Video Night in Kathmandu (44 page)

Johnny looked stricken. “Only ten dollars,” he protested. “Number One price. You go into town—no good price.” Then he returned to the smirk that was his specialty. “Drinking, dancing … anything you can do.”

Impressive though this bill of rights was, I begged off.

Johnny’s official government bonhomie was fast disappearing. “Okay,” he said, wincing. “Look. I give this you free.” He scribbled down a phone number. “Official government place. You go to hotel. You talk to office. Say Miss Joy.”

“Well, er, actually, no, thanks. Maybe if I change my mind, I can call your office later.”

At that, Johnny slammed shut his ledger and trudged back, muttering, into the gloom from which he had emerged …

… And out of which appeared, just a few seconds later, another beaming local, papers dangling out of an overstuffed folder as he hustled over toward me. Pointing to his badge—he too, it seemed, was an official government guide—he invited me to deliver a rough summary of my agenda. Anxious not to whet his hopes, I told him vaguely that I had many meetings, conferences, appointments, commitments.

“My friend, why you no have fun in Bangkok? Many nice ladies in Bangkok.”

Of that, I said, I was sure. But I would be happy to take it on trust, I was starting to say … when, with a magician’s flourish, he pulled out his dun-colored folder and began riffling through page after page of official government soft-focus, four-color glossies. Languorous limbs on heavy carpets. Silky legs on velvety sofas. Pouting lovelies splayed across satin sheets.

“Here.” He settled on a young lady who seemed to have conquered shyness. “She very beautiful girl.”

That was beyond dispute.

“Beautiful girl graduated from college,” he went on.

“In physical education?”

“We have three massage,” he continued relentlessly. “A, B, C.”

I decided not to ask whether these corresponded to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctor’s degrees, respectively. This was all most interesting, I assured him, but I’d nonetheless have to turn him down.

“You no like Bangkok? Very good place.”

So it seemed. Already I was convinced that the city welcomed visitors with open arms. And already I could see that its service industries were exceedingly well developed and its authorities admirably eager to please. But by the time a third official government
tout approached me with the novel invitation: “My friend. You no like birdwatching?” I was inclined to suspect that ornithology was not among his interests. And when at last I entered the airport bus, the driver who took me for an official government ride lost no time at all in urging upon me the merits of a special hotel and, by happy chance, a nice young lady he happened to know.

I had long been wary of big bad Bangkok. It was a city, they said, whose main industry was recreation and whose main business was pleasure. Wickedness, by all accounts, was an art form here. For not only were all the seven vices, and quite a few others, embellished, expanded and refined in Bangkok, but they were also coupled with all the seven graces. In free-and-easy Bangkok, so legend had it, half the women were pros and half the men were cons. Everywhere in Asia, the Thai capital was spoken of in whispers, with the fascinated horror that attends a shadow Saigon. It was, by common consent, the best place around for procuring anything and everything illicit—smuggled goods, fake Rolexes, pirated cassettes, hard drugs, forged passports and IDs. And the Thais were famous for their gentleness and grace.

“Ah, such a charming people,” mused Alan, a kindly sixty-nine-year-old British photographer-eccentric I met in Bali, “and yet the streets of Bangkok are really so terribly wicked.” Once, he said, he had been approached on the sidewalk by a man offering Number One king prawns; when he accepted, the man had led him down a shady side street and into a dark café, served him the promised prawns and then presented him with a bill for $100. (“I must say, though, the prawns were awfully good.”) Another time, he reported, a monk had taken him out for a drink and then had asked him pointedly whether he was sleeping alone, adding, “I am very nice man!” “Imagine that!” cried Alan with an innocence only strengthened by his knowledge of the world. “And he a monk! But still, you know, the Thais are really such a charming people.”

Of all the unlikely resources husbanded in Bangkok, however, the most famous were potential wives. Two days after meeting Alan, I ran into another Brit in Bali, who was, by profession,
“how shall I put it—a smuggler.” No stranger to the blackest of markets, this character assured me that along the roads of northern Thailand $35 would buy a boy for life, and $50 a girl. I had also read that at village auctions virgins were the pièce de résistance. And it was common knowledge that the principal crops grown in certain parts of the country were young girls sent by their families to the bars of Bangkok to make fortunes they could plow back into the community as soon as they resumed their rustic lives. Indeed, said one Thai gentleman, talent scouts roamed the northern villages, offering families $150 for every prospective B-girl. “Here,” he reported happily, “everything is for sale. Even human life.”

The government itself seemed hardly bashful about advertising the skin trade. The Yellow Pages alone listed 100 massage parlors, and 350 bars, in every corner of the capital. Brochures circulated around the world, enticing packs of male visitors from Japan and Germany and the Gulf on special sex-tour vacations with the assurance that in Bangkok “you can pick up girls as easily as a pack of cigarettes” (those who found even that too onerous could select their companions from photo booklets before leaving home). In the city itself, accredited tourist agencies organized expeditions around Bangkok’s most breathtaking natural wonders—its pretty shopgirls. By now, in fact, an estimated 60 percent of all the country’s visitors came only for the dirt-cheap sex, and more than a million girls were waiting to oblige them. And since their international reputation—not to mention their gross national product—depended on the mass production of pleasure, the authorities made sure that the fantasy business was the best-run industry in town: well organized, fastidiously tended and lavishly displayed. All the playboys of the Western world made for Bangkok, and Bangkok was increasingly made for them.

Of late, of course, a terrible shadow had fallen over the business: crowded with bar-girls, heroin addicts and men who were gay just for money, Bangkok had the perfect conditions for an epidemic of AIDS. By the spring of 1986, six people had already died of the syndrome, and four of them were foreigners. Yet where countries like Japan had responded to the threat with a panic-stricken decisiveness and talk of testing all who entered the country, many Thais seemed content just to shrug off the
danger. The public health minister himself had requested agencies to exercise discretion about publicizing AIDS statistics so as not to damage the tourist trade.

And indeed, the minute I entered my Bangkok hotel, I found myself surrounded by consumers of the Bangkok Dream. Simon, from Durham University in Britain, had first visited Thailand a couple of months ago and had now returned, he said, with a sly smile, for no reason at all really, and for how long, he didn’t know. An Indian who was entwined in the snack bar with a couple of local ladies told me, rather shyly, that he had collected photos and tapes of almost a thousand Bangkok girls as souvenirs of his annual visits. A black man from the South Bronx explained that he was here on an extended R and R break from the pro basketball league in Australia. “People come here for different things,” explained a male nurse from San Francisco. “Some people come for the temples. Some people come for the deals. Some people come for the sex.” He pronounced this last with such disgust that I was moved to ask what he had come for. “Girls,” he said, hardly pausing. “Fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girls. I’ve already been to Sri Lanka and Korea, but this is the best place to find them: the girls are real fresh here, straight from the hills.” Noting my look of bemusement, he went on to explain himself. “Look,” he began earnestly, “I’m forty-two years old. I’m losing some hair. I could lose a little weight here and there. I’m not getting any younger. But I don’t want no thirty-five-year-old woman. I want to marry a girl who’s twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. In America, none of them girls are gonna look at me. But here—here it’s different.”

No less typical of the city’s supplicants was twenty-one-year-old Dave, who had arrived three months ago on vacation from the University of British Columbia. By now his tertiary education was a thing of the distant past, his ownership of a local bar a prospect for the perpetual future. Bright with ingenuous good nature, Dave had somehow managed to bring sincerity even to Sin City. Not long after we sat down to dinner, he leaned over in my direction. “Just look at these beauties,” he whispered, gesturing toward the waitresses. “And you know something? They aren’t even working girls.” His own girlfriend, he confessed, was “out at work” tonight.

As soon as we had finished eating, Dave volunteered to serve
as my Virgil through the inner circles of Bangkok’s inferno. The best introduction to the city, he declared, was a pilgrimage to the heart of the Patpong Road, a mess of more than fifty look-alike bars set along two narrow lanes, designed with nothing in mind but the bodily pleasure of foreigners. We could try the Honey Bar, or the Pink Panther, or the Adam and Eve—they were all the same. But we might as well go to the Superstar.

And so we did. At the door, a scantily clad young sylph flashed me a soft smile, led me by the hand to a barstool, pressed her body lightly against mine, urged me to order a drink. As soon as I did so, she threaded long and languid arms around me, brushed lustrous, sweet-smelling hair against my face, inclined my straw into my mouth, tickled her lips with her tongue and whispered sweet nothings that could not have been sweeter or more full of nothing. Then, gradually, gently, all sidelong glances, kittenish giggles and seraphic smiles, she glided through a cross-questioning as ritualized and precise as those delivered by immigration officers deliberating whether to allow one entry. “Where you from? Where you live in Bangkok? How long you stay?” Give the right answers, I quickly discovered, and the response was immediate.

“Where you live?” asked a bewitching, orange-bikinied houri.

“Metro Hotel.”

“Oh,” she said, “sexy eyes.”

All my reservations confirmed, I had, I felt, been transported back to some B-movie image of Saigon, 1968. Behind me, a jukebox with a throbbing bass pounded out “Do It to Me” and “Slow Hand” and “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy.” A psychedelic light show on the wall fuzzily gave off a deliquescent blur of naked bodies mixing and mingling. On a platform behind the bar, a handful of beauties went through the motions of excitement in body language that needed no translation. Their reflections kept them company in mirrors behind them, above them and in front of them. And distractedly gawking up at the dancers from their barstools were rows upon rows of burly men in white bush shirts and crumpled trousers, Australians and Germans and Americans. As they looked on, every one of them bounced a giggly girl up and down on his lap, pawing soft limbs, stroking spare parts, slurring endearments. For purposes of identification, every handmaiden had a number on her breast.

Though Bangkok was famous for its narcotic properties, I did not sleep well that evening. All night long, from outside my room came the sounds of giggles and slamming doors, heavy feet padding after light ones down the corridor. And sometime before sunrise, I was abruptly awoken by a call from a hotel employee. “I miss you,” she purred. This was strange, I thought, since I had not yet had the pleasure of her acquaintance. “I see you last night,” she moaned. “I love you very much. You no remember me—the one with black hair and brown skin?”

She was indeed no different from all the others. Everywhere, at every time, it was the same: intimacy on the grand scale. Wherever I looked in this huge and hazy city, scattered harum-scarum along its main roads, were hundreds upon hundreds of short-time hotels, girlie bars, sex shows, massage parlors, “no hands” restaurants, pickup coffee shops, brothels, escort agencies, discos and—following as surely as the day the night—VD clinics. At one end of town gleamed the showy crystal palaces of the Patpong Road, at the other their tarted-up country cousins on a street known as Soi Cowboy. Between them, around them and on every side there seemed to be bars with videos, bars with shows, bars with dance floors, Swiss and American and German bars and special Japanese-language bars where businessmen from Tokyo could pay a flat $110 for a full night of entertainment, no holds barred, no strings attached. And in and out and all around were massage parlors, small massage parlors, back-alley massage parlors, massage parlors that were three-story pleasure domes as luxurious as Las Vegas casinos, each one equipped with one-way mirrors through which its customers could watch, unwatched, up to 400 masseuses seated in a huge glass tank, knitting, filing their nails or turning their deadened gaze to a TV screen. For the sake of convenience, these girls too had numbers on their breasts.

As a young, unattached foreign male, I found myself caught in a swarm of propositions. When I entered a taxi, the driver offered me “a private girl” (to which I was tempted to reply that I was a private man). When I stopped at a street corner, in the midst of a monsoony downpour, a shabby young man thrust upon me a soggy Polaroid of the girl he owned. When I peered into a barbershop, I was asked—nudge, nudge—whether I
would like a private room. And everywhere I went, I heard from the shadows a busy, steady buzz of “Sex show. Sex show. Sex show” as ceaseless as the song of cicadas in Japan.

Nowhere, it seemed, was I safe. I checked into a tourist hotel and found that it was a “knock-knock” place, which provided girls, along with Cokes and pay phones, in the lobby. Many of these houses of good repute, I later discovered, took the liberty of sending spare girls, uninvited, up to the rooms at night. Even first-class hotels posted notices observing, with all regretful courtesy, that guests in single rooms would have to pay double since it was assumed that they would not, could not, be sleeping alone. And in the up-country city of Chiangmai, when I sat down to breakfast in my respectable hotel, video screens in every corner of the room began blasting out images of groping, groaning bodies squelching together in unfocused ecstasy. I had to take the moans of venery together with my toast and tea.