Bungee Love

Chapter 1

Everybody’s looking for something.

Some of them want to use you,

Some of them want to get used by you.

—Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams

I go with you, she said softly as she slipped her hand inside my arm. Slightly startled, I turned to see a smiling face—twenty-something, I guessed, but she could have been sixteen. It is so hard to tell the age of a Thai woman, especially with the nighttime neon lights that reveal only outlines and shadows.

I looked at her beguiling face, smiled back, had a fleeting thought of saying yes, but said, No, thanks. The waif-like face turned her lips into a pout of disappointment, and she tugged on my arm as I kept walking. My mind started playing Why not? and What if? games, and I started to slow down.

I like you, she purred. I boom boom good.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk as my imagination ran away with the idea of boom boom, but I started walking again as words failed me. She held on to me for a few steps and puckered her lips in a tantalizing invitation as I was prying her hand from my arm. She made a pouty face again as I walked backward away from her, but then she quickly turned to another man, put her arm around him, and said, Hey, handsome man, I go with you?

Whoa, did I feel special! I laughed at my momentarily inflated sense of attractiveness as I watched the girl disappear in the crowd. She was a walking fantasy but hardly the only one.

Wewcome! Hewoo. Hey, sexy man, I wuv you. Want go wid you. What you name? and more broken-English come-ons came rapid-fire from the steady stream of painted women on Soi Cowboy. Jeez. It was overwhelming and dick-hardening walking down the crowded street with sexy Thai girls touching me, beckoning me into some unknown mystery. I saw dozens sitting on bar stools, standing provocatively in doorways, coaxing strangers into bars with a little butt wiggle or titty jiggle. Some were wearing short shorts, some tight skirts, and almost all had high heels or boots to show off their legs. Yeah, Thai women have nice legs and cute butts, and they know how to advertise their best parts. The rubbernecked foreigners—almost all men, many with cameras—strolled through the soi (street) like shoppers at a market looking at the fruits and veggies. Hmm, this one looks nice, round, firm, feels good too. That one looks a little fat—oops, overripe—too skinny, too old. Really it was sidewalk shopping, but the goods were in miniskirts, shorts, halter tops, bras, and stuff that made Victoria’s Secret look prudish and old-fashioned. It was hard to think straight with cute girls smiling and touching me as I walked by. Yes, sir, I blended right in with my wide eyes and silly grin, smiling while the music in the background made a beat that pulsated the night and made me bob my head unconsciously.

Welcome to Bangkok—candy land for sugar freaks, something for everyone, and an overdose for a newbie. Yes, I know there are skyscrapers, beautiful temples, shopping malls galore, and a bustling metropolis in this city of eight million people, but Bangkok’s reputation for tawdry, gaudy sex overshadows the cultural highlights—at least for many foreigners, at least men, at least me. I had only been here for two hours, and I was still figuring out day versus night, but that is hard to do in Bangkok, where nights throb with action, where streets are lit up, where traffic always clogs the roads to a standstill, where food is cooking 24-7, and where midnight ushers in worlds that teenage boys dream about.

The doorman at the hotel gave me a funny look when I asked him where to go for nightlife, but hey, I had no idea. "Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza was all he said, but the wink and grin gave me a pretty good hint that everyone but me knew about these places. Besides, I was a single American guy in Bangkok, slightly lost and clearly very naive, and not the first goofy foreigner to be snorkeling in the ocean and ask, Where are the fish?"

That was how I ended up on Soi 23, a little one-block street near the intersection of Asok and Sukhumvit Roads, perhaps the main tourist drag in Bangkok. Every city has one street that is an anchor point for exploration and a common reference point for tourists. Hey, have you been to London? Do you know where Piccadilly Circus is? Paris? Yeah, look for the Champs-Élysée and the Rive Gauche. C’est tres bonne n’est-ce pas? New York? Go to Times Square, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park. Florence? Got to see the Ponte Vecchio and El Duomo. Venice? St. Mark’s Square is action central.

Well, in Bangkok, everyone knows Sukhumvit Road and the Bangkok Transit System (BTS) Skytrain that goes from the National Stadium and MBK (seven floors of everything technological), past Paragon Mall and Ploenchit, past Nana Plaza, Emporium, Ekkamai, and all the way out to On Nut. Nana Plaza at Soi 2 and Soi Cowboy at Soi 23 are landmarks for farangs (foreigners), like the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and the red light district, De Wallen, in Amsterdam—all for the same reason: sex, in every size, color, shape, gender, age, and dress that you can imagine and a lot that I never thought of. Mark it on the map, and take a walk along Sukhumvit Road to discover Thai versions of sexiness, entertainment, and gender-bending. Actually, the fun is that your imagination will be stretched in ways that make you gasp or smile.

There are no vehicles allowed on Soi Cowboy at night, because it is lined with bars, go-gos, discos, street performers, an occasional elephant, people cooking an amazing variety of food in carts, and hundreds of young women trying to hustle some money for the way they look and the promises they make. It is the tainted, touristy side of Thailand where the women ply their trade and the foreigners come for fantasies. It is a concentrated place for the free market economy based on sex and booze so it does not pollute the rest of the city, where supply and demand meet, where some gawk, some smile, and some lose their money, but where most get what they are looking for. So business is good, and the girls and customers keep coming back for the beer, shows, sex, money, and thrills. It makes capitalism in the developing world look like Girl Scouts selling cookies.

What did I need? Adventure? TLC? Sex? Yeah, all that, but I was curious too. What is a go-go bar like in Thailand? Are all the girls brown, skinny, and short? What is it like with a Thai prostitute? How much do they charge? What do I say? Yeah, I was very naive—a midwesterner from America lost in the lights, noise, and short skirts of Bangkok. There was a lot to see and do, and I wanted to make up for lost years and lost youth. It does not take long to stroll Soi Cowboy from end to end, especially if you don’t stop to drink along the way, watch the dancers, or have a quickie. So I went up one side and back the other of Soi Cowboy in thirty minutes and was still sober and curious. Clearly, I was a newbie farang overwhelmed with sex, music, booze, and open opportunities to do everything I thought about when I was sixteen, and quite a few things that didn’t occur to me until much later.

I wondered what Nana Plaza was like, so I walked the twenty blocks to get there. Distance was not the problem, but my senses were overwhelmed along the way. I smelled the fumes from motorbikes and buses as they roared and belched along Sukhumvit in traffic that was really a free-for-all. In between smog and exhaust, there were whiffs of food—some sweet like crepes, some spicy like som tom (chopped spicy papaya salad), some recognizable like barbecued chicken, and some totally new. The spicy Thai fish oil can be nauseating to a farang, but Thai people love it. Unfortunately, I hopped over open grates with smells of sewage that were just awful, and in a few steps more, I passed food carts with delicious aromas. Every ten steps brought different scents and sights, but it was difficult to look and walk at the same time in fantasyland.

The sidewalk along Sukhumvit is narrow because so many vendors set up shop (really a table is all they need) along the curb and along the buildings, so pedestrians walk a gauntlet of booths, tables, and displays with anything you might possibly want. T-shirts? Of course, they are there by the thousands, but how about knockoff Polo shirts for five US dollars? NFL or Premier League team shirts? Muay Thai boxing shorts? Swiss watches? Bikinis? Sexy underwear? Elephant tusks? Knives? Guns? Pirated DVDs of movies that are still being shown in cinemas? Viagra? Condoms? Dildos? Yup, anything you want. How much? You better be ready to bargain, or you’ll pay double, at least.

Walk Sukhumvit Road twice and you’ll learn that there are distinct places for different goods. Food and souvenirs are good near the BTS station at Soi 11; T-shirts are better on the even-numbered side across the street by Soi 6 and 8; most of the merchants along Soi 5 through 7 are deaf and communicate by sign language as they punch prices into calculators with big screens and show you the numbers; and the black girls stand by Soi 3, where the popular Arab and African restaurants are. The crowded sidewalks end at a huge gnarly intersection near Nana Plaza, and the McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut are sure signs that the farangs eat here. The next block has the JW Marriott, Starbucks, access to the motorway, and the beginning of the central business zone in Ploenchit with shopping malls and hotels—the civilized Thai world.

Somehow the food carts, vendors, and hookers along Sukhumvit fit in like all the other commodities for sale. It was hard to look at the variety of things on both sides of me as I tried not to bump into tourists who suddenly stopped to buy things. I tried to avoid stepping on the burka of the Arab women walking slowly or bumping into mothers pushing strollers (what the hell are they doing on Sukhumvit at midnight with their babies?), and I tried not to look in the eyes of the hookers who had me figured out thirty seconds before I saw them. After midnight the sidewalk traffic was fierce. There were poor, dirty women with sleeping babies begging for money; men without limbs, some with open wounds; and occasional motorcycles on the sidewalk—all under the shadow of the BTS Skytrain in a giant concrete tree house of walkways and tracks overhead. Pathetic, gripping, sad, smelly, chaotic, erotic, and maddening were alternating feelings as I picked my way through an undulating sea of people. Maybe that’s why drinking is so popular along Sukhumvit Road.

I did not want to go in a tuk-tuk, basically a motorcycle with a two-seat bench under a covered top. They are everywhere and navigate effectively around taxis and buses, but they are touristy, overpriced, open to bus fumes, and the top of the tuk-tuk blocks the view. The drivers try to charge tourists two hundred to three hundred baht to go from Soi Cowboy to Nana, but the taxi fare is less than one hundred baht, or three US dollars. I walked it in thirty minutes. Sukhumvit Road after midnight is hard to describe, maybe like Times Square in New York with more sleaze intermixed with the wide-eyed foreigners and sex tourists. I could hardly look left and right fast enough to see everything before I arrived at Nana Plaza. I heard someone describe it as Disneyland for perverts. Maybe it is true. If you think Soho, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Hamburg have sex-filled streets, go to Nana Plaza. It’s just mind-blowing.

There are many nicknames for the Nana Entertainment Plaza, including Sex City and Three Floors of Whores, but once you go, you know it simply as Nana. In the two hundred yards between Sukhumvit Road and Nana, the soi is jammed with bars, curbside food vendors, and crowds of foreigners. Street traffic has to fight the pedestrian traffic to snake its way through the crowds. Have a hankering for grasshoppers, cockroaches, or insects? No problem! Quick-fried and salted in a paper bag for snacks. Som tom (papaya salad), tom yum (hot and sour soup), dried fish, barbecued meat, too dark to tell what it is, and cheeseburgers on the grill are available within fifty feet of Nana in an assortment of portable carts, grills, and kitchens built on bicycles. If you are worried about what the meat is or how long it has been sitting in the unrefrigerated cart, you need to have another drink. Across the street, the Nana Hotel has a restaurant, a disco, cheap rooms, and a parking lot in front with twenty to fifty working girls leaning against cars and just waiting. Welcome, they say, or they just smile and wait for you to make the first move. They know that someone will come to them, so they just wait.

If you look around, you can see anything near Nana. Young girls carrying babies and begging? Unfortunately, it is much too common. Disabled and deformed adults dragging themselves along the street with outstretched arms? Depressing. Elephants eating bananas from your hand? Yup. Young girls searching your eyes for interest? Every sixty seconds. All this happens in a crush of thousands of people walking through the streets and sidewalks with a background of loud music in every bar. Sex, lights, music, booze, food, laughter, and craziness—it is theater for viewing and participation, and it is hard to know when you are the audience or the actor. Actually, I was both but did not realize it.

I walked past the Nana Hotel and saw many bars on both sides of the soi with open seating facing the soi. It was like stadium seating overlooking the street so the spectators had good views of the action. Farangs perched along bar stools watching the fish swim by, watching the buyers and sellers do business. It is a fascinating show whether you like international business or just want to watch sexy women in short dresses. And it is important to note that Thai women are rarely overweight or overdressed, so what you see is a flesh parade of shapely brown legs in high heels with a bit of cleavage and a Thai face with big eyes, long eyelashes, and painted lips made up for the night. Some girls arrive by taxis or motorbikes to start work at Nana, and some hookers are coming back from short-time customers to try again. Girls come and go as they move from one spot in town to another to try their luck. There are young Euro guys, usually in small groups, getting drunk, who come to look at and touch the girls, maybe ask, How much? but are too proud or too poor to buy some time with them. Newbies fall in love with the first girl who puts her hand in their crotch and says, Oooo, so big! Old farangs get a street-side seat and sip beer for hours while they watch the show. I could not tell if they were saving their shot for later, or if they used it up already so were relegated to being spectators, or maybe their pensions were only good enough to pay for the beer, or maybe they were smarter than the rest of us.

The entrance to Nana Plaza is a small alley jammed between the food carts and the porch bars. It is the only entrance to the three-level entertainment complex. I pushed my way through a sea of dancers, working girls, hostesses, and farangs who streamed through the tiny walkway, some going in and some coming out. Hope was in the faces of everyone, no matter which direction they were heading, and the farangs in the audience lit up a smoke and ordered another beer. I passed the small Buddhist shrine inside Nana and made my way to the escalator on the right, and when I arrived at the top, I was greeted by five girls in white tank tops and orange mini-shorts waving me into the nearest go-go. I surfed their energy and found myself sitting in a front-row seat to a stage. I ordered a beer. The music started. Girls in underwear started parading on the stage. More started coming down poles from the ceiling—beautiful girls in bras and panties just falling like rain on the stage. No wonder so many farangs came here. The titillation started at my eyeballs and ended in my Jockeys!

The music pounded a rhythm, and the girls gyrated to the music. You could not help but move to the beat, feel the music. I was tapping my hand on the table when a girl slid next to me and took my arm. Hi, I said, but I could not hear what she said, so I just smiled at her. I think I bought her a drink, and I had another beer while the show went on. She smiled at me and stroked my leg like she was trying to start a fire. Well, it worked—blinking colorful lights, throbbing music, sexy girls parading onstage, and the girl next to me rubbing my leg and smiling at me even though I could not understand anything she said. Oh, it was good—intoxicating, cock-throbbing, mind-numbing good—but after 20 minutes I managed to free myself from the girl and walk out of the bar.

I walked by a few go-gos with nearly naked women on stages swaying back and forth to the music, each with a number pinned to their panties or bras, and I could almost hear someone say, Yeah, I like number 38. Send her over here. Now it was 2:00 a.m., and the crowd around Nana was divided between farangs who were sitting, watching, and sipping their drinks, and young girls who were dancing, standing, milling, and flaunting what they had to offer. A girl in a polka-dot dress and black hat caught my eye as she strolled by. The fishnet stockings were a nice touch, so I said, Hello, and she looked at me quizzically. That caught me off guard because the time, place, and dress added up to one thing, but she made me question my math.

Excuse me, I said, are you looking for a date? She eyed me over and did not reply immediately. Now I could not tell who was the buyer and who was examining the goods. I quickly asked, What’s your name?

She replied, Baby.

Ah, appropriate, I thought, as now I could tell she was young and with a slight attitude, perhaps cocky enough to wear a crazy hat and fishnet stockings and sure enough not to jump at every guy who swam by. She warmed up slowly and asked where I was staying. She was pleased that it was nearby.

She asked, Short-time or longtime?

I said, Short-time, another plus because Baby looked like she had places to go and things to do.

How much? I asked.

Three thousand baht, she said, which is about one hundred US dollars.

Two thousand, I countered.

Two thousand five hundred, she said.

Okay, I said and wondered what the hell just happened. People haggle longer over buying a T-shirt than what I just did.

With an agreed-upon price, we started walking to the hotel, when her phone rang. She answered and talked in Thai while we walked in front of the grandstand of farangs in the first bar outside Nana. I saw some smiles and nods as they checked her out. Baby walked deftly in high heels over the cracked sidewalks, curbs, sewer grates, and alleyways, past the carts of vendors selling fish balls, chicken satay, salted fish, sausages, fruits, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and scorpions. We passed the 7-Eleven and turned right at the Rajah Hotel, where the parties would go until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., continued past Annie’s soapy massage parlor that closed already, and she was still talking on the phone as we arrived at the Majestic Grande hotel. I was simultaneously annoyed at being neglected and relieved that we did not have to contrive stupid banter along the way.

The doorman smiled at me, opened the door for us, and asked my room number. Baby knew the routine and was already reaching in her purse for her identification card. She left it with the guard at the security desk, and we headed for the elevator. Bangkok was busier at night than in the daytime, so we found others waiting for the small elevator and rode up together in a knowing silence—farangs and hookers, avoiding eye contact, playing our games and roles. Baby and I exited at my floor, and I opened the door and put the electronic card (they only have hotel keys in Europe and Motel 6 in the USA I think) into the slot that turned on power in the room. We were alone. Baby took off her shoes and immediately was three inches shorter. When she took off her hat and shook her black hair, she looked three years younger than the twenty-two she told me. She headed for the TV and turned it on, looking for some Thai music. I clearly got the idea that I was not enough to keep her attention very long. As she watched TV, Baby rolled down the mesh stockings and put them in her purse. She started to take off her clothes with the same detached purpose, so I got undressed quickly. I sat next to her on the bed, and we were nearly naked.

She said she was tired and fell back on the bed, her smooth stomach revealing a belly stud. I asked if she wanted a massage, and for the first time her face brightened. She said yes. I started with her feet, massaging her soles, toes, and ankles. Her muffled sighs suggested I was on the right track. Her legs were not muscular, but they had good tone. Now I realized that her legs may ache if she had been walking and standing in high heels the past six hours. Oops, dumbass, why did I assume that I am her first customer tonight?

I rubbed her muscles and massaged her knees. She still had her bra and panties on, so I asked her to roll over. She did, and to my surprise I saw that her entire back was covered in a tattoo. I unhooked her bra, and she slipped her arms out. Now the image was clear: large feathery angel wings covered each of her shoulder blades. In the middle of her back, high on her spine between the wings, were the letters BB in a Gothic script. Ahh, her name is not Baby. She is BB. Nice to meet you, BB, I thought as I sat on her butt and began to massage her right wing. The more I massaged, the more she was reassured that I was okay, maybe old, maybe harmless. The tattoo was sexy because it followed her natural contours, and there were faint colors of blue and gold in the feathers. I slipped her panties off and entered her from behind so I could watch her wings wiggle as we pumped together in rhythm. She was waking up as I put my hand underneath her stomach and pulled her to her knees. Her head was on the bed and her hair was tousled over her face, and I heard her moaning softly as I pushed deeper. Her muffled sounds and grinding turned me on. With one of her little butt cheeks in each hand, I grabbed her and pumped harder until we both came. I lay down on her back and felt the heat of my chest on her wings. Yeah, BB was angelic in many ways.

My heart was beating fast, and I consciously felt it slow down as I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. I looked over at BB. Her eyes were closed, but I didn’t know if she was tired from her day or happy or if she even cared who I was. She was slender, and her body was firm with nice curves. Small boobs, brown skin, long hair—was this just my fantasy? Didn’t think so, not judging from the numbers of farangs in Nana looking for the same thing.

Hey, you okay? I asked.

Ummm, she purred, which could mean she was satisfied, tired, or could not speak English. The silence let me catch my breath, but curiosity and questions quickly filled the void.

Where are you from? I asked, as if boom boom gave me the privilege of getting to know BB better.

Issan, she replied.

Where in Issan? I asked.

Surin, she said.

It was months later that I learned about Surin, elephant capital of Thailand, but it is a typical city in the eastern part of Thailand. It is rural, agrarian, and poor, but it is a genuine small city surrounded by rice farms and mills. Ironically, it is home to more than five thousand farangs who marry Thai women and live in simplified bliss. Old European and Australian guys find a young Thai woman, decide to stay together, maybe marry, maybe have kids, and start a life in rural Thailand, living off the pension from back home. The women move up from poverty, they gain resources for their families, and the farangs live out their fantasies, at least for a while. It is a glimpse of the dreams they share; each depends on the other. For men, it is sex, love, adventure, service, and compliance from a young Asian woman. For women, it is money, security, a car, a home, and family. Win-win. East meets West. Old meets young. It is an odd game for Westerners to understand, but it works in Thailand, where rescues and lifelines sustain hope, and farangs are sometimes the only options to improve their lives that are grooved in traditions of piety and economics of poverty.

BB said a little about Surin and home, and she revealed just enough to show that she was searching for the same lifeline. She wanted a farang to save her, fall in love with her maybe, take her away to a foreign land, live in a nice house, give money to her family, and take care of her parents, because that was her duty. That is what brought her to Bangkok. That was why she was here, in bed with me, to make money to send home to take care of her family in Surin.

How long you stay Bangkok? she asked.

Not sure, three to four days maybe, I said.

She was disappointed, perhaps because I was not going to be a longtime customer, perhaps because I was not going to be the farang who rescued her. She calculated quickly the risk/profit ratio for me while I simply gazed at her amazing tummy.

I go now? she asked, and I assumed the calculation was not in my favor.

My mind raced from No, I want you to stay to Yes, this is ridiculous, go now. I think I was afraid to sleep with her, afraid she would steal my things, afraid I might care for her, afraid I could not make love twice, and afraid I wouldn’t know what to do. Man, I worry about too much crap. So I said, Okay, you go now.

She understood all the thoughts that were not spoken, or at least she understood the implications, so she got up and looked for her clothes. I watched as she put on her tiny black panties and her shaved little pussy disappeared from view. I looked at her sexy body and wondered why she was leaving, but I had no words to tell her to stay. She slipped her dress on and primped herself with eye shadow and lipstick. I wondered if she would go off to look for another customer, and I tried to understand how that felt but could not. Her world was in a different galaxy from mine. I felt foreign, out of place, humiliated, and insignificant. I gave her money and kissed her on the cheek like the stranger that she was, and she went out the door. Then I lay down on the bed and thought, What the hell did I do? What is the matter with me?

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble,

Not much between despair and ecstasy,

One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble,

Can’t be too careful with your company.

—The American, One Night in Bangkok

Chapter 2

If you say that you are mine

I’ll be here ’til the end of time

So you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

—The Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go

I t was noon when I woke up. The Thai sunshine was pouring through the curtains that I had forgotten to close the night before. I was hungover, jet-lagged, and tumble dried by Bangkok. BB was gone, and I felt lonely. I didn’t mind being alone, but I didn’t like to feel lonely. It brought back memories—bad memories and sad times that I tried to forget. So I stayed in bed, too tired to be hungry, and replayed the last few days. BB’s tattoo wings, her cute butt, her soft skin, crazy Sukhumvit Road, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy, and the twenty-two-hour plane ride from Detroit all seemed like a blurry dream from a very long night. I could see it all again now in slow motion.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to flight blah blah blah. Our next stop will be Tokyo, Japan. Fasten your seat belts. Turn off your cell phones and all electronic devices. Stow your luggage in the overhead compartment or in the space below the seat in front of you.

My attention drifted in and out as the stewardess read the airline safety message. I turned off my phone and buckled up. I mechanically obeyed and prepared to depart, but so many questions went through my mind: What am I doing? Have I made the biggest mistake of my life? Can I go back? Where am I headed? I was very confused, but I could not stop the plane, and I could not turn back the hands of time. I made a choice, and now I would learn where it would take me. I stared out the window and watched the ground disappear like my old life, leaving the past behind so fast that it was only a momentary series of images. I felt helpless, afraid, and hopeful, looking back in despair and looking forward in anticipation. I was more anxious and dubious than committed, but I was airborne now, and I was not at all sure where I was headed. I need a drink.

As the plane tracked to the north, I looked out the window and saw snow, Lake Michigan, and the UP of Michigan appear and disappear behind us. The lakes were frozen white with snow; it was the start of winter in Canada. The land, vast forests and bush without footprints, was dark—perhaps green, almost black. Against the blue sky with white clouds, the ground looked like God was playing with black and white finger paint. There were swirls of black amid the moonscapes of white snowy lakes. From forty thousand feet above the silent stretches of endless black and white, it was hard to imagine the animals, trees, fish, snow, and silence below. Northern Canada is the flyway to the Orient, and I watched the wilderness approach and vanish, wondering what it was like at eye level, what it sounded like, what it smelled like, what it felt like to be alone in endless forests and lakes. Maybe it was not much different from being alone at forty thousand feet. Alone is alone and a state of mind as much as a social situation, so it may not matter whether it is a cold Canadian lake or snowy forest or dark cabin of an airplane.

It is what it is. I had heard that banal saying so often, but now it had real meaning for me. I could not change the circumstances; I could not change the course of this plane nor the path I was on. I was brought up with a Protestant work ethic and American virtues, so preoccupied with choices and self-determination that it was hard to see beyond self-control or, at least, hard to give it up. Planning had been my trademark. I wanted to chart my course, and it made me feel in control to know where I was headed. My first wife jokingly called me the planner because I tried to organize my life and chart the future so often. Not so with Thai people. Acceptance and fate may be the opposite of planning. Thai people are so accepting of the uncontrollable future that it amazed me to see them not try to manipulate their futures, not try to argue with forces beyond their control, not fill with anger, guilt, sorrow, and anxiety, because it is what it is.

Acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and the lack of ambition, wanting, jealousy, and contempt are peaceful feelings, maybe Buddhist values maybe Christian principles that I never wore comfortably. It is what it is. Maybe it was fate, maybe destiny, maybe just this life, maybe beyond my comprehension. We travel the same paths again with different emotions, and they become different paths. The journey that looks insurmountable from a distance is only one step at a time close up. We take those steps because we must move forward, not to combat the past, not to forge the future, but simply to be in the present, to savor, to cope with, to endure the moments that we have. It is not an insight as much as a realization or maybe a confession for my past transgressions that cannot be undone. The long journey begins with a single fucking step, because it is what it is—the start, the present, the only thing I can do, and I really had no choice but to take that step, to walk, and possibly to fall down.

I was so outside my own head in this mind-set that I could not tell what was banal and what was insight. I had spent so many hours just thinking about what went wrong with my wife, my life, me, that I wanted, really wanted, to have insight and understanding, but I feared I was stuck in a cycle of the same inward-looking anger, blame, and guilt more than insight. Maybe I saw my life in a new way, but could I understand it? Could I live it? How could I understand people who could not consider futures more than days or weeks ahead in their lives, because there was no food, no water, no money, and no certainty? I wanted to sit down and ponder the difference. I wanted to find acceptance. Me, the guy who had everything, who had planned everything, confronted with ordinary people who had nothing but lived profoundly full and complex lives with grace and dignity that exceeded the selfishness and failure that shrouded me. How did they do it? How could they find peace and comfort and dignity in a life that seemed so desperate from Western perspectives? Could I ever learn to live like that?

I was astounded at how the human spirit preserved dignity in the face of humiliation. It is the dignity that allows a girl to sell her body on the street and still feel honorable. I was transfixed by the beggars who bowed to strangers with begging hands in the hope of making another day pass. I was ashamed of myself and countless others who lived less noble lives and had the audacity to feel maligned, mistreated, or entitled to things we wanted but did not earn. It is what it is. How do we accept our fate with integrity and dignity instead of longing or bitterness or anger? Why should I feel sorry for my circumstances? I made them. It is what is.

For me, the struggle was always to accept what I had done to my family. Could my best friend and wife for twenty-eight years, who had been devastated by me emotionally and psychologically, ever forgive me? Could I ever forgive her for breaking our trust and our marriage? Could my daughters forgive me? Could they accept me? How long would it take to heal my divorce and rebuild trust in my family? Maybe I could never do it. There was so much confusion, so much anger, so much blame, and so much shame. How could I transcend the past mistakes? When I looked back, I felt guilt; when I looked ahead, I was eager to be blind to my past, to create a new life. Was it fantasy or selfishness? Was I fooling myself? Was this possible? A few months ago I was teaching classes at the university, rolling along in a rut that I had dug for myself, trying to regain the family and love we had let slip through our hands. I had lost excitement about my teaching and my marriage. I missed my daughters, who were too engaged with their own lives and friends to need me; I missed my dog, who died after twelve happy years together; and I looked forward to drinking in front of the TV so I could forget what I was missing.

Then I remembered the whole story. Nate. Yeah, that was the guy who changed my life. I wondered if he knew it. I wondered if it changed his life too. I remembered when my wife told me that she loved two men. I remembered the devastation that I felt when I realized that she was infatuated with another man. But there was more. She was pregnant with his child. She did not want to leave him. She wanted to have us both in her life. I could not comprehend it. My world was turned upside down, and I could not see what was tumbling in front of me. I just felt bad—angry, lonely, depressed, and confused. Who could I talk with? Who could I blame? Where should I aim my anger? Who would I kill? What the fuck would I do? That was when I decided to leave, to go as far away as possible from my old life. Escape only looks like a solution when you are too blind to see better alternatives, but my anger and pain were blinding.

I’m so tired but I can’t sleep,

Standin’ on the edge of something much too deep,

It’s funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word,

We are screaming inside, but we can’t be heard.

—Sarah McLachlan, I Will Remember You

The flight from Detroit to Tokyo was more than thirteen hours, and we arrived a day later because we crossed the International Date Line on the way. The layover to the next stop was only an hour or two if you were headed to Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, or Bangkok. My seven-hour trip to Bangkok seemed short in comparison to the thirteen-hour leg, and the plane arrived just before midnight at the new Suvarnabhumi Airport (pronounced soo-wanna-boom because many of the English letters in the translation are silent, but it is not easy to tell which ones). Being disoriented by language, time, and culture was only the beginning.

The old Don Mueang Airport north of Bangkok was familiar and adequate to world travelers for years, but when Mr. Thaksin Shinawatra was prime minister, he decided to build a huge new airport east of Bangkok. Suspicions about who owned the swampy land and who got wealthy from the decision made for recurrent political discussions in Thailand, because corruption is endemic to politics in the developing world. As one political candidate said before the election, corruption in government is like influenza but some people want to portray it as bird flu. What he really meant was that graft was part of doing business in Thailand and was neither fatal nor unusual. So the new airport is an architecturally stunning structure filled with so many shops that it looks more like a mall than an airport. It also has long walks to immigration checkpoints, with the usual long lines followed by a warehouse of baggage claims and frenzy of taxi services outside. Progress comes in many flavors; corruption is the cherry on top.

I managed to navigate the immigration, baggage claim, and taxi drivers, but it took more than an hour. That meant I would not arrive at my Bangkok hotel until 1:00 a.m. Like most travelers who arrive on this twenty-four-hour odyssey, my body did not know the day or time zone, so it was impossible to check in and go right to sleep. Worse yet, my head was echoing several movies I had watched on the plane, and my stomach was trying to forget the chicken whatever in tinfoil along with the vodka tonic before dinner, the red wine with dinner, and the Jack Daniel’s after dinner. I needed a walk and some fresh air. And that was how I ended up in Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza my first night in Bangkok. The walk satisfied my restlessness and curiosity, and BB satisfied everything else.

You can’t always get what you want,

But if you try sometimes, you just might find

You get what you need.

—The Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Now I had been in Bangkok for two days, and I was adjusting slowly. I still could not sleep much at night, but I felt less anxious, maybe because I finally made a decision and stuck with it right through the rethinking, doubting, worrying, and second-guessing that had always been my style. I needed to look ahead and not back now. Duh. Did I have another choice? It is what it is.

I finally got bored replaying the past and wallowing in my melancholy and decided to explore Bangkok. I must have walked two hours when I stopped for a foot massage. That is probably the greatest bargain in Thailand: two hundred baht, or six US dollars, for an hour of massaging tired feet, calves, and shoulders. Yeah, a foot massage actually includes a lot more, but it was all legitimate, no happy endings, and after you have one, you’ll be hooked for life. If I could only import that to America for Saturdays or football stadiums or any mall where men could sit and get a foot massage while women shopped, I’d probably be a zillionaire. But some things don’t cross cultures very well, and roundabouts and foot massages are two sad examples. Maybe that is why expats find their own niches in foreign places and borrow whatever bits of new cultures fit together with their old habits and cobble them together in their new lives in new countries. It was something I needed to learn.

So, how do you start a new life? How do you forget the family routines of twenty-eight years and invent new ones all by yourself? How do you turn the clock back and start over? Well, I did try to dye the gray out of my hair, and to my chagrin, I had the darkest-brown hair I ever had in my life. It did not look like me in the mirror, and I could not find a lighter-color hair dye, so I was going to have to wait until the gray grew back, and that could be an interesting color shift about halfway through. I should have taken a photo, but I was actually embarrassed. Good thing I didn’t know anyone, but I was still self-conscious. Guess I was used to the gray look, but it was gone now, along with mowing the lawn, playing with my dog, golfing with my friends, and eating dinner with my daughters.

Sunday started out great. I woke up and started thinking about writing. My overdue book chapter was at the top of the list, so here was a positive step. Not sure if I’d stick with it, but hey, Michelle, the therapist, said it was a good idea to work, and maybe it would help me be reflective. She said I needed to focus on one thing at a time and that work should be a priority. This was a good suggestion, not that I couldn’t figure it out on my own or that you needed a degree in psychology to tell people that they ought to do their job, but it was helpful for blithering idiots like me who lost sight of common sense. Yeah, she also said I should stop drinking. Maybe that was why I quit going to Michelle for therapy.

Anyway, I took a walk at 6:00 a.m. and saw a few joggers, a few old hookers still trying to entice the pathetic guys wandering around, and many street vendors either setting up or closing up their carts. They were incredible to me for the daily amount of work that they did to move their carts, set up their goods or kitchens and food, sell for long hours into the night, and then do it again the next day, and the next. It made me feel lazy, indulged, spoiled, and unappreciative to watch people in the developing world struggle to earn basic necessities.

Thai people are usually polite, reserved, and hardworking—at least to the outside foreigners—and they work hard for modest wages. I heard that the average daily wage is four to five dollars, but like all nations, there are huge discrepancies between the haves and have-nots. The farmers in Issan make just enough to survive, which is why their daughters come to Bangkok to sell themselves, or at least rent themselves for the short term. It is commodification of sex, and from an economic perspective, it makes sense for Westerners in Thailand to buy sex, but it is sad for the girls, their parents, and their children whom they leave in the provinces to live with their parents. I suppose it is a common historical theme, looking for money, whether it is a gold rush, pirates, prostitutes, explorers, innovators, or consultants—they are all looking for money and opportunities, and trying to take advantage of circumstances, to get ahead. Commodification of sex and profiteering are so at odds with traditional Thai values that they pull at the fabric of families and culture, but money talks and losers walk, so young people in developing countries learn to chase the money.

Well, the hard part to believe (and culture shock was not it) was that I went to three malls today. I decided to walk away from Sukhumvit Road to see what life was like beyond the seamy side. Wow. I went past the American and Vietnamese Embassies on Wireless Road and past Lumpini Park, and then I went left a long way on Asoke Road until I came back to Sukhumvit Road. It was amazing to see so many motorbikes with two or three, sometimes four, people on them, and many were carrying bags of food, fruit, and goods to sell. The sun was hot, and most people seemed to cover up, stay in the shade, and work at a slower pace. Yes, I reminded myself that I was in the tropics for sure. I went up Sukhumvit Road past Nana on Soi 2 to Ploenchit Road, and I discovered a shrine of Buddha with a very public ceremony. The music was playing, and female dancers in beautiful gold costumes were dancing (the fingers stretching and curving were amazing), so I stopped and watched. Then I found a bench with a seat in the shade, and I watched the folks kneel, pray, and offer flowers and incense as they walked around the shrine and repeated the same gestures at least to all four sides of the four-headed Buddha.

No, I did not understand it all, but I read about Prince Suddhartha and I recalled the novel by Hermann Hesse that moved me years ago and helped me cope with the loss of my son—at least it was a loss from my life when I got divorced the first time. My first marriage was to my high-school sweetheart, and I persistently chased her through college even when we were hundreds of miles apart. She was the focus of my life, and I hardly dated any other women in college so when we finally were married at twenty-two years of age, we were both happy and naïve. Our marriage lasted six years until a cute graduate student pulled my heartstrings and my dick in a new direction. Maybe if I had more experiences growing up I would not have been mesmerized by someone new, but I was, and I did not know how to stop until I crashed and burned that life. Jake was two years old when I packed up our things and helped move my ex-wife to another state. Suddhartha’s journey of wandering, sacrifice, and enlightment gave me strength, just like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance let me see that my pain was familiar to many men. These memories went through my mind as I watched the people dance and pray.

The incense was overwhelming and pungent as it wafted in the wind. The shrine was piled so high with flowers that attendants, all men in uniforms, removed them every ten minutes or shifted them so new ones could be added. I studied the people and was fascinated by the children praying, the devoutness and sincerity of the women who took off their shoes and gave deep wais (bows) with closed eyes and appeared to make fervent prayers—for what, I’ll never know—but the hopefulness and sincerity were palpable. I almost felt guilty for not praying and not making an offering, but farangs looked out of place and their motives may be questioned, so I watched and wondered and thought good thoughts about the people who prayed there today. I hoped their prayers were answered. I wished I knew what to pray for.

A few more blocks brought me to an area of better office buildings and shopping malls—and I mean malls, because they were huge; Central mall, Big C, and Siam Paragon, and later MBK. The Central mall had a sign that said, 7 is for Heaven, so I followed everyone up the escalators to the top floor and was blown away. Restaurants, so many and so many types, that you could eat anything you wanted: American cheeseburgers in the Garage, yakitori Japanese cooking, sushi at Mount Fuji, a Korean grill, Chinese chicken rice, and Swiss fondue—all that and more. Then I found the supermarket approach, many little booths with specialties in each one—sausage in one, sweets in another, and fish balls in another. Yes, I had plah (fish) and salmon balls deep-fried on bamboo skewers (four to a skewer) thrown in a plastic bag with sweet sauce. Tau rai krup? (How much?) Twenty baht, or about sixty US cents. Yes, I was in heaven because cheap and fast trumped everything in food for me.

Why was I such a novice in a mall? Probably because I’d avoided them most of my life, endured them with my daughters for years, but now that I was here, it was like an eighteenth-century person seeing twenty-first-century electronics and fashions for the first time. On the first floor were Coach, Bvlgari, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Cartier, Montblanc, and on every floor there were incredible specialized shops. These were not like malls in Singapore and Hong Kong, where you were scrunched among thousands of scurrying shoppers; they had clean, marble floors with huge ceilings and spacious open areas with fountains and plants and shoppers strolling leisurely among the special exhibits, play spaces for toddlers, restaurants, and benches to sit on. Not only were the crowds thinner, the prices were lower. Did I mention the cinemas on the top floors? Did I describe the coolest invention in a food court? When I entered the food court, I got a large plastic ticket with a bar code. I wandered around and ordered food, and the attendant simply scanned in the price into my ticket. When I left, the cashier scanned my ticket and collected my money. Isn’t that clever? It’s another good idea that should jump cultures.

So, I ended up in the MBK mall, the last stop on the BTS Skytrain, but it was surely the oldest and most densely packed mall, and mostly for electronics. I stared up at the interior vestibule, seven stories of shops and escalators. Clothes were on floor two, gold and jewelry on floor three, cell phones on floor four, and cameras on floor five. Everything was categorized for convenience, but there were so many small shops that shoppers wandered and gawked. Imagine glass counters one hundred feet long, with one row on each side of an aisle. Now double that, because it had two sides around the escalators. Then double it again, because there was another aisle. Now every ten feet of those glass counters belonged to a different person and was essentially a different shop. So, if you wanted to buy a phone, there were literally a hundred merchants selling phones. I just could not figure out which counter to approach to buy something. I asked a few people, and they all were enthusiastic and eager to offer deals. If they did not have a particular model or color, they motioned down the aisle to someone who did.

Yes, the buying/selling of redundant merchandise in cramped quarters is a time-honored profession, and Thais are really into it. No Walmarts, Kmarts, or Best Buys here, because every family depends on selling wares in a small shop, whether it is fish at the market, souvenirs to tourists, or phones in MBK. I am learning that microeconomics of the developing world is about people finding a way to live off the margin of upselling some goods or services. Phones and sex are near the top of the list in Bangkok.

I bought a cheap Thai phone, a Thai SIM card, and a top-up card for three hundred baht. I felt more fully dressed with a phone in the back pocket of my jeans. It was a good day for me. I learned how to ride the Skytrain, learned to read the zone charts, and learned how to pay the right fare, by watching other people navigate the ticket machines. I even learned to get off at Siam Station to transfer to the green line so I could get back to the Nana exit. I almost did not make that one. I was feeling more connected to Thailand with every day I was here. It is what it is.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road,

Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go,

So make the best of this test, and don’t ask why,

It’s not a question, but a lesson learned in time.

—Green Day, Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)

Chapter 3

In the arms of an angel

Fly away from here,

From this dark cold hotel room

And the endlessness that you fear.

—Sarah McLachlan, Angel

A month before I left the United States, I began searching the Internet for Thai women. Why? Because a close friend and colleague who got divorced said she found the man of her dreams on Match.com. Hell, if it worked for her, maybe it would work for me too. Initially I was curious, but the Internet revealed more websites than I had imagined, including potential brides from every country in Asia, porn in thirty-three flavors, and everything related to marriage, dating, and sex. I joined one that looked respectable (is that possible?) and began searching and contacting women for potential dates in Asia. I don’t know if it was my caption or my age or my photo, but my mailbox was not overflowing. Of course, I was picky, trying to find women with cute photos who also had a good education, spoke English, and seemed normal. I avoided contacting women with screen names such as superpussy—just call me old-fashioned, I guess. I received a few autoreplies from the best-looking women who must have been inundated with e-mail so they set up autoreplies to save time. I also got a lot of long-delayed replies and a few outright rejections. What kept me going though were the genuine replies of interest from people who were hoping that someone nice was out in cyberspace and this wacky way of meeting might actually work. That was how I met Kay.

Her profile said she was twenty-eight years old, a college graduate, and a lonely girl in Bangkok looking for a man to be her friend. Even I knew this was a request for money, but at least it was subtle. She described herself briefly and in plain terms, but her partially obscured photo revealed half of a nice smile and potentially cute curves around her waist. There was an air of privacy and mystery about her, but she did reply to my first message. She knew I was an American professor, and she knew I was going to visit Thailand for a few weeks. She also saw my photo and knew my age, so I must have passed the minimal standards test.

Her first message was brief, a bit flighty, and I could not tell how well she spoke English, but it was better than the replies of many other women who clearly revealed only beginning English language skills. So I wrote back to Kay and tried to start a conversation about my job and her job, to express an interest but not look like a cyberstalker. This anonymous chatting was new to me, exciting, uncertain, and probably a bit bumbling, but each time she replied, I was hoping we were building a connection. It was about the fifth message that I let my guard down and told her how eager I was to meet her. In fact, I said, Why am I missing you so much when we have not even met yet?

She replied, Maybe you wish for so much that you will be disappointed?

Boy, that was insightful. Now I knew that she was intelligent, perhaps defensive, and definitely calculating whether she wanted to meet me. I gave her my e-mail address so we could correspond more easily, and we began to exchange messages there. Next, I asked if we could meet, but her schedule was full. I could not tell if she was stalling, lying, or really trying to arrange a date. Only the day before I left America did we confirm that we would meet three days after I got to Bangkok, when she would be in town. Her e-mail did say though, Have a safe plane ride, and think about the things you want to do to me. Good message, but it did not help me sleep at all.

Kay would not give me her phone number, so we relied on e-mail, but she had gone home for the weekend and only e-mailed me Monday afternoon that she would meet me