Not for Publication. William John Stapleton
he wasn’t going out all night every night, moving restlessly from one venue to another, driven by insomnia, nerves, free floating anxiety and a desperate desire for company, to commune with someone, anyone.
Instead he was as quiet as, well, a grave.
The first week in Nepal Michael lay curled up under thick eider downs in the Blue Horizon guesthouse in Kathmandu.
Sleep deprived and unused to the cold, having lost himself somewhere back down the line, Michael found it impossible to stop his imagination from staying furled among the rising cadences of a Bangkok night, “massage, massage,” “boy show, boy show”.
The grimy quagmire of self abnegation which had been his final dive in the City of Black Eyed Angels played against the cold white walls of the small room.
“He’s probably in shock,” the intelligence officer observed.
Correct assessment.
Michael was exhibiting all the debilitating signs of prolonged stress. Physical, moral, emotional, intellectual and mental decay had set in.
It took weeks for the unpleasant echoes coming unbidden into his frost coated brain to die down; to recover from the string of mafia run massage “boys” constantly offering Michael opportunities to humiliate himself.
In those final scarifying days in Bangkok the chorus hit fever pitch.
His judgment diminished, commonsense entirely eradicated, he grew lonelier with each passing drink, pursued from one bar to another.
Humans are pack animals. Like dogs they attack the vulnerable. He had been wounded, inside and out. And sure enough, just like dogs, they attacked.
Trekking season was yet to arrive and when the silence of the Blue Horizon Guesthouse became too much to bear Michael wandered the narrow, pot-holed streets, frequently losing his way. The shops in the tourist area of Thamel didn’t appear to have altered much since his last visit 30 years before.
On his walks through the jumbled, unfamiliar streets he passed a gang of glue sniffing street kids. Sometimes they fought. Sometimes they played cards on the filthy pavement near the clothing shop Himalayan Couture. But mostly they just inhaled as much of the fumes as they could before stumbling around each other in a kind of deranged ecstasy.
A book could have been written just about that hapless little gang; on how they came to be there, who they were, where they were going. The Glue Sniffers of Kathmandu.
Michael watched as a dirt-caked 10-year-old breathed fumes from an ever-present plastic bag.
Now and then the filthy group of children sat huddled together on the pavement running their hands through each other’s hair, picking out the nits, just as he had seen monkeys do.
Occasionally members of this little urban tribe made an attempt at begging. Usually they were too stoned to care. The lives of this haphazard crew were already spiraling towards early deaths. Few of them would make it to 20-years-of-age. He had watched too many similar scenes over extended periods of time not to know that this was true.
Low season in a tourist area meant the street-based entrepreneurs were even more solicitous, the restaurant waiters accommodating.
In the Kathmandu bars catering to foreigners there was easy company amongst the idle staff.
Random touts attempted to ply him with hash or pollen. When they failed they would offer up packets of salt for $100, claiming it was China White, the best heroin in the world.
One night he found himself being led up five flights of interlocking doors to be shown two sad looking young women lit only by candlelight.
Trying to get himself back on to some sort of human equilibrium, Michael took a fancy to the doorman at one of the local dance clubs; and woke up several days in a row with only a vague memory of the previous evening, of ramshackle rooms above the club.
Sometimes with the dawn he would find himself without a cent in his pockets and no idea where the money had gone, just as he had done in the life he had fled.
THE HOME OF CABARET
Among the images playing in his head in that cold Kathmandu guesthouse were lavish, lascivious scenes from a televised cabaret show in Thailand’s sex central of Pattaya, two hours south of Bangkok.
Pattaya, built beside a narrow strip of dirty grey sand edged onto a warm, garbage filled sea, was said to be the world’s largest open-air brothel.
The hundreds of women past their prime and lady boys not pretty enough to work the bars lingering under palm trees along the wide esplanade leant credibility to the claim.
Australia had some of the best beaches in the world, their golden sands and crashing surf the backdrop for innocent summer love and lazy afternoons.
But these indifferent sands held no such hope; except to the Europeans who sunned themselves with apparent joy, fresh from another of their interminable winters.
The entire cabaret show had been dedicated to glorifying the success of a go-go boy in lying, stealing and deceiving a foreigner, maximising his take.
At the same time the gullible Westerner was lampooned as a Les Patterson-like figure: stumbling drunk, sloppily dressed, with buck teeth. The foreigner had been him.
Xenophobic to the core the Thai audience, which included some of the most dangerous characters in the country’s sex industry, loved it; laughed themselves silly.
The only one not laughing was him. The customer. The one whose money they had so gleefully plundered.
The actors portraying two of the central figures in the story Michael had dared to tell were much better looking and more talented than the characters on which they had been based.
Some of the dancing and professionally choreographed skits showed off the Thais innate musical and acting talents.
But it would have been a damn sight cheaper, more decent and have had far less consequence if, instead of ridiculing an elderly foreigner, they had just apologised for cheating him and given back the money stolen.
With the edgy, testosterone driven pride of Thai men, saying sorry to a foreign tourist or returning money was not in a sex worker’s code of conduct.
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