Incountry #18 Leaving Thailand

Am I thinking of leaving Thailand? Yes.

For one and a half years we lived happily in Chiang Mai. Five months ago we moved to Pattaya and the Princess changed from a nice housewife to a raging drunken, Thai boyfriend keeping, 40 year old gogo dancer. She needed a 400% increase in
money to keep her Thai boyfriend who is 15 years her junior.

She stops dancing and going short time with Farangs about 4 AM and goes to Thai night clubs where she gets drunk and dances till 8 AM. She comes home and yells at me sometime between 8 AM and noon. Twice she has attacked me with a knife and
a cleaver.

A couple of weeks ago she broke my toe in three places with a thrown bottle of Listerine.

I retained a lawyer and he told me it was better for me to do a runner than try and kick her out.

Of course she tells me that her new job is just for exercise and she never goes short time or long time with customers.

I had a friend bar fine her and take pictures. He has a really great camera. I think I could go to wall mural size with the photos. I show the pics to Princess and her response is, “I only do this one time because he is very handsome.”

I have lost a substantial amount of my funds due to the strengthening of the Thai baht.

One of my American friends here is so concerned about my welfare that he has offered a rent free house on an island and offered to have me picked up by a truck of his and completely moved out of my house in 3 hours.

I have been drugged and mugged and my passport stolen along with my cell phone. It is the second cell phone that has been stolen in two months. I may have been drugged at the gogo where Princess works. I really don’t know because I
have no or a spotty recollection of the rest of the night after I visited her bar. I do know for the next three days my mouth was as dry as a desert.

I can tell you what I remember but it is difficult for me to put the pieces together. I went to Princesses’ gogo sometime around 10 PM. I had a couple of draft beers. My first of the night. I tipped Princess 300 baht for dancing, as
is my normal practice. I tipped her daughter 100 baht because she was dancing with Princess. As an aside it is interesting to watch them both dance. From the front they don’t look much alike. The Princess having large breasts and the daughter
small ones. But from the back it is like watching the same woman. Except for her daughter's butt which is really a work of art. I won’t go into the rest but in addition to it being a topless club it is a bottomless club. It is not
a topless and bottomless club. Some of the girls are topless and some are bottomless but it will cost you 100 baht to get both at the same time. Maybe it is only 50 baht for the young good looking guys.

Princess likes me to go there. She asks me when I am going so she will not be bar fined when I am expected. Of course she says she is never bar fined. When she comes home and passes out I check her wallet and mysteriously my 300 baht has
turned into 3000 but I am sure that is some magic and she would never lie to me.

She is the oldest dancer there by 15 years but she is also the best dancer. When I come into the joint she goes into high gear. I imagine her daughter would do the same but she does not have a high gear and is not really a good dancer. She
does however have a beautiful butt and a sweet smile which makes up for the rest.

I normally stay to watch Princess dance and take in one show which is nude and involves strange practices of drinking beer in different ways from different bodily parts that are not normally used for drinking beer. After an hour I am gone.

My usual practice after this is to have a couple of beers on Soi 6 with a stop at King Kong and a few other cultural sights along that road. From there I work my way up Soi Bua Kaow to visit with old friends and then head home.

On the night of my drugging I remember nothing coherent after leaving the gogo. At sometime between 2 and 3 AM (I am able to place the time because Princess was cut early that night and arrived home about 3 and was upset I was not there).

I went home to change my pants because they were wet. I don’t know if they were wet because of a loss of bladder control or someone spilled a drink on them. I took my wallet out of my slacks and put it in my wallet hiding place and
donned a new pair of pants and took only my keys with me and some cash in my back pocket. I believe my passport was in the pants I left in my house. I don’t know that for a fact. Someone may have stolen only my passport and my phone leaving
my wallet before I changed clothes.

At any rate about 7 AM I arrived home. I had cuts on my left leg with a band aid on the largest one. My left shoulder was bruised and scraped. Both my thighs were sore like I had run some distance. Both my shins were bruised and sore. I took
off my clothes and went to sleep till 2 PM. When I awoke I noticed my passport and cell phone were gone but my wallet was there and some cash in my back pocket. The band aid is the strange part. I have no idea how it got there or who put it there.
It was a multi-colored kid's band aid.

Princess was upset I was not there when she arrived and asked me where I was. I told her I don’t know.

That day she asked me how much it would cost to replace my passport. I told her about 5,000 baht in costs, travel expenses to BKK and so on. She said she could get it back for me. That evening I gave her 5,000 baht and she went out at 11PM.
She returned at 2 AM with my passport. She said she had spoken with the motorcycle drivers at the end of our street who said I had gone off with a young woman about 5 AM. They had the phone number and work location of the lady which was on Walking
Street. Princess went there only to find the lady had left for Sattahip. She went to Sattahip and got my passport back which she threw at me.

What do I think happened? Where I was drugged I have no idea. I think Princess got home early and called my cell phone which rang in the bedroom. She got the phone and was so upset I was not there she threw it on the floor (although I really
checked well for pieces and could not find even a little piece of broken plastic) or she put it in her purse and turned it off and later sold it. Then she searched my pants and found my passport and decided to teach me a lesson that I needed her
when I went out and put the passport in her purse and sold it back to me later inventing the story of the lady in Sattahip. In any event I have no way of knowing for sure. The next day I did something I should have done a long time ago. I took
all my important papers including my passport and locked them up at a document storage facility in a large reputable law office.

A friend of mine who owns a bar was drugged while he slept above his bar and all of his valuables taken. I think it was his wife that did it but who knows. This is Pattaya.

One of the scariest things here is watching the Pattaya news on TV. There are at least two shootings, two traffic fatalities and a couple of druggings reported every day.

I have always been a loner. Even when I go out with my mates in Pattaya I usually disappear around midnight to plan the rest of the evening by myself.

Dana’s non drinking daytime approach to Pattaya is the safest. <Our Dana is a very clever fellow and those who follow his advice will do just fine – Stick>

I have never been a tourist. I have never taken vacations. If I want to see a place I move there. This was the case in Vietnam, Taipei and Thailand among other places. Not being a tourist I don’t go to tourist areas. I don’t
eat tourist food nor do I keep tourist hours. If there is a better recipe for disaster than where I go or what I do or when I do it I really don’t know what it is.

I walk down the street at 5AM and the guys from the gay Thai karaoke club yell out, Kelly, come on in we got a woman for you tonight. I smile a crooked smile and they respond jing jing, a real woman for sure.

I go to the 7 Eleven at 7AM to pick up a pack of cigarettes and the clerk gives me a message from a uni girl who is back in town needing some money for tuition.

I walk into a gogo in a location only frequented by the Pattaya savvy and miles from Walking Street to ogle some of the talent and the mamasan brings out a lady with short fingernails, no paint on her face and calloused hands. The lady is
not dressed to work. She has on conservative clothes and granny panties. No T back. No lipstick. I look at the mamasan like she has lost the plot and she explains this is her first night working. She is very frightened. She has never met a Farang
before let alone slept with one. She speaks not a word of English. Does this happen to me once a month? No it happens once a week, sometimes every day.

I went to an Estonian beer bar in the Arab quarter last night! I am still trying to figure out why I went. There are times when I think I have a death wish.

Am I leaving Thailand? I don’t want to. One thing I know for sure that my Thai language skills are not good enough. I need to go back to school.

There are times that I think watching Farangs in Pattaya including myself is like watching a group of autistic children playing in a sand box of broken glass.

PS. I am writing a story that requires the assistance of a Stickman Reader. If you happen to be in Pattaya now and would like a little adventure email me.

Stickman's thoughts:

You might not want to leave Thailand but it might be a good idea to leave Pattaya for a while. The totally inappropriately named "Princess" sounds more like "Nightmare" and I would suggest that you would be wise to get away from her. Moving somewhere else within Pattaya may not be ideal as the place is only so big and she will almost certainly find you quickly. It is a shame that one even has to think like this but if she is pulling knives and getting involved in passport theft and such scams then she is dangerous person the type of person one would be best advised to avoid completely.