Last night, the 23rd of April to be precise, I hit the town with an old friend of mine who is as tired as the fun palaces of Walking Street were fatigued last night. Forgive me for monotony but there were rows of beautiful zombies trying to smile, trying to dance, and the very little audience hardly helped the smiling. We sat déjà vu seeing déjà vu. The bodies were similar and beautiful. Very few girls stood out. Very few punters stood out. We’d been on the dark side before Walking Street and the same pallor of hope sat on the dark-side bars. The girls were slightly more animated but not so beautiful, and if nights of rum and coke and meaningless chatter can destroy body and soul we sat with sad examples of such. I thought I was on form at pool but Roy beat me 3 to 1.
After watching the semi-beautiful backsides of four a-go-go dancers as they stood and chatted in the shower of the friendliest a-go-go on Walking Street without any interaction whatsoever with their audience, Roy suggested L. K. Metro so we wended our way there. Roy went to his favourite haunt and met an Australian who couldn’t stop talking and had been beaten up the week prior by his lady-companion, and I went to two a-go-gos. In the first I met “Il Presidente” from Milano, Italy, and he flirted with the girls. I’d seen him do it before, and my melancholy deepened somewhat. He left soon after and a dancer called me to the stage. “Yaa go,” she said in EngThai. “Like you.” I declined, and left. The finale was in another bar where because I gave no tip I was singled out for Thai disapproval. That was about it.
I reclaimed Roy and we walked to Bronx Pizza where I ordered two slices of pizza, one free, and reclaimed my all-of-April-buy-one-get-one-free-slice-of-pizza card from an angry guy serving who really wanted to keep it. We enjoyed the tasty pizza and I taxied Roy to the dark side where I left him with an allegedly enjoyable two kilometer walk to his lonely room.
When I got to my lonely room in Nirun I fluffed the sheets and a maleng saap, a dung beetle, ran out from under the pillow, traversed the bed and waved its antennae on the corner, enquiring what the future held. It held my slipper which descended on the two-inch creepy-crawly. Now a maleng saap hardly ever dies and after three strikes this critter was still slinking away so I made sure and left the remains for disposal the morning after. The morning after it had managed to crawl a bit more before giving up the ghost (if dung beetles can, indeed, give up the ghost). I sent it flying off the balcony. I closed the room-door at 8 a.m., I needed to buy a re-entry visa from immigration, so I had to get going early, and reflected that one of the two nice, attractive and young barmaids on the dark side would probably never be seen again. I’d learnt she’d found a reliable punter. Roy had chuckled, “That won’t last.”
Maybe it will. Was I melancholy for that as well, for the disappearance of Meeow as we called her, as she called herself, a nome d’arte which meant absolutely nothing to any one of us who had a hand between her Botticellian buttocks? Yes, of course I was down in the dumps! She was desirable, voluptuous, and available. Was available.
