“Bastard,” she murmurs back. She lets go and withdraws the hand, leaving me desolate and lonely. Then she jumps on me. That’s okay, we don’t have the crime of marital rape over here; basically, you get into bed naked with someone, you take your chances (am I being a tad too robust for you here, R?). Anyway, if she’s channeling Krom, I’m definitely fantasizing that she’s Katrina.
Afterward we are relaxed rather than blissed. The tension is gone. Chanya curls up against me. In the silence and the dark I wonder about my lover. For her the thought of doing anything new and challenging, like sleeping with a woman for the first time, is a welcome cure for an extreme numbness. It could just as well have been base jumping.
Now, in the way of all humans, especially stoned humans, my mind switches to something completely different. A memory that hitherto had no relevance to the present pops up in perfect clarity. It went like this:
–
I heard the first whisper one hot humid afternoon on Soi Cowboy. The Isaan lingerie vendors were selling bras and panties from their stalls through oral hire purchase agreements, the cooked-food stands were doing a roaring trade, and the motorbike taxi jocks were practicing kung fu while making lewd offers to every female who passed. The soi boasted its usual abundance of attractive women under thirty and not a one of them looked more fatale than any regular country lass in shorts and T-shirt, yawning, eating, and gossiping al fresco on a sultry day. The sorcery of sex and money would transform them into irresistible succubi at exactly seven p.m., not a minute before.
They all knew me and I knew them, mostly because they all wanted to work for my mother, Nong, at the Old Man’s Club. Mama Nong paid better than all the other bars because Police Colonel Vikorn owned most of the business. She didn’t need to bribe cops so she had a wider profit margin; therefore she could be choosy, and she was. She chose girls like a seasoned wine taster chooses wine. Sometimes she surprised even me, taking on a girl who didn’t come close to a rival in looks and body, but possessed a certain extra something that Nong herself had owned in her day: magic that could turn a poor girl into a rich one overnight. All you needed was the talent to make a man believe with all his soul that he couldn’t live without you, even though you were, well, an article for sale among thousands. That’s all. I understand you call it capitalist democracy, R, over there in the West.
Now O called out from across the street: “Hey, Sonchai, some old man was asking for you last night. Said he saw you on TV.”
As the respectable face of Police Colonel Vikorn’s pharmaceutical empire, I was often on TV, giving the kind of glowing account of our district’s law enforcement record that farang like to hear. Naturally, I speak in English. No Thai would believe a word, but I didn’t feel guilty or impure about this particular duty. If the world currency is hype and hypocrisy, then hype and hypocrisy it must be. Survival has always been the guiding fundamental on these shores.
“Really? So, what bar are you working in now?”
“Rawhide.”
“How is it?”
“Oh, it’s okay. Bit quiet. Any room at the Old Man’s?”
“I’ll ask, okay?”
“Thanks, Sonchai.”
Like the bite of a mosquito-how are you supposed to know it’s malarial?
It happened the next afternoon too. This time it wasn’t just hot and humid; the heavens opened when I was halfway between Country Road and Suzy Wong’s, so I dived into the Pink Pussy where I’d misspent much of the sperm of my youth. Some of the girls who really were girls then are still there, mostly as entrepreneurs introducing customers to new arrivals from Buriram (there’s a saying: Are there any pretty girls left in Buriram?). “Hey, Sonchai,” Lalita said, “some old man was in here last night asking about you.”
“Really? Did you tell him to look for me at the Old Man’s Club?”
“Of course. He said he knew that.”
I shrugged. “That’s all?”
“He bought me a drink.”
I waited for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I said, “So, did he take you upstairs?”
She smirked. “For an old man he was really cute. Kind in bed and very funny. Very generous, too-we only lasted thirty minutes and he gave me two thousand baht.”
“Anything else about him you noticed?”
“Just the way he was-kind of hard, but knew all about sex. Different. He wasn’t your usual wick-dipper, that’s for sure.”
I didn’t think any more of it until the next day when it happened again. The reportage came from Superbar this time. And then from Blue Balls. It finally dawned on me that he was playing some kind of game, this mysterious old man who claimed to be looking for me, but never looked for me in the Old Man’s Club, where he would surely have found me. Then one evening, at about ten p.m., I was strolling down the soi to grab some fresh air, having been on the go at the Old Man’s since five in the evening, when I saw an aging farang leaning against a wall at the end of the street, staring at me. What impressed me most was that he was standing under some exterior air-conditioning that split the light into a joyful spectrum of colors, which were raining all over him.
I wondered if this was the old man who had been asking about me-and should I be thinking about personal security? To avoid any kind of problem I deliberately averted my eyes, turned, and walked back to Mama Nong’s bar. Only then I allowed myself to reproduce the image of him in my imagination: he reminded me just a tad of Brando in Last Tango in Paris. In Europe or North America he would have been wearing a sweatshirt under a gray raincoat open at the front, disclosing once-impressive musculature-and showing signs of alcoholism. That night he was in long shorts and T-shirt, like me, and drinking from a can of iced lemon tea. An old man, sure, but a dangerous one. And there was something else that only returned to me with hindsight: a look in his eye unmistakable to any cop who has had to do with the desperate and the damned. This man had firsthand experience of what shits the gods can be and, unlike the timid majority, intended to tell them so face-to-face when he met them.
That was it. I never saw him again and there was no reason at all to keep the memory in the foreground-until now. I am quite certain that old man is one of the old men in the hospital ward. On the other hand, throughout my life absolute certainties have turned out to be misleading products of despair, so I’m probably wrong. It would be nice to know, though, for sure.
–
The memory of the “Rainbow Man” continued to haunt me into the next morning. Nowadays there is a way of finding out who your father is, of course; or, to be more precise, who he is not. For a while I thought about enlisting the skills of the forensic team at the station, but decided it would have been too embarrassing. The news would have spread like a computer virus.
A quick search in YouTube using the key words DNA Paternity Testing Kit revealed that there existed a quick, shame-free solution provided at low cost by Know the Father Laboratories Incorporated, based in Kentucky. Part of the sales strategy of Know the Father involved a clip from a reality TV show where a sobbing, torn-apart young woman swears on every holy book she’s heard of that the child is his (pointing at the image of a man on a ten-foot video screen beamed in safely from another county), while the putative father on the screen darkly mumbles that he doesn’t believe her and she is a lying whore.
In the video clip the presenter ratchets up the drama and illustrates the power of the product by pushing the distraught mother to her limits: “We need the truth now, Jeanie, if you have any doubts, anything you want to say, honey, that you haven’t said already, any little indiscretion you’ve covered up till now, this is the moment.”