The Man from Madison, Kentucky
By Korski

He was heavy-set and well-rounded, but not obese. He had a kind face and small wisps of brown hair on an otherwise bald pate. There was, too, a softness, and an easiness, in his voice as he talked and I listened over two ice teas and a Thai pork noodle soup. I said little, and I rarely asked a question. He never asked my name and I did not tell him my name, nor did I say what I do for a living. About the only thing he did learn about me by the time I left him was that I too had been to Brazil and speak some Brazilian Portuguese, and I have a decent mental picture of where it was that his story—or the one he wanted to tell this sweltering afternoon on Soi Four in Bangkok where he regularly drinks—began about twelve years ago.

From what I learned, he had that kind of business in Madison, Kentucky, or rather a couple of them, that allowed him to get away for several months a year. It was not in investments, or real estate, or anything that required a fancy college degree; he wasn’t that kind of guy. He was a plumber, or an electrician, or a do-it-all, something along these lines—he was a bit vague as he was about other details I would have liked to know. And yet knowing exactly what he did wouldn’t have mattered in any major way to the story he told me.

It all began in 1994 when his brother-in-law, who was married to a Brazilian, invited him to spend three weeks with him and his wife in a town of about 7,000 people south of the Brazilian coastal city of Salvador. As he was wandering about one night at a street party in the small town, a young woman strolled behind him and ran her soft hand along his shoulder. He turned and he noticed that she was a dark mulatta and was wearing a short and tight white skirt. She had gorgeous legs, big tits, and one of those famous Brazilian asses that only blind men fail to notice. Within the hour, seated on the ground and eating local food at this street party, he saw the woman, made eye contact, and waved for her to join him. At the time, he didn’t know that she was five weeks pregnant by a man who had had her for a single night and now wanted nothing to do with the woman or his responsibilities.

Within six months, the man from Madison, Kentucky had bought a house overlooking the Atlantic in this small town, and the two of them began living together as man and wife. But because of his various businesses, he had to spend two or three months a year away from the woman. She had the child that she was pregnant with when she met him, and before long he began to see the child as his own. He had had two children by a very brief marriage twenty-eight years earlier, but it had been a marriage so thoroughly unsatisfying that in all these years since the breakup he had sworn to himself that he would never again get into any kind of permanent relationship with a woman.

This young Brazilian woman who was on her way to becoming his common-law wife was favela poor when she met the American from Madison, Kentucky. She had never worked at other than menial jobs, and now she didn’t have to work at all because she had a house, a cell phone, a credit card, and money that he gave her to spend pretty much as she saw fit. When the Madison man was in Brazil, the two of them spent their days on the beach, and drinking, and eating and sleeping, and then doing more drinking. Although he didn’t say as much, I assume that after all these years of being single he had also rediscovered the joys of sex. Then, and right down to the present and his revelations to me, he never got over the woman’s arresting body, and the short white and tight skirt that she loved to wear, conscious as she was, and he was, that in public men could not help staring and whistling at her.

Their relationship came to an abrupt end four years and eight months after they began sharing the same bed. After a three week absence to attend to his businesses in Madison, he returned to hear his neighbors—now friends—gossiping that his live-in partner was cheating on him with a local married man. Two days after he returned from Kentucky, she told him one late afternoon that she was going to a female friend’s house up the beach and would return in a couple of hours. Shortly after she left, he saw a pickup pass by, and it was going in the direction that his wife had taken. He recognized it as the pickup of the man who villagers said had been having an affair with this shapely woman to whom he had given so much. Making an obvious connection, he walked for some distance in the direction of where the woman had supposedly gone to see a friend; and then along the way he saw his wife and her lover walking directly toward him. They were not holding hands or being amorous, because at the moment he saw them she was about to chase after her fleeing and somewhat wild son.

That night he confronted her, telling her of all that he had heard about her unfaithfulness from townspeople. She denied everything. He didn’t believe her, and within a month he had sold the house they lived in to his Brazilian sister-in-law, with the proviso that the woman of white skirt fame and his informally adopted son could continue living in it. She was furious at this great loss, for had the infidelity or its discovery happened a mere four months later she and the man from Madison, Kentucky would have been legally recognized as married in common law, and under Brazilian law the house could not have been sold without her okay. Her luck was doubly bad. The married man she had been seeing and sleeping with now had no more interest in her once the man from Madison made public his knowledge of the affair. Thus she found herself pretty much where she had begun: without a cell phone, without a credit card, without spending money, and barely able to provide for herself and her son.

Brazil no longer had the appeal it once had, and the man from Madison heard from a friend that he ought to take a vacation in Southeast Asia and broaden his perspective, forget the past and try to find a new life. He did travel, and he discovered Thailand and the inimitable charms of its many bargirls. He had heard that they are less trustworthy than the scummiest of politicians, and once he decided to patronize them he swore to himself—as all men do—that he would never get emotionally involved with a one of them. But he just couldn’t help himself, and he believed every word the young girl told him about how faithful she would be while she waited a mere two weeks for him to go home to Kentucky and make some arrangements to stay in Thailand for a long enough period of time to start down the road to marriage.

He returned in exactly two weeks, just as he said he would, and she was there to greet him at Don Muang airport. But the news he received presently was that in his absence she had found someone else to take care of her. So bye-bye, it was nice knowing you, that’s how life is when you live in hard times and there is no guaranteed future. He could hardly believe his misfortune, and he swore that never again would he get involved with a Thai bargirl. He did not change his mind a month later when this Thai beauty who had stolen his heart and shagged him like he had never believed possible came back to him and said that she had made a mistake and now wanted him to take care of her. Bye-bye, it was nice knowing you, you’re not going to make me a two-time sucker, he was smart enough to tell her.

More than a year later he met, through a friend, a young Thai woman who was not a bargirl, or so I was told. She came from a poor family that lived not far from Bangkok and farmed rice. He told himself that while this woman did not have that great Brazilian body and a love of short white skirts that possessed him as much as it did the woman he had once trusted, she was kind and considerate and would meet that fundamental criteria of a caretaker for an ageing man from Kentucky. He recognized that he was getting to that point in his life where despite what had happened with one Kentucky marriage in the distant past, and what had happened with a young Brazilian woman who made his eyes sore, and then what never should have happened and always does with a Thai bargirl, he needed someone to do the laundry and clean house and do the cooking and make the bed, and not forget to bring him the pills the doctor prescribed.

He made a deal with the Thai woman when he proposed that they get married. He would not pay any bride price, or give any money whatsoever to the girl’s parents—as is the norm among foreigners who marry Thai women, even well-traveled bargirls who have shagged 1001 men. But he would, for as long as he lived, give her a yearly sum of money at the beginning of each calendar year. She could do whatever she wanted with the money. She could spend it in a day. She could send all or part of it to her parents and siblings. She could save it. He would not ask, ever, what she did with the money. And he never has asked her. He has told his Thai wife that he has provided for her in his will, that she will get most of what he has, and this—one can read between the lines of his story—is the major reason this Thai woman decades younger than this man from Madison, Kentucky finds it so easy to stay with him, and never forget his medicines and his need for afternoon rum cokes.

They live eight months a year in Madison, Kentucky, and they spend the months of January through April in Bangkok in a hotel. They rent a car so his wife can make daily trips to her parents’ home in the country. He goes to the farm now and again, but doesn’t much like it there; it’s too hot and dirty and uncomfortable. Instead, what he prefers to do is to spend every afternoon in the very bar and restaurant where I met him. He normally drinks three or four rum cokes, and then he returns to the hotel and either takes his wife out to dinner if not too tired, or she offers to get something from the street or a restaurant and bring it back to their room.

He says he is very happy with his Thai wife, and he could not have done better. She respects him, and she treats him very well, and he has no complaints. But he confesses to thinking all the time about the Brazilian woman, and the young boy who is not of his own biology but calls him dad and he sees as his son and pays for his schooling. This Brazilian woman, now really poor and without any prospects because her ass is unshapely and her tits sag as all women’s tits give way to gravity’s law, has called him now and again since he has been married to the Thai woman. She has made it clear that she would take him back anytime, and under any conditions. And how, in her needy years, she loves him more than ever. But he won’t do it; he can’t. He just can’t let go of someone who treats him so well; and yet remains so thoroughly Thai. His wife has had few problems making friends in small town Madison by the big river, but she refuses to take out U.S. citizenship. He knows that as soon as he dies and is buried in Madison, his wife will take her inheritance and return permanently to her Thai family and the only roots that matter.

 

Stickman's thoughts:

The Korski factory produces another great story.  Some magic quotes and observations here.

The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
 
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.