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Exquisite Corpse
Issue 8A Journal of Letters and Life

ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
Fuck It in Phuket: Mai Kee
by Robert Perchan
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They gathered in the hour before noon every day on the scuffed sofas and worn leatherette armchairs in the lobby of the hotel and waited for the tour director to show up and go over the day's schedule. Every one of them had a tale to tell of the night before and a bar to recommend. "At Pussy Galore, Steve. There's this girl who inserts darts into her--" "Can uncap a bottle of Coke with one quick pelvic thr--" with this fucking eel, Al, I couldn't believe--" There were, by my count, a dozen of them: a blond and ruddy hail-fellow-well-met type who looked like he coached girls' softball back in the States; an ex-hippie of indeterminate years with an enviable shock of ashy blond hair and a doughy, seamed face, like gently folded batter; the dapper Southerner called "Doc" who made no secret of the pills he washed down with quick slugs of Pepsi; a Viet Nam vet who wore a light-weight hiker's vest everywhere he went and claimed a special bond with Southeast Asia that no one else could possibly fathom; the designated asshole of the group, a redhead of about thirty with the meticulously trimmed beard of a junior naval officer who incessantly intruded into conversations with puerile allusions to the size of his cock, "Mr. Moby Dick"; a semi-retired bailbondsman whose advice to his tour mates on all matters pecuniary was an emphatic and succinct "Buy Debt! There'll be a check in your mailbox every month!"; an octogenarian former professor of rocketry of Teutonic stock who, to my knowledge, never once uttered a word to anyone except Hummel, the tour director, and then only in hushed, brief asides; and maybe a half dozen others, all fiftyish and paunchy as yours truly, and to each and every man jack of them his own peculiar kink: trout flies, Tonka trucks, tutus.
     I sat across the lobby from them on these late mornings, inconspicuous in my tropical khakis, feigning absorption in the splashy brochures available on the tourism counter, listening, daring to jot down a phrase or two of conversation when a word or image struck a note. The drawn, weathered Thai woman with the dime-size chocolate mole on her forehead behind the reception desk attended dutifully to a clipboard and issued perfunctory instructions to the maids as they trundled up to the desk to collect the room keys of the late risers. It was all business to her and her drudges. She batted not an eyelash whenever one of the group erupted with an observation on the previous night's forays into the fleshpots of Patpong or Soi Cowboy or Nana's Plaza.
     "I tell you she had one," insisted the ruddy girls' softball coach.
     "And I'm telling you you're nuts, Jack," the one called Doc countered with peppy finality, swigging on his Pepsi. "There's no such thing as-"
     "If she did," Designated Asshole interjected, "you'd've been a fool to let her slip away like that. If you were a man you'd still be upstairs right now in your room with your wick in--"
     "I think she had to go to the dentist this morning," Jack defended himself. "She's very quiet. Never says a word. A toothache or someth--"
     At this the entire group burst into a shower of derisive guffaws.
     "The dentist!"
     "A toothache!"
     "Buddy, if she's got teeth inside there you're lucky you're not in surgery right--"
     "You sure you're last name's not Bobbit!"
     "Ha! Fucking is probably just her way of flossing!"
     "Jack, I'll tell you what," offered the rotund bailbondsman with the trout-fly-nipple fetish. "Ask her out to lunch and if she starts shoveling food under her skirt--"
     "Well," snapped Jack, his ruddy moon-face flushing deeply. "I know what I know."
     "It's possible, you know," the ex-hippie declared, searching the eyes of the others with an anxious New Age proselytizing zeal. "I met a guy who sighted a Vu Qiang ox in Cambodia last year. He was as close to it as I am to that guy over there." He pointed at me and I casually retracted the tip of my ballpoint pen with a discrete pump of my thumb.
     "Shit," sniffed the Viet Nam vet in the hiker's vest. "Anything's possible in this part of the world. In Nam some of the whores put razor blades up their pussies. They were working for Charlie. A guy would take her up to her room and jump her bones and zip! the head of his dick would come out looking like a bloody radish rosette."
     The Viet Nam vet and the ex-hippie locked glances, unlikely allies in Jack's defense. Only the morning before I'd listened to their brief, heated exchange about Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the torching of the ROTC building at Kent State. Today they were delivered from the awkwardness of sharing sides by the arrival of the tour director, a lanky man assembled utterly in different shades of gray-slacks, shirt, socks, watchband, hair, eyes, down to the twin sheaves of quills bristling out of his nostrils-like camouflage for a descent into an ashheap. He had very bad teeth-gray, naturally-and long,nervous fingers and a striking Thai woman with liquid, molten eyes in tow. She was darker even than the rural village girls who flooded down from the impoverished northern provinces to work in bars called Pussy Alive and Baby A-Go-Go and Bunny House. The tour director introduced the woman as Toom and let the group know she'd be guiding those who wanted to take in an afternoon of muay thai. Blank stares hung in the air all around until Hummel explained, "Kick-boxing. It's the national sport here. Like baseball back home." At which point the group swung its collective head in the direction of Toom. But Designated Asshole had already taken her aside and was looking down on her meaningfully, once or twice giving her elbow a pat with the cupped palm of his hand.


*


      Jack, it appeared, was my man. Of course it was more than possible that what he took to be a mai kee-certainly he had never heard the term before-was just a love muscle, the overdeveloped constrictor vaginae you can find represented in almost any human female population from Burton's Abyssinia to Malnikoff's Aleutians if you look hard enough. There was no reason to assume he had any expertise. Men are astonished all the time by what a woman can learn to do with the right regimen of contraction exercises or the proper spring-loaded device ordered by catalog from the Euphoria Collection or Vibrator XXXpress. Ask Dr. Ruth.
     And there have been hoaxes. The "Snapping Pussies of Lamu'u-nika" scandal in the late 1930's was a case in point-with its outrageous rumors of voracious vaginae dentatae devouring whole native villages grass huts and all just as the globe was about to be sucked into the maelstrom of another world war-and suggests that in times of social and political upheaval the human psyche is quite capable of projecting its deepest fears on the nightmarish screen of tabloid headlines. One did not, at the risk of one's own sanity and safety and reputation, go traipsing across the globe in search of the merely sensational. Poor, hapless Federsen and Wohl, trapped in the crocodile-infested lowlands of Lamu'u-nika just as the Japanese Imperial Army "liberated" the island's capital from its colonial overlords.
     Yes, there have been hoaxes. Occasions for knowing titters and sly winks, in retrospect: the "Snapping Pussies of Lamu'u-nika" sham with its subtle overtones of castration anxiety was the Piltdown Man and Cardiff Giant of the Freudian Era rolled into one. But Jack knew what he knew, as he said. And it would have been folly for me to take him cum grano salis after so many mornings and afternoons of sitting around lobbies of two-star hotels listening to realtors from Spokane and purchasing agents from Albany compare prices and performances and tits and muffs. That the others in his group considered him a bit off his ruddy, moon-faced head was fortuitous. Frankly, I wanted him shimmed away from the pack just a tad, if possible. The more likely he would gravitate toward "his" girl. And the sooner. And I on his heels. Human psychology is funny. These male tour groups were spontaneous, makeshift societies in miniature. Members forged tribal bonds the first couple of days of knocking around Bangkok together, wisecracking and sharing confidences and exploits, masking their fundamental unworldliness with a shared good-old-homeboy skepticism: "I'm telling you, Jack, such women don't . . ."
     Jack joined the muay thai contingent as it followed Toom single file out the hotel doors. Coal Black, I thought, and Her Seven Moral Dwarves: Horny, Lusty, Randy, Rutty, Humpy, Rammy and Doc, who had switched his wash from Pepsi to Singha beer with suave prestidigitation. Two others followed a street kid who claimed he knew the best place in Bangkok to buy bespoke silk shirts. "No reep-off, meester. You come tailor today," the kid lied. "Ready tomorrow." The trout-fly-nipple fetish bailbondsman and the Viet Nam vet discovered they had something in common-they liked selecting girls from a gallery of choices-and set off for a massage parlor whose glossy fliers promised miniskirted masseuses seated on tiers and foam lavings on air-mattresses. Designated Asshole alone remained seated in the empty lobby.
     "You're not interested in muay thai?" I ventured from across lobby, folding my brochure in my lap.
     "Seen it. Last time I was here."
     "You've been to Bangkok before?"
     "Third time."
     "I take it you like it here."
     "The girls are too small. That's my problem," he complained and shot me a look of imperial condescension. "Even the ones who have had a kid."
     "My."
     Designated Asshole stroked his red beard. He had fine blue eyes with tiny pupils and a narrow, unimpressive chest. It was difficult not to glance down at his crotch seam to surmise if everything there were as grandly appointed as he would have others believe.
     "You fellows were pretty hard on your buddy this morning."
     "There's one like him every year on these tours. Some guy thinks he's discovered the most unique bit of gash on the planet. Then two days later he's waltzing in the hotel with a new girl. Then she
's the most unique bit of gash on the planet . ."
     "Well, what was so unique about this one, if I may ask?"
     "Hah! Listen to this. He claims the girl has a tongue inside her cunt. So it's like getting laid and a blow job all in one."
     "A tongue," I said.
     "Can you believe that. Of course," he pulled up a bit, raising his eyebrows and shrugging, "maybe she had some special action down there. But a tongue! The poor guy probably just hasn't been laid right and proper in a while."
     "A tongue," I repeated. "A mai kee?"
     "Pardon?"
     "Nothing. Just rambling."
     "You don't believe-"
     "Of course not. Poor guy, like you say."
     Designated Asshole was still staring at me through the filmy glass doors of the Hotel Sukhumvit as I hopped a tuk-tuk-that onomatopoeic and ubiquitous motorized three-wheeled contrivance with maniacally suicidal U-turn impulses and murderous fumes-and directed the driver to take me to Banglamphu. Waiting around the hotel lobby had given me an appetite, but my finances forbade me little more than a bowl of Banglamphu street stall noodles for lunch these days. Fieldwork, after all, can be expensive, especially for an independent. But Bangkok can be a magical city, whatever kind of budget you're stuck with. One morning you are fishing a snake out of your toilet and the next week you are wolfing down chicken and rice at the wedding of an Israeli backpacker named Schlomo and a Thai Muslim bar girl named Sumalee. There are some four hundred Buddhist temples in Bangkok-featuring the fifty-yard-long Reclining Buddha, the mysterious and untouchable Emerald Buddha, and the five-and-a-half-ton Solid Gold Buddha-and many times that many prostitutes in the bars of Patpong and Soi Cowboy and Nana's Plaza ministering to pilgrims whose reverence leans more toward the enchantments of the flesh than the incantations of the spirit. Indeed, there's something for everyone. Pirates from the South China Sea and dentists from Waukegan will find themselves warmly received at a Patpong hole-in-the-wall bar called Pussy Jolly Roger, where the girls dance naked with miniature Captain Hook hats on their heads and white plastic molars glued to their nipples. Their "tooth pasties."

*

     The only documented mai kee on record is a woman from the town of That Phanom in the northeastern Thai province of Isan. And scanty documentation that was: a letter dated July 17, 1969, from Michael Fishbourne to one of his graduate students back home in the States. In it he mentions almost in passing that a 37-year-old woman referred to only as Noi was capable of extraordinary feats of dexterity involving her "nether region." These included the production of sounds that were "most human-like." The expulsion of air from the vagina is, of course, hardly a rare thing and seldom silent, as impassioned lovers know only too well, and serious scholars dismissed his claim as simply a trick and a delusion. He had, after all, he later admitted, paid the woman for a private demonstration.
     And Fishbourne was grieving, in those days, the death of a beloved wife. One of his colleagues pointed out that when her cancer was in its final, virtually untreatable stage, Fishbourne had carted her off to a psychic surgeon in the Philippines and believed that the relatively comfortable last six months of her life was directly attributable to the mass of liverish material the "surgeon" had removed from her abdomen. Poor Fishbourne, people said. He had always been such a rigorous man. And now pursuing phantoms in the backwaters of Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, Fishbourne claimed he had examined the Isan woman after her performance and used the word "glossa" to describe an unusual structure he was certain was involved in the enunciation of the most distinctive of the sounds: mai kee. Thirty years passed since that letter was posted and no one gave it another thought, save for the occasional cocktail party joke (one party-there was pot on hand-finally broke up into uncontrollable giggles when everyone realized they could not begin a sentence with anything other than the word Mikey) at the long-dead professor's expense, until Political Correctness and Sexual Harassment Codes put an end to even that last little shred of immortality.
     And then two years ago I arrived in Bangkok on a wholly other mission. The UN wanted expert "classifiers" to decide which of the refugees streaming across the Thai-Cambodian-Laotian borders were true political refugees and which ones were just looking for a free lunch. The job was easy. Everybody was hungry. Ergo they were all refugees. From hunger, anyway. The UN didn't see it that way. I was dismissed. My university department head wrote me a curt letter letting me know my "unprofessionalism" had jeopardized its standing with some important international programs and that I needn't hurry back. They even dredged up the old Fishbourne business. As a lark, weary of the bad food and beetles and tedious humdrum of life along the Laotian border, I published a brief article in an obscure magazine back in the States titled "The Talking Pussy of That Phanom." I had not expected anybody back at Harvard would see it. But people are quite cutthroat in their circumspection around universities these days and they keep their eyes peeled. It was a joke, really, the article. Though you do hear things upcountry, talk. Thai rurals are an outgoing folk, especially when they get hopped up on the local hooch. And, truth to tell, back in 1969, I was that grad student. I had liked old Fishbourne, cranky and supercilious as he could sometimes be. It hurt me that my mentor's name had become synonymous with "delusion" and "gullibility." "Keep your head about you," people dehorted jocularly at the airport as they shook hands and bade farewell to colleagues embarking on journeys that would take them deep into Stone Age turf. "Don't let those Ifugao fishbourne you."

*

     From the bar of the Sukhumvit I could see directly into the lobby where the group would be gathering to launch their evening sorties on the bars of Patpong. I regretted having spoken to Designated Asshole. It had been inexcusable and unnecessary. I hadn't needed any confirmation of what Jack claimed he "knew." That was my job to verify it. And I didn't want anyone to get wind of what I was up to. I had let one-my one and only-slip through my fingers six months before by loosening my lips too readily to a Delhi arms merchant at the bar of Pussy See Pussy Do. It had never crossed my mind that the guy might take me seriously, so much bemused condescension had I endured at the hands of farangs I'd bellied up to the bar with over the past year and a half. Or that he might want sweet little Pong for himself. And have the bucks to spirit her out of the country overnight right under my nose. What a fool I'd been! He had even told me he was Collector of Oddities. A goat with three eyes. A shell-less tortoise. Conspiratorially he intimated he had a line on a Vu Qiang ox calf. Only three ever captured, and two of them died within months. A sort of Southeast Asian unicorn. Poor Pong.
     And for a while there I was beginning to get a reputation. "See that Yank over there. That's the guy who's looking for a girl with a tongue in her pussy." "Hey, Mr. Harry. You see that girl dancing in red bikini? Tag say Number 46. She got a tongue in her pussy. She my friend. You pay her bar fine. 600 baht. Take me too. 600 another baht." "Hey, Sir Grandfather Big Nose. You want girl got tongue in she's pussy? You put you's in mine! Ha ha ha!"
     So I had to lay low from ridicule for a while, if only for the sake of my dignity. And take stock of my finances. The fact is that if you want to get inside a Thai whore's quim and loll your finger or tongue or pecker around it's going to cost you on average 1000 baht a pop. That's twenty-five bucks at today's exchange rate. And then you figure at best, at the very best, maybe one in five hundred might be a mai kee. Twenty-five bucks times five hundred girls is better than ten thousand dollars. Of course you could get lucky and find one your first month or your first week or even your first day. But that's the stuff of fiction and lottery dreams. And I suspect the ratio is closer to one in two thousand. (Don't even reach for your calculator here-you haven't got that much in the bank.) One in two thousand is a guess, naturally. There's no way to tell. I made an appointment one afternoon with a gynecologist at one of the V.D. clinics on Patpong. I figured if anyone had come into contact with that many vaginas it would have to be a Patpong woman's doctor. But this woman's doctor turned out to be a woman doctor decidedly unsympathetic to abstruser avenues of inquiry. "Crazy farang!" "Crazy foreigner!" Let's just be generous and say that that branch of medical science is still in its infancy over here.
     And then, during this respite, I came up with the grand scheme. Beautiful. Right out of thin air. These budget sex tour groups. Twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty men (and curiously, now and again, the odd wife). Say fifteen guys times ten days at one girl a day comes out to, what, one hundred and fifty girls. Nearly half a year's research for one working alone on limited funds. All I had to do was hang out in the hotel lobbies and do a little harmless eavesdropping. Gents who back in Indianapolis would never own up to ever even having chatted with a hooker would carry on with expansive good cheer about the Patpong whore they had bedded the night before. And, as often as not, in lurid, polychrome detail. Of course, as I say, there was no way knowing if Jack could tell the difference between a genuine mai kee and simply a gifted, well-trained pubococcygeal. Not many men can, I suppose. That, in the end, was my job.
     The tour director arrived without Toom this evening and took a quick head count. All born this side of the Great War were present or accounted for: Doc and his white pills and Singha wash, apparently, would not be bound by clock time and had already hit the streets of Patpong. One chair sat ominously empty of its usual occupant. But only now did this absence intrude on the jovial anticipation of the punters. In the stillness that spread out from the lobby even unto my stool in the bar could be heard the soft rapping of the black velvet knuckles of the actuarial glove. Buy Debt of the trout-fly-nipple fetish and a slack-jawed office manager from Baltimore leaned toward each other and conferred in whispers. Designated Asshole examined his fingernails and checked his watch. The rest stared at Hummel or into their laps.
     "Has anyone seen Professor Wunderlich?'
     Nobody had.
     Then the Nam vet and the ex-hippie spoke up simultaneously. They had the rooms on either side of the octogenarian's on the third floor and had helped the old man fit his key into his lock when he came back tipsy the previous night with a sixteen-year-old bar-fined out of Pussy Delight on one arm and a sullen Lao missing an earlobe on the other. He hadn't come down for the noon meeting, but that wasn't unusual. And if anyone had the right to sleep in, it was the professor.
     "I'll just give his room a ring," announced the tour director in a sort of public whisper, and walked over to the house phone on the reception desk. The poor guy. A corpse, of course, is a tour director's worst nightmare. There would be the embassy to notify. And the police. And what passed in the tropical Third World for a coroner and morgue. The outlay for a casket and the shipment Stateside. Thirty years ago when they shipped Fishbourne home, with no next of kin, I volunteered to drive out to the airport and claim the remains. They asked me to identify him right there at Customs. Handed me a surgical mask and ushered me into a small room and popped open the sealed coffin with a vacuum whoosh. His face was puffed and purple, as if his head were in the process of metamorphosing into a huge plum. His dentures were gone. Probably melted down, I realize now, and cast into a souvenir gold ring for a GI on R and R from a war just a mortar heave away in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta.
     With the receiver tucked between his shoulder and ear, Hummel stared dismally for some minutes at the clasp of his gray watchband. He set the phone back in its cradle and, as if he had locked in place a new fuse and completed a magic circuit, the doors of the lobby elevator cranked open and out ambulated the professor with the bar-fine from Pussy Delight at his side. Hummel grinned in almost cosmic relief and steepled his hands together and nodded in a mock-Thai bow. The Lao-she indeed was missing an earlobe-floated down the stairway moments later. Many of the new arrivals, particularly the hill girls, feared and distrusted elevators. Escalators too, I'd learned the hard way, having spent a good quarter of an hour in a department store one afternoon urging an upcountry Isan girl (she hailed from a village near That Phanom and I had hoped she might know a bit of mai kee lore) to "just step forward and grab the handrail" while the pretty young clerks in their spotless uniform dresses at the perfume counter sniggled uncontrollably behind cupped palms. And finally, when Nok got the hang of it, I had to drag her out of the store bodily, so fascinated had she become with riding the "walking ladder."
     With the professor of rocketry now a securely identified blip on the tour director's screen-often at these meetings I observed his head swing around evenly in the manner of a radar scanner to keep track of his "boys." Hummel instructed the group to rendezvous on Patpong at the flashy, neon-decked Pussy Royale. He would send them off two by two in tuk-tuks from the streetcorner outside the Sukhumvit. From the Pussy Royale he was to lead them to the night's special destination, Carabao House, a cozy upstairs nook specializing in oral delights. He had struck a deal with the mama-san and they would have the place all to themselves for two hours. "All girls in the buff and no tipping expected." A paragraph in his brochure I had found stuffed behind a cushion of a lobby sofa promised an "orgy of tongues, tit, and twat" and apparently this was the golden night. But Hummel was a careful man, too. Although Patpong would be teeming with thousands of pleasure-seekers, he knew better than to arrive there in the mini-bus in which he ferried his charges to the alligator farm or their afternoon of muay thai. Mini-buses meant tours and a stop at Patpong meant "sex tour" and it was no secret the local police chief would want his palm greased to overlook so brazen a flaunting of the country's laws. Sex tours are illegal in Thailand the way drug rings are illegal in the States-"Like, yeh, right, man." One group I'd followed two months before ignored this nicety of the judiciously placed bribe and the tour director found himself being interviewed on CNN-from a jail cell. So off the group went two by two in their tuk-tuks.
     I hopped in a tuk-tuk at a stand across the street and instructed the driver Ka-roo-na nam phom pai yang Patpong. I paid up front and tossed in an extra ten baht. Reh-o, I urged. "Quickly. Short cut." The Carabao House arrangement wants an unanticipated snag. My hope was for Jack to make a bee-line from the Pussy Royale to the bar where "his girl" worked. It was possible there would be as many as thirty or forty girls dancing there and I wanted him to lead me right to her. I didn't want to spend a couple hours outside Carabao House while Hummel's crew sat around with their pants down to their ankles and got their collective wad siphoned off. Worse, once fellated my man might decide he had had his share of libidinous play for the evening and spend the rest of the evening tooling up and down the strip bouncing bottles of Singha off his lips.

*

     Pussy Royale was a newly-remodeled showcase with a huge rectangular bar that took up nearly all its interior space save for the barstools and the row of snuggle couches along each wall where, for the price of a "lady's drink," you could tweak a waitress's bare boobs and trade such vital information as your Christian name, your nationality--avoid anywhere that sounds even vaguely "Arabic"--and whether you want head and she gives it--"smokes," in the local slang--or not. A dart show was in progress as I entered. A girl lay naked on her back on the raised dance floor inside the bar firing tiny pointed projectiles from her nether cleft at a cluster of colored balloons tied to a pole. Blow-gun style. Pop. She was accurate. Popopop. Western women especially tend to look down their noses at these kinds of displays. But it is the sort of pointless talent men of all cultures--raised to appreciate the absurd skills required to win foolhardy playground dares and daffy barroom wagers--find eminently admirable. We've been competitors since we were austrolopithecines, and we've never been able to shake it. And it's certainly more entertaining than watching some frumpkin of an Olympic archer from South Korea with a high-tech bow that looks like a scaled-down space shuttle console sling cupiditous bolts at a calibrated bulls-eye. But it will be a long, long time before we see a trio of Patpong girls empedestaled on the stepped platform of an Olympic awards ceremony to accept the gold, silver and bronze in Pussy-Blow-Dart-Pop-Balloon as the Thai flag is unfurled overhead and the national anthem pipes through the stadium's loudspeaker system. And this is unfair, as the world of sport's only real moral claim on our wallets and our enthusiasms has always been its promise of equal opportunity to the disenfranchised and unempowered. Imagine, if you will, snapping open tomorrow's sports pages and coming across this:



P-B-D-P-B TAKES FIRST OLYMPIC STEP

Monaco (Reuters)--Pussy-Blow-Dart-Pop-Balloon took a first step toward eventual inclusion in the Olympic Games when it was granted provisional recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Monday. But hopeful P-B-D-P-B sharpshooters can expect no smooth trajectory to the Summer Games, IOC Director General Geraldo Rivera warned. The governing body of the newly recognized sport--the International Pussy-Blow-Dart-Pop-Balloon Association--will first have two years in which to convince IOC members of their claim to full recognition. If successful, they would join 17 other non-Olympic sports waiting hopefully on the sidelines for the chance to . . .
      But forgive me: it is a curious habit of the expat mind at bar to editorialize to itself at length on matters of little consequences to the World-at-Large.

     Members of the tour group trickled into Pussy Royale and gathered at a corner of the bar just as the dart show came to a close and a string of dancers mounted the stage in red or yellow or black bikini bottoms but no tops. The panties would stay on for a while--pinned to them were plastic tags with the girls' identification numbers--and come off as the girls neared the end of their half hour shift. With, of course, your stunning exception, the less they wore the more they looked alike. But I oversimplify. From eye-level at the bar two distinct types emerge. The girls with longer, prominent pubic bones, exposed, hard-nosed, defiant cunts promising a furiously demanding fuck that will end with one agonist's shoulders firmly pinned to the mat. (Not recommended, you understand, for the cardiacally impaired. Every year, according to the German Embassy, some dozen or so overweight male Kraut tourists pop a couple hundred milligrams of Viagra and blow out their tickers as bedsprings groan and then subside in baleful silence.) And their meeker counterparts, the smaller pubises that seem neatly tucked away, barely V-shaped at all, soft, puellesque, shyly hinting at a gentle, swaying lay that dissolves at climax into childlike giggles. There are sub-types too, naturally, and that occasional stunner that defies all classification. But one man's meat is another man's poisson, as the French say. If you ever want to hear two men disagree on the transcendent merits of what is right smack there in front of them, take them to Patpong.
     The tour boys, jovial and backslapping now that they were out on the town again, attracted the attention of girls seeking a "lady's drink." Foreigners in playful high spirits can be generous. A "lady's drink," little more than a couple ounces of orange juice or cola in a tumbler of ice, runs about 100 to 120 baht--say three bucks--of which the girl is given a share. At closing time, or before she leaves with the customer who has "bar fined" her out for the night, she cashes in a handful of plastic chips--one for each drink she has hustled--that the bartender has doled out to her that evening. The girls, I knew, avoided the quiet loner, nursing a beer and sulking, his solitary thoughts focused on that whore he had once had long ago and now, through the warped prism of memory melded to imagination, has become the ideal against whom all the pretty tarts working the crowd and hustling drinks are measured and fall short, his dashed hopes breeding in him a stinginess that is but another face of despair. Such a loner they took me to be, I suppose, and in the twenty minutes I had been sitting at the bar across from the tour group boys, only one bothered to approach my barstool perch, and she backed away in stunned bafflement when I snapped at her, apropos of nothing at all, the last phrase I remembered studying in my copy of Cricket Knight's Thai Spoken With a Smile:
"Maeng-ka-phroon! Ra-wang!" (Jellyfish! Be careful!)
     And then Jack made his move. He slid off his barstool, spoke into Hummel
's ear under the disco music, and headed toward the exit. I tucked eighty baht into the tiny wooden barrel set in front of me that held my tab, and shimmied and wove my way through the yammering shoals of grinning, cajoling Brits and Aussies and Frogs and Krauts and Yanks and turbanned Sub-continent swarthies. Jack's chin sawed through the crowd with gritty determination. He had forsworn the Carabao House orgy and could only be headed for his mai kee. There is a thrill that all men know at least once in their lives--even the tender-footed urbanite who has never cradled a shotgun--when the certainty that his prey is about to reveal itself comes as a scent, almost an intuition, a sweet chill to the bone.

*

     Pussy Hard Rock was an upstairs bar of the shabbier sort. Some twenty or twenty-five girls altogether, a third of them "dancing," each bending her knees in time to the music and, catching a customer's eye, lowering her pelvic cradle into a squat and producing a bump or two and a counter-clockwise circular rump grind. When you first enter one of these places, your mind takes a moment to adjust to the circumstances as your eyes sweep the room and your heart does a little jig to syncopate its beat to the rawness and rhythm of flesh and sound. Encoded in the hetero male brain is a triangle-shaped hole into which only a triangular peg will fit. The deltoid female pubic muff and the mound of soft adipose flesh on which it flourishes is that triangular peg. The ancient Greeks intuited this and squandered the intellectual capital of an entire civilization waxing poetic and mystical about triangles in weird paeans to a Realm of Forms. The Pythagorean Theorem has to be the wackiest statement of erotic longing of all time--save perhaps for the Willendorf Venus. Had these eminences taken their minds off of prepubescent boys for a while and balanced their isoceles on its point rather than allowing it to rest so dully and securely on its base, perhaps they would have seen this. And I won't even go into the matter of old Imhotep and his Pyramids. Suffice it to say that when our species shed the matted hair from its back and chest and limbs and stood up so nakedly and brazenly straight, the triangular muff remained, a signal detectable across distances, stripped down and sleeked up as we were for speed and agility and general mayhem on the broad African savannahs.
     Jack sat on a barstool ensorcelled by a dancer with a thumbnail-sized bit of pubic hair that covered little more than her tiny crevasse. Barely five-foot, skin that achingly lovely bronze that pallid Westerners bake themselves for days on end under fitful suns to attain, she was an Alpha female in the best Southeast Asian sense of the term--not a cigarette burn or razor blade scar on her. She dipped into a squat and performed a couple of jocular, mock-seductive writhes for Jack. She had a wide smile and two rows of even, baby-like teeth almost identical in size. She pointed at her cheek and rolled her eyes, a reference, I took it, to her morning trip to the dentist.
     As she rose up out of her squat and brought her knees together, her thighs touched, just barely, leaving a tiny open space at her divine fulcrum through which flitted a splash of unearthly white light. And then something happened. A strange and dark rage, like a fever unannounced by any other symptoms, flushed through me instantly, subsided, and left my limbs swamped and leaden. A film of condensed vapors like gelid sweat bathed the roots of my hair as the floor under me gave with the spongy elasticity of a trampoline. I staggered a few steps to my left and collapsed on one of the empty snuggle couches along the wall and gaped helplessly at Jack and then at his girl and then at Jack again. A plump waitress in bikini bottoms and a flimsy negligee jacket homed in on me and I managed to order a bottle of Singha, shooing her away with a feeble, breathless Maeng-ka-phroon! Ra-wang! when she returned with the beer and tried to hustle herself a 100 baht lady's drink. I put the bottle to my lips and as I tipped it up caught again a glance of that trigonal postage stamp of black fur and the light that danced just beneath it. The hot flash of fevered rage descended again and I closed my eyes in abject submission. Pools of iridescent blue dots and shimmering red dots swirled into each other and separated out again. The driving beat of "Gimme Shelter" pressed in on my diaphragm like a bunched fist and I sucked in gulps of the bar's machine-chilled air: It
's just a kiss away, it's just a kiss away. The fear that I might possibly be truly physically sick hit and--to try to get a grip on a reality that seemed about to abandon me to a bottomless Void--I blindly ran through an inventory of afflictions tropical and otherwise that might strike so out of the blue: Malaria. Hepatitis. Typhus. Cholera. Coronary. Black Clap. Allergy. Acid flashback. Male menop--
     "You okay, pal?"
     I opened my eyes. Jack's blond moon-face swayed over me, searching and concerned, as if suspended on an invisible guy-wire.
     "You don't look so good."

*

     I stayed in bed three days straight, getting up only to use the toilet and boil myself bowls of bland white noodles. I sent my landlady's son to a Chinese herbalist with a request for something that would soothe "overwrought nerves" and he returned with an envelope filled with a grainy brown meal that was apparently some sort of "tea." I steeped this and drank it and did feel a little better. On the fourth day I rose and dressed and walked shakily downstairs to use the lobby phone of the lodging house. The desk clerk at the Sukhumvit--the parched woman with the dime-sized chocolate mole, I assumed - replied archly in high-pitched screechy tones that Mr. Hummel's group had left for Don Muang International Airport the previous morning. I had wanted to thank Jack for putting me in a tuk-tuk that night. He had even paid the driver my forty baht fare. Your typical American, so frugal when overseas these days, is capable of genuine small kindnesses, if given half a chance.
     A letter from my bank in the States arrived informing me that my last thousand dollars had been wired to my account in Bangkok. I stopped by a language institute that had offered me a job teaching English some months before. The director, a bloated Thai with sour pools of pinkish rheum collecting in the corners of his eyes, grumbled that I had caught him at a bad time, and maybe he would be able to use me sometime in the future and maybe not. He couldn't be sure. There were hordes of young Brits and Aussies and Yanks trekking off to the hinterlands with their Patpong and Soi Cowboy and Nana's Plaza girlfriends to smoke dope and copulate and goof on the wavy pristine drapery of nature, and then returning to the city broke and eager to replenish their drained wallets and empty stash pouches. They worked cheap. I envied them their release and the impudent nose they thumbed at the workaday world. They babbled of jungle visions and fondled exotic phra phim amulets and griped about visa hassles and the capriciousness of Thai law enforcement and bureaucratic red tape, but on the whole were no more ridiculous than your suburban American clown grilling burgers in his backyard and staring with suppressed menace at his wife's fat-ass bermuda shorts and varicose veins.
     And I thought about Jack's girl at Pussy Hard Rock. There was no denying I had had some sort of "attack." Or what brought it on. One could speculate, of course, and posit what kinds of occult psychic machinery might lie behind the simple cause-and-effect. But as the days and nights after that evening wore on, the truth became simple and incontrovertible: I was heartsick. A man of fifty-four in love with a hill country whore clearly not yet twenty years of age. Whom he had never spoken even one word to. Had not been in the same room with--save for ten minutes of mental and emotional and physical disaster. I needed to see her, and I feared that if I did I might relapse, or worse. It no longer mattered much if she was a mai kee or not. Perhaps there was no such thing as a mai kee, after all. Old Fishbourne was a man in deep despair over a dead wife when he examined the woman from That Phanom. He believed that the pig innards the charlatan on Luzon pretended to tug out of a fold in his wife's abdomen were her own cancerous bowels. And I had never had a chance to give Pong the kind of thorough gynecological examination necessary before the Delhi arms merchant whisked her away. She was shy that way and ran screaming and jumping about my lodgings when I produced the speculum. Every man, as I said, has this triangular hole in his brain that longs to be filled, completed. But no man's hole is exactly the same as another's. We're all different, absurdly so. My story here would probably strike the average Joe bellying up to the bar in Kokomo as the demented raving of a lunatic. So be it.
     I wrote a note and signed it and left it on the table of my lodging house room. I did not honestly know if I would return home alive that evening. I wanted Julie to have my Ibo fertility puppets and my Korean shaman wind skates. There's not much an anthropologist can leave the daughter of a divorce, in the end. I doubted the university would want my papers. And there was nothing left in my bank account. That last grand was the silted residue of a prematurely drained IRA. Then I turned off the lights and sat in the dark and let my eyes adjust to the pair of cheap sunglasses I had picked up from a street vendor. It struck me as extraordinarily comical that I was like a man preparing to view a solar eclipse, calculating the potential retinal damage and pressing ahead just the same. Quite mad and quite in possession of himself, just the same.

*

     In the murky darkness of Pussy Hard Rock I maneuvered my half-blind way to the same snuggle couch on which I'd collapsed two weeks before. It was still early in the evening and the only other customers were a couple of young German tourists wearing t-shirts that proclaimed in slick obscene mottoes that they were survivors of the greatest fuckfest since the Romans carried off the Sabine women. Jack's girl stood naked on the raised stage behind the bar, bending one knee and then the other to the beat of "Light My Fire," holding on to a pole fixed to the floor and ceiling. I fought off the impulse to tear off my dark glasses and take in wholly. Already my heart was racing and my palms wet. The heavenly blip of white light between her thighs was muted to a gauzy glow. A plump waitress sauntered over and plopped down beside me on the snuggle couch.
     "How come you got a sunglasses on?"
     "The better not to see with."
     "Tik no understand."
     "Your name's Tik?"
     "My name Tik. What your name?"
     "That girl up there. What's her name?"
     "What girl? Got seven girl up there."
     "The one," I said breathlessly, "holding on to the pole."
     "That Moi. Moi no talk girl. No hear."
     "She's deaf?"
     "Okay."
     Only now did I notice that as she danced, the girl called Moi kept an eye on the legs of the other girls on stage, divining the rhythm of the music from their movements.
     "You want Singha?"
     "Sure. Bring me a beer."
     "You want Moi come sit with you?"
     "Please," I said, as the room commenced to tilt and spin and I summoned from the giddy depths of my being the balance and equipoise of my spirit's sea-legs and my soul's gyroscope. "Yes, please. But please ask her to put something on."

*

     Moi lay on my bed that evening and many an evening after that, her legs spread in the manner of a Pussy-Blow-Dart-Pop-Balloon sharpshooter casting a trajectory. I sat beside her on a chair behind my sunglasses. With a handbook on International Signing bought at a used book stall we learned to communicate well enough that way, silently. Eventually a pink tip did emerge between her dainty nymphae and, improvising on a technique known to ancient Chinese sages as Burbling at the Jade Fountain, I managed to teach her a few basic phrases in English like "Oh thank you, but you flatter me" for the inevitable comments she was sure to receive regarding her stunning beauty and "Go fuck yourself" for anyone making a snitty comment to her about our age difference.
     But learning a language is not like turning a trick, and teaching one is not easy either. Even now every syllable we attempt costs her a laborious effort, but she makes it just the same, for me. Perhaps she has a hole in her brain too, and something about me--though I cannot imagine what this could be--fits it just right. But women aren't the same as men, that much we all know. She'll never be fluent, and we've had to accept that. We were the talk of the town for a while, so to speak, once back in the States. Perhaps you caught us on the tube that afternoon Oprah set her microphone on Moi's modestly skirted lap and all of America heard her muffled pussy ask "Why is everybody in the audience so fat?" She did me particularly proud that day, for I had not taught her that expression. We had not practiced it. She had learned it on her own. I had to slap my thigh and laugh when a hefty New Jersey matron with blue hair stood up and pointed at us and howled "Ventriloquism! I saw it! He moved his lips!" Jack got wind that Moi was in America and phoned one afternoon from his home in Santa Monica. I don't know why. He had to know she was deaf. But I was happy to have the opportunity to thank him for helping me out of Pussy Hard Rock that evening. "I couldn't have done it alone, Jack." I handed Moi the receiver and she slipped off her panties and squatted down on the mouthpiece and gazed up a me imploringly and squeaked, "It was sweet of you to call, Jack. You were a dear. I'm happily married now."
     And demonstrating that old Fishbourne had not been so completely off his rocker after all helped reinstate me at Harvard. My "Talking Pussy of That Phanom" piece--much elaborated--is now often cited as a singular example of dogged pursuit of truth. But I don't much care for teaching anymore. The students these days have no imagination, no vision of the quest. Fieldwork for them is drudgery. They would no more paddle a canoe up the Orinoco to undertake protein efficiency studies of Yanomamo hunting methods than scrub toilets in a bus station men's room. And my colleagues are no better. At cocktail parties the younger ones corner Moi in kitchen nooks and on bended knees address the most indecent proposals directly to her pelvis. She's a good sport, of course, and lets them off with a sharp knuckle-rap to the pate and a snappy Maeng-ka-phroon! Ra-wang! from those very same nether regions whilst hers truly stands off, nodding and winking.
     But I guess I can't blame them. Just the thought of making love to her is unutterably overwhelming. And actually doing it--my god! Once a week is almost more than my constitution can handle. And I have had to hang on to those shades. I still cannot bear to take in her full frontal nakedness. That dancing splash of unearthly white light between her thighs. We couple in the dark, like shy honeymoon lovers. Her deafness is incurable. And she will never learn to talk the way normal people do. So much for the magicians at Harvard Med. At night we lie side by side in a dark world of silence, punctuated only occasionally by tender whispers delivered up from that sweet fissure between her legs: Please nudge me if it starts to rain. I left the downstairs windows open. We live in a world of silence. But speech, regardless of where it proceeds from, is nothing more than manipulated sound, and sound nothing more than agitated air.


ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
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