Boardwalk Bing and the Teeruk Tantrum

I step into the humid Bangkok air for the first time in my life. I am 50, fat and bald and downright ugly, but I don’t care. I have no money, but I don’t care. I am wearing shorts, a singlet and flip flops. People are casting strange looks at me as I walk thru Suvarnabhumi airport. I grab the first person who says “Taxi?” and follow them out into the night. They stand upwind of my unwashed body, but I don’t care. I am armed with 299 printed, collated, and indexed copies of Dana’s First Rule For Sex Tourist Engagement.

In Farangland, I work on an oil rig. I spoke to the other riggers and we agreed we'll charter sixty 747 airplanes and go as a group. None of us want to go to America now. Thailand was our goal. We were winners from other cultures who had unfortunately lost big time. As for myself, I had been unhappily married to three different white woman who were each as fat as I was. These women were so big it was like riding a bicycle into a tunnel. I am small and the teddy bear is huge and entering them was like putting my kosher danish sausage (you know…KDS– another product from Dana Industries) into an immensely large jar of orange jam. I had stopped having sex with them years ago since it was too messy and unattractive to have a penis in the marmalade.

The latest of the three wives caught me one night reading Dana’s column, my right hand scrolling down with the mouse, my left hand scrolling down my shaft. I was in a zen Dana sex trance. She screamed. She swore. She left me. Later in her lawyer's office, my cock and my balls have been ripped off and flung to the ground. I felt like a mouse in a room with a cat. The legal session lasts forever. The night becomes a long drawn out scream. But I knew something my wife did not know about the lawyer she had hired. She had registered him but he had calculated her. He knows she won't leave oil rig money.

By the time the night was over I was broke. No wife. No house. But I had one thing she did not. I had tropical perfume in a faraway land that distracts with postcard perfection. I had a dream of flying to Bangkok on Thai Airways, where the First Class hostesses will wear duct tape and dog collars. I was on a roll. Got my mojo working. I rolled the dice for me and came up a winner.

I was on the road to Poona.

But I was alone. My oil rig buddies dropped out one by one, and my last friend got his 6 weeks leave a day before I did. His testosterone was up and his mistress was waiting down river. And then there was me.

After I drop my bag containing my spare singlet and 36 packets of extra small, super lubricated condoms in my hotel room, I go off in search of my very first sex act with a list of diseased Aids infected whores. My first view of Nana Plaza is that of a warzone of expats and pussy. I stop at one of the stalls to buy some fried crickets and emergency sleepwear for the soul mate I was sure to find that night.

“Spiderman pajamas with pussy hole? No ploblum kind sir.”

I also buy some Viagra at a roadside pharmacy. “Is it real?” I ask. "I have guarantee" is the reply. I buy some silly goggles from a Burmese hill tribe lady, and since it was at night I have an elephant–tail flashing red light strapped to my ass.

I go up to Rainbow 4. Armed with Dana’s wisdom I have my manhood out as I know that dicks will be examined at the door by gap toothed mama-sans. Rainbow 4 is alive. It is pulsing. The place is packed with male meat. It is a madhouse that makes me come alive. There must be 30,000 farangs against 5000 bargirls. Now there are 30,001 farangs, I think as I step through the curtain into the air conditioned splendour. Even odds.

I shout the words Dana had taught me that all farang use when they enter bars "Pretend you are counting flies on the ceiling girls. Cheap Charlie just landed."

I sit right up front, right where I can see all the action, and look up at my first ever glimpse of brown bodies, writing in ecstasy, small breasts bulging against a flimsy layer of pseudo silk material. Women throw sex at men like farmers throw corn to pigs. A girl comes up to me.

“My name is Rathsudakhemarapawarin which in Thai means 'Feminine Virgin Butterfly' but you can call me Tits."

“What about her?” I ask, pointing at a girl whose pouting lips and full body tattoo show she has been a virgin at least 100 times. She was 1000 pounds of sex in a 79 pound body, and I was in love.

"Her name is Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee. Do you want to buy me a drink?”

"No."

I take my drink and go to where Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee is standing. I wai her.

“Khun Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee, I know you will not do anything unless I pay you. So will you stay here with me a few minutes? I will give you 500 baht.”

She looks confused. Another girl, equally as beautiful as Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee explains to her "The crazy farang will give you 500 baht for nothing."

I am grateful for all the hours spent studying Thai in the plane ride over. I didn’t know they were speaking Isaan. Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee says to me "My name is Wan”. I look at the other girl and Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee says “and my sister's name is Wan." I know from Dana that Thai girls all use nicknames but I am determined not to call either of them Wan so I continue to use their real names.

Then it happens. My life crumbles before my very eyes. There is a three day old copy of the Bangkok Post lying on a bar stool. The front page headline, in 38 point type, screams "Early Tuesday morning the body of world famous Stickmanbangkok.com writer Dana was found on the pavement outside the A. A. Hotel on the corner of Soi 13 and . . . "

I couldn’t read anymore. Dana? Dead? Could this be real? Was this why I came to Bangkok? Dana, my idol, the only man I could possibly conceive of who could bury his nose in Hitler's panties? No longer in this world? What was I supposed to do? I heave a great sob, and throw down my throat all the Viagra I had just bought, three Vodka Red Bulls and an entire bottle of Mekong whiskey.

My world is shattered. I must be by myself. I go into the men’s room. And this is where the stress of my divorce, the alcohol, the Viagra, and the hot breath of Ba Na Da Wa Ma La Ra Pa Lan Ran Bee combine to send me into a hallucinogenic parody of the real world that Dana must have experienced every waking moment of his short, unhappy life. Most of the established Newtonian and Einsteinium laws of Physics have been discarded.

I go outside of my body. Sitting on the crapper he (that is, me) could feel the presence of a colored snake draped over the toilet tank behind him. There was now a big black snake under the bed and it had Japanese eyes.

One thousand war elephants and eighty thousand Burmese infantry were pouring through the pass. Men on horses are blowing bugles. Beside me on the seat was my mother's blood. She was squatting by the side of the road and rubbing vasoline on a soi dog's balls. Some other dog is nailing the poodle from the Emporium with the perfumed ass. . . . flying flaming dogs… his pet goose named Pogo. . . . stampeding buffalo around a single pronghorn antelope…tumor ridden koy fish…46,000 one-eyed teddy bears. My god! What was happening to me? Is this the paradise Dana had promised?

I can stand it no more. I stumble out of the men’s room, remembering to stop and accept the cool moist towel from the attendant. I wai him and give him five hundred.

In the bar, I go to the dancing fool midget waitress. She had no arms and she had no legs but was far and away the sexiest thing there. I ask her “any idea where I can pick up a gun?"

“Why you want?” she asks.

“No reason”, I reply. “It’s just that this seems like a good place to die."

Suddenly the next level of psychedelics kicks in and I am taken to the Siamese sultan of the Kubla Khan whose pink coral castle guarded the Sundra Strait. Melted roofing tar fell like black napalm rain.

And I am dying. Like two old fishermen staring at a lights blazing luxury liner going by, I am being drawn deeper into a void, a void I will never be able to emerge from. I can no longer think. My mind is numb. I hear strange sounds. Sounds like "…ow ow, yum yum, boom boom…". I hear the worst words any man can hear from his best friend: "I have opened a bar." Nine bar girls start dancing on my head. No. Ten. No. Eleven. No. Twelve. No. I was right the first time. Eleven. Eleven bar girls dancing on my head. In my trance I have to take them somewhere. I cram them into a taxi. Off we go. I am confused. I cannot find my condoms. The girls start asking for food. They all want a monthly salary. My ATM card. Delivering eleven future bargirls was like delivering eleven three year olds on different pee schedules.

I am lying face down in my hotel room. Eleven bar girls are standing over me. The next thing I know I am drilled in the back by a hot stream of hooker urine. They are loading eleven antique guns. Eleven bullets. Wadding. Powder. I realize the powder will witness the night as then they just lower the barrels and squeeze the triggers.

Oh Dana! Where are you now that I need you most? I must learn to cope on my own. I realize that the only things that count are chaos and anarchy and violence and sex, and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes… sex is not enough.

But I’ve learned one thing from Dana. One thing that will keep me warm on the cold nights in farangland. It's not just about the women you meet. It's also about the men you meet.