Chapter 17 Ladyboy

The next evening I called Yaa from the payphone on the road.  She told me she’d rented a house in Pai, spending nights alone listening to music and I could believe it now.  Her quiet time before she took another surge at life, sitting in her wooden bungalow recovering from the previous month’s excesses.  She didn’t know when she’d be back.

I took myself to Bubble on Saturday, interested in nothing more than obliterating myself with alcohol and working it out on the dance floor.  I was working the end of two extremes, pushing myself to the physical limit all week, fighting back with uninhibited excess at weekends, another test, just to see how much I could take.  Somehow I was more drunk than usual and when a girl made advances I let myself go. 

Dancing together she stopped me every now and again. 

“You like me?” she’d say.

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, you’re very beautiful.”

As the night closed we stood together.

“You want to come back with me?” she invited.

I nodded finding myself with a set of car keys. 

“You can drive, I drunk,” she said.

Walking to a black four by four she left me as she chatted to friends and I looked around ‘Not bad’ I thought' must have a bit more money for something like this’.

Returning and climbing to the passenger side she looked at me.

“Sure you O.K. to drive?”

“No problem.”   

I cranked the long gear stick into first.

“Where’re we going?” I asked.

“Waterfall, you know waterfall on the way to Doi Suthep?”

I nodded.

“What do you do?”

“Write for problem page, if person have problem with love they can write to me.”

“A journalist?”

“Like journalist.”

Falling to silence we stopped at 7/11 to collect supplies and continued half way up the mountain parking in a lay-by.  It was black outside, the sound of running water audible as she led me down a slope.

“Ah fuck,” I cried as I stubbed my toe.

“O.K. honey?”

I reached down feeling my left sandal had broken free and a split in the nail of my big toe.  At the water’s edge the trees parted, the moon illuminating a shallow stream.  Hopping to a flat rock in the middle we lay on our backs.

“This my favourite place,” she said.

In silence for a couple of minutes as we looked at the stars she lent over kissing me, long hair falling to cover my face she reached to unzip my fly, then moving down to pull my penis clear, kissing, swallowing.  Working for a couple of minutes she brought her tongue away flicking and moved to return. “It’s not going to happen,” I said, placing my hand on her hair as she moved up to kiss me.

“You can drive me home?”

I drove along the highway towards the airport, after a while leaving familiar surroundings and following her directions to a housing estate.

“You can park there,” she said pointing to a white wall.  She led me to a single storey house, pushing through a screen door and a huge dog bounding towards us. 

“One moment,” she said leaving me in the bedroom and closing the door behind her. I heard voices in the lounge and looked around, a typical girls room, pictures of family and friends, a mirrored dressing table, hair crimpers lying on the floor. 

“You O.K?” she said returning.

I nodded watching as she climbed to the bed.  Light starting to filter through the window the alcohol was wearing off and realized I hadn’t properly seen her face all night.  Her figure was attractive, dark hair falling past the shoulders. I looked down as she unzipped my fly, the arms, the Adam’s apple, ladyboy.  I held my hand on her shoulder.

“I have to go.”

It must have happened a thousand times before; meeting the farang, making sure they knew the situation without actually saying ‘I’m a ladyboy’ and then we sobered up.  Climbing from the bed I fastened my belt and took my one good sandal.  An older girl was sat watching T.V.  as I made for the door, stepping over the dog and entering the street.

‘Where the fuck am I?’ I said to myself. Every corner I turned looked the same. A housing development like you’d find at home, every street a repeat of the one you’d just walked. Eventually finding the main road I looked in either direction as it trailed to the distance. Left looking more promising than right I hobbled along until I met a highway I thought I recognised. ‘O.K.,’ I said to myself ‘the motorbike’s still at Bubble, you get a taxi into town and you're home and dry.’

I reached into my pocket to see how much money I had, no wallet, no keys. The wallet wasn’t a problem but the motorcycle keys were.  Looking back it was like a desert highway, telegraph poles stretching endlessly to the horizon.  Marching back as fast as I could I re-entered the estate and searched for fifteen minutes until I spotted the jeep.

I didn’t bother knocking, just walked in, stepping over the dog and making straight for the bedroom. 

“You have my keys, my wallet?” I demanded as she appeared behind me. No response, I looked to the dressing table.

“You have my keys?” I said again pulling open the draw and rifling through until I hit them.  I didn’t mind anything about the situation other than the fact she’d hidden my things with no intention of returning them. I passed back through the lounge, again stepping over the dog and making my way to the street. I looked down at my big toe, nail cracked down the middle, blood curdled between the toes.  I had to get back, a time when all I could do was keep moving until my equilibrium was restored. 

Walking down the access road I heard a motorbike and turned to see a young girl slow and stop.

“You O.K.?” she said.

Offering me a ride into town she introduced herself as Om, telling me she’d take me to Bubble once she’d run an errand.  I clutched the grip bar on the back of  the bike and thought about what the ladyboy had said to me. ‘You sure you like me?’ ‘I write for problem page’ ‘What you do?’ I’d forgotten that part. I’d told her I was boxing and she’d told me she knew one of the trainers at the camp, nothing to be done I relaxed.  ‘So you spent a night with a ladyboy, one more notch in the belt’.

Moving through the old city we came to a dead end, a boy riding his tricycle as an elderly lady accepted a pair of plastic carriers.

“Your family?”

“My grandmother.”

Taking me to Bubble she gave me her number and I drove to the Blue Diamond munching through scrambled eggs as my thoughts returned to ladyboys.  I saw them everywhere now, sometimes alone, sometimes mixed into groups of girls, with their male friends.  It wasn’t like being gay at home, a way of life accepted by all.  Many had the figures to pull it off, only the Adam’s apples and deep voices giving them away.  Andy’s step son at the camp was in the transition phase, a sixteen year old who wore makeup to school, hair finely cropped, an air of femininity in his walk. 

Thomas had told me about a boxer at our camp who’d become a ladyboy.  His family putting him to training after he’d failed as a monk he’d preferred to spend his time with girls, watching as they dressed up, experimenting with their makeup. By his mid-teens he’d decided he wanted to be a woman, not just playing the part but having the operation and the only way he could afford that was by fighting.  First becoming regional champion he’d started wearing lipstick in the ring and blowing kisses to his opponents.  Winning the Lumpini title in Bangkok he’d taken his chance to fight in Japan and made his money.  His parents their giving consent for the operation he was now starring in a Bangkok cabaret show. 

You had to work on preserving your morality in Thailand.  If you wanted a different girl every night you could have one, if you slept with a ladyboy no one cared, but somewhere you had to draw the line and ladyboys were outside my circle.  I loved adventures, but last night had been something else, recklessness?

Attending training that afternoon I worked up a good sweat and lent against the ropes as a familiar face pulled into the car park.

“You miss me?” Yaa said as I approached.

“Miss you.”

“I not think you miss me. I only stay two day, have to go Bangkok.”

Spending the next day together, she was gone that evening and lying in bed I had a terrible feeling I was addicted.  Every moment alone I wanted her, every idle thought drifting back to her.  I remembered a conversation I’d had with a young Canadian in China.

“You don’t smoke?” I’d asked.

“Too much of an addictive personality for that,” he’d told me, and I was the same.  When I liked something I did it to excess, till it made me sick, till I couldn’t do it anymor;  eating, drinking, smoking, travelling, masturbating, loving; in small doses all acceptable but I couldn’t do small doses, couldn’t get the balance. 

Having finished my books I decided to review what I’d read, taking my notebook and sketching down what I could remember.  I’d been struck by Pirsig’s discussion of the hippies, the generation of my parents and one I knew nothing about other than they lived in San Francisco and went there with flowers in their hair.  Pirsig had talked of Kerouac’s On the Road as their inspiration and I was fascinated by that.  The power of one individuals writing to cause such dramatic social change, I knew there’d have been other factors but it really did sound like it had been the spark.   

Pirsig said the hippies had wanted total freedom, to get up when they wanted to, get laid when they wanted to with whoever they wanted to, go wherever they wanted to.  But he’d diagnosed you had to have some order to stop things falling apart.  The travellers in Thailand couldn’t travel without someone to drive the buses, someone to make the shakes, people working in routines.  You had to have order and out of order came beauty.  I’d read in some self help book that ‘Freedom came from discipline’ and that seemed to be the point.  

I’d never wanted to be a hippy but in China I’d had thought about living like an aborigine, hunting my food, sleeping beneath the stars.  It seemed we’d made our lives so complicated, added so many add-ons to make life more convenient, but life had to be more than a drive towards convenience.  There were advantages of course; clean houses, the ability to travel, social stability, other people to interact with. It was just the balance that had to be right.  Too strict and life became stifled. I reckoned that’s where we were, economic progress seized on as the doctrine of our generation and like other beliefs before it, it had suffocated everything around it.  No time for just being, no value in anything which couldn’t be measured in terms of profit and loss, just a continual treadmill of doing, no one with time to stick their head up and say ‘Have we got this right?’.

No training on Sunday I decided to read ‘On the Road’ picking out a recent print and retiring to a teahouse.  A white colonial building selling ceramics in the front I sat in patioed lawn to the rear and ordered a green tea.  Wham, bam, slam, ‘I hitched a ride on a trailer, a guy called Sam was in the back, a hobo, where he was heading I didn’t know, didn’t care.  I rock up to Frisco and Jed’s got me a job.  I’m crashing with a girl; got me a job as a night watchman, Jed’s reading me philosophy, seems like a smart kid'.  I stopped reading, I could see what it was, I could feel the intensity and I was dizzy.  Laying the book face down I leant back and stared at the sky, ‘I can’t read that’ I thought, I’d got a taste for what it was, but that was enough.

It was about freedom, about a generation of young Americans rebelling against the American dream.  Young women who didn’t want to be housewives, young men who didn’t want to be insurance salesmen but like the backpackers wandering the streets of Chiang Mai you could only have so much freedom. Without some kind of structure in your days, you gradually faded away.  That’s what had happened to the movement, fizzling out once people saw the end goal was chaos.  Any society can support a minority of hippies, but anyone believing everyone can live like that his asking for a return to the stone ages.  No one to build buildings we return to live in huts, no one to farm we return to hunt and gather, no one to apply medicine we rely on witch doctors and kids who’ve just read a manual. 

I thought about the situation at home, we were another generation looking for a new way of seeing life, a way of comprehending what was happening and finding value in a world where everything was becoming faster.  Career changes inevitable, periods of unemployment more than likely. I’d hear people saying the same things again and again – ‘My job's gone’, ‘My contract's just finished’, ‘I’m retraining as a ……’ People didn’t seem to understand why, but it was clear to me, just a simple evolutionary step, economics heading towards its logical conclusion.  It was something inherent in human nature needing a single point towards which to drive philosophy, religion, science and now economics.  Perhaps we were on the edge of something more beautiful than all that had gone before, an age where people reconciled everything, saw life for what it was and moved towards balance.  Or was it annihilation, mankind imploding when work was taken away and they we were faced by utter reality of being.

Making a second border run Andrew showed us pictures of the two girls he’d simultaneously dated in Bali.

“They were O.K. with that?” I questioned.

“Yeah, we went everywhere together.”

It sounded like paradise, two girls playing the concubine but he really did look lost.  So much money, so many choices, he wore the demeanour of someone constantly perplexed, another lottery winner.

Driving through the mountains we got to the topic of reading.  

“So, what was the last thing you read?” Gareth asked.

“On the Road.”

“Ooohhh Kerouac, that’s a bit heavy mate.  I’ve been taking me Harry Potter to bed.”

That was an interesting moment for me, Gareth was amazingly controlled, his life set up, everything ticking along and he took himself to bed with Harry Potter, no big ideas, just tales of wizards and sorcerers.  He’d put a cap on things, worked out how to enjoy himself and when to switch off. That was the trick I couldn’t master.  It was what Pirsig had talked about in reference to motorbikes, balancing curiosity with the knowledge we couldn’t know it all.  With the fact that we had a body and we had to maintain it.  I couldn’t just spend my life philosophizing and drink till excess every night.  ‘Was I pushing too hard?’ I questioned, ‘To want it all, to want the perfect life, was I better off settling for something?’.

I thought again of Robert Redford with Meryl Streep around the campfire in Africa.  He’d told her the only animal he’d ever seen looking miserable was the ape, man’s closest relative.  Every other animal lived in the moment, no past, no future everything they did, they did as if for the first time.  It was human reflection which tortured us; memories laid one over another in a pattern which produced happiness or discontent depending on how we reconciled them.  The more I demanded answers, the more I got, but at some point I sensed you had to stop.  To accept you were no more than an element in the infinite.  No one individual had the answers, no religion, no philosopher and it would have been boring if we had.  To know everything, to live forever, to go to paradise, what would that be like? No more highs, no more lows, that wouldn’t be life.  That’s why I smoked, why I hadn’t climbed up a mountain and become a monk, why I enjoyed my vanity, courting, the folly of a drunken night.  But I wasn’t Gareth and I wasn’t Yaa, I felt a duty to keep asking questions, given what I knew I couldn’t just stop.  My instincts had driven me down a path, given me a view of the world from the rooftops.  I just needed an outlet, to find a life where I could use what I knew.  As the clocked ticked towards my departure date I wasn’t ready to leave, and Christmas being the only part of year when things at home slowed down I changed my flight and settled on the 30^th of December. 

I’d vaguely decided to return home over the past couple of weeks, my fitness and my new optimism for life giving me the feeling I could make it at home.  I’d resurrect my degree in philosophy, get a job, perhaps buy a house and rent it out as I’d told the girl from Anglesey.  It seemed sometimes we just had to follow our hearts to get a fresh perspective.  I was absolutely sure I’d done the right thing coming to Thailand.  Even if my plan hadn’t worked out, I’d learned so much, found a new place, reached physical perfection. 

Watching Jay preparing for his fight on he was finally getting into shape, a new discipline about his training he’d put an end to his nights with beer and cigarettes and having kept up fairly well with my own sessions my own body had transformed itself; veins in my arms, solid stomach, gullies dissecting my thighs. I was on the inside now, one of the camps' longer termers. I told Yaa of my planned departure over dinner.

“When you come back?” she said.

“I have to make my life in England, get a job, buy a house, same as you. I can’t do that in Thailand.”

Later drunk on Sangsom she put the question to me again.

“Perhaps I not go home,” I replied, “can stay in Thailand, we get married.  We can open coffee shop.”

“When we get married?” she replied enthusiastically.

“I don’t know, when can we get married?”

“Next week, Wednesday, I go Bangkok, come back and we get married.”

Waking the next day I had the feeling she’d been serious ‘I smart in many things but not in love’.  Avoiding her Wednesday return I spent my final week shopping for clothes, a warm coat for the English winter, a couple of Pierre Cardin shirts.  Everything felt right, I was optimistic, I’d had another adventure, I was fit and I’d worked out some more ideas and maybe, just maybe I’d fallen in love. 

On Christmas Day the whole camp turned out for a barbecue, it was my unofficial farewell and looking around I felt an unspoken bond between us, a hard won respect from our hours of training together. 

“Hey Paul, you coming to my fight?” it was Jay.

“You’re joking right? You think there’s any way I’m going to miss that.”

On Boxing Day, everyone slept in late.  I spent the day saying goodbyes and at six went to see the fight.  Taking our seats a whisper went around that the opponent would be another farang, that didn’t usually happen in Thailand and spotting him it didn’t look good.  An Israeli with a bodybuilders physique, huge bulking legs, six pack, thick arms.  When the fight began Jay stood off for the thirty seconds then lurched forward missing with a combination of hand shots. 

“Come on Jay, take it to him,” I shouted.

Bang, the Israeli cracked in the low kick, then again, again, again.  Hobbling to the side Jay clutched the ropes.  It was shortest bout I’d seen, less than two minutes and I knew he’d be crushed, all his bravado, all his plans for his gym in Canada, he’d been humiliated. 

Meeting Yaa in Bubble that night I met the fighters from the camp sipping soft drinks.  I’d fallen in love with the place, watching the girls picking out the guys, the pulsating rhythm, The Deep Bomb.  Closing the night at Spicy everyone was in high spirits, but an air of acceptance was falling over my relationship with Yaa. 

“When you come back?” she asked again.

I looked into her eyes.

“Can we spend tomorrow night together?  I have a few things to do in the morning but I’d like to spend tomorrow night with you.”

Waking early I packed my bags and sorted through my books.  I always kept the ones which had taught me something new, they were heavy to carry but there was something about reading them for the first time.   As if the words had been spoken directly to me, forming new patterns in my mind as the things which stuck became a part of my thinking.  It was ZAMM and Lila this time.  Filling my final day offloading the rest and shopping for gifts in the evening I took Yaa to The Riverside. We hardly spoke as we ate, she wanted was to hear me say I’d come back, but I couldn’t. 

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too.”

“Why you have to go back to England?”

“I tell you already, I can’t stay here.”

She knew everything, knew I didn’t want to go, knew I had to, but somewhere in her mind I’d betrayed her.  I knew what happen if I had stayed, it would have been the bottom again.  Following her around, spending all my savings, getting too drunk, too often.  I’d have ended up a wreck in Bangkok airport.  Like the guys I’d seen around town, only coming to Thailand for the sweetness, oblivious to the sour until the ATM stopped working. 

“I go,” she said.

“What?”

She stood looking down at me, it was another game and I wasn’t playing.  Remaining seated as she snatched her bag and walked out I looked across at the other diners.  ‘It can’t end like this,’ I said to myself, ‘that can’t be the last time I see her.’

Riding to camp I called her from the payphone getting the answering machine and deciding to return to my room.  ‘It can’t end like this’ I told myself again as I sat on the bed.  I was a romantic at heart, a passionate believer in beautiful beginnings and equally beautiful endings. 

Pulling on my winter jacket I raced through town visiting Bubble and Spicy, I called her from a payphone, left a message, went to Nen’s apartment and climbed the fire escape, nothing.  My coach leaving at six, I was running out of time but calling from the night market I finally got through.

“Where are you?”

“I go to friend’s party, get drunk.”

Arranging to meet her outside McDonald’s I leant against my bike watching a road sweeper clearing away the previous night.  Our time together had been magical, the way we’d met, the intensity, staring at my watch I looked up as a motorbike roared down the street.  She stopped abruptly, looking at me through glazy eyes.

“I sorry, I so sorry,”  she said.

Wrapping my arms around her I kissed her brow.

“Where can we go?”

“Apartment Nen.”

Riding as fast as I could I wanted every second with her.  Nen sewing as we arrived she moved to a corner to let us sit on the bed.  I held her hand, I loved her, whatever it meant now, whatever that word could contain, I had it for her.  Stroking her hair I pressed my forehead to hers.

“I love you.” 

“I love you too.”

“I call you when I get to England.”

I checked my watch.

“I have to go.”

Walking to the door I asked her not to come any further, we kissed, I was gone.