3
Students of my earlier chronicle (a transsexual Thai-M2F-murders a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras-standard stuff in District 8) will recall that my mother’s commercial talent invented the concept of the Old Man’s Club as a way of exploiting the hidden business opportunities of Viagra. The idea, which still fills me with filial admiration, involved blitzing every red-blooded Western male over the age of fifty (ideally, those most pissed by the options left them by their postindustrial utopia) with electronic invitations to screw his brains out in a congenial atmosphere especially tailored to the tastes of his generation. Photographs of Elvis, Sinatra, Monroe, the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, even the early Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Cream still adorn our walls, and our music pretends to emerge from our faux juke box (chrome and midnight blue, with a billion glittering stars). The sounds come out of a Sony audio hard disk hooked up to one of the best systems money can buy.
My mother saw Viagra as the solution to the management problem that has beset the trade since time began: how to accurately predict the male erection. Under her business plan, an old man would come ogle the girls, choose one he liked, then book her by telephone from his hotel room when he had swallowed the Viagra. The drug takes almost exactly an hour to reach full steam, so the logistical problem originally posed by nature was thereby solved. It ought to have been possible to use a simple computer program to work out which of the girls would be occupied almost from minute to minute. (At the height of our enthusiasm project management software was discussed though in the event not installed.) And guess what? It worked a treat, save for one small flaw that really could not have been foreseen by any of us, not even Nong.
What we had left out of account was that these sexta-, septa-, octa-, and even nonagenarians were not old men of the serene, humble, and decrepit genre we were used to in the developing world. No sir, these were former rockers and rollers, swingers and druggies, ex-hippie veterans of Freak Street in Kathmandu, San Francisco (when there were beautiful people there), Marrakech, Goa before it went mainstream, Phuket when there were only A-frame huts to sleep in, the world when it was young and LSD grew on trees along with magic mushrooms and a thousand varieties of marijuana. Scrawny contemporaries of Burroughs and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, and Jagger (not to mention Keith Richards), these boys, doddering though they might appear, had once taken a tribal vow never to underdose. You’re only supposed to take half a Viagra to enhance performance, but would they listen? The hell they would. Some popped as many as three or four. Only a half dozen suffered heart attacks, despite dire warnings on the bottle, and of those only three actually expired. (Desperate times when Vikorn’s Bentley had to be requisitioned as an ambulance in the teeth of expletive-enriched objections from his irascible chauffeur, who doubted there was much Buddhist merit to be made in saving the lives of geriatric farang.) The others uniformly declared they’d gone to heaven without having to die first.
Now what was wrong with that? I’ll tell you. Gentlemen, take a whole Viagra (or more), and you kiss your natural flaccidity goodbye for eight hours or longer. (Forget about urinating for a day; questions arise as to how to carry out basic chores with that broomstick between your legs. Many report nostalgia for detumescence. Poetic justice: there’s nothing to do but screw, whether you want to or not.)
They wore the girls out, who started to leave in droves. My mother had promised full satisfaction and she hated to disappoint, which left us with no recourse but a relay system. One horny old codger could get through five or six healthy young women before the drug started to fade and he allowed himself to be carried back to his hotel in a condition best described as ecstatic catatonia (or rapturous rigor mortis). Profit margins shrank to paper-thin.
Something had to be done. At an emergency board meeting it was agreed to delete “satisfaction guaranteed” from the advertising and to appeal to a broader market. Overworked young men suffering from stress-related impotence were favored. We continued to be the destination of preference for the Western raver on a pension, and at the same time the more traditional customer began to favor us (Western ravers with no pension, basically), but we had lost our market niche. We were hardly different from all the other bars and as such suffered the seasonal downturns, not to mention the recession in the West. Suddenly we were running at a loss in a bear market. It was Nong who suffered most, for the club was her pride and joy, her brainchild and the vehicle by which she was to prove to the world that she was not merely an exceptionally successful whore (ret.) but also a full-fledged twenty-first-century businesswoman of international quality. She grew unusually religious, meditated at the local wat every day, and promised the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po two thousand boiled eggs and a hog’s head if he would save her business. Even Vikorn burned a little incense, and I went further in my meditation than ever before. With such mystic brain power working on our behalf, a miracle was inevitable.
Her name was Chanya, and I still remember the day she walked into the bar asking for work. She spoke English fluently with a slight Texan drawl (but enough Thai in it to keep her exotic), having spent nearly two years in the United States until 9/11 forced her to come home. Post 9/11 was no time to be traveling on a false passport in America. You had to have grown up in the business to recognize her genius. My mother and I saw it instantly; Vikorn took a little longer to catch on. Within a week we were boiling eggs like crazy and taking them and the roasted hog’s head to Wat Po, where the monks ate them or gave them to the poor. Let me explain.
First, farang, please dump those childish notions you harbor about our working girls being downtrodden sex-slave victims of a chauvinistic male-dominated culture; take it from me, there’s nothing your media won’t do to comfort you in your postindustrial despair to make you believe your culture is superior to ours. (Are they kidding?-I’ve been in Slough, England, on a Saturday night-I know what atomized basket cases you are.) These are all country girls, tough as water buffalo, wild as swans, who can’t believe how much they can make by providing to polite, benevolent, guilt-ridden, rich, condom-conscious farang exactly the same service they would otherwise have to provide free without protection to rough drunken whoremongering husbands in their home villages. Good deal? Better believe it. (Don’t look at me like that, farang, when you know in your heart that capitalism makes whores of all of us.) Most of the girls, being the sole breadwinners and therefore matriarchs, dispense the whole gamut of family business through the medium of the cell phone (generally in our staff toilet while changing into their working gear), from care of the sick to rental purchase agreements, from the chastisement of miscreants to the number of water buffalo to invest in this year, from marriages to abortions, religious duties, and grave decisions as to who to vote for in local and national elections.
But chemistry is at least as important for commercial sex as it is for the more art-house variety, which is where you start to differentiate between the supporting cast and the superstars. Here’s the secret: your superstar makes the chemistry. She is a tantric master in a G-string, a topless sorceress, a dancing dervish with wicked allure. She knows how to turn herself into a mirror that reflects the many and varied fantasies of the men she seduces. Guess how many have come up to me to confide they’ve finally found her at long last, the woman of their dreams, the girl they’ve been waiting half a lifetime for, the one they are so sure of they will marry her tomorrow if only she’ll agree, the saintly Chanya? Answer: roughly fifty percent of Chanya’s customers. We have even employed a bouncer (known as the Monitor-like me, he doubles as a cop during the day) to protect us from attack by the brokenhearted. In short, Chanya saved our business, and we are not about to desert her in her hour of need. All genius has its dark side. In our preatomized society personal loyalty is still important, which is why even the wily Colonel Vikorn did not hesitate to interrupt his Saturday night in Bangkok (as the song says, it makes a proud man humble-and occasionally dead) when he realized our superstar was at risk. So here’s what really happened.