Thailand, 1976
By Steve Watkins
Center Column
They served Western breakfasts and Heinekens on the 3½-hour flight from Kathmandu to Bangkok. It was all you could drink, and my friend Dave and I helped ourselves as we flew south of the Himalayas, searched for Everest tucked somewhere in the jagged skyline near the Nepal-China border, crossed Bangladesh and the sprawling delta, cast our shadow on the unbroken forests of green Myanmar, skirted the edge of the Andaman Sea, and finally began our descent into Thailand. Farther east were Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam, destroyed by the war that we had feared would never end. It was October 1976. Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh city—had fallen to the North Vietnamese Army a year and a half before. There were reports of boat people trying to escape, rapes and murders by pirates on the open sea, massive reeducation camps, and torture and genocide by the Khmer Rouge next door in the newly named Kampuchea.
I had taken a class spring semester on social philosophy of developing nations, taught by an activist professor who’d been briefly imprisoned by the Argentine government because of his association with the guerilla Montoneros. He led us through an examination of revolutionary and progressive movements happening around the world—and the brutally repressive, usually violent government responses, too often backed by the CIA. One bright spot was Thailand, where young activists had led a successful campaign for a constitutional democracy and election of a liberal government a year earlier. Disgusted with how the Americans and the war had corrupted their country, faced with a deluge of refugees from Vietnam and Kampuchea, the new government had enacted progressive changes: instituting land reform, kicking out the American military, closing U.S. Air Force bases, and ending R&R for thousands of G.I.s, a blow to the sex industry.
It didn’t take long before the backlash, though—a right-wing military coup three weeks before we arrived. Paramilitary units surrounded Thammasat University in Bangkok and slaughtered hundreds of faculty and student activists, shooting them or letting them drown as they tried to escape across the Chao Phraya River. Police and a civilian mob hanged students from the low branches of the tamarind trees at Sanam Luang, the royal park next to the university, and beat and burned the hanging bodies.
But news was slow, and it had been a while since I read the International Herald-Tribune, so we didn’t know much about the coup when we landed at Don Mueang Airport and stepped off the plane into brutal heat and humidity. Another backpacker we met on the flight suggested we share a tuk-tuk to a place called the Crown Hotel, where he’d stayed on a previous trip to Bangkok. It was small, a little out of the way, a couple of miles from Siam Center, whatever that was, but it had a cafe, a swimming pool, and air-conditioning. We could split the cost of a three-bed room. What did we say?
We said sure, changed dollars to Thai baht, and held on tight with the new guy, Alan, for the wild ride into Bangkok. Some parts of the capital could have passed for a modern American city, with high-rise buildings, wide highways, billboards, neon signs, traffic jams, blaring horns, refrigeration, brand-name stores, and lots of shiny cars. But Bangkok was also water buffalo in fields, rice paddies, barefoot farmers in conical hats, free-range-chickens, thatch-roofed huts, a complex network of canals, colorful stupas, and ornate temples, wats, with high-peaked roofs decorated with dragons. And it was street vendors on repurposed bicycles, and a sea of motorcycles weaving on and off the roads and sidewalks, wherever there was a break in the insane traffic. Thai women in low-cut Western blouses, Thai men in business suits, young people in platform shoes and disco threads, and students in school uniforms mixed with old people and children in rags, living on the streets, in constant danger of being run over.
TEMPTATIONS
The Crown could have been any of hundreds of roadside motels in the U.S., except for the Thais who ran the place. Most of the rooms, once full of G.I.s on R&R from Vietnam, were empty. There were a handful of backpackers and half a dozen young Thai women who Alan told us were sex workers. We wanted to draw the shades, crank up the AC, and sleep through the stifling heat of the afternoon, but Alan wouldn’t shut up about the hot Thai women and the disco bar at a place called the Grace Hotel. He’d be going there that night, he said, and we should go with him. Dave and I already regretted hooking up with the guy, but there didn’t seem to be any way to dump him.
So we headed to the pool to get away. The women were out sunbathing in their bikinis, a sharp contrast with the modestly dressed women in India and Nepal who rarely made eye contact with men, especially Westerners, and seldom spoke. We couldn’t help but stare—and try to not seem as though we were staring, though I doubted they minded. They spoke to us in English, asked where we were from, told us how much they liked Americans, asked where we lived in America, and wanted to know if Florida and North Carolina were near New York, which was the only city they knew. They didn’t seem to be flirting, certainly not coming on to us, maybe because they were off work, or because we looked like the hippie backpackers we were and so likely didn’t have much money.
Alan went off alone that night, and we didn’t see him again for a couple of days when he came back to gather his stuff. He told us he’d been shacking up with a woman who picked him up at the Grace Hotel—a different woman, but the same thing that happened the last time he was there—and just like that, he was moving in with her.
Dave and I considered going to the Grace ourselves. We were a couple of red-blooded American boys, after all, out to experience the world. If that was what Thailand was offering—if it was what Bangkok, and the women at the Grace Hotel, were selling— shouldn’t we experience that, too? On the other hand, weren’t we opposed to that sort of thing—the exploitation of women, sex as a commodity? I was knotted up about it, and disgusted with myself for being knotted up when the right path was clear.
Yet it was all around us. We were out on the street, and a car pulled up and two women beckoned us over. They wanted to know where we were going, where we were from, did we want to go with them, we would have a party, the four of us, they would treat us so good. One of the women pulled down her halter top and grabbed my hand. “You like this, yes? You like more?” Her friend did the same to David. We said no thanks—slower than we should have—then stepped back to the curb. The women drove off angrily.
EVERYONE IN DANGER
We pushed on to Siam Center, all steel and glass and air-conditioning and covered walkways, replete with Western-style stores and high-end Thai shoppers decked out in miniskirts and designer jeans and synthetic fabrics. I checked for mail at the American Express office but came away deflated. Still not a word—from my on-again, off-again girlfriend or my parents or anybody else back home.
Shortly after, as we debated whether to catch a tuk-tuk or walk back the Crown in the brutal heat, a young Thai man approached us. His black hair was disheveled, his eyes red, his clothes dirty and torn. “Please,” he said, and he handed me a newspaper, opened to a photograph of a dead man hanging from a tree limb, his face bloated, his useless arms dangling by his side, his feet less than a foot off the ground. Another man, his face twisted in rage, was swinging a folding chair over his head, caught in the second before striking the corpse, while a curious crowd packed shoulder to shoulder looked on, many of them children, laughing and jeering.
The young man tried to explain what was happening in the photograph—at Sanam Luang, next to Thammasat University—and about what had just happened in Thailand: the military coup, the mass murders, the student activists forced into hiding, leaving their families, making their way north to the Hill Country, to the jungles above Chiang Mai, to join others in the new resistance. There was martial law. Everyone was in danger here. He needed our help. He was a university student. His friends and teachers had been killed. Could we please help?
We hesitated, shocked by the photograph and others equally horrifying, trying to follow the barrage of information, unsure if the request was legitimate or if we were being conned. We’d been hustled countless times in New Delhi and Kathmandu, usually suckers for a good pitch, especially if there were children involved—me more than Dave, who’d had a lot more experience with street scams during his two years in the Peace Corps. But this felt different. I thought we should just give him some money. He seemed earnest, desperate even, clearly frightened.
A military patrol approached—a convoy of jeeps with mounted machine guns and Thai soldiers fiercely scouring the sidewalks. The young man grabbed the newspaper and walked quickly away, vanishing into the passing crowd. Dave and I were once again left bewildered, wondering what was the right thing to do, asking ourselves if we should have helped, knowing we’d failed.
A WARNING
Later, still dispirited, we dropped in to the Malaysia, a seedy backpacker hotel near Patpong, the red-light district, to meet a guy we’d run into earlier on Khao San Road—the Freak Street of Bangkok—who said he could score us some Thai Sticks. While we waited in the lobby, I saw a scrawled note somebody had posted on the message board: “WARNING. Don’t go with any of these girls on the street. They took us to an apartment where some guys were hiding. They had knives. Robbed us and took our passports. Don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this shithole now.”
Thai Stick guy showed up with our purchase as Dave and I congratulated ourselves on our escape earlier from the women in the car. “You guys are only gonna want to smoke a little of this at a time,” Thai Stick said. “It’s some seriously potent shit.”
As soon as we were back at the Crown, Dave pinched some in his hash pipe and I broke the drug fast I’d been on for the past couple of weeks while trekking in the Himalayas. It was clear right away that the guy wasn’t lying.
That night, hours further on, we dragged ourselves out of our dope fog to look for something to eat. The first restaurant we found was overpriced Chinese. Dave stuffed himself, but I was having trouble eating. Some rice and barely palatable sweet and sour vegetables. Curfew was at 11, but we were drawn to the lights of the city and soon found ourselves stumbling through Patpong, thick with street hustlers, neon-lit sex clubs, other farangs wandering about, Thai men in leisure suits, half-dressed women everywhere—trying to pull us into their clubs, offering us “specials,” asking if we wanted to be their boyfriends. Disco music blasted out of beaded doorways. Strobe lights inside made us dizzy if we looked too long. Young kids and old men forced advertising fliers on us for stage shows and services.
“Girl with man. Two girls with man. Girl with girl. Boy with man. Girl with bunny.”
We couldn’t make out if that last one was for real or a typo, not that it mattered. No way were we going into any of those places. It was all too much. We feigned innocence and said no to all the entreaties. Besides, it was past 11 by then—not that the action in Patpong seemed to be letting up in the slightest. We hailed a tuk-tuk and retreated to safety and the Crown. The military patrols were already out in full force.
COUNTING BUDDHAS
We spent the next few days exploring the city—and assiduously avoiding Patpong and the Grace Hotel and women in cars. Our first stop was the Emerald Buddha carved out of six tons of jade at a massive temple complex, Wat Phra Kaew. I wanted to touch it, to feel the cool smoothness of the stone, but it was roped off from visitors and there were armed guards everywhere. We cruised the Grand Palace after that—not much to see there—then hit the weekend market at nearby Sanam Luang, where it was all tchotchkes and cheap clothes and chickens and grilled bits of animals and cast-off ribbons and medals from G.I.s who’d lost them or just didn’t want them anymore. A double ring of tamarind trees outlined the parade ground where Dave and I went to throw the Frisbee—not such a good idea in the crushing heat of midday. On a side street, vendors were selling juice in plastic bags with short straws stuck inside, the openings bound by rubber bands. We sat and sipped under one of the tamarinds and near a couple of others that appeared to have been recently charred, and only then understood that it was the place we’d seen in the newspaper photographs. The hangings. The crowds. The man with the metal chair.
More military patrols cruised past. We didn’t run into any more desperate university students. Another car pulled over with more solicitous women. They called us to them, like Odysseus and the sirens, but we waved them off and sailed on to the next wat, and the one after that, and the one after that. The Golden Buddha. The Iron Monastery with its 37 spires. The enormous Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho—15 meters high and 43 meters long, with prayers pressed into the soles of its giant feet. A thousand more Buddha images crammed into the 91 stupas. We climbed the Temple of the Golden Mount for its expansive views of the polluted city, and the Chao Phraya River, and Thonburi on the west bank, where the student survivors at Thammasat swam to safety from the massacre—if they weren’t gunned down or drowned.
We made our way down to the river and took an express ferry to Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, with its massive central tower. Dave wanted to sit and meditate at every stop, and I did my best to join him. But, as always, my mind was too restless. My legs cramped up. I started spinning on the massacre, the young man we hadn’t helped, the women in cars, the hand-scrawled warning at the Malaysia, the letters I hadn’t gotten from home.
We drank more bags of juice, ate street food—eggs and vegetables scrambled in grease-spattering woks. The food-wallahs kept wanting to throw in some chicken or fish or crabs. We kept insisting that they not. Dave was happy with the Thai spices, but as in India, I couldn’t abide them and struggled to eat. All my clothes were loose. I added a notch to my belt so I could cinch it tighter when I was wearing jeans. I switched to cheap Thai cigarettes from bidis but was still smoking too much. Dave and I both missed our chai. Thai coffee seemed to consist of sweetened condensed milk with a few spoonsful of Nescafe. We went easy on the Thai Stick, which was so much stronger than any of the hash and bhang we had toked on in India and Nepal. Went back to the Crown and saw who could hold his breath the longest sitting at the bottom of the pool. Listened to the women there talk about how much they missed the American G.I.s. Visited the Bangkok Zoo and took pictures of the baby hippos. Played tourist as if our lives depended on it.
GRACE HOTEL
And finally, after a week in Bangkok, we gave in to curiosity and the false but convenient argument that we couldn’t change the shape of the Thai economy and all those sex workers’ place in it, and there wasn’t much else to do at night anyway—which wasn’t true, but we pretended—so we might as well check out the Grace Hotel.
First, though, we let ourselves be coaxed into one of what appeared to be the only two Mexican restaurants in Thailand. We didn’t mean to—we were just walking past—when we came across a couple of Thai men, one of them a little person, dressed in full stereotypical Mexican costumes: sombreros and colorful ponchos and Pancho Villa mustaches. They were hawking menus outside the dueling cafes, which were right next door to one another. We went with the little person, who opened the door for us but didn’t follow as we entered to a nondescript room with utterly empty tables.
We ordered shots of tequila and a couple of the special house burritos, which turned out to be folded cardboard and a tasteless, mashed, brown, legume-ish substance that no amount of salsa could save—particularly since the salsa was just more blazing Thai spice that left me crying. Dave said maybe another shot of tequila would help. We had a couple.
As we were getting up a leave, a man we assumed was the owner approached our table, and in passable English he invited us to join him for a drink. We stupidly agreed, and followed him into a back room where a young Thai woman brought in more shot glasses and tequila. She stood silently by the owner as he reached his hand inside her shirt and kept it there, groping her, as he made his pitch. What he proposed was simple, he said: He would pay us each $500 American to marry a Thai woman. One woman for David. One woman for me. We would never meet them. We only had to let him borrow our passports for a few hours so he could make the marriages official. The woman he was groping, he said, she would keep us company until he returned. Once we were back in the States, we only had to wait one year, then divorce the Thai wives. We just had to give them time to become American citizens first.
Easy money. What do you say?
We said no and got out of there as quickly as our drunken legs could carry us.
***
We should have called it a night right then and there. We should have gone back to the Crown, maybe had one last beer sitting in the shallow end of the pool, then gone to bed and slept it off. But we didn’t. We mindlessly pressed on. By the time a tuk-tuk dropped us off in front of the Grace Hotel an hour later, we could barely stand up, still reeling from the tequila and the proposition. We sat on the curb, then lay flat on our backs, sprawled on the sidewalk, looking up into the neon sky as the Bangkok night swirled around us, two more stupid, drunk farangs making fools of ourselves, somewhere we knew we shouldn’t be.
Dave and I eventually sobered up enough to peel ourselves off the warm sidewalk, though it took a while for my head to stop spinning. Dave was right there with me, swaying, holding onto each other, steadying ourselves in space. The doors to the Grace Hotel yawned open, beckoning. We checked our passports and money hidden in pouches hanging from cords around our necks, tucked under our shirts, then went inside. The club was exactly as Alan had described: So dark that anything could be going on in the corners; a wall of bodies, most of them young Thai women in platform shoes or boots, tight shorts, Western shirts knotted under their breasts, straight black hair, smoldering eyes, heavy lipstick and mascara; crowded neon-lit bar; cover band—shaggy-haired Thai musicians butchering American pop songs.
We waded through the crowded room, aiming for the bar. Right away girls were cooing in my ear, what they would do for me, where was I from, did I want a girlfriend, they would be my girlfriend—tonight, forever. American? G.I.? Disembodied hands stroked my neck, my back, lower. You like this? You want this? You are American, yes?
We pressed ourselves against the bar to order beers, and right away a couple of women elbowed their way next to us and continued the come-ons. “You want a girl? You like me?” “Just a beer right now,” Dave said, as if that would calm things down. There must have been, as Alan had said, 10 women for every man in the Grace, and most of the guys looked like us—jeans and T-shirts, Western backpackers, not much money. The Japanese businessmen with their smart suits and carefully combed hair and obvious affluence were more popular. But there weren’t enough of them to go around, not by a lot, so the incessant solicitations continued. “Hey baby, you like this? You like this?”
Girls danced with girls in the center of the crowded floor. We pushed our way back to a table and slid into a booth. The women at the bar followed closely, continuing with their limited English, squeezing in next to us, running their fingers through our hair, rubbing our thighs, grabbing, stroking. Dave tried talking to them, asking questions, telling them his name. Plus it was Dave. He was going to try to get to know them, regardless of the circumstances, the cacophonous band, the flashing lights threatening to send me into an epileptic seizure. I could barely communicate with the woman pressing herself against me. Too busy alternately liking what she was doing with her fingers and hands and tongue and wanting her to slow down, back off a little, let me drink my beer and get my bearings.
It hit me too late—that I had to get to the restroom right away. The Thai Stick we had smoked earlier, the tequila, the faux-Mexican food, the beer. I shoved her out of the way and bolted for the back of the club where I hoped I’d be able to find a toilet in time. The lighting there was dim, my eyes couldn’t adjust, I felt my way along the wall to a door. There was a sign. I pushed my way in, rammed into someone coming out, threw up in the sink, on the floor, in a stall, on myself. It triggered a bout of dysentery, and I threw myself onto the toilet just in time for that. Guys entered behind me. I heard them cursing outside my stall. I locked it. No way was I going out with anybody there. No way was I letting on to anybody that I was responsible for that disgusting mess. I sat for 15 minutes, elbows on my knees, holding my head to keep it from falling off. Cleaned myself as well as I could. Stumbled out of the stall, and when two more farangs came in I made sure they heard me also cursing whoever the fuck had done this. Must have been one of those goddamn Americans.
I had to get out of there. Not just out of the restroom, but away from the bar, the women, the Grace Hotel, all of it. I made it as far as the booth where Dave still sat with the two women, whose names, from what I could make out over the deafening music, were Noree and Thong, though that couldn’t have been right. Dave was with Noree, still trying to make conversation, while Thong attached herself to me. I was too nauseated, and my head was still spinning, but Thong didn’t seem to mind. She kept asking if I liked her, if I would take her home, if she could be my girlfriend. The band dragged through KC and the Sunshine Band—“Get Down Tonight.” The room swirled. We were on the dance floor. I lost sight of Dave and Noree. I stumbled out of the Grace with Thong, and into a tuk-tuk. She pulled my arm around her, as if we were just some nice couple on the way home after a night out on the town.
When we got to the Crown, Thong rolled a joint with the powerful Thai Stick we had bought at the Malaysia—and smoked the whole thing. Maybe to anesthetize herself. I staggered to the bed and fell face down, too drunk to stand. It was past the 11 o’clock curfew, and we were trapped there for the night. Dave never showed up, and I didn’t sleep—worrying about him caught out after curfew, remembering the warning we’d seen at the Malaysia, paranoid about what Thong might do if I wasn’t vigilant, ashamed for what I’d gotten myself into.
Once it was full-on daylight, finally, I walked Thong to the road in front of the Crown Hotel. She kept telling me, over and over, that she could stay, that she would be the best girlfriend. Number one. She insisted she didn’t want money, she just wanted me to be her boyfriend. I told her I was sorry. I stopped a passing tuk-tuk and she reluctantly climbed in. She took the money.
I was in the shower, trying to steam away my hangover, when a bedraggled Dave came in. He’d spent the night at the Grace, stuck in the bar after curfew, the only farang left when they shut the place down and locked the doors. Noree, and most of the women at the Grace Hotel, were stuck there, too. Dave had spent the long hours talking to her and her friends, none of whom spoke much English. Those who knew a little did their best to translate for the others. They told Dave which of them came from a village to find work. Who sent money back to their families. Who had been lucky enough to have a G.I. boyfriend. Who missed the Americans now that they were gone. Who regularly slept at the bar tables, if they weren’t hired and taken to a rented room at the Grace, or to hotels like the Crown or the Malaysia.
When a military patrol stormed into the bar, the women hid Dave under their table. The soldiers drew their weapons. Shouted at the women. Threatened them. Demanded their identification papers. Stormed off again. In the morning, when the curfew ended, Dave gave Noree money for breakfast. He stumbled outside and caught a ride back to the Crown.
MISTER TONY
After a few more days in the city, we decided to take an express bus south to one of the ports, and a ferry over to the resort island of Ko Samui. First, though, we had to line up our tickets to Calcutta for a trip across northern India and down into Rajasthan for a last visit to Dave’s Peace Corps village. We hit up a shady discount agency called J Travels that several backpackers had recommended. It was smooth sailing for Dave, but my International Student Card had expired, and I needed a new one to qualify for a half-price ticket.
A guy at J Travels overheard my conversation with the ticket-wallah and followed me outside. Said he’d sell me a counterfeit sticker for my card. Nobody would be able to tell the difference. Meet him here tomorrow. 200 baht. Cheap and best. Same cost as one night with a girl.
Dave went off the next day to do the tourist thing. I caught a bus to J Travels. Waited an hour. Met the guy, and he was right—the sticker looked legitimate. We made the exchange, and I went into J Travels to buy my ticket to Calcutta. They didn’t look twice at the doctored International Student Card, just took it, took my passport, took my money, and told me to come back that evening. Ticket would be ready. All documents would be returned.
And that was when everything went sideways. I walked to the bus stop a block away and stood there with the locals, exchanging smiles, until two serious-looking Thai men materialized at my sides. They wore suits but no ties, their eyes hidden behind black sunglasses.
“Mister Tony?” one of them asked.
I was caught off guard by this but assured him that I wasn’t Mister Tony.
“You are not Mister Tony?”
“No.”
“We think you are Mister Tony. We have been watching. You have come from J Travel.”
“Yes. But I’m not Mister Tony. I don’t know anybody named Mister Tony.”
The other man took my arm. “We would like for you to come with us.”
They pulled me away with them. I resisted. They were insistent. People were watching, but no one said anything. The bus pulled up. Everybody got on except me. I was stuck with the two men who thought I was Mister Tony. I looked around frantically, but it was clear there was nobody to help.
“We have a car,” one of them said. “You will come with us to the car.”
I wasn’t given a choice. But I balked at getting in the back seat. “Who are you?” I demanded. “I’m American. You can’t just take me somewhere. Where are you taking me? You have to show me some identification? Are you police?”
“Immigration police,” the first man said. “We have been told that Mister Tony has an expired visa. It could be counterfeit.”
“Show me your badge,” I said, as if I was in any position to negotiate. But they didn’t, not that I could have read the Thai. They looked official, but who knew?
They shoved me into the back seat. I complained, but they weren’t listening.
I tried to memorize every turn we took. Distances, times, directions, landmarks. But I was soon lost. Half an hour later, we pulled up to a nondescript building. They pulled me out of the car and escorted me inside, one on each side, firmly gripping my arms, as if they thought I would try to escape.
Inside, I was taken to a small room with two chairs. They sat me down in one and turned me over to an older official. He seemed angry, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Even if I was the mysterious Mister Tony, it was just a fake visa they were talking about.
“Are you Mister Tony?”
“No.”
“What is your name?”
I told him.
“Do you know Mister Tony?”
“No.”
“How do you know Mister Tony?”
“I don’t know Mister Tony.”
“How do we know you are telling us the truth?”
“Because I am.”
“Why are you at J Travels?”
“I was buying a ticket.”
“Why have you been seen at J Travels many times.”
“Only a couple of times.”
“Where is your passport?”
“At J Travels. They kept it so they could buy the ticket. If you take me back there I can have them show you.”
“Did you purchase your visa extension at J Travels?”
“No. I didn’t purchase a visa extension.”
“Where are you from?”
I told him.
“Why are you in Bangkok?”
“Tourist.”
“What is your name?”
I told him again.
“How do you know Mister Tony?”
This went on for a while, until my interrogator got too frustrated to continue, or too bored. Fifteen minutes later, he was replaced by another tired official who ran through the same set of questions, repeating many of them, maybe to see if they could trip me up with inconsistent answers, though he didn’t bother to rephrase them. I was beyond annoyed, but when I let my anger spill out in my responses, he got more aggressive and threatening, glaring at me, turning away when the door opened to bark at yet another official who joined us in the room.
A calmer voice in my head reminded me that nobody knew where I was, that these people could do anything they wanted to me, and that I was helpless to stop them. I had no way to defend myself, not that I’d have known how, anyway. I was surprised they hadn’t put me in handcuffs. I toned down my responses and did my best to sound polite and helpful. I couldn’t see that it made much difference in how the new interrogator spoke to me, but I kept trying. I even apologized for the misunderstanding, offered to do whatever they would like me to do to prove I wasn’t Mister Tony, assured them that I had legitimate business at J Travels, and that I would never disrespect Thailand in any way.
The same two immigration cops who had picked me up returned. They escorted me back to their car and drove to J Travels. Once we were there, I started to get out, but one of them shoved me back onto the seat. The other went inside. He was gone for 10 minutes. I prayed that the guy who had sold me the counterfeit sticker for my International Student Card wouldn’t show back up.
They finally let me go—left me standing on the street outside J Travels. Didn’t say a word. But I was through being meek and polite, and as they climbed back in the car I demanded that they drive me to the Crown Hotel. They’d made me miss my bus. They’d wasted hours of my time. They owed me.
I ended up walking back to the hotel, seething. I hated Thailand. Hated what had become of the country. Hated what I’d done there, what I’d contributed. Hated being an impotent bystander to history.
SLAVE MONKEY IN A COCONUT TREE
We never made it to Ko Samui. Our bus—screaming 80 miles an hour down a perfectly straight, state-of-the-art highway, built by U.S. military for tanks and speed—broke down in wilderness several hours south of Bangkok. After a long, sweaty afternoon waiting for repairs that never came, broiling in the shadeless open, we took our packs and hiked east several kilometers to Chumphon, a nothing of a town. We spent the night, wondered why the locals were so hostile, and hired a tuk-tuk out of there the next day—to the coast and a dirt-road fishing village called Pat Nam.
We spent three nights in the only hotel in town. The electricity and water were turned on at 10 every evening, shut off in the morning. We complained, but the woman who ran the place just laughed and told us it would be back on soon. We complained about the noise, too. Nobody stayed there during the day, but at night, as soon as the electricity came on, it was a party all over that raged for hours. Then in the morning, everyone but us was gone.
It wasn’t until our last night that we figured out we were staying in a brothel.
We spent our days exploring the coastline—it was the Gulf of Thailand, which opened out onto the South China Sea—walking miles every day, not seeing anybody, just distant trawlers, a few smaller boats. We threw off our clothes and went skinny dipping in the still water. There seemed to have been storms recently, though we only had one rainy day. All manner of detritus—logs, dead fish, nets, plastic—had washed up on the narrow strip of beach between ocean and jungle. An hour’s hike south of Pat Nam, we stumbled onto a hermit who invited us into his tin-roof shack and offered us tea. He didn’t speak any English, didn’t speak much at all. He had a monkey, and gestured for us follow him to a grove of coconut trees where he tied a long rope around the monkey’s neck, then held onto the other end as the monkey scampered up the trunk to pull off the coconuts and throw them down at us. Whenever the monkey stopped—maybe tired, taking a break, or maybe on strike for better working conditions—the hermit yanked hard on the rope until the monkey went back to work.
We had to move fast to avoid getting hit. The hermit hacked the end off a green coconut with his machete and offered us a drink of the coconut water, then split the husk in half so we could pry out white coconut meat. After we finished, and the monkey was safely back on his shoulder, he made it clear that he expected us to pay him for the coconut and the monkey show, which we did.
HEY YOU
The villagers in Pat Nam were no friendlier than the people we’d encountered during our brief stop in Chumphon. Kids, adults—all men—stared at us when we walked through the dirt streets or looked inside the small shops. They yelled “Hey you!” and then burst out laughing. We tried to talk to them, but they weren’t interested, or it was too difficult, or they’d had enough of farangs, not that we saw any others the whole time we were there.
One afternoon when I was walking alone in the village, looking for a place to buy cigarettes, I heard the by-now familiar and annoying “Hey you!” I turned to look, and it was a lone Thai soldier in a ragged uniform. He stood 20 feet away with an M-16 aimed right at me. I froze, confused, scared. Half a dozen men and boys were also gathered on the street. The moment seemed to go on and on. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know why he was pointing his gun at me, didn’t know what to say to get him to lower his weapon.
And then they all broke out laughing, the soldier loudest of all. They congratulated one another on freaking me out and wandered off into the village.
That night I sat alone on the beach from dusk until well after dark, watching lightning for hours out on the horizon over the Gulf of Thailand. I felt hollow and haunted, worried that I was missing something I should have figured out after all these months and miles and countries so far from home.
PATRIOTS
Back in Bangkok for our last two days, we caught up on the news. Jimmy Carter had been elected president. Jim Palmer won the AL Cy Young. The U.N. finally took action against apartheid in South Africa. We watched All the President’s Men in a cinema where everyone jumped to attention the second the film ended. They sang the Thai national anthem as an image of the king filled the screen. I wondered if any of these great patriots had taken part in the massacre at Thammasat University and the tamarind trees of Sanam Luang.
We left there soon after, back to India where we planned to travel for another month, then hopefully home by Christmas.
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Steve Watkins is co-founder and editor of PIE & CHAI, a professor emeritus of English, a longtime tree steward with Tree Fredericksburg, an inveterate dog walker, a recovering yoga teacher and co-founder of two yoga businesses, father of four daughters, grandfather of four grandsons, and author of 15 books. His author website is http://www.stevewatkinsbooks.com/.
