How Luck Pans Out…
The first Thai girl I had a long term relationship is now 47 years on. She was 19 when I met her and doing the gogo gig in a small bar in Soi Cowboy. Call her SJ to save some face. The bar had been set up by an Alaskan guy called Scotty who had created the dive with his Thai girlfriend, who was quite hot despite dropping a kid. When I arrived the bar had been taken over by a morose Dane but all the girls had been recruited by Scotty's girlfriend, mostly related and mostly from Nongkhai. They had what I call the long Lao nose which is actually a thing of beauty rather than the short Lao nose which is cute in young women but tends to make older gals look a bit Negroid. SJ had the short nose but it suited the knife sharp cheekbones and swathe of long black hair. She was the eldest sister of seven (or maybe eight) femmes and had done little school, ending up with a lithe but hard body, steel under velvet, and heated, rough hands that would give you a hard-on if she ever shook your hand. All that hard rice cutting in heated fields. Most of the girls were commendably skinny and few were significantly over five foot.
The Danish owner was either morose because it was in his nature or actually knew that his wife was f..king around with a Thai guy, but never let on as the penalty for knowing Thai secrets was usually not very nice. Pretty much the same, these days. In the end, he buggered off back to his homeland with the Thai wife, before easy communications and unlikely the boyfriend would ever get a visa. You could call that a win. Scotty was later kicked out by his girlfriend, having run out of money. The girlfriend ended up in a Soi Cowboy bar and I did take her for short-time once but a waste of space, having developed a diva type attitude that didn't mix well with the mere 500 baht she picked up for the deed.
Whilst I was living with SJ, one of her best friend's was Bee and so hot she almost left me speechless… unfortunately already married to a large Belgian youth who ended up on heroin and in serious trouble with the local thugs. He used to wander around telling anyone who would listen that he didn't have to pay for sex in Belgium and didn't see why he should fund Bee's family. At some point he was pimping out Bee for short-time and all her friends told her to get rid of him but she stuck it out until they made it to Antwerp. As soon as she got a Belgian passport she dumped him and ended up working in a cake shop on the day….god knows what she got up to in the night. Before the European Union became omnipresent quite a few other countries gave out passports to foreigners as soon as they married their citizens and even back then the girls knew which countries were easy touches. It was also possible to legally go work as entertainers in some Western countries. I did see Bee a decade or so later, on holiday in Bangkok with an even larger, younger and thicker Belgian guy.
SJ had some regulars from her gogo and unknown to me she was still seeing some of them despite escaping the bar. One of them was an American veteran who was about forty and claimed to be a doctor. He had a VD clinic down one of the sois not far from Cowboy and had some kind of contract for checking the girls out. The idea of medical ethics didn't seem to worry him and he would f..k girls who took his fancy, having first made sure they were clean! Later, he ended up beating the shit out of his Thai wife and spending a few years in a Thai prison where he ran the pharmacy (he could speak fluent Thai). He eventually got a pardon and tried to set up with SJ but she wasn't that stupid.
I had eventually found out about her playing around and dumped her in favour of someone less mad. She had the typical Thai problem with alcohol, beyond a certain point there was no stopping her. To be fair I don't recall her passing out or puking up, she just got progressively crazier until some kind of violence ensued. Fortunately, never actually against me except for the odd ashtray hurtled in my general direction. She and a group of even crazier female friends would gang up and have a fight with a group of Thai men who had insulted them in some way. I left them to it, the sight of a foreigner would have summoned half of the pimps in Cowboy to ensure victory for the Thai nation. No change there, either.
SJ decided she didn't like gogo dancing and ending up dropping a kid with an elderly American. When that went bang – she was caught out f..king around again – she moved on to a younger English guy and had another couple of kids. She had managed to extort some money out of the guys (she was still f..king around and it was never clear who the actual fathers of the kids were) for land and house in her upcountry villa.
I had gone there with her once, like 25 years ago, and it was the pits with villainous locals and fist-sized, flying cockroaches all layered with a mind sapping heat that was barely touched by copious quantities of alcohol. The locals stuck to home-brewed whisky Lao that would strip paint and probably power their motorcycles if they ran out of fuel. In the morning, the locals were wobbling around, tapping their heads trying to restart their brains. I say morning but it was something like 4.00 AM when the cockerels started screeching their heads off. Back them, land was ridiculously cheap and you could knock up a half decent concrete house for around 100,000 baht if you got the Thai price (the foreign price was five to ten times that depending on how stupid they thought you were).
SJ's sisters had followed her lead and ended up working as hookers of one sort or another. The luckiest snagged a rich British guy who actually had very rich parents. He was fleeced every which way but eventually divorced the sister but not before she got a lot more than half his wealth and a British passport. SJ wasn't that amused at this success as she had burned through the miserly amounts available from her boyfriends and didn't have the wit to up her game. She eventually ended up dumping the British guy after a failed attempt at poisoning him, aged about 35, and let one of her friends introduce her to some ancient Swiss guys. The friend had hit the jackpot as her Swiss guy had cancer and had emptied his bank account into a couple of suitcases to avoid inheritance tax or his relatives getting their hands on it and given her all the money shortly before dying. A big party was thrown in his honour and the friend ended up f..king the Thai male singer – his handsomeness a stark contrast to the patina of death that hung over her Swiss beau.
SJ still had a reasonably slick body and tight pussy (the kids being cut out rather than dropped) but hard, evil eyes and a patina of general craziness that didn't go down too well with the staid Swiss guys. Also, all the bullshit that filtered through her mind had somehow come out in her aging facial lines (the family had nicknamed her Gaa (old)). She ended up doing the Phuket beers bars, one of them owned by the younger sister who had snared the aforementioned rich Brit. Some youthful British lad fell in love with her but given short shrift as he was more beach bum than the dreamt of rich old guy who could be helped on his way to heaven after handing over all his worldly wealth. Eventually she hooked up with a slightly younger Eastern European guy who had the patina of a failed gangster but claimed to run his own business. He failed to get SJ a visa and she carried on as usual when he was out of Thailand with the eventual result of dropping him in favour of a Finnish pensioner, she by now 43.
Meanwhile, the three boys she had dropped were being looked after by the grandparents and various dysfunctional family members, the country villa the final resting place of failed hookers and burned out guys. The eldest son went on to become a drug dealer, the youngest a yaa-baa addict whilst the middle son hooked up with a rich (half) Chinese lass only to be kicked out a few years later when he failed to think beyond his next meal or shot of alcohol.
The Finnish guy was told the fathers of the kids were dead and annoyed when one of them kept phoning up SJ. He also wasn't amused when the suggested 100,000 baht renovation of the family villa ended up costing 600,000 baht and went off alone to Finland in a huff. SJ claimed she had to look after her sons and would need another huge influx of money to sort out their medical expenses, not to mention her father's heroic battle with a weak heart, her aunty's diabetes and her mother's need of tender loving care.
SJ has the husky voice of a katoey, down to two packs of unfiltered cig' a day, and the skinny body of someone on a diet of whisky lao but like her father a tough old bird, quite likely to outlive clean-living citizens. The short Lao nose long gone, thanks to the artistry of a plastic surgeon; weird tattoo eyebrows and ruined hair further testaments to the way Thais destroy themselves. A long way from the svelte 19-year-old I'd met all that time ago. One of those people who ruin everything they touch… I still get the odd phone call from her when I regale her with tales of my wealth and ever younger Filipina girlfriends, easy to wind her up as her ruined brain circuits try to come to terms with her ever diminishing prospects. But never say die, there is always another sucker to get addicted…
