Highway to the Safety Zone

Yesterday I found myself soaking in the sulfurous stink of a hot-spring hot-tub in an obscure tiny Thai village off the main highway north to Chiang Rai. This was one of the spots that my buddy Billy discovered on his motorbike rides. When you're in an unknown land, turning left is as good a choice as turning right, and that's how he finds things. Another trick: satellite dishes always point south. This keeps you from getting lost, of course if you're somewhere without satellite dishes, you are probably also somewhere where people don't speak English. So, double-fucked.


We were supposed to be going on this jaunt with a few other people but they found that task of waking up before 10 am a bit too daunting and chose to rub their bleary eyes over a 1pm Mexican Breakfast at the cafe down the alley... same as last -- wait, what day is it? Anyway, it's better that way, that Canadian couple we were supposed to give rides to were some serious chunkies and I'm not sure my suspension could have handled that.

So it ended up just being the two of us.

We took the highway Northwest, the direction of the Burmese border. I'd done the trip on visa-runs in a minivan, but never out on the bike. Along the way we passed a gigantic open fire which was devouring the brambles and brush along the side of the road and throwing up enormous columns of smoke. It seemed pretty out of control and with the wind kicking up, not much end in sight. I looked at the Thai lady standing on her front yard across the street from the fire to see if she was concerned at all, but she looked back at me as if she hadn't noticed. So we drove on.

Honestly I'd be more surprised to see firemen than a fire out here. When an apartment in Will and Liz's building went ablaze the firemen showed up and stood around taking pictures with their camera phones and smoking cigarettes. A couple of tenants ended up putting it out.

Anyhow, Billy and I ended up at a tiny compound of concrete and wood structures, linked by unsteady bamboo bridges which crossed hot stink streams. We bought some ice tea at a kiosk that also sold eggs you could boil in the springs, if so inclined.

We went into separate tubs in separate rooms and boiled our own eggs... Billy kept hollering at me through the wall, telling me stories of his friends getting hustled by bar girls:

"The going rate for a girlfriend here is about 35 bucks a month, but on top of that you got to pay for her sister's baby, her families land, shit, she probably got a husband back in her village sent her down to Chiang Mai just to send some cash back."

He told me about the various fights he's been in:

"I told this big German fuck that by the time he woke up he'd think he'd been sucking Hitler's dick"

"Hitler's dick? where'd you get that from?"

"I don't know... just came to me."

After the baths we went to get massages next door. Maybe now's the time to point out that all together, this treatment cost us $3.50. The room is wide open to the farms and fields outside and we can hear cows moo while we're being massaged, a bird even flies through the door and out a window.

The massage hut is also a school that trains blind girls to give massages. Billy got the blind girl, I got the teacher. Billy is stretched out like a big white whale as a small milky-eyed Thai girl kneads him and kung-fu's his body. But even the great rub-down can't silence the man:

"See, people don't realize how little it takes to be happy. They think they need a big car, a big house. Hell, when I made 70,000 a year -- that's ON the books, who knows what all else I took in -- I thought that nothing was better than a 14 dollar steak. But while you're working, you're always working. Always thinking. Out here, I have nothing but time. Time to do whatever I want whenever I want. Guys come out here for 2 weeks -- they work their asses off just to get two weeks away from work. I live here all year, and on $560 a month from my social security. I couldn't live on that chickenshit if I was back in LA, not in any neighborhood you can go out at night in. Here I got a bike, a nice room, I can get a girl any time I want to. I live like a king."

All this time I'm being twisted into bizarre shapes and the woman is showing me with her hands that she can control the flow of blood to my heart... super, right? She pushed above my abdomen and lets a rush go into my heart -- just to prove she could have killed me if she wanted to. Then she puts my legs behind my head and steps on my eggs.

Massage time was over.

Relaxed noodle-like we take the long way back to Chiang Mai.

Damned if I don't love that motorbike, meanwhile. It's great to take those rolling country roads while screaming "Highway to the Danger Zone" into my helmet. I'm working on my fishtail now, pretty much just have to brake real hard with the back tire.

June. June and that's it. I promise.