Home Bangkok Pattaya River Kwai and Rose Garden Patpong Top Man Club Patpong Map Spirit Festivals AmazingLinks
While enjoying this story, listen to Beau sing Mai
Pen Rai, if you wish.
A boy's
name in Thai, courtesy of
Parn.
One of the boys I met was a 19-year old heart breaker. During the week, the word I used to best describe him was "genuine." In no way do I believe he was phony. The way he said good-bye to me, standing and waving (like the kid at the end of the western movie SHANE) as I eased through the crowded alley tells me that. We had begun a friendship that was ended when it should only have been beginning. I was honored whenTon invited me one day to visit his home. These are my observations:
We met at a bar at 4:30 p.m. and taxied through the jammed streets to what I could describe, I guess, as his barrio. We left the taxi and walked down a narrow alley crowded with improvised food stalls, running kids, dogs and other four-legged denizens. We emerged and continued along a narrow cement walkway towards the "apartments." On one side was a concrete structure of several stories, housing families. These were the more well off neighbors. On the other side of the walkway was a ramshackle conglomerate of battered shacks. Two-ply plywood held together with nails and 2 x 4s. Inside each 10x 16 foot home was one room with plumbing further down the alley.
After leaving our shoes outside, we stepped over the threshold into my friend's space that he shared with two other young men. My first impression was of a room spic and span compared to the dump outside. The only furniture was a double bed, which absorbed 2/3 of the rectangle. No top sheet, just a clean under sheet, ends tucked neatly in place. Behind the bed, a shelf held a dozen or more stuffed toy animals--dogs, cats, rabbits. These belonged to the boy, not his roommates. Five photos of my friend were arranged below, tacked into the wall. The Polaroid snapshot I had taken the day before was placed directly in the middle.
Everything about the humble home was tidy. Another set of shelves contained personal products, razors, hand crème, bobby pins. On the side wall ran planks holding the cooking and eating utensils. Several plastic bowls and metal pans were stacked in columns, upside down so flies couldn't scamper about inside the dishes. The only foodstuff I saw was a small bunch of bananas.
"Where do you cook?" I asked.
"Out there," Joe, who spoke some English, gestured to the narrow walkway and its parade of neighbors. "Or, sometimes in here on the floor."
The image of a conflagration waiting to happen flashed through my mind.
Through the open door, I saw a ball of white puppy fluff stop to pee before moving on. Moments later, a much larger rat slipped along in the gutter, pausing to sniff each piece of garbage for its possible nutritional value. Passersby ignored it. Just another pedestrian.
Near the door, on the shelf above the dishes was my friend's prize possession, an adornment shared by all the boys--a surprisingly large aquarium that was the spotless home to a dozen goldfish. The 20-gallon tank was well lighted and an energetic filter system bubbled away. Often, I remembered, as we walked and talked along Silom, the boy would stop at a store and stare at three lonely fish flitting about despondently in a small aquarium. Now I knew why. He had his own, superior home for happier pets.
I imagined the three young men, turning in at 3 or 4 am, after another night's work, the room only illuminated by the fish tank. The colorful inhabitants, flitting and dodging back and forth to provide a tension-easing mental massage on the young men who waited for sleep to envelop them.
Home Bangkok Pattaya River Kwai and Rose Garden Patpong Top Man Club Patpong Map Spirit Festivals Amazing Links
Copyright Mike Williams, 1999. All rights reserved. Email Mike at sanukthai@hotmail.com
Last updated: November 25, 1999.
