LINGERING IN BANGKOK

Bangkok's Sky Train courtesy of Wikipedia

It didn’t feel like he lived here anymore; although he had tried hard enough in a number of different locations to make it work. He was just lingering in Bangkok; trying to sort out his next moves. “You’re lost, aren’t you?” another Australian asked, and he nodded, yes. A few hours later yet another Australian made exactly the same observation. And once again he agreed.

His mind was in overdrive thinking of ways to make a substantial amount of cash in a hurry.

The best option, which he had no idea whether he could pull off, would involve about three months on one of Australia’s most luxurious properties, pulling in he hoped more than enough to clear up lingering annoyances while writing the biography of the scion of one of Australia’s richest families.

It was just the sort of assignment he needed in just the right location to clear his head and get back on his feet after being thrown for a sixer by his own stupidity; not just falling for the easy lies of love Thai style, but going on an outrageous bender subsequently.

For the first time in many years he had been off the stabilizing medication that killed cravings and had kept him functioning as a more or less normal person throughout the first decade of the millennium, and being turned into a public fool was a brutally hurtful outcome for what he had been naively convinced by another falang, a foreigner, was a genuine relationship and to abandon his reservations. “You would be a fool not to take this chance for happiness.”

Huh. The money he had wasted building what he had been convinced was the foundations of a life together still irked. Stupidly scarred and stupidly drunk, “the beast in me”, to quote the Johnny Cash song, had been seen out on the town, all over town. Everyone to know.

He had been one of the only people if not the only person in the country on the highest dose possible of the stabilizing medication he came off the day he left Australia; and it had in the end been for many many years been the only thing that had really helped. Meetings, endless meetings, worked to a certain degree. He swallowed the gospel as much as he could and enjoyed some of the people he met. But there had never been an off switch. Being a workaholic, the responsibility of having children to care for, a demanding high profile job, a community radio program to run and various other interests had boxed him into a respectable enough corner.

Nobody ever saw him at his worst.

“People like you normally die,” Pat the Rat, one of Sydney’s most infamous drug and alcohol counselors, had declared 30 years before when he had been referred to her as a difficult and persistent relapse.

“Every now and then things get so bad they develop a desire to stop. But usually they’re dead before they get there. They know they should want to stop. But they don’t.”

He was a little miffed at the time. Wasn’t it supposed to be her job to fix him?

But as strange as that day he had spent with the renowned pioneer of twelve step programs into Australian detox centres had been – he tagged along while Pat the Rat dealt with a parade of hard cases and shivering wrecks of street alcoholics – can you believe they won’t do medicated detoxes here? She asked in reference to one particularly messy patient. At the end of their two or three hours together it didn't seem like she had interviewed him at all. But her astute summing up, transmitted to him later by his group counselor, who had arranged the whole thing, remained with him forever.

And all those years later he came back to Thailand; and thought everything would be fine; even though he was abandoning all the struts which kept his life in place: the psychiatrist who had been so helpful. He had told her things he had never told another living soul. And the medication one of Australia’s leading addiction experts had placed him on and which had worked so well in killing the cravings which had previously played such havoc; and the work, the kids, the friends, everything which he had used to transform himself into a respectable and affectionately regarded if perhaps somewhat eccentric reporter.

Nobody expected journalists to be normal anyway; it was part of the old mystique of the profession before it became just another technical “skill set”.  

And for a while everything in Bangkok was fine.

He went to meetings. He stayed sober. He met people from all different parts of the world. Which was a pleasant change from some of the relentlessly boring bastards he encountered back home.

At first he was enthralled by the beauty of Bangkok - which had been little more than a sprawling shanty town when he first encountered it as a young man and was now one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

And after having been a single parent for so long; and not having re-partnered, as all the studies indicated was the best way forward for personal happiness; not having to sleep alone proved a delight, even if an expensive one.

He had virtually never slept alone from the time he discovered you didn’t have to until the horror of heading towards 50 enveloped him, and while he knew - as some people commented = an astonishing number of people around Sydney, in those final years, when he went to bed he slept alone.

His sputtering affair with a woman down the road went nowhere; and for a while every time he looked at a woman all he could see was the word “TROUBLE”.

As for men; 50 was 500 in gay years.

That he had been manipulated by a foreigner and his Thai boyfriend into believing that age didn’t matter in Thailand, that they thought about these things differently, remained a resentment he should have dispensed with long ago.

And years later, after a string of odd encounters, after being pursued from place to place, after being made a fool of and having made a fool of himself, what had once been affection for Bangkok had become more of a wistful stare; a gaze across the crowded food courts, an affection for the final days of Pat Pong, Bangkok’s first red light district and soon; no doubt, to join the sprawling shopping malls and glistening condominiums which were transforming the city. The dilapidated air of Super Pussy and other fading go go bars, including Electric Blue where his Australian mates always seemed to meet someone who made them happy, would soon be a thing of the past; of that there was little doubt. His desire to photograph the fading tackiness before it vanished was yet to be realized.

Gold Porsches, black Mercedes, cars worth small fortunes were everywhere; as the Bangkok streets became increasingly crowded. Cars were status symbols. Walking was for peasants.

The traffic was slowing at a kilometer a year; and was already seemingly at a standstill in many different locations. But if they didn’t have to, people wouldn’t take a half hour walk.

Neon pink and blue, occasionally yellow and green taxies also cluttered the streets. As a result of the “mai dee riotic” – bad traffic, during his time here he had become a great fan of the “moto cie”, the motor cycle drivers who could weave you through the traffic like maestros performing a particularly complex dance; and who rarely tried to overcharge you unless they picked you up in a tourist zone such as Nana on Sukhumvit.

And so he looked at things as if he was looking at them for the last time; the towers, the cranes, the street stalls, the beggars and colourful touts, the bars and the restaurants and the crowded atmosphere of Asia,; the excellent food, the incommunicative stares of any major public transport system, except the Bangkok Sky Train was a state of the art engineering marvel moving massive numbers of people in an astounding efficient and non-confrontational way.

He had only ever witnessed one robbery.

He had never seen a fight despite the thousands of people cramming onto the trains at peak hour.

And whether he stayed or he went, there was much Australia could learn from Thailand – in particular that over-regulation kills not just creativity but commercial enterprise. A good deal, probably more than 90 per cent of the street life that makes Bangkok such an interesting place and provides a living for so many of its population, would be illegal in Australia. 

So much of antipodean life has been killed off by the local, state and federal governments who cannot help but keep on passing law after law after law. And killing all the freedom of which we had once been so proud. The raw beauty of capitalism; that if you sell bad food then nobody’s going to buy it; or you’re flogging something that nobody wants then you’re not going to be standing on the street corner for very long; means that soon enough you’ll go out of business or provide what the public wants. And that includes; in the myriads of stalls that fill Bangkok’s streets, some of the world’s best food; cheap clothes; reading glasses and sun glasses; toys; art works; wooden carvings; as well, of course, as those insane flickering laser lights only a tourist would be mad enough to buy. And the infamous clutter of restaurants, karaoke bars, massage parlours; and hectare after hectare of some of the most up-market and superbly designed shopping precincts the world has ever seen.