No Class

Last Monday I was riding my motorbike through town; I was on a street called Huay Kaew, which is a fast road that goes up into the mountains. I was just past the Central shopping mall in town when I glanced over to my right and saw something that sent a quick gasp of surprise and realization through me. In the reflection of the Import Clothing store wall-sized windows was a guy on a motorbike, with suit pants pulled up at the ankles by the acute angle of the legs in the driving position, a striped patterned shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a red silk tie flapping over the left shoulder -- holy shit, I'm a teacher.

At Will's request I've taken up a couple of classes at a small English school near his apartment. My professional get-up is the uniform of the Chiang Mai teacher-class, a collective of liberal arts students, maladjusted adolescent-minded adults, and French-Canadians. It is a unique group in that they have adjusted to a style of living in Chiang Mai that does not include frequenting the sin-traps, sticking instead to Thai-nightclubs, and having carved out a niche of assumed sophistication. I appreciate the group for the opportunity for some kind of intellectual stimulation, but scorn it for its inability to provide for me a strip-club buddy -- for that I'm better off asking my mother.

*Just a thought on strip-clubs -- I love strip-clubs and although I like seeing women squirming around in their nothing-at-alls, there is something more to the atmosphere that I can really get into. Mostly it's the perfect place for people watching, and strip-clubs are basically a who's who of the sexually and socially frustrated -- the "wrong crowd" that I have a knack for falling in with. I hope to one day own my own club and conduct my business in an upstairs office; when my Chinese business partners come to town they can meet me down at the club and we could do our arms trading while drinking Chivas and watching 'Lexus' do the crabwalk to "Hungry Eyes." Of course, I'll have to use one of the girls as a numbers runner, which inevitably gets her kidnapped -- little do I know that she is Steven Seagal's estranged niece. When he shows up he's probably going to Akido all over my hired goons and then I'll be ruined.

So my first class is a trio of 15 year olds. I was pretty nervous my first day so I brought a bandana/handkerchief with me. I was sweating like the Guidance Counselor at my old elementary school -- Mr. Bundy. He used to stand in front of an auditorium full of students and alternate between furiously mopping his forehead with his handkerchief and drinking a Diet Coke while repeating : "you kids got to learn... some self control!" Despite my manic sweating I managed to control myself and speak very very slowly, which is not easy for me to do. I also try to enforce the American way, rather than the British system which the book proffers.

We go through the lesson book which has little stories about people doing whacky things: a woman who lives on an airplane, a guy with 13 jobs, etc. I've been trying to make things a little bit more interesting than just sticking to the book allows. In a picture of a guy offering a woman some champagne I tried to encourage the students' imagination a bit:

"Do you think there's something going on between Bob and Helen? -- maybe they're a little bit more than friends?"

"Maybe Bob is trying to help Helen relax -- get in the mood?"

"Is Bob a bad man or just lonely?"

"Is this illegal?"

But they don't seem to get it and just stare at me blankly, which I remember doing to my own language teachers quite a bit. Now I get it. It doesn't get me down, I keep going through my routine and imagine that I'm Rodney Dangerfield with a tough crowd.



I'm working on a version of Hollywood Squares to play with my second class -- made up of 6 university girls -- but I don't think the game will have the same appeal without Gilbert Godfrey or Bruce Vilanch.


**Oh boy, do I have problems: My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist -- the kid couldn't help me at all!** --Rodney

Songkran Chapters 4&5: Washout

Surprise surprise, the last two days of Songkran were a hell of a lot like the first three. It was wet, it was dangerous and intense in its exhaustive redundancy.

Yesterday’s low-point was definitely the ladyboy debacle. I was riding in the bed of a pickup truck driven by ‘the judge’ – the owner of my guesthouse. Our barrel of water was nearly empty and I had nothing to combat the drunk ladyboys a few trucks over. Neither car was moving due to the splash-traffic so we were being bombarded with cold water from the she-males. There were about ten of them in or around their pick-up truck. They also had remarkable tits. Thailand apparently does some good plastic surgery and seeing as there was nothing but a thin layer of white t-shirt covering these male-bags it was evident that someone had done a quality job. Anyhow, I snuck over to their truck so I could sneak attack them with their own water. But as soon as I got close to the truck they grabbed me and molested me with their enormous hands, in an iron Muay Thai grip that I couldn’t escape.

They touched me. Repeatedly.

Almost ruined my day, but hakuna mattata, I guess that’s life.
Today, was the stunning conclusion. I was still shell-shocked this morning and it took me a very long time to work up the will to go outside. Simply walking to breakfast is signing a commitment to being wet for the rest of the day. You can’t do things like buy a newspaper because it wouldn’t make it more than 3 seconds before becoming wet-pulp, which means there was nothing to know about the world except that it was a wet wild place.

So, with a friend of mine from the guesthouse, one of the travelers who came in for the week, I finally convinced myself to go out. We walked to the moat and found a beer stand in front of which we stood for a few hours King-of-the-Hilling it, Singha after Singha, spraying the truck loads of party-goers that drove by.

Eventually, towards the end of the day, we decided to go for a tuk-tuk ride and seven of us piled into a three person vehicle. The tuk-tuk, for clarification, is a three wheeled vehicle, basically a converted motorcycle with a bench on the back. Our driver had found a way to make the vehicle bounce like a low-rider on hydraulics, so as we pulled up in front of any bar with sound system, we bounced the fucker and showed off our go-go moves.

And so we said a misty-eyed goodnight to a fantastic week-long party.

Happy New Year Thailand, here’s to 2549 more.

Songkran Chapter 3: Blood in the Water

I spent the third day of Songkran with my Thai friends Ball and Ying, who just graduated from Chiang Mai University. They explained to me that this used to be a gentler festival and that I should really say thank you when somebody pours water on me because that means they’re saying happy birthday; I found this emotionally difficult to execute when I got fire-hosed in the face by a fat guy dressed like Robocop.

The name of the game is redundancy. This festival is in fact the same thing every day, and the city gets wetter and wetter. But people can’t keep from going about their normal routine, so they just adjust to the fact that life is now wet. We are, for the most part, now in an aqueous world. There are muddy footprints leading into every restaurant and a warm puddle on every seat from where some completely drenched patron, tee-shirt heavy and hanging to his knees, cargo pockets sloshing full of water, once sat. Money is no longer shuffled in wallets but peeled off of soggy rolls.

The magnitude of the festival has increased. The girly bars have set up gigantic speakers and little stages so that their girls and their customers can shake their booties to club Reggae and Gasolina. There is more of a mardi gras feel to the place.

There was also a little parade yesterday, aside from the informal parade of ladyboys in pickup trucks around the moat. Different temples carried their gold Buddha statues around while the folks around splashed water and some kind of scented oil on them. These were followed by a drum and flute group who rocked out as a woman danced and twirled knives around. We were careful not to splash her with scented oil.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing this rumor that 100 people (more by now) have already died this Songkran. People do die, but I doubt that this high fatality rate is entirely true. I have seen some injuries: bruised noses, black eyes, scrapes and limps. But the thing about the festival is that people know that there is some crazy shit going on. How do you go and die when you know that there’s this much crazy shit happening? That’s crazy enough in itself.
And that’s my final thought.

Songkran Chapter 2: The Soakening

The second day of the Thai new year has left me feeling totally wet, parially whacky, but mostly exhausted. I’m currently licking my wounds which include a banged up knee and a couple of fire-ant bites. After being repeatedly and relentlessly doused with 800 year old moat water I have also decided to pop a Cipro just in case some mythical Thai bacteria is unsheathing its ceremonial sword in my intestines.

I spent a couple of hours circling the moat in the back of a Tuk Tuk with a few friends from the guesthouse. I was armed with a pump action gun that quickly broke. Luckily its replacement, another pump action with five lateral squirt holes, worked just fine. In fact, with the rake of water that it sprayed I had the option of either moistening an entire group of people or, by turning the gun sideways, soaking just one from head to toe. Of course, the gun is no match for a plastic bucket full of ice water which was a real favorite among those parading around in the back of pickup trucks.

It was all out war of course. Even the child monks unarmed in their safron robes were not safe in the bed of their own truck. It’s amazing how much fun dumping water on strangers is. I never got tired of it. I even started offering some folks the choice of the blue bucket or the green bucket and then proceeded to give them both.

While walking around by the moat during my second expedition I looked out along the banks to see thousands of little plastic buckets being tossed into the water on strings and hauled back in. It was like watching a desperate and disorganized chain gang: little buckets splashing down, being pulled in, and immediately thrown into the street on whatever car, motorbike, or passerby happened to be in the range of its filthy spray. There is something mechanical and yet completely chaotic about this process -- like THE UNIVERSE.

And the Thai people, rightfully, love getting us foreigners. I was walking down the alley this morning, after being gang-soaked by the waitresses at my favorite breakfast place, when I heard some children shouting the Thai word for honky, the little squirts chased me down the alley and had me begging for mercy at the bend in the road. They ran out of water and were embarassed my tears and eventually left -- I swore revenge and dragged my soggy ass home.

Of course, the honkys get totally carried away and the doors to the macho monkey show are blown wide open. I watched as some fridgenormous Scottish guys tackled each other into the moat; when they grew tired of that, they started tossing each other’s girlfriends into the moat, guffawing and cracking open beers, tossing buckets of water into the face masks of passing motorbikes.

What was probably once a decent holiday of respect and ablution somewhere along the line got a shot to the face from a plastic water gun and became an irreverent psycho swamp party.

Songkran Chapter 1

Today was the first official day of the Songkran festival. The tiny water guns and hoses that had been appearing on sale at street shops and in the hands of children over the past few weeks are now the 45 gallon barrels carted around in the beds of pick-up trucks full of howling hooting shirtless Thai men, dousing every motorbike driver and especially every white person they see. If that white person happens to have breasts, well, they’re really gonna get it.

This is the Thai new year. I don’t know what it means, all I know is that the moat is now lined with an arsenal of people devastating each other with its filthy water. I drove around on my bike, being careful to avoid the main splashways and only getting a few water gun pissings on my route through the center of town.

Tour buses of all kinds are bringing in Thai country people and youngins from Bangkok to get wet and whacky. Thai country people, by the way, are the spitting image of American rednecks. They drive big Ford pickup trucks, they listen to their own kind of country music and they chew tobacco. Now they’re coming into Chiang Mai and turning the old city into the infield at the Indy 500 – a beer glutted and soggy splash-all. The folks on the street are actually opening people’s car doors and throwing water in at the drivers. It is fucking fantastic, and it goes on for five days. I couldn’t be more excited

I’m learning quickly how to survive this thing. My natural spidey-sense paranoia is not enough. When driving around I look for three things: a group of shirtless wet people standing on the sidewalk being suspicious; wet spots on the road indicating past warfare; and children. Children can be so cruel and I can just imagine how I would have acted if there was a holliday in the States that was basically just a no-holds-barred water fight. I was walking around and a kid just followed me shooting a steady stream of ice water at my lower back, a laughing little psycho newt. Tomorrow I’m going to get those little bastards back. There will be tears.

I’m also on the hunt for Thailand’s biggest fireworks and have recruited my retired Thai judge friend in the process. Together we will blow shit up in celebration of the New Year or the harvest moon, or the equinox or something.

I will keep y’all updated on everything that goes down. Tomorrow I’ll be out in the crowds for sure and the next day I think we’ll have a pickup truck for our own mobile command unit. I am also looking for the biggest baddest fuck-all water gun – you know, the one that the neighbor’s kid has.

This is the best of Thailand, when people here party they really do it to exhaustion and without the slightest care for public safety. The intensity of the fun and fear of it so outweighs the tight-security, Tony Danza hosted, 1812 overture of a holiday that we call the Fourth of July. Which I will be back in time to gripe about first-hand.

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.

Bar Girl's Picnic

If you go out in the street tonight you're in for a big suprise
every easy girl you know is through with you awful guys

for ever whore that ever there was
is on a break tonight because
tonight's the night the bar girls have their picnic

They don't give a fuck if you're rich or not, they don't want to see your tattoo
you can't even soften them up because no one is selling booze

No alcohol on election day
so angry drunks can vote Thaksin away
today's the day the bar girls have their picnic

Yep, it was fake election day yesterday. Continuous protests have been taking place in Bangkok for the last few months to get rid of Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin because he's kind of a greedy bastard. To make sure people voted, all restaurants and bars were closed last night. This of course put the many bar girls out of the job for a night, so they took their makeup off and had dinner together at the food stands, or strolled along the moat together and laughed at their desperate and horny clients frantically looking for a hole to plug.

And by 12 o'clock they all went to bed because they're tired little hoes

April Abandoned

Chiang Mai greeted my flight from Kuala Lumpur with a dense blanket of filthy nicotine-yellow haze. The cab driver told me that they had been burning the mountain this time of year -- which I assume means clearing the underbrush. The entire city was half choked with smoke and even during daylight I couldn't see the mountains from my balcony. So we planned a camping trip to the burning mountains to get above the smoke.

From Doi Pui, which in Thai literally means Pui Mountain, Will, Liz and I looked out over the gray of the city. As the sun set, the gray turned cafe au lait creamy, and as the city lights lit one by one, it was as if watching a Polaroid picture develop, and the city slowly outlined itself -- the square of the moat, the eliptical lakes, the barren stretch of the airport. The air was cool, dark and quiet as we sat by the fire drinking tall Singha beers and smoking Dunhills. All we were missing was the harmonica to soundtrack us as we wondered whethere there were any wild tigers left in thailand; the decision that there weren't didn't stop any of us from jumping a nerve every time a stick cracked in the distance.

There has been a rapid non-tiger related evacuation of tourists and expats from Chiang Mai. Maybe called back to their Nordic homes to resume a life with pockets full of small change and responsibility. This of course means that the generations of expats without a normal world to return to, remain here and continue to soak in their own atavistic depravity. A bald guy in a sarong buys soy milk and 100 pipers scotch in an ultra-modern fluorescent-lit grocery store. Why do they dress and act this way here in Thailand? The Thai people never dress as the androgynous tatterdemalion -- the inspiration comes from somewhere else, perhaps a separate cultural force but then again, culture cannot explain such grotesque and sudden mutation.

It's the expat gene.

I'm convinced now that the gene, when active, essentially dopes the host body into a delusive state. The concept of time is lost along with that of hygiene and the ability to censor one's own use of the N-Word in the presence of those who find it terribly offensive. Honestly, I didn't think people still said that word. The gene's doping, which is chemical in nature, coincides with a release of pheremones, which help the carriers identify fellow expats: in recognition, the individual will look at one of his own with a half-nod and grim smirk, a look that says "you know everything i know, we speak the same language brother, we have no secrets, I too will have a Chang beer, later, i would fancy a bantering idiotic conversation in a British accent devoid of consonants."

Exhibit A would be the man I played pool with the other night who was about two drinks away from a wheel chair you move with your tongue. His effort to pull the cue back to take a shot would either dislodge the stick from the knuckle he was balancing on, or pull him two stumbling steps back away from the table. I couldn't understand a word he said, but when he scratched a shot, or totally miscued, he still had the ability to look at me in a cocky way that said "that is really unlike me to miss that shot" my only response was to look back at him in a way that said "do you need a bucket?" But he didn't barf. And eventually I scratched on the eight ball entirely because he left every single one of his balls on the table leaving too many obstacles. He won by losing.

Maybe that's a good expat slogan: "Be a loser and win!"

Of course, not everybody has the balls to do it.