An Evening in Soi Twilight

Admittedly I get tired of the Americans who assume I am a sex tourist. Because that is all they know about Bangkok. And even about sex tourism, clearly, they do not know much.

Believe me: if you spent a sober hour in a go-go boy bar, watching exactly what goes on, not only would you not buy sex – you would not be tempted.

Or rather: to buy sex your own level of anguish would have to be extreme, or your skill at blindness highly practiced. Your loneliness would need to be at a near-fatal level. None of which excuses anyone from anything -- though others who have known desperation may harbor secret sympathy. Which they would be wise to keep to themselves.

I remain on the periphery of these places – because that is my district, my territory and vocation. These boys bearing numbers are my smudged little brothers, these tottering old johns are my very own despicable uncles. I’m a guttersnipe.

Soi Twilight (or Soi Pratuchai, or Soi Boy, as it is also called) has clearly been hurt by the unrest and economic downturn. The Banana bar is closed. The door to Future Boys is boarded up. The little street looks forlorn without all its lights, like a Christmas tree with bulbs burnt out. Fresh Beach Boys must be nearly out of business; the johns walk in and walk right back out again. At Bangkok Massage, where there used to be a crowd of boys in blue shorts teasing men as they walked past, there are now only two or three, playing with their phones and looking bored.

Jennifer, the cordial Hong Kong transvestite who perennially holds court on Soi Twilight, with her pearlescent flowing blouse, her ponytail and dangling earrings, says the best show is still at X Size and anyway, “They take good care of you there.”

One thing that perplexed me as a child was that, not only were there things I was not supposed to do, there were things I was not supposed to know. I was the kid the other kids asked the meaning of dirty words. (How did I explain cunnilingus? It must have been absolutely hilarious.) I was always in trouble for what I knew. Even when it was something that everyone knew – I was in trouble for admitting that I knew.

This pattern has continued all my life.

This idea of appropriate knowledge is not restricted to sex. Not at all. Most dinner parties would sooner excuse one for discussing fellatio than Afghanistan or the environment. Ignorance, and the pretense of it, is a very important part of being a good person.

I remember the strenuous pride middle-class people in Denver showed at being entirely ignorant of bus routes and schedules. I’d ask someone about a bus and they’d go on at length about how they knew absolutely, totally nothing about the buses, which ferried the poor around town. I’ve never even been inside of one. It was like asking a guy, in front of other guys, for advice about impotency. I wouldn’t know anything about that!

At X Size, like all the bars on this street, the young men stand on stage in white underpants with red plastic numbers attached. The lights at X Size blink continuously red, yellow, white, and it always seems to me that there is one color at least that tells the truth. It’s all a grand show. Blink. The boys are bored, exhausted, and forlorn. Blink. It’s a cabaret.

If you look closely enough at the young man as he grins on stage, or makes eye contact with a johns, or flexes, or arranges his crotch, you can see his mother in a small northern village, his father the farmer and Red Shirt sympathizer, his sister he hopes will never come to the city, his girlfriend with whom he endeavors to forget all the johns of the past two hundred nights.

Business is no good. The young men try to make eye contact with me and I do everything I can to keep my face blank. Nonetheless, hustlers have psychic powers and, before five minutes have past, the roughest of the young men is sitting beside me, saying “We go your hotel? Bar fine 400 baht.” His chest and arms are covered in traditional protective tattoos. He’s straight as an arrow.

Most of the young men have only very rudimentary English skills, yet possess a deep sensitivity to verbs and particularly to the active or passive tense. Pleasantries may not be possible, but no one ever seems to get confused about the difference between “I like to fuck” or “I like to get fucked.”

Also, this young man reminds me of some vocabulary I’d forgotten. Instead of saying “suck”, these men say “smoke”. You don’t suck cock – you smoke it. This does indeed seem more casual and friendly than the word “suck” and the young man is visibly relieved to speak of smoking, rather than fucking. “You smoke me! I smoke you! No problem!”

I respectfully decline; he goes away with a tip.

The principal claim to fame of the X Size show, as far as I can tell, is that the big cock show is also a petting zoo. The well-pumped performers wander the audience and, for a tip, you can feel the heft of the thing in your own hand.

I’ve seen what happens, however, when one of the johns attempts to suddenly publicly deep-throat the monster: the young man jumps back instantly, like one of those little birds from the mouth of a crocodile.

As far as I’m concerned, Bangkok big cock shows could be a positive and life-affirming part of human culture, if only each and every audience member would take a vow, forever thereafter, to shout down any one of the countless racist numbskulls who rant about Asians having small cocks. If I had a dollar for every one of these morons I’ve run across, I could fly business class to Europe.

The fire-eater in his black leather thong twirls the fire and then swallows it. At one point he playfully lights his crotch on fire and then looks around for sympathy – yes, gentlemen, don’t we all hate when this happens?

In between the live sex acts and the shopping segments – when the boys return with their plastic numbers to the stage – there are cabaret acts. The divas take to the stage and lip-sync melodramatic anthems. Ever since I first saw a show, these divas have been my inspiration. Look at her. If she can dance in those three inch heels, with that much energy and spirit and precision, all while wearing that gigantic headdress, and that sheer gown, and those eyelashes large enough to create a breeze, if she can do all that for half a dozen elderly sex tourists, then I too can do my best and not worry about overmuch about rewards, or about those people who condemn me, so as to assure themselves.

The moment I touch my bill the façade of good cheer drops at once, sudden as a power outage. The man who was playfully hassling me a moment before, sits limp and bored. The host counts out change with a flashlight. The show is over – for those of us who have the luxury of going home alone.

Babylon in Decline

Bangkok

It is extraordinarily interesting, this process of coming back to life. It might well be worth seeking out, if only you did not have to be dead so often, and for so long.

The first day I am not even slightly human, the second day I cannot hate myself enough, the third day there are glimmers here and there, a few trees in living color, then back again to the prerecording. The fourth day I am so sick I can barely move across the room.

Today I am still shaky, but I can feel the breeze across my face, and I know that the color in the world is going to win. Every hour it is kicking the heavy radio of worthlessness, self-loathing boombox, and sooner or later, a good stout kick will come and the radio will cut out – and I will not be depressed again for months.

As if Bangkok did not have better things to do than to bring me back to life.

At my favorite restaurant the proprietor says, “19 dead? Bullshit. 400, maybe. They came in with their guns and --” He makes the motion of gunning down a crowd.

“And the government says the Red Shirts they pay the protestors 1000 baht a day. 1000 baht. I’d close my restaurant, send my workers to go make a good salary. Here they only get 200. If the Red Shirts they pay 1000 baht, they have two, three million volunteers in no time!”

I asked him if he’d had to close the restaurant, which is only a five minute walk from Lumpini Park, the center of the protests.

“No, no, we stay open! Every day packed with customers. We hear gunshots from the park and the Red Shirts drive in the street shouting Turn off your lights! What can we do, we have customers. And so we eat by candlelight! Two days no electricity. Gun shots all the time. But we stay open.”

In Sathorn and Silom there are few obvious signs of trouble now – except some businesses have closed – and tourists remain sparse. Of course, there are still some – Bangkok is too integral to SE Asia – and many people’s addictive patterns – to remain neglected for too long.

As for gay Bangkok, of course the sex-addicted golden-agers and the aspiring pedophiles are still here. As well as the flight attendants and the English teachers, those ineradicable mercenaries. We keep our eyes on the ass in front of us and try to pretend everything is as it was before.

There can be no doubt however: Babylon is in decline. The Babylon Sauna: Bangkok’s legendary sex club, with its grand pool and glass walls, with naked pharaohs presiding over the gym equipment and elegant bars amid palms. Now a large disco ball blocks off the hot tub and half the shower stalls are closed. The men cruising the halls reach a locked door and peer through the window: there is construction that does not appear to have been touched in months. Men do not talk about anything else, “This place has really gone downhill, hasn’t it?” They lower their voices. “The owner. . . he has gone mad. Paranoid. He is a pure egoist. Like a diamond. He is entirely out of his mind.”

Nonetheless, we do our best to go on consuming each other, one man after another. The sexual delivery system becomes ever more efficient. Unlike our queer fore-uncles, we needn’t suffer unloved in small towns.

Henry Miller estimated he’d slept with 40 to 50 people in his life. Henry Miller, the cuntstruck libertine! In his life!

I reckon many gay men here do better in a week. With plenty of help, or course, from Viagra and the Internet.

Of course, unlike Henry Miller, we do not have the liberty of actually paying attention to the people we’re screwing. That’s the trouble with men nowadays -- they are so hard to see. You have to really squint, turn up the lights, hold him down by the wrists, to catch a glance at the man in your arms. Mostly the men come and go so quickly they are impossible to see or tell apart, like the blades of a fan.

We consume each other and you can see it in our eyes: good enough, not good enough, good enough, not good enough, good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.

I am going to sit very quietly now and wait for the color to return.

David Markson, This Is Not A Novel

David Markson, This Is Not a Novel

Counterpoint, 2001

Reading David Markson gives me the blessed illusion, for a few hours, that I possess a mind capable of thinking only interesting thoughts. Suffering and mortality abound -- the average must be about five deaths a page -- but it is imbued with coolness and space, like wandering through a marvelous but unpopular museum on a rainy Tuesday morning.

Markson creates a mosaic of tragic facts. Anecdotes, almost, except that most are only a sentence long. (Looking at a page will be more useful to the prospective reader than any review.)

A friend said, "Looks like a book I'd keep beside the toilet." Well. Certainly you could, and Mr. Markson would be well-pleased I imagine -- but you might find yourself spending all day in the john. The facts, and the way they are all woven together, is entirely transfixing.

Now that David Markson is dead, it is impossible not to think of his death, in a list with all the other deaths he mentions: David Markson was found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment. Like most of the artists and writers he mentions, he deserved vastly more honor and notice than the world ever provided.

Markson wrote several books in this format and he tried not to repeat event or quote. One place he tripped up was a quote of Emerson's, which he gives in both Reader's Block and This Is Not A Novel. It's worth repeating though, and it's an excellent reason to read Markson: "Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day."

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

It's just so much fun. When the Cardinal calls, outraged, to say that the cessation of death imperils the Church, when the narrator explores the fate of insurance companies or funeral homes in a country without death or launches upon an analysis of the handwriting found on death violet-colored stationery. It's just so much fun.

Saramago skewers society and its institutions -- yet portrays individuals with tenderness and dignity. I think he is one of the best for creating characters who are truly and convincingly good.

Half of the book is spent exploring the idea of a country without death, half to showing what happens when death herself trips up and falls in love. It is all a romp.

Please ignore people who say Saramago is "difficult". They are just trying to make themselves feel elevated -- and we should call their bluff. If you're reading Saramago for the first time, you'll need to accustom yourself to a few differences in the use of punctuation and the paragraph -- innovations which function so smoothly it is likely they will be adopted by other writers.

Two hundred pages of delight and then -- a big bang-up old-fashioned ending that made me catch my breath. Such fun! Especially if mortality's been sending you small shocks lately, this is one to put on top of your reading list.

TOKYO GRAY

"Maybe gray is the Japanese favorite color," Chiyo says, when I complain, again, that Tokyo is so gray, when I ask, for the hundredth time, why it must always be gray.

Chiyo is my closest Japanese friend. The one I see most anyway. Money is involved. I am her tutor in English conversation. She pays me a rather exorbitant sum to chat for two hours on Wednesday afternoons. Another lady chats as well -- but it is clear Chiyo is in charge.

After seven years, I know virtually nothing about Chiyo. At least, few of the things an American would expect to learn in the first half hour. I know that she travels regularly on guided tours to unusual destinations: Syria, Bhutan, Eritrea. I know that she also attends lessons in swimming and hula dancing.

Chiyo dyes her hair the green-tinged copper of a penny fished from a wishing well. It is the last color I can imagine anyone wanting their hair. It suits her perfectly. She is perhaps 60. She is perhaps 78. She is perfectly slim, her back straight. Somewhere around year five she let it slip that she was widowed. That was as much as I ever learned about that.

A year or two ago Chiyo retired. I have no idea from what. Whenever I ask her, her smiles gleams. "Please -- " she says "Ask a new question." After seven years of conversation I don't even know the answer to America's Question #1: What do you do? This is my friend -- I don't even know what she does for a living. It makes me feel like I've gotten nowhere at all.

It is also true that she refuses to answer the question with so much grace -- with such a brilliant spark of mischief -- that it really counts as an answer in its own right. Hell, it counts as a career.

Tokyo must be credited for its courtesy, certainly. To permit a foreigner to stay here so long -- and pay him for his knowledge -- when there wasn't a single day when he could say he knew for certain what the hell was going on.

I was a bookstore guy in America. I ran register. I shelved. Here I lecture on Dickinson -- or chat about the weather -- for a not gigantic sum or money, but certainly more than any other country would consider me to merit. I teach in a university. A secretary makes copies for me. It's a well-upholstered life.

I made two close Japanese friends. It took five years before there were two. They were friends like I think of friends. We drank beer and talked about our lives. No money was exchanged. Both of them dropped me, immediately and entirely, the moment they got a boyfriend. Evidently I was just a platonic foreigner, to tide them over until the real thing came along.

After seven years in Tokyo, I have not learned Japanese. How's that for shameful? I can barely manage a few basic phrases. After seven years -- and despite months of intensive lessons. Recently an old woman in an elevator asked, in Japanese, where I was from. I stuttered before I could get the answer out. And felt ashamed enough to weep.

In my defense, it is only the second time I can recall having been asked the question.

In seven years I have been inside three Japanese homes.

Of course, the problem may be me. The problem is so often me.

But in every other country I've visited there were plenty of people with impaired social skills, with shrill voices and odd habits -- and they still had friends. People who smelled bad and asked to borrow money and tended to make off with small pocket-able objects -- and they still had friends.

In Tokyo it is difficult to keep from falling into the assumption that one must have done something terribly wrong -- to wind up so alone.

Recently I have resumed reading large quantities of Japanese literature. It is my way of keeping the door open, of saying that I would still very much like to learn something, connect somewhere. It is an apologetic gesture. A good will gesture. Or at least the determination to act as though there is good will.

The narrator in Izumi Kyoka's story "One Day in Spring" mentions, as he walks through a small village, "the people here branded foreigners 'Blue Goblins' and 'Red Goblin' because of the bright paint they put on their houses." When I brought the story to Chiyo she said, "Yes, red demons and blue demons -- like in the story of Momotaro."

The demons, or oni, have sharp claws and wild hair and two long horns. Often they are shown with extra eyes, fingers or toes. A tiger skin loincloth or an iron club. When the demons weren't looking, the monkey opened the gates of the fort and Momotaro and the spotted dog, rushed in to fight the demons.

Chiyo mentions that years ago she took a trip to Mexico. "I like the colorful houses of Mexico -- but also it is embarrassing a little, I think."

I stare around me at the relentless gray of Tokyo, a jumble of gray boxes trailing electric wires as far as the eye can see. It does not seem to me to be anyone's favorite gray.

Of course I may be wrong. It has already been established that I am never sure what's going on.
However, it is not therefore required that I must pretend to be blind.

To me, the gray of Tokyo is the gray of things that have not been looked at in a long, long time. The gray of temporary and neglected things. When something is painted this color, it is because no one is intended to look at it ever. It's background. But then, what is in front?

I seldom catch anyone looking at Tokyo. Of course when Tokyoites pass by Tokyo Tower, or when a tree is in flower, they hold their cell phone in front of it and press the button.

I see people hurrying, crowds cringing, cramming themselves through Tokyo. In these last few weeks it appears we have passed an important marker: there are now more people looking into devices than out at the world.

Perhaps it is wise to look away -- the world daily becomes more frightening, more polluted and chaotic and upsetting.

The city is crowded and cluttered and gray; the screen is neat and in color.

Sitting on the train, a line of people in an identical posture. Bent over a device they hold with both hands, and stare into determinedly, without break, as though they could thread themselves through it, and away from here.

Just because I have few Japanese friends does not mean there is no one I care for. My tenderness for Japanese people is exacerbated by my inability to express it even a little. There are people I love to whom I have never asked a personal question.

On Wednesday morning I teach a class of elderly students. Some of them have now become very old indeed. I watch them struggle to climb the stairs and enter the classroom. The oldest of them were adults in World War II -- they are embarrassed by overmuch concern or praise. They want to learn the grammar. That, at least, is their excuse and they are sticking to it.

Some of these students, I reckon, have been studying English since the Occupation. I smuggle in as much tenderness as I can. They do as well, just as they smuggled sweet potatoes beneath their clothes during the war.

I am a member of a discussion group in literature and ecology. The half dozen of us are a little like scholar monks in the Dark Ages. A subterranean subcommittee for lost causes. I would like to continue talking to them for the rest of my life. I love them by nodding and taking notes on a clipboard. Our affection is inseparable from a certain gentle hopelessness. We meet six or eight afternoons a year. Each occasion is an oasis I sip at as long as I can.

What is Tokyo?

Tokyo is an enormous and complex device used for producing exhaustion. I should admit that I never understood why everyone has decided exhaustion is so valuable and worth seeking or, if exhaustion is the goal, why it wouldn't be simpler and more economical to have everyone run in place, at home, until they collapsed.

Nonetheless, millions of people participate in Tokyo every day and receive, as their reward, exhaustion, which, it should be said, is a particularly profound and comprehensive exhaustion, involving not only the physical but also the emotional and spiritual aspects.

My favorite bar is an informal and unofficial one on the Yamanote platform, a row of gray plastic bucket seats between a walled-up area of perpetual construction and a Newdays convenience shop which must do fully half its business selling cans of beer and lemon chu-hi to exhausted commuters generally who gulp it down in 90 seconds while pretending to look at the free magazines in the shadow of the convenience shop.

It is at this vulnerable skulking moment that I find Tokyoites easiest to love. Sympathy arises easily as I sit in a gray plastic seat and watch the Tokyoites flee for home. It is extraordinary to sit still, amidst the hurrying crowd, and simply watch. Great masses of people, carried off and replaced every 180 seconds.

This city resembles a mausoleum -- and everyone is dressed up for it like the wedding of a close friend. Women in white suits, men with gel in their hair. At 10:10 pm their clothes are still smooth, though their faces are crumpled from clenching them all day. They look like wealthy refugees who've been through a lot. Their money and status have not shielded them from punishment and deprivation. Indeed, it has rendered many of those humiliations even more effective. Despite all this, they still want to look their very best for their interview with the authorities.

But I am an ignorant foreigner, who has lived here seven years and never learned the language. Therefore, it need not be taken seriously when I say that what I see, when I look into deeply and intently into the crowd, is an astounding degree of misery. A level of suffering that is outrageous.

Not once in seven years has Chiyo ever admitted to being anything less than perfectly fine. That's not true -- I think she had a backache once. We are friendly and grateful to each other. Maybe this is what allows a conversation to continue for seven years -- the sense that there is so very much that has not been said.

We drink the very most beautiful green tea -- it is ever so slightly blue. The snacks Chiyo brings are exquisite. Almost never in seven years has a snack been repeated. Wednesday afternoons I am usually tired. She laughs at me if I yawn or sigh. She never praises me, is often sarcastic, and at this point would forgive me, I think, for anything short of setting myself on fire.

In retaliation for knowing so little, I pretend that I know Chiyo's occupation. I pretend she was the madame of a bustling and exuberant brothel. I think she would be an excellent madame. She's got the gaudy colors, certainly. The air of mystery.

We are grateful to each other. Friends, I hope, despite our gaps in knowledge. A bit of color amid gray Tokyo, about which we agree to disagree.