The descent into the Zone

After reading Odzer’s book, I decided my returning to ‘The Zone’ was long overdue! I was angry at that bitch for the way she portrayed the girls! I felt she had used them for her own ends, and it disturbed me that an academic and fellow anthropologist could have such superficial knowledge of a country in which she spent three years doing her fieldwork. But she had made me curious about what’s happened at Patpong since my last visit to that part of the Zone. Patpong had been my base area in its early days in the mid-seventies when I lived nearby.[1] At that time it was a fun place! I met the great love of my salad days, Suwanna, in a bar called Superstar on the corner of Patpong and Silom Road. She was 18 and a go-go dancer (and was she good!) I had turned 25 and just come back to Thailand. She was my dragoon-lady and my goddess of love: so beautiful and charming, and the best screw in my experience that far! In 1976 my eldest son was born at the hospital at the opposite corner, just across the tiny street.

Yes, Patpong and I go way back!

Now I hadn’t been to Patpong since 1992. Since I don’t live in the neighbourhood any more, I have acquired new base areas. And in 1992 Patpong had already turned very much into a tourist trap, with the stalls of street vendors occupying the entire street, selling the standard merchandise of printed T-shirts, leather works, canvas suitcases etc. Patpong is a disaster just waiting to happen! It’s jammed nighttime, and should a fire break out there is no way a fire engine could make it into the street! This night I begun in accordance with my ancient Patpong routine: I visited Superstar and had a Singha Beer as homage to Suwanna. And wherever she is today I wish she knew how precious her memory is to me! I met her here at Patpong Road the last time in the summer of -76. I just ran into her in the street. She didn’t work at Superstar any more, and I hadn’t seen her for a year or so. But she was still my dragoon-lady, and she could just have snatched me away forever! We would have flown over the clouds to Shangri-La, never ever to return to this world! Superstar hasn’t changed much. It was relocated 16 years ago to another building, when the corner location was changed into a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint, but the style is the same: booths around the black walls where you can sit in almost total darkness. In the center is the bar shaped like a double horseshoe and inside the bar a stage raised to the level of the bar, where the bikini-clad girls do their bus stop dancing. No stupid sex shows and no nudity.

When I sit down at the bar, a girl comes to sit with me. Her name is Daw, and she is from Ayutthaya. So this is the place for Ayutthaya girls, I think, because Suwanna was also from the ancient capital Ayutthaya. I buy her a coke, and tell her that I’m on an inspection tour, and that I’m not going to take her out. But there are few customers this night, so she doesn’t mind sitting with me anyway. After a while another girl comes to sit down on my other side. She introduces herself, and Daw asks me to buy the other girl a drink. This is an example of how a peu-un pod works! But this night I did a bar round more for research than for drinking!

I wanted to compare Odzer’s account of Patpong – already 10 years old – and my own memories – to the present situation. Things change quickly in places like this. Bars change hands, move to new buildings, are redeco­rated. The girls are all new. Now the King’s Group establishments have multiplied like viruses! There are King’s and Queen’s Castles everywhere! But some bars have been turned back into shops, selling the same stuff as the street vendors. The pace is much faster. Many girls have turned into short-timers, offering blowjobs in some upstairs back room. This is the American Way – cold and business-like! Odzer would be happy!

I decide to check out the skull-bars, so I cross the street, and yes, Rose is still there, as is Kangaroo. I go upstairs to Kangaroo, and I’m met by some kind of mama-san, asking me to come in. But I wouldn’t stay here to drink one beer!

- I’m only looking around to see what’s going on at Patpong nowadays, I say to her. And she’s happy to show me around.

- Yes, we have moved, but it’s same as before, she says. You see, now the blowjobs are done here in this section…

And she shows me a couch behind the bar section. I can see the reason for the change: When somebody is coming up the stairs, he now has to go all the way to the top and turn around, before he can se the skullers and the girls sucking their dicks. This new arrangement gives everybody more time to clear out when the police do their raids. The girls here show more than a little mileage. This is the end of the career of the bar girls who fail to get out in time.

The skullers are a fascinating tribe. Old Western men so totally deranged that they don’t care to take a girl to a short-time hotel or even to a back room, but prefer to have their cocks sucked right in the bar. They are so totally spent that they don’t even bother to ground out their fat cigars when the poor girls are going down on them. They just sit there drinking and reading their magazines, dropping the cigar ashes in the hair of the girls taking turns in vain attempts to give their limp old cocks a final revival…

The skull bars really scares the shit out of Thai men, I’m told. They don’t want to be reminded how far the descent can be from one life to the next. They just can’t imagine a fate worse than to be reborn as a bargirl and having to blow the pink dicks of a dozen fat, old skullers every night.

So I leave, and I walk Patpong Road up to the end at Surawong Road. Then I cross and walk back on the Superstar side until I come to what’s nowadays called Soi Superstar; the shortcut to Patpong II Road. I turn left twice, and walk north to Topless, a place that have changed style and moved several times over the years. When I enter the place it looks much like it did in 1992. But the customers are gone, and so is the spirit of the place. The girls still do nude dancing, but without the esprit they used to show. Now they look bored, and are considerably older than before. And I don’t see a single beauty around here anymore (regardless of age!) This place won’t last long!

I cross the narrow street and continue my walk up to the Surawong corner once more, to visit the Pink Panther Bar. No visible changes. Except that I’m not recognised by a single girl here anymore!

The upstairs place at Pink Panther is a nasty one, with sex-shows of the kind marketed so aggressively by the touts in the street. I’ve never understood the fascination with those shows. They are absolutely un-erotic. How can a girl opening a bottle of soda water with an opener hidden up her cunt possibly turn you on[2]

So I walk on and visit a few more bars. My basic conclusion is that this place has gone way down! It’s possible you still can find places here where you can have fun, but you would have to spend a lot of money before you find it! So why bother, when you easily can find yourself a base area in other parts of the Zone!

Farewell Patpong! I leave you to the three-day-tourists!

It’s 02:00, and most places are closing down. I cross Surawong Road and take a taxi back to Sukhumvit Road. After this evening of exhausting research work I want to wind down at HQ. Have a slow beer and chat with people without the feeling that somebody is in a hurry to separate me from the little money I have. HQ is crowded at this time. A hundred girls hanging around looking for a man for the night. Men going their rounds, looking for new arrivals. The jukebox blaring out the latest Thai pop songs, and around 03:00 the air has been replaced with something called atmosphere, and you can hardly breathe! HQ is open to 06:00, making it one of the few place places where you can keep on drinking after closing time, and also a place where bargirls have a second chance to find customers. It is also the only place where you occasionally find a uniformed policeman behind the bar – an indication of who’s running the place – and why it can stay open to 06:00!

But HQ is also a state of mind. It’s ice. It’s the meeting-place of lost souls; of those men who have ‘entered the Zone never to leave’.[1] Tourists drop in here sometimes, but not too many, and not in April. The sign outside is very discreet, and if you don’t know the place, you would most likely walk by without noticing it. The name of the place is officially Thermae Coffee Shop, and it’s located in a windowless basement of a hotel without a sign. Thermae is the ultimate flesh-market, with no attempts of conceal­ment ever made. But many of the expats do really come here for drinking and meeting friends, because the beer is cheap, and nobody is hustling for drinks.

Arriving before 02:00 when the bars close, is considered arriving early. If you do so, you’ll meet the real termites, not the after-hours bargirls. (But of course many termites arrive late too!) Many bargirls sit out the late night hours here when business has been slow and they don’t have money for a taxi, just waiting for the buses to start running again in the early morning. This night I order my Singha Beer from the waiter that looks exactly like the pictures of the young chairman Mao (but I notice that he’s graying at the temples too!) The style of the waiters’ grey shirts with a ‘mandarin collar’ just makes it impossible not to notice the striking resemblance! This is an interesting place in many ways. First it’s hard to find out who’s employed here, and who’s working as a ‘volunteer’! The old ladies for instance: One of them looks like she’s passed 90! (And I’m certain she must be past 80!) The hunchback woman walks with a limp, and has great difficulties just moving around with the beer bottles. She can’t be under 75! But they are here every night! Some other ladies in their fifties try to make a few baht from tips by giving massage to drunken men. How they survive is beyond my comprehension! One woman you see here every night too, is like a mountain. She’s just the fattest woman I’ve seen in this part of the world. Her hairdo is in the style of a garbage-dump, occasionally decorated with paper flowers… She always gives me the glad-eye, and I use to call her pikrasue to the amusement of the girls.[2] I think she is some kind of mama-san for some girls, but nobody I’ve asked knows for sure. They all belong to the set! The congregation of lost souls!

The truth is that most of the members of this congregation are not the fun type. Some of them have just lost it. There is a man you see here quite often. I’ve never seen him drinking or talking to anybody. When he is going his rounds he doesn’t even look at the girls, he just looks at the ceiling. I use to say that he’s possibly an anthropologist doing fieldwork, a participant observer. Others are just talkers. Some ancients are scraping by on small pensions and can’t afford to take out girls very often – if indeed they still are up to it![3] But they come here and drink slow beers and keep talking. Some of them are telling phony stories about their exiting past. How they’ve been around; how they’ve been fighter pilots and secret agents during unheard of wars, wars so secret that not even today’s mass media have been able to find out about them. Some stories are so screwed up that they are almost believable, considering the recent history of this part of the world… But here nobody cares. You can assume the past you’d like to have had.

At six in the morning the lights are switched on, and they start to clean the place. If you still don’t want to go home, you just move outside to a passage on the western side, where you can order nice Thai food or continue to drink, if that’s what you prefer. Not many customers are left at this time, and most of the girls give up around five and take an early bus home. If they are really desperate for money, they might hang on and try to pick up somebody that’s really drunk just to get a bed to sleep in, hoping that he in the morning will give her some money, just because he doesn’t remember how she ended up in his bed…

Here at HQ, late one night when I was standing with David at the S-shaped bar that occupies the center of the room, discussing something important enough to have been completely forgotten, a girl stopped in front of me and just looked me in the eyes, asking me a question without saying a word. And I answered: yes, yes of course, anytime – and hugged her.

She looks fifteen. Her name is Noy (meaning “little” in Thai.) Her outfit is that of a very conscious teenage whore, with bright pink lipstick and the most diminutive of miniskirts. She’s consciously se­duc­tive in a way you rarely see here. And she’s pretty. She comes from Thonburi, the old capital of King Taksin – on the west bank of the Mae Nam Chao Phraya, which is nowadays snaking through the middle of Bangkok Metropolis. She lives there with her mother, a younger sister and a one-year-old son. Her father has left them for the monkhood, she told me later.

Noy turned out to be a surprise! After the standard 15 minutes in the shower (The Thais are extremely cleanly at all times!) she comes to the bed. She kisses me like a tender lover. I do some warming-up by sucking her pussy, which she obviously enjoys. Then she just goes down on me and delivers the blowjob of my lifetime, totally disregarding all Thai sexual taboos! I’m just astonished! I just can’t imagine where she’s learned it; she’s just turned 19! And the things she does to me, Thai girls traditionally wouldn’t ever consider! It’s against the teachings of their monks. (And Thai men would traditionally never suck a girl’s pussy. They believe it would turn them into submissive slaves to the women, because of the powers of the female bodily fluids. And of course they are right!)

Noy turned out to be a surprise in more than one way. One day when she came to visit me, she brought some of her paintings to show me. And they are quite good! She’s an artist in more than one way! Another day I asked her: Don’t you bargirls ever fall in love?

- But of course, she answered. I’m afraid of it all the time!

Later she tells me about one man she’d fallen in love with. After some time he asked her to go with him to America. He wanted her to leave her son with her mother and go with him, she said, and added:

- I never talked to him again! I started to think about prices and awards I wanted to convey to her for her skills. Cocksucker-of-the-year is too playboyish and cheap. The International Golden Lips Award is better. The Monica Lewinsky Award would absolutely be degrading. So I decided it must be Appointed Honorary Member of the White House (Light) Guard”. (There is a go-go bar called The White House at Clinton Plaza, right next door to HQ!)

From Ground Zero (the junction of Sukhumvit Road and Soi Asok) to the northern end of Soi 22 of Sukhumvit Road is about 500 meters. And from the same point about the same distance up Sukhumvit Road to HQ. Soi Cowboy is only a few steps up Soi Asok (Soi 21), which means it’s all within walking distance from where I live. To Nana Plaza in Soi 4 it’s an additional 500 meters. And since I live in the middle of Soi 22 this adds up to a 2-km walk to Nana Plaza. A little too much in this climate! And as you rarely go out before midnight nowadays (only tourists do!) and the nighttime traffic is fast on Sukhumvit, you can get to Nana Plaza by taxi on the 35 baht minimum charge. (US$1) Then you walk back to HQ, and from HQ you can walk back home.

At Nana Plaza you’ll find bars of many different kinds. Katoey-bars[1] on second floor. Quiet watering holes, and wild sex shows. If I go there nowadays, I chose bars on two criteria: The music and the girls. The techno places drive me nuts! The girls must be both beautiful and fun!

At Pretty Lady on the ground floor the girls are pretty and fun. The girls who do nude dancing do it with esprit, and if you take a girl out of there, you know exactly what you get! They don’t mind giving you a sample!

Another little Noy who use to walk around in a fake leather micro-skirt has been after me! She never wears panties and the micro-skirt barely covers her bare assets. She’s a very horny little one, and when she kisses me, her pussy gets soaking wet! So far I’ve never taken her (or any girl in this bar!) out. There are just too many pretty girls around; you just can’t have them all! Last time I met her I was pretty drunk, and I said to her, you are a pretty little thing – when are we going to make a baby?

And she went absolutely wild – she thought I was a catch! She sat on my lap soaking wet and kissing and hugging me and wouldn’t let go! And when it was her turn to dance and she got up on the bar, she showed me pink… The bar doubles as a stage in this place – or rather the bar is the edge of the stage – so when you sit there you look right up into the cunts of the dancing girls. The waiters are outside behind the guests.)

There’s no question, I just have to take this little Noy out sometime! Well, this certainly is not about poppin’ a cherry – this is all about ice.

—————— Copyright © 1999 Carl Jacobson ——————-

Update in May 2007:

Things change quickly in cities like Bangkok! Bars change hands, and move to new locations. Girls you’ve known for years suddenly disappear without trace. Occasionally, if you know someone who has been close to her, you may get some vague explanations…

The Pretty Lady bar at Nana Plaza changed hands and name – and later took the old name back, closed for some time and re-opened recently again. The little Noi disappeared and I never got to knocking her up…

The White House bar and the whole Clinton Plaza was demolished about the time Clinton left the White House – to make room for yet another hotel.

Business hours for entertainment venues were cut by Thaksin’s notorious interior minister Purachai – ‘Mullah Puh’. All bars had to close at midnight – for a while. He didn’t last long as interior minister, and everyone knows that the nutter Thaksin is living in exile…

Over the years I’ve been involved with many Thai girls. Some affairs lasted a few weeks, other months, and a few lasted many years. What they all have in common is that they never turned sour. But things happen; you lose contact for a while – or for ever!

As things happened I have returned to Patpong a few times after all, and to be honest, I have found a few new girlfriends there too! Mot, Dtan, Tigk, Pen… The thing that doesn’t really change is the Thai girl. She may change face and name over time, but somehow she always remains the same! “There is no sweeter love!”

The Noi from HQ who I met in 1999 is still a dear friend, even if I haven’t seen her for some time now and know nothing about her current whereabouts. I miss her! We never actually lived together more than a few days at a time, but we had an on-and-off relationbship for years, and when I called her from Seoul some years ago, she told me she loved me too! Coming from a bar girl only after two years of acquaintance, those words carry some weight!