Is This Story Fact or Fiction, and Whose Fact or Fiction is it?
By KorskiThe brother wrote and wanted to know if the latest story he had been sent from Thailand was true.
He isn’t sure how to respond. He thinks: Maybe I should tell him that part of the story, like all my stories, is true. I did something, I met someone, I overheard something, and then there are all the fictional connective tissues and pieces that I throw in. And the result is another one of my stories. What more can I say?
He thinks: But does my brother care about the whole story, or just that part near the end? That part when the young boy goes missing and they cannot find him. And what about the part that followed? The story in the newspaper about the disappearance and where there is a village in which it is believed that the boy was taken by orangutans. Did he care about this piece of the story too?
I think I will not write to him on this question, he thinks. But why would I do this to my brother? He is good and honest. He is faithful to his wife and to our mother. He is not like me. Yes, not at all like me!
I do know, he thinks, what is true and what is not true, and I know that with enough time and these stories before me on paper, I will not clearly remember what I really did or heard that was true, and what really happened and what I made up. Does this matter?
He thinks these kinds of thoughts, and then about a man named Simon from Liverpool that he meant to write a story about three or four days ago. Simon is forty-seven and has lived in Pattaya for nearly fifteen years, and he has a consuming fascination with how young women look in the midsection after a pregnancy. An odd interest, surely, and one only or genuinely accessible to a dedicated whoremonger.
Simon began by relating a story about a twenty-three-old girl he met on Soi Six one afternoon. In the previous hour he had had a couple of beers in a bar down the street, and he liked the girl, so he sat with her on a large red couch and fondled her as she fondled him. But something was wrong. She was too quiet. She was a little too heavy. It was too early to get a girl for the night. Whatever… So he left and walked down the street and in a crowd of nine or ten bargirls standing out front his eyes fell on one that smiled sweetly at him. He took her by the hand and they went inside and sat, and he laughed almost continuously for the next twenty minutes. She made him laugh even though she only spoke three or four words of English and understood nothing that he said to her. Amazing, he thought. Who would not want to spend a night with someone like this?
Nok had small teeth and her pinkish gums glistened and she had small moles on each cheek. She wore too much makeup. But she was irresistible. So he barfined her and told her he wanted her to spend the night with him and he would pay her whatever she wanted.
Nok claimed that she had only been working as a bargirl two weeks, and had never left the bar, only going upstairs a couple of times with men who wanted something on the run and didn’t want to spend much money and preferred sleeping alone or with dogs rather than a bargirl for the night. Some men just don’t know where real pleasures lie.
Simon said she couldn’t control herself this first time out, and as he took her from bar to go-go show and all along Walking Street and bought her one drink after another, she began to turn wild and aggressive and uncontrollable, and more than once he wanted to just get up and leave her. But he felt responsible for her, and for treating her well. He had told her he wanted her for the night, and his word was always good. And, after all, she had made him laugh as he had not laughed in weeks.
Then in the last bar they were in she put her head in his lap and he rubbed her head, thinking she was getting tired and they should go to his hotel room. She was in fact throwing up on his pants. When he realized what was happening he brought her to her feet and asked one of the waitresses to take her to a bathroom and help her finish emptying her stomach.
Nok barely came up to his sternum, which was good because he had to practically carry her the several blocks to a baht bus that would take them to his hotel. It had started to rain, and it rained harder as the bus headed toward the hotel. When they finally got out of the baht bus and started the final half block to the hotel, the black sky opened up on them and they found themselves walking though pools of water. Everything they wore and carried was completely soaked.
He turned on hot water in the shower, and he left her there, fully clothed. She crouched in the corner and stayed there for several minutes, until her body began to warm.
In near total darkness, he helped her undress and put her to bed, and then he got into bed and fell asleep. When he woke on toward morning she was in his arms. She had in fact been in his arms, her head on his shoulder, for most of the night.
He went to the bathroom and when he returned he opened the curtains to let in morning light, and his eyes fell on her stomach, fully exposed, the top sheet lying at the foot of the bed. Her stomach was a large irregular circle of badly wrinkled skin, furrowed, revolting, unsightly. He could not hold his gaze.
She had told him she had one child, a boy, and she had told him that she had left her husband because he was a drunk and refused to work. But this sight before him, like thick paper harshly crumpled, made him wonder if this disfiguration was a major reason her husband left her.
And yet, this was not the first time he had seen such wreckage on someone so young, and from the birth of a single child, and with so little warning, because Nok was so well formed and with such fine textured skin on her arms and legs and face, everywhere that was visible.
He rolled her over and took her from behind, and when he pulled out for a brief respite he saw that the condom was covered in blood. He brought it to her attention. She apologized and said she didn’t know that her period was coming on. She followed him to the bathroom and insisted on taking off the condom, carefully. As if she had done this a hundred times.
He thought of her all day long after she left. He thought of how she had made him laugh, and how wild she got, and how she had so thoroughly enjoyed eating a large cup of chocolate chip ice cream. But his mind kept returning to her unsightly stomach.
Simon ended his story here. He now told the brother of the brother who wanted to know about the truth of the story where the young Canadian boy disappears that for the better part of fifteen years he had been fucking hookers around the world. He had a particular preoccupation with freelancers, and they were always the ones he sought out first. It was not just their nastiness and often drug-induced unpredictability that he relished, but also the mysteries beneath their blouses or dresses or skimpy tops that did not reveal whether or not they had ever borne a child. And if they had what it had done to their once irresistible hard and tight bellies.
What Simon found across the span of many years and half the globe, and after fucking hundreds and hundreds of hookers, left him nowhere. Or rather nowhere in terms of feeling at all secure about a generalization he might make. He could conclude only that there was no pattern, none at any rate that he could discern. Some of the freelancers he picked up on the street or in discos or bars were young and had had a child and there was nary a line or bump of stretched skin obvious to the naked eye. But then for every instance he would see that showed the minimal effects of childbirth on a woman’s midsection, he would presently encounter another young woman who was unsightly when undressed, though rarely as disturbing as what he had seen on Nok’s body.
Nutrition? Genes? An early or late or underweight or overweight child? He had no idea what accounted for the differences that he saw, and that so fascinated him. As with Nok he was at times so repulsed by what he saw that he would quickly take the girl from behind and then tell her to get dressed as soon as they finished and give her some money and show her the door.
Hundreds, I’ve seen, Simon said. And all I can conclude is that it’s all potluck. I am none the wiser for all of my attention to this…this largely irrelevant fascination.
This is the story that the brother sent to his brother, and he did not say whether this was really Simon’s story or his own story, or whether Nok was a real person, or whether almost everything had been pulled out of the air as he tried to imagine how to answer his brother, while at the same time part of his mind was trying to remember a restaurant where he could get a bowl of tomato soup and some garlic bread. And then decide whether or not to return to Soi Six and see if he could find Nok and get her to get him laughing, and laughing, again and again and again.
Stickman's thoughts:
I will never forget strolling along the beach road in Pattaya, pausing to steal a photograph of some unwilling passer by, when I spotted a guy making the same journey. But he was not taking photos. Hew must have been on the hunt because after engaging a lass in conversation for 10 or seconds he would lunge for her T-shirt and pull it up. I quickly realised that if she had obvious signs of being a mother he moved on.
The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
