants down as to openly laugh at others for whom he has contempt. I’ve seen it many times.

We talked for another two hours or so, and Mundo filled me in on what he’d learned about Toy in the two nights they’d spent together, the basic outlines of her story and how she wound up in Pattaya working in a beer bar on Second Road between Soi Seven and Soi Eight. As best I can recall, I’ve sketched Toy’s story, a perhaps useful introduction to the word for word email exchanges that began four days after Mundo saw Toy for only the second—and last—time.

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Toy was seventeen when she fell in love with a local village boy and promptly got pregnant by him. They lived together for three months, and during this time the boyfriend’s ya-ba habit became intolerable. She said he went “crazy.” She told him to leave and never return. She had the baby, and for a short period of time remained in the village and tried to support the two of them. This proved difficult, and so like so many young Thai girls in a similar predicament she moved to Bangkok and got a job in a shirt factory. The work was exhausting and the money she got was just enough to get by—pay the rent, feed herself, buy a few clothes and a mobile phone, and send money home to the village for the baby and her needy and demanding mother. Toy’s father died when she was six. She had one sister who was married and living in the village.

A friend suggested, and not for the first time, that Toy was young enough and attractive enough to make considerably more money working as a bargirl in Pattaya than she was getting in the Bangkok shirt factory. Toy soon headed for Pattaya, and it was apparently an easy transition into working in a beer bar entertaining farang and going with them for a couple of hours or the whole night when they wanted to bar fine her. Toy, like many young Thai hookers, could not work in a go-go bar because although she was pretty and had a good figure she had quite visible stretch marks on her stomach from child birth.

When Toy was twenty she met a thirty-two year old American from Chicago who worked in Information Technology. He was immediately attracted to Toy, and he bar fined her for the entire week that he spent in Pattaya. He returned twice more in the next six months, each time for a period of one week, a pattern of visiting Pattaya and spending time with Toy that would continue for nearly five years. Early in the relationship, the American (he weighed over 300 pounds and at six two towered over the slightly built Toy who was just over five feet and not more than 105 pounds) fell in love with Toy and said that he would send her money every month if she would return to her village and stay there until they could agree on how to be together all the time.

Toy returned to the village, and she got the generous monthly support as promised. But before long she was bored. The village had none of the excitement to which she had become accustomed—the music, the gossip, the occasional dinner and entertainment and some clothes, thanks to generous farang. Before long Toy returned to Pattaya. She went back to working in a beer bar and going with farang just as she had before.

The American, cognizant of what had happened, continued to send Toy money. Finally, he made arrangements for a three-month visitor’s visa for Toy and her child. This was seen by him as prelude to something more permanent, perhaps marriage. The three of them began their new life with a vacation in New York City. And then they went on to Chicago, where the American lived and worked.

Toy had strong and positive feelings toward her American boyfriend, but she could not tolerate living in Chicago’s cold, and she missed her family and friends back home. When the three month visa expired, she returned to Thailand, aware that by so doing she would, most likely, never again find herself in America. She immediately went back to Pattaya and work in a beer bar, in a low traffic location on Second Road. The monthly deposits to her bank account ceased.

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Mundo met Toy late one night after he had gone to several go-go joints and beer bars on Walking Street and couldn’t find anyone that caught his eye. He liked Toy’s broad smile and easy manner, and upon meeting her and without asking her anything more than her name he bought her a drink and asked if she’d join him at the rear of the beer bar where they could chat and listen to some live music. They had three drinks apiece, she cuddled with him as only Thai and Filipina hookers know how, he paid her bar fine of 200 baht, and they walked a short block and a half to his hotel on Soi Eight. Once inside the room, he immediately saw that Toy wasn’t the shy type. She didn’t bother to close the bathroom door when she showered prior to joining him in bed, nor did she come to the bed with a towel around her. They had sex for the better part of an hour and then they fell asleep. In the morning they had sex again before she left; she was obliging to a fault. Mundo thought that Toy was as good a sex partner as he had had with the last thirty of so hookers he shagged in three different countries. He hadn’t asked Toy how much she wanted for staying the night, and she hadn’t mentioned a figure. In the morning, he gave her 1,500 baht. He guessed that he had paid her 500 baht more than her going rate for the time they spent together. He imagined that she would see this as a tip for a service well and imaginatively provided.

The following day Mundo bar fined Toy before sun down, and along with an American named Bob whose acquaintance he’d recently made, and the American’s Thai girlfriend of the moment, the four of them went to a restaurant on Walking Street. They had several drinks, and then dinner. And then several more drinks while they chatted and cuddled and made small talk and listened to a live band. Around midnight, Mundo and Toy returned to his hotel. They had a long session of sex, and then they fell asleep in each other’s arms. In the morning, after Toy smoked Mundo and they showed he again paid her without asking how much she wanted, this time 2,000 baht, even though he had no intention of ever seeing her again. On leaving, Toy offhandedly gave Mundo her email address and she asked for his in return. Mundo rarely gives his email address to anyone (he doesn’t own a mobile phone). Why he did so on this occasion he doesn’t know, he said; it was one of those impetuous moments and nothing more.

Four days after returning home, Mundo received the first of several emails from Toy. He was taken aback by her boldness in her very first email to him. Below is what she initially sent, and then all of those that followed both from her and to her from Mundo, all in the course of less than ten days. I have changed the name she uses in the beer bar (Toy is not her real name) and have eliminated the first four numbers on her bank account, information she sent to Mundo in one of the emails. Toy’s spellings, capitalizations, grammatical errors, and sloppy punctuation have not been altered from the original.

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hi mundo.

how are you? I never forget your name and your friend. I am happy that live together. thank you for admiration me. I have many ploblem now. can you help me? it about of money. I don't need work in bar. I want go back home for find new work. I am be bored at pattatya . when you come to thailand agian. a day you come back to your home , I feel miss you so much. maybe I am fall in love you.
miss you.

toy.

My comment (based as are the others that follow on my conversation with Mundo in the Foreign Correspodent’s Club). Mundo’s initial reaction was to “trash” Toy’s brash email. Upon reflection, however, he decided that he wanted to see how she would react if he played to her hand; he had heard and read scores of accounts of how Thai hookers ask for money and often have more than one sponsor sending them money. Because of his policy of two-times-only-and-no-more, a policy seldom violated, and because he rarely gives his email address to anyone, he had had no personal experience with a hooker asking for money beyond that paid for sex or for spending time with him during the day or at night.

In what follows, we see a fascinating, almost comical narrative, with Toy responding to Mundo’s taunting words,trying to tell him exactly what she believes he wants to hear. Mundo, for his part, is, quite literally, toying with her, and he quickly begins to up the ante and come up with whole cloth fabrications to rationalize not giving Toy so much as a single baht. Mundo—in anticipation of what follows—does not have a sister, he has never been married to a Brazilian or a Mexican woman, and he has never considered getting into any kind of long-term relationship with a hooker in any part of the world. Nor has he ever considered living permanently in Thailand or buying land there.

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Hi Toy,

So good to hear from you. When are you planning on quitting and how much money do you need? Getting out of Pattaya would be a very good idea. What village are you going back to? How thrilling this idea that we may be falling in love.

Mundo

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Hello Mundo,

I need 20,000 baht a month. I will quit here when I got the first money. I will go home in Karasin and then will find a job there. Hope to hear from you soon.

Toy

Comment: Here, unlike subsequent emails, Toy does not respond to Mundo’s bait: “How thrilling this idea that we may be falling in love.” It’s notable, too, how she minces no words in getting right to the point about what she wants, and then ties it directly to what she knows every farang sponsor will demand: quit going with other farang and move back to your village. She’s either learned this from previous demands by farang or has a good ear for what other bargirls around her are doing in this regard.

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Hello Toy,

You said you had a problem there. What is it? What kind of a relationship do you want to have with me? I sure find you attractive, and very smart too.

Oh yes, I forgot to ask you when I was there. Do you have another boyfriend, or are you married to a Thai man or someone else?

Love, Mundo

Comment: Mundo comes back again with the “love” bait, and signs off with “love.” He’s eager to see how she’ll respond to the common claim that most Thai hookers have Thai boyfriends or husbands, and, at the same time, perhaps one or more farang sponsors.

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hi mundo.

how are you? hope you fine. yes', I told you I have problem now. I don't have money to pay fortuition fee my daugher. and I need stop work in bar. from that time on you go back I not go to with man. and I never marry with thai man. we are ever live together and terminate . now I not have boyfriend. I have make money for work around 15,000 - 20,000 bath. yes' I need have relatedness too. I think you are good man and I am feel comforted that live with you. if you think that it overabundantly for money. also up to you that you can give me . I hope and wish that go back to home and live with my daugher and my familly.
hope you answer me.

tak care of yourself

love.

Toy

Comment: This time Toy is quick to take the bait, and to come forth with the kind of stock phrase often heard from Thai hookers: “I think you are good man.” She also tells Mundo what all farang in love or falling in love with a hooker want to hear; she is not going with other customers since meeting him. She adds that she will feel comfortable living with him, and then there’s the “love” sign off. Of course, and as expected, Toy claims to not have a boyfriend or husband, either Thai or farang. She cleverly appeals to everyman’s desire to help children by asking for money for her eight-year-old daughter, which she had told Mundo about when they were together. What most surprises Mundo about her email is her insecurity in again asking for 20,000 baht, as she initially did. She even seems to strike a semi-honest note by claiming to be making between 15,000 and 20,000 baht a month, which may be an exaggeration but one virtually impossible to check. Mundo had expected that with this email Toy would ask for more than 20,000 baht.

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Hi Mundo.

thank you for something that you understand me. maybe you I meet you a short time. and I am happy that to meet you. and I think that I be lucky so much. I wish that have you only.and I hope that you may think have me only too.
I wait you come back agian.

thank you so much.

HEAD OFFICE SWIFT CODE BKKBIHBK
Pay to order of
name toy y. (not her real name)
account no xxxx198505
BANGKOK BANK BANGCRU PRAPRADANG
THAILAND

Comment: The above email was sent by Toy immediately after sending the previous one, without a chance for Mundo to see the previous email and respond. It is notable how crudely it reads, and for the lack of “love” in the sign off.

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Hello Darling,

So nice to hear form you again and to see that we are really falling in love, and after having spent only two nights together! This is pretty amazing.

I've got some good new and bad news, for the moment. I just heard from the doctor and he told me that I can, after all, give one of my kidneys to my dying sister. She lost the use of her kidneys about two years ago and has been on a machine to keep her alive. I could not bear to see her die at such a young age (27--just two years older than you), so I decided to give her one of my kidneys if there was a good "match." The doctor said it is a "perfect match," which means that when she gets the kidney it will not be rejected and she will be able to have a normal and happy and long life.

So this means that I will be operated on in the next couple of weeks to remove my right kidney. But it also means that because the operation is so expensive insurance will not pay for everything. I therefore need to use the money I currently have available, as well as my savings, to pay for part of my operation and my sister's operation.

But I have this really great plan for us! You said in your email before this one that you would like to live with me, and maybe we will even get married soon! So here is what I suggest. You go back to the village now and find a very nice piece of land on which we can build a house. Then, after the operation, I will sell some of my stocks and bonds and get cash and then plan to meet you in the village with two or three million baht, which should be more than enough to build a very nice house. Great idea, right! I know you'll love it!

So, do find us a nice piece of land with a good view if possible.

Also one far enough away from your mother so she won't be pestering us all the time for money for her live-in partner, who you told me is spending all her money (your money, actually) on drinking and gambling. As I remember, you sent her 8,000 baht just before I had that incredible night with you and Bob and his special friend for the night.

Oh, there is this one little joke I must tell you about that will surely make you laugh. The doctor said that after the operation that removes my right kidney I will have to be very careful about exercise, and sex. He was telling me in his own careful words that I cannot have the kind of sex we had the two days we were together--wild and like two crazy tigers, as you might remember. I sure remember how great it was!

You won't guess what I told him next. I said, Well my gorgeous Thai girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife will be happy to smoke me as long as I want! He had no idea what I was talking about--this smoking stuff; and frankly I was too embarrassed at that point to tell him. But I did tell him. You should have seen the look on his face!

Anyway, enough for now, and do get back to the village soon and find us a nice piece of land.

Love (for always, I hope), Mundo

Comment: Now Mundo has decided to “shift into high gear” and see how far his fictions will go with Toy. As I noted, he does not have a sister, he owns no stocks and bonds, and he cannot at this point in his life imagine owning land or building a house in Thailand. Again, he wants to see how Toy will respond to his words of affection, and now this embracing word that cannot be missed and which women everywhere love to hear: “darling.”

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Hello my darling

I’m glad to get your e-mail I’m so sad to that your healthy problem but is good idea you can give your kidney to your sister she can return to her beautiful life again about the land please don’t worry I can looking for you . I’m welcome to get marry with you but at the moment I can’t go back to my hometown because I have money problem and I have sent money back to my family also so now I owe my friend I have no money to pay for my e-mail to you . I wish to do our dream come true if you want I go back to my home you can send money to me for my travel . The weather in Thailand now is rain everyday and every where quiet is made me get bore
I do not want to say hello and welcome everyday please don’t forget to let me know when you have operation I will cheer you up my future husband
Take care of yourself. I’m looking forward for your e-mail. Hope to hear that you can send money for me.

Love you
Toy

Ps I can go back to my home when I get money from you

Comment: Toy played right into Mundo’s hand, apparently seeing the kind of sympathy for his imaginary sister that she sought for her quite real daughter. If Mundo really piled the shit high and deep by talking about marriage and buying land and building a home, Toy is seemingly unaware, in all probability ecstatic at the prospect that she may with some patience get a whole lot more than a “mere” 20,000 baht or so a month. Perhaps at this point Toy brought to mind stories she’s heard about other Thai hookers who have been lucky enough to snag an outsized sucker and then, when the house was built, tell him to get lost or he’d be facing undesirable consequences.

Yet Toy may be smart enough at this point to see that she’ll have to settle for a lot less than 20,000 baht in the short run, and so she appeals to Mundo to send her an unspecified amount of money for travel back to the village, and for her family, and an alleged debt to a friend. She’s also reaching in her bag of sick buffalo tricks to hit Mundo from other angles at the same time: the weather’s bad in Pattaya, she’s bored, she’s tired of being nice to farang who come to the bar—and then the final, nicely place ball kicker—“please don’t forget to let me know when you have operation I will cheer you up my future husband.” Finally, sandwiched in between all this phony love and caring and “love you” drivel (not merely “love” as in a previous email) is the request that matters: “Hope to hear that you can send money for me.” As a biologist might say: True bonobo balls.

Mundo read these last couple of lines to me several times, all the while laughing, even cackling. Then, half tongue-in-cheek, he came forth with a proposal that showed his confidence in my meager creative abilities. He said,”Korski here’s what you and I are going to do, if you’re game. We are going to have one jolly good time writing a real killer email to lovely little Toy. We’ll knock her into dreamland for an opener, and then we’ll just make it simply unbelievable. She’ll run back to the bar faster than she can get a guy off smoking.”

Now I ask you reader: How can you refuse a friend, one as dear and close to me as Mundo? I won’t reveal which lines and outrageous lies came from Mundo and which are mine, that way saving both of us a bit of embarrassment when savvy readers cackle and shout: You guys are really over the edge! She won’t buy any of it!

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Hello my sweet darling Toy,

I have some fantastic news for you, and also some stories that I know will bring a smile to your always intelligent face and mind! And I must say, you cannot believe how much you made my day (and week) when I read that you very much like the idea of marriage.

First the really good news. Yesterday I checked with my bank and they will be issuing an ATM debit card in your name (thanks for all that information that was included on instructions for depositing money in your account). The ATM card is not a credit card; I never use them because they’re not safe when traveling. This card in your name will allow you to take out up to 12,000 baht a day, the same amount I can take out of my accounts. I will initially put 100,000 baht in the account, and I will give you the card and the password when we get together in your village and begin planning our marriage and the big house we’re going to build.

More good news. I have been looking at some plans for houses and found one that is similar to the house I now live in—3,000 square feet, two car garage, large backyard and outdoor spa, four bedrooms, and three baths, with a large living area and a huge family room. I’m not sure we can build it there for 2 million baht; I may have to spend 3 million. I only have one friend who married a Thai woman and built a home in a village near Udon Thani, so I need more information on what it will cost us.

Now you might wonder why we would need a house so large? What I haven’t told you is that I have two young children who I will bring to live with us, if that is okay with you? Is it? One is ten and has a Brazilian mother (long story that I will tell you another day). The other child is seven (they are both boys) and his mother is Mexican (another long story that I will get to in another loving note to you).

The good news here is that your eight-year-old daughter will have someone to play with and grow up with, and she’ll even be able to learn not only English but some Spanish and a little Brazilian Portuguese. Wow! What an international house we’ll have—English, Thai, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and even some Russian (another story about how I learned some Russian). Maybe we’ll invent a new language! Talk Russian when we eat, talk Portuguese when we have sex, talk Thai when your friends come over, and mix them all up when the five of us are just one big happy family.

Now I have some other small news, and a funny story too, that will help you with one of your money problems. You said you have no money to pay for your email. I am guessing that you use the Internet Café which is next to the beauty parlor and right across from the Sunshine Hotel check-in desk because this is right around the corner and down half a block or so from where your beer bar is located. Right, Toy? Okay, this must be the one. So here’s the story, and I do hope you’re not offended and will not think bad of me for what I was doing before we met.

The girl who sits behind the desk at the Café sometimes (she comes and goes, unfortunately) is named Jum. You can recognize her by the mole in the middle of her right cheek. She’s from Chiang Mai. Anyway, what I wanted to say to make you laugh is that when I stay on Soi 8 (where I was staying when we got hooked up, remember) and use this Internet Café I usually take Jum for short time when she gets off at five in the afternoon. She comes to my room for two hours or so and we do...well, you know what we do! She’s not nearly as good as you, so I was only giving her 1,000 baht, not the 1,500 I gave you the first time or the 2,000 on our second and last night together before I came home.

One of the reasons I kept going back to Jum is she’s really funny in bed. I have two scorpion tattoos on my upper legs, one on each side and near my penis. You didn’t see them because we got so wild so fast and it was very late and all in the dark and you have to look carefully anyway to see them. One of the scorpions is a female and is red (on my left leg), and the other one is a male and is blue (on my right leg). Now Jum, who always wants the curtains open and lots of light when we get our clothes off, saw those scorpions the first time she came to my room. Then this is what makes me laugh even as I tell you this. Somehow she just knew that the red one is a female and she called her Jane. She called the male, the blue one, Jim. I have no idea where she got these names, maybe from another farang; Jim was his name and one of his ex-wives was named Jane. I’m just guessing. What is so incredible is that Jim is the name of my very best friend, and I want to tell you something about him later because he gives such good advice. Jane is the name I gave to my first wife who was a very sweet and loving Khmer girl that believed in ghosts and vampires, and left me because she had a dream one night that I was a vampire! Can you believe this? Incredible what some people will believe, wouldn’t you agree? Just absolutely incredible. I tried my best to convince lovely Jane that I am not a vampire but she wouldn’t believe me, even after I had one tooth filed down that she said scared her. I am a little heartbroken to this day that she left me for such a silly reason.

So, back to Jum and the scorpions. Every time she came to the room and after she would take a shower, she would get between my legs with her head and stare at one scorpion and giggle a little and say, in good English, Hello Jim! And then she would kiss the scorpion on the tail (this is what she told me since I could not see what she was kissing). Then she would turn her head to the other scorpion and say, Hello Jane! Then she would kiss Jane. But I don’t know where she would kiss Jane since she wouldn’t tell me! I think she was afraid I would think she was a lesbian, which is okay with me. Well, after she had said hello to Jim and Jane and given each of them a kiss Jum giggled some more and then said Hello, hello! To you know what! I don’t have to tell you what happened after that.

Okay, sorry, darling, I did not mean to get you all distracted or upset, but I thought you would like this story and laugh and have something to tell your friends in the bar that would make them laugh too. The reason I wanted to tell you all this is that I think you should go to Jum and tell her my name and if she forgot my name tell her that I have two scorpion tattoos named Jim and June. She will definitely remember me, then, no doubt about it. Then you should tell her that because I was so good to her (yes, I did take her out to dinner, like I did you once on our second and last night together, and also to Walking Street, and I even bought Jum some clothes one time). Because I treated Jum so well I want you to tell her I EXPECT her to not charge you for sending emails to me or anyone else! I think she will understand. She is honest like so many Thai girls I have known, and she will know that she owes this little bit to me. If she doesn’t stop charging you and tell the other girls working there not to charge you, then just tell her a very small lie that I will be coming to Pattaya soon and will not take her short time unless she helps you out.

I called my lawyer right after I got this latest email from you and we had a very long talk about how I should sell my stock and bonds so I can move to Thailand and marry you and build our dream house. He is a very good friend. Very very good, in fact, and yes, you guessed it, his name is Jim, and like me he has traveled a lot in Southeast Asia. He speaks Korean and Mandarin and even some Lao; he had a relationship with a girl named Nu that was part Lao and part Vietnamese...well, this is another story for another day
[ With Nu on the Road to Poona]. I’m telling you this because when he gives me advice, I ALWAYS take it; he is that smart.

Anyway, Jim has taken a very careful look at my gold stocks, primarily invested in 24 karat mines in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and he says that I should wait until after my operation to cash any of them in because their value is going to go up in the next couple of months. This is great news for us! But it is bad news for the moment. What do I mean?

In about ten days I will have to check into the hospital for three days of tests to insure that nothing will go wrong when they take out my kidney and then immediately put it in my sister Katie. (She is really sweet and you’ll love her, and she had big white teeth just like you.) I told you about the insurance problem I have, and because I don’t have enough insurance to cover the operation for myself and Katie (yes, I am paying for her too), the hospital requires me to pay everything in advance. And this, my darling, my love, is an awful lot of money right now. You would not believe how much! The hospital rooms are going to cost us about $850 a day for each of us, and we will both be in the hospital for about six or seven days. Then there is the cost of the operations, and after the insurance pays for part of it, I still have to pay $29,000, and maybe more, for the two of us. Whew! I can hardly believe how much I am paying because I so love my sister Katie.

So this is what my very good friend Jim is telling me to do, and I always go with his advice because he is experienced in just about everything having to do with money. He is an absolute whiz! You’ll love him, though I’m not sure you’ll like his ponytail that is a lot longer than your long hair. I won’t introduce him to you right away. I’m afraid he might try to take you for himself since he is two years younger than me and is a real charmer. Maybe he’s better looking than me, I don’t know. Up to you to decide that one!

Anyway, Jim is advising me to hold onto all my money right now because if I don’t have it available when the hospital and the doctors demand it in the next several days these operations just will not happen. And I must, I must, put sister Katie first on my list. Same as you would do with your daughter, or mother, right?

Here is what I suggest you do to get the 200 or 300 baht you will need for a bus to get back to the village. I really hate to suggest this since you told me you have not been with any other men since I left and have been completely faithful, and I love you more than you can imagine for doing this for me. But let’s make one, just one little exception, okay? Get a farang in the next day or two or three to bar fine you and go long time and don’t let him give you less than 2,000 baht, like I gave you our last night, and you were sweet enough to not even ask for it. So, with 2,000 baht I’m sure you’ll have plenty for the bus and also be able to pay back the loan to your friend. By the way, how much was the loan and what was it for?

Okay, now we have the money problems under control for the moment, I think. But there are two other matters I must bring up, and I don’t want to but I must do so before we start talking more seriously about marriage and how much sin sot I’ll give (you haven’t mentioned this yet?) and when we’ll get married and how big a party we’ll have. Here’s what Jim says I MUST do now, or rather you must do for me.

He says I must get you to get tested for sexual diseases and for AIDS, and that you should send me a certified statement from a doctor that you are free from all of these nasties. Once we get together again I don’t want to have to use a condom. I want to be much closer to you than I was on those two nights we spent together. Damn condoms, I hate them! (By the way, do you ever go with a man who doesn’t use one?) I also sure don’t want you dying on me or getting sick. I need a good partner for the planning of the house, and these three kids we’re going to have to take care of.

Can you do this for me darling? Get these tests and send me the certified results. I know it won’t cost much, and I think we can make one more exception for you to have a bar fine and go long term with one more farang, okay? I hate to do this, but I am so fearful that I won’t have enough money for Katie’s operation and mine that...well, you know just how really important family is, right?

Now to the last thing I must reveal to you, and maybe you will decide you don’t want to marry me after all after hearing what I have to say. I hope I am wrong, but I think it is very important for both of us to be perfectly honest and open with each others. NO lies, no deceptions; and then we will be very happy together and not fight. I know you think about this the same way I do.

This is what I must tell you, and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way. Almost eleven years ago I had some real serious problems, first with my Khmer wife, and then with my Brazilian wife, and then with my Mexican wife. They were all beautiful and loving in their own way, but I was just like so many Thai men. I could not keep my eyes and hands off other women. I’m sorry, I really am, but this is just who I was. Or who I am.

So I went to a doctor, and then to three or four more. Finally they identified the disease I have. It goes by the scientific name of Lepidopteritis. Here, now, I must tell you what this means since I’m sure you’re shaking your lovely head and saying, WHAT? What IS he talking about?

This is a word that refers to butterflies and moths of every kind you can imagine. It comes from science, biologists who classify things, I think.

Ah, I get it, I can hear you saying!

This leads me to another small story that you may find fascinating and you can share with all your bargirl friends and others—even farang! In the last century there was a very famous novelist by the name of Vladimir Nabokov. He was a professor at a university called Cornell and he wrote a very famous book called Lolita, about an older man falling in love with a very young girl (13 or 14, I think)—Ugh! (I can’t stand the thought of any man going with a girl under 18, can you? I bet we agree perfectly on this.) Now what few people anywhere in the world know about this most famous author of one of the best and worst books of all time is that he was utterly fascinated with butterflies, and for five years in the 1940s he spent 12 and 14 hours a day looking through a microscope at butterflies at Harvard University. He only had one great interest. He wanted to know why butterflies are so promiscuous. Why they go once or twice with a female and then move on to another female. They just cannot stay with one female.

I’m not a biologist but I think biologists now understand something about this butterfly habit of men and other beasts. Whatever, what really fascinated Vladimir Nabakov was the penis on a male butterfly. They come in all kinds of different sizes and shapes. Some are long like farang, and some are short like most Asian and Thai men. Some are skinny like Japanese men, and some are fat like—like many farang, and like mine, as you know! More than a mouthful if I go too deep, I bet you’re thinking!

Nabakov looked at thousands of butterfly penises, and he looked at so many that he lost a lot of his eyesight when he finally decided what was going on. And this is what he found. He found that a main reason so many butterflies are, well, butterflies when it comes to the opposite sex, is that no female understands that a penis has to be stimulated a little different every single time there is sex. Because a female can’t do this, or doesn’t know how, or doesn’t understand the problem, the male then goes searching for another female. And another one, etc. As you and every other bargirl and Thai girl in the world knows!

What about me, since I’m human, and so, obviously, are all those farang and Thai men who are butterflies? Well, I, like others with this disease, got three special genes from my father that made me this way, more so than other males who are mostly normal. There is, alas, almost nothing that can be done to help people like me. Nothing at all that science has found so far can help one bit with this disease! (I bet most farang in Pattaya I know would not call it a disease!) A loving and dedicated wife helps, however. It helps if you drink enough (which is bad for the liver). And it helps it you live way out in the country away from other women who would tempt you. But it is just awfully hard when a man has this disease like I do, this “disease of infinite pleasures” as my best friend Jim calls it.

Why did I tell you all this? Yes, why, when it makes me look so bad! So awful, like other men! Maybe even just like the Thai husband of your daughter?

I told you this because I need you to know what you will have to deal with when we get married. So this is the BIG question I must ask you now.

Will it be okay if after we get married I go once every two weeks to Bangkok or Pattaya for a couple of days, to do you know what? Will it be okay, my love? Can you still love me and care for me and live with me when I’m a very old man? Or tolerate this sickness until doctors find a cure for butterflying?

Please write soon and pray for me for my upcoming operation. And for Katie’s too. And please, my sweet darling, don’t tell me the names of the farang you go with to get bus money and money for the tests, okay. It would be too painful, really.

Love you. Love you oh so much!

I cannot wait to hold you in my arms and have you wrap yourself around me all through the night.

Love always,

Mundo

Comment: One might imagine that even a hardened and seasoned hooker like Toy might’ve seen angels dancing in front of her when she read the second paragraph about the ATM card in her own name, and with a cool 100,000 baht in the account. Maybe she even did a quick calculation on how long it would take her to drain the account (at 12,000 baht a day) and what kind of excuse she’d use to ask Mundo for more as soon as she had emptied it. But then her frown must have been worth beholding, and framing, when she read that she wouldn’t get the card and the password until he arrived and they began planning their marriage.

We’re really inside the bullshit junkyard by the time Mundo (and me?) get to all that nonsense about Mundo having been married to a Brazilian and a Mexican and having children by them and now wanting to move them into a house with Toy and her daughter in some village in Thailand that Mundo knows absolutely nothing about . Mundo, in fact, has been married but only to women who, as the phrase goes, are “lily white.”

Toy is offered a nugget concerning Mundo’s truth telling, one that she can check out in a half hour if so inclined. That truth or falsehood of whether or not there’s someone who is or has worked behind the desk at the Internet Café in the outdoor area next to the Sunshine Hotel on Soi 8, a young woman who goes by the name of Jum and has a mole on her right cheek. There is no such person, in fact; and if Toy did the footwork to check this out, maybe this more than anything made her realize that this very long email was nothing more than a great put on, meant to pull her by the leg all the way down Soi 8 and right into Walking Street, Mundo laughing all the way. As for the likelihood that any hooker would kiss some scorpion tattoos on farang thighs before getting down to the “serious” business of smoking (giving a blowjob) , well, it’s all very much within the realm of possibility. Though whether someone like Toy would believe this claim is quite another matter since like most hookers she probably gets very little detailed information from those bargirl hookers she works with. Does Mundo have a couple of scorpions painted red and blue and near his penis, and has he ever had a hooker do what he describes in this section he wrote? I have no idea, and I certainly don’t plan to look for evidence anytime soon. But if you’ve been with as many hookers as Mundo you’ve probably run into funny scenarios and genuinely weird shit much more improbable than this.

Did Toy catch the running joke on her, and by this time was really pissed off—if still reading, when she read about the “24 karat mines in Las Vegas and Atlantic City?” Hard to know, and perhaps by this juncture she had gotten up and left the computer just to be able to save five baht on the bill that she’s already beginning to suspect generous Mundo is not going to help her with.

If Toy is still wondering what’s up, she must be smelling dirty rat and worse when Mundo tells her to turn another trick for her bus money; and then follows with the howler about being willing to come up with sin sot for their marriage.

The flood of shit in this giant junkyard really begins to flow after this: the polite “demand” that Toy be tested for STDs and the HIV, and that the results be certified; then Mundo coming on about his “disease of Lepidopteritis”, that genuine bane of so many Thai hookers and a major reason that they find themselves turning to hooking. As for the Nabokov story, a good bit of it is true, and that which isn’t someone like Toy won’t figure out in her lifetime.

No, I didn’t write those lines about Mundo needing to get away every two weeks to butterfly with hookers in Bangkok and Pattaya. Though—and assuming Toy was still reading at this point—I’m sure she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, care in the least. Our guess is that 90 to 95% of the Thai hookers in Pattaya and Bangkok would let their “husbands” butterfly every day of the week if they had ATM cards with 12,000 baht daily limits and a two or three million baht home was being built for them in the village—a home that they would call theirs and theirs alone once it was finished.

Why was Toy so crass right from the get-go with Mundo, asking for money in the very first email? Perhaps because he had told her the second morning on paying her that he wouldn’t be returning to Pattaya for at least six months, and he seemed to be both generous and flush with money. How could Toy not have read that Mundo might be loose with his money when, in all likelihood, she is used to getting 1,000 baht a night for several hours of bed play, and on the second night she got double this amount from Mundo? Then, too, she had seen the bill that Mundo and Bob had paid for the four of them for a couple of hours of eating and drinking—almost 2,500 baht (about $65 U.S).-- and she probably said to herself: With his email address in hand, I’d be foolish not to spend 20 baht on an email and go right for the jugular vein. After all, farang suckers in this town reason with their dicks and they’re easier to suck money out of than pellet fed fish in a stocked pond meant for five-year-old children.

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I put together these emails and my comments and the long last email that Mundo and I jointly wrote and sent the whole package back to Mundo for his final okay. At this point, he hadn’t gotten any response from Toy to the long and last email that he’d sent. Neither of us were surprised, and in fact this is exactly what we both expected, as I’m sure most savvy Stick readers would have expected after reading our laughable put-on. But Mundo sat on the complete set of emails and comments I’d put together for another five days—busy whoring and drinking as usual, I’m sure. When I finally heard from him, suggesting a few minor changes to my comments, he wrote: “Okay, send it to Stick. It’s a guarantee I’ll never hear from her again.”

Luck was with us, however; that’s the only way to describe what happened three days later. The very afternoon I got Mundo’s okay to send the narrative to Stick and ask him to post it, I got hit with what I’ve come to call the “Cambodian Shits.” I’ve no idea why I get hit every time I go to Phnom Penh, but I do. And it invariably lays me up for a couple of days. I feel lousy, order room service, drink lots of liquids, watch some BBC, and read whatever I’ve got with me, in this case Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and Chandler’s, Voices from S-21.

By the third day after getting hit with the “Shits,” I decided to return to my usual routine. Late that afternoon I went to an Internet Café not far from my hotel, fully intent on making the few corrections suggested by Mundo and then sending everything to Stick straightaway. I made them, but before sending this true narrative, I ran through my Inbox and saw an email from Mundo. It was titled: “Don’t send yet!”

I soon discovered what had Mundo agitated. To his utter amazement, and now mine, there were two emails from Toy. And neither was anything like what we could have predicted. They had been sent less than five hours apart, and the second one was sent at a time of the night when Toy should have been in the beer bar looking for business. It is the air of desperation, I think that is most striking; since she had not gotten another email from Mundo she feared that she would never see a baht of the great fortune promised. (Which she won’t, of course!)

Below the two emails from Toy was a note from Mundo that read: Can you fucking believe the cheek of this bird? She’s more chemically imbalanced in her pursuit of baht than all these nutball farang who fall in love with these scam artists that you had a go at (Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers are Clinically Sick).

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HALLO MUNDO MY LOVE
HOW ARE YOU TODAY ? SORRY I HOT SEND E_MAIL LONG DAY BUT I COME BACK PATTAYA TO DAY!I HAVE PAPPY YOU TELL ME EVERYTHINK NOW I MISS YPOU TO MUCH
KISS AND LOVE
TOY

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waht you do now ?way you not send mail nto me i miss you to much

love toy

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Comment: Will Mundo respond, tauntingly and as playful as ever? I wouldn’t bet against it.