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    Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia
    Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia
    Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia
    Ebook62 pages1 hour

    Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia

    By William John Stapleton

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    About this ebook

    The unique enterprise A Sense Of Place Publishing has just released its newest publication, Bangkok Busted: You Die For Sure. This is a deeply personal story by author William John Stapleton on the fallout after he wrote a book about being robbed, lied to and deceived by one of the city's go-go boys and the subsequent personal distress and widespread public ridicule he endured.

    Few foreigners are crazy brave or stupidly insane enough to tell their often embarrassing and humiliating stories of falling for the practiced love lies peddled to them by Thai sex workers.

    Such stories have resulted on the heterosexual side of the ledger in books such as My Private Dancer and Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye. In the author's case he wrote The Twilight Soi, a book which made him a reviled figure by the Thai public who swallowed the lie that the book was an insult to Thailand, to its culture and to its sex workers. It is not and was never intended to be any such thing.

    "Most people in Asia cannot imagine why anybody would write a story admitting to their own stupidity and misguided conduct in falling for the 'I love you very much I miss you very much' patter of their prostitutes, either male or female," Stapleton says. "For a start, I first wrote the Twilight Soi and now Bangkok Busted: You Die For Sure because painters paint, builders build and writers write, and that's what do.

    "The story I related is so bizarre that I would not have believed it if it had not happened to me. The Thais were outraged that a foreigner as imperfect as myself should object to being robbed, cheated and publicly ridiculed. But I wanted to tell this story partly because I did not want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.

    "These men often make easy prey. They are lonely, they are out of their own comfort zones and away from the spying eyes of friends, family and work colleagues, often are without obligations of work or children for the first time in their lives, and run off the rails in the torrid atmosphere of Asia and its bars. They often enough end up suiciding."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456615024
    Bangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia

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      Book preview

      Bangkok Busted - William John Stapleton

      review.

      LANDING WHERE?

      Where are we? he asked one of the hostesses on the Thai Airways flight after he woke from a brief alcohol induced sleep.

      His reputation for instability, so ably fanned by those he had offended, already preceded him. Michael was surprised the airline's crew had let him drink at all, much less knock himself out.

      We are one hour from landing, sir, she responded in a politely dismissive tone, clearly aware of his identity.

      Landing where? he asked.

      Sydney, she replied, shaking her head and saying loudly enough for him to hear, no wonder.

      Michael’s heart hit the floor as he watched the hostess continue her way up the aisle, collecting the detritus from yet another of the traveling herds which had filled the world's skies and beaches since he first began traveling half a century ago.

      Sydney!

      Now was the time, fractured, out of the story line, an unplanned curve in history. He had never felt so lost. No longer bound by children, a regular job or the various therapeutic programs which once kept him functioning as a semi-normal individual, he had no idea of his next move, his motives, or in a very real sense even who he was.

      Once satisfied with observer status, even that no longer survived.

      I suppose he will end up in the harbor one day, a man had commented on the plane, dismissing as absurd the audacity and stupidity he showed in daring to comment on the regions criminal organizations; perhaps driven beyond all normal boundaries of self-preservation by the suicidal bender he had embarked upon.

      Michael had never wanted to see the so-called Harbor City or the beauties of its much spruiked beaches, Opera House or Bridge everagain.

      The claim Australians regularly make that they live in the best country in the world never rang true for him.

      He had not felt at home there for years and experienced no sense of home-coming, despite the extremity of the circumstances.

      When the job evaporated and the children grew old enough to look after themselves Sydney, the city he had once loved so much for its wild parties and peculiar sense of having never meant to be there, walled as it was by sandstone cliffs and perched on the edge of the most ancient of continents, became nothing but a brightly colored trap.

      Christmas and New Year in Australia sounded romantic enough.

      But as the London papers crowed, the Great Southern Land's famous summer of sun, sex and surf had disappeared.

      The plane taxied through squalls of cold rain to exactly where he did not want to be: home under leaden skies.

      As things turned out, it did not stop raining for weeks over the Christmas holiday period, when Sydney's beaches are usually crowded with sun lovers from all over the world, baking themselves brown. In contrast the Thais do everything they can to lighten their skin tones, tanned skin being associated with peasants working in the field.

      The reality of thumping back into the homeland to which he had determined never to return struck quickly.

      After some time pacing around the terminal trying to locate the shuttle bus driver, he endured the ride through all too familiar landscapes, from the cluttered industrial and commercial mishmash of buildings in Sydney's inner-west to the barrenness of endless miles of neat, heartless suburbia.

      While he stared blankly at the landscapes through which they passed, his spirits sank even lower, if that was possible.

      For a start, particularly after his acclimatization to the heat of Asia over the past two years, he felt cold, the last thing one expects of an Australian summer.

      Michael was still fleeing something he could not see, the false accusations of pedophilia concocted by Aek and the bar X-Size in Bangkok and Surai from the Happy Café in Phnom Penh, the handsome, charismatic, sex mad and money hungry bastard he had slept with briefly and who subsequently kept breaking into his apartment and rifling through his belongings and his computer. Anything to please the criminals of Bangkok.

      Their first attempts at denigration, driven by the fact he had dared to write about a routine experienced by many foreigners, of being robbed and deceived by one of their sex workers, had turned his life in Bangkok into a living hell.

      They had, without any evidence, called him Thailand’s number one drug driver. He could barely walk five feet without being

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