Babylon

Almond blossoms in Spain

The Babylon in Bangkok is said to be the best gay sauna in the world.

He wasn't in a position to judge.

"I haven't been to a gay sauna in 20 years," he commented to a man lingering outside the steam room.

"Same," the man replied. "That's why I'm on the outskirts."

They grinned in a flash of recognition.

"Looks like you're about to get lucky," the man continued, nodding in the direction of an Asian man standing nearby.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," he responded.

But there was at least a brief and optimistic communication between him and the man from Laos. The suggestion that they might consummate the introduction was met with a "I look around first".

It was a kind of gay sexuality he had never been drawn to; the ceaseless touching of numerous men; before the finale with some virtually random pick.

He liked to think the people he was sleeping with were good people, or interesting, or had the pathos of doomed destinies.

He was still sad from the departure of Nick that morning and wanted to distract himself one way or another. Prior to the Babylon he had had lunch with a mutli-award winning writer for teenagers, a social worker until getting sober and embarking on an enterprise to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Boyfriends with boyfriends with girlfriends had been the theme of his last book. Designed to sell by the bucket load to teenage girls, who were the principal purchasers of such books.

"You're starting to feel things," the American writer had commented. "You've got the typical response of the abused child, 'I never wanted to feel anything'."

"No, I didn't," he responded, gazing out the restaurant window of the Malaysia Hotel.

"From what you tell me it's no wonder," the writer said.

He shrugged and continued to stare at the car park fronting the hotel.

The Malaysia had been marooned in a nondescript part of what had then been the sprawling shantytown of Bangkok when he had first stayed there 40 years ago.

Back then it had been a citadel for backpackers, one of the most famous stops on the Coca Cola trail. The corridors were filled with stoned westerners from all over the world, diving in and out of each other's rooms, retelling tales from Afghanistan, India, what was then called Ceylon, wherever it was they had been. 

The bellboy who carried your bags to your room would take the opportunity to become your provider: "You want hash, heroin, Thai sticks, lady?"

As in so many similar hotels, the bellboy invariably warned of the dangers of the city outside, of how they would be ripped off for sure and it was much safer, quicker and cheaper to buy through him. They were usually right.

While The Malaysia was now surrounded by increasingly upscale condominiums filled with westerners eking out comfortable retirements on their western derived pensions, the hotel itself had barely changed in appearance in that 40 years. If there had ever been a renovation, which he doubted, it was a very long  time ago. 

But while The Malaysia had changed little in appearance in half a century, it had changed greatly in the clientele it attracted. Not only were the present generation of backpackers far less debauched than they had been, it was now seen as something of a gay hotel. The grey hairs hanging around the lobby and lounging in the armchairs made it look like an old age home for elderly queens.

It had been several long decades since he had stood outside the front of this same hotel and an Arab man had pulled up in his black BMW. He had reluctantly stooped down to the window to negotiate. He didn't like Arabs. They always expected value for money. A value he was extremely disinclined to provide. The negotiation complete, he had climbed into the comfortable smells of the brand new car and the less comfortable smell of the waves of cologne coming off the randy Arab.

It was all a long time ago, as he brought his attention back to the author of Boyfriends with Girlfriends.

Lunch complete, he wandered off to The Babylon. It might have been a citadel of gay Bangkok, but he had never been there. Within a second or so of having paid his 230 baht he ran into someone he knew. The upper crust Englishman grinned cheerfully, showed him around and advised him to relax and enjoy himself, there were some true uglies wandering around and there was no need to be shy. 

He might have passed his physical prime some decades before, but indeed there were some beached whales blocking the corridors.

And by the sound of it some of them were having fun. He wasn't. He sat in the heat of the sauna and sweated out the toxins before finally calling it a day; running, just as he thought he would in a moment of precognition, into a young man outside who was much more his cup of tea. When the working "boy" let slip that he only slept every other day and wouldn't mind sleeping at his place; all was revealed. There was a reason why the young man didn't have enough money to get inside the sauna and was happy to go with him for a discount rate of 500 baht. Just the sort of errant soul he would have once been happy to party with for days, weeks or months. No longer. 

Instead he slushed through the bucketing rain and flooding streets of Bangkok during the wet season; kundioh, kundioh, alone, alone, and grinned or grimaced ruthfully to himself. It was time to join the dots.

In This Part of the World

Silom Road, Central Bangkok 

There were rivers flowing underground and rivers flowing in the sky, and plates of glass piercing his eyes as he walked down the crowded streets.

Which was exactly why the inevitable happened.

In a place like Bangkok.

"Karma comes back quickly in this part of the world," someone had observed to him; and it was true enough.

As the remnant mourners threaded their way in a line through the crowded soils backing on to the Chao Phraya river an American friend of the deceased, Chris, whose memorial service they had just attended, complained: "Why is it so crowded? Why do they have to live on top of each other? Thailand's a big country. There's lots of empty space."

"They're very superstitious," he replied. "They're frightened of ghosts. They like each others company. They like it this way."

The whippet slim man who had had trouble with the Buddhist ceremonies throughout because of his staunch Christian beliefs mumbled further Americanisms, as if everyone should live like them.

So the Buddhists can accept Christ as a spiritual leader, but the Christians can't accept Buddha, he had felt like commenting at some of the balking behaviour, but he kept his views to himself.

And the inevitable did happen one Sunday morning.

He ran into the go-go boy Aek who he had once been so fond of and who had stolen so much money from him. And who had been at the origin of the series of books he was in the throws of completing under the mantle of The Twilight Soi.

The burning down of his house, the constant propaganda and lying about him, the relentless pursuits by the front-women of some of Bangkok's criminal and pedophile networks, had led to a chaotic and frightening time. And the "boy" himself, he was 26 now, had been spiteful throughout.

But there was no use confronting him with the "Kuhn kamoy mak mak" - you steal very much - rave he had once done.

All that had ever achieved was to make him look sadder and stoke the fires of spite even further.

So he smiled and embraced him as if nothing had happened, as if they had been friends forever.

"Kuhn maw," you drunk he observed.

Aek shrugged. "I everything now, whiskey, cigarettes, yabba. Many problems now."

His English had improved to the point where he now knew the pronoun "I" and had stopped talking about himself in the third person.

Aek might have been a duplicitous little bastard, but he had always taken good care of himself. Pretty like a coral snake, he had always thought, beautiful and dangerous.

Aek wasn't beautiful anymore. There was barely a shred left of the happy, handsome, popular young man he had first met.

He looked more like a bloated southern US senator in the making. Sadness, but not regret, seemed to ooze out of him.

And as he had once done when they were living together, in some sort of self-confirmation, he related how many falang, foreigners, had made a pass at him at DJ Station, the gay disco at the bottom of Silom where he had been drinking away the night.  

"But me no want to take care," he shuddered. 

Damaged goods. There had been too many customers, too much trouble, too many thefts, too much shame.

The remnants of the go-go boy he had known declined the offer a coffee; "I go home now, want sleep," painstakingly, drunk to the point where he had little idea what he was doing, Aek too his number and promised to call the next day. He never did. It was just as well. He would have been tempted to answer the call; and the last thing he needed was another raft of lies and thefts.

He saw him into a taxi and said goodbye.

It was a better ending than the last one, when they had run into a club down the road and to Aek's repeated declarations that he wanted to visit him in the "condo" to talk about old times, he had replied: "Fuck off".

But it wasn't a happy ending. The relentless pursuit of someone who had dared to write about what was in front of his face had not been expensive, it had hurt a considerable number of people along the way, not just himself. They said they did it for Thailand. They did it because they were paid; and they did it to discredit him and protect the criminal networks they represented. Sad, sick and obsessive, they had hurt the young man they protested to love so much; and what was left of him, in a land where life is cheap, wasn't worth squabbling over. Good work, he thought to himself in a shrugging ruthfully sad way as he lapped the block; the streets damp in the wet season and the rats scuttling through the garbage. 

Preternatural Configurations

Silom Soi 4 Courtesy of  http://www.virtualtourist.com/

There wasn't anything left that hadn't reared its ugly head. In the fetid damp of Bangkok's rainy season the rats multiplied. The garbage left in street corners was alive with them; sometimes they scuttled away as he passed, sometimes they ignored him. And with the rats came the cats, who, too, were breeding up in large numbers with the ample food source now available. The locals seemed indifferent. The plagues of London were faraway. "I must have been a traveler in time and space, to be here now," the logo of his Paypal consultant had declared, or something to that effect, as if even business operatives were allowed a little cosmic tilt, here in 2012 when according to the Mayan calender the world had been meant to end.

"I angry lady," an uncharacteristically moody Nick had said as they came through the door to his small apartment.
"Why?" he asked, "What she say?"
The response, he thought, was: "She say, how's your husband? What he think. Secret. He die tomorrow. You not Thai. You not understand."
But what Nick actually said he did not know.
Despite the considerable amount of time he had now spent in Bangkok, his brain was still trying to rewrite the babble of Thai around him into English, and the operation was only confused by the phrases of English which did drift down the corridor or across the ether.

And Nick, suddenly flush with cash and determined to celebrate, lapsed into in-coherency, alternating between a kind of playful aggression and affection, as he had done for the past hour or two.

They had sat in Soi 4 off Silom for several hours, watching the comings and goings of another flock of queens. It had been almost 40 years since he had written his thesis The Glamour and the Grot: Towards an Ethnography of the Gay Bars of Adelaide. How excited his supervisor had been. "It's almost like being there," he declared jubilantly one day after reading a draft.

Trapped in a marriage with two children and Bowie just having declared his bisexuality, Professor Alan Patience was more than champing to explore a new world.

He had been happy to show him around.

But that was another place and another time, perched on the edge of a vast desert and an infinite sea in a the bubble of churches and Anglophilia that was Adelaide.

Back there, back then, the homelands had always been calling.

One thread of his ancestors, surviving in the harsh desert landscapes of outback Australia, had been experts at detecting patterns in complex landscapes, they had to be in order to survive, but in this place the same ability to scan and detect could be both a plus and a minus, feeding paranoia along with justified safety concerns.

"My God that man is hard to kill," he had heard one of his pursuers, the pedophile Tong, had declared in frustration one day.

The go-go boy Aek's mentor, Tong, who had been so determined to off him, was nowhere to be seen, presumed dead. The Cambodians, who did not like people like him and certainly did not like the undue attention he had brought on them and the inter-linkages between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, their blood lust already up, may well have killed him. There was no explanation forthcoming from those who might have known.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed. The sparkling modernity, cash and television lifestyles which had swept across other parts of Bangkok were only now lapping at the shores of Pat Pong, Bangkok's oldest red light district.

It had the air of a sea resort out of season, of Brighton during the recession of the 1980s, of a place that had seen better days.

While all around tower after tower, cranes perched upon their ceilings, sprang up towards the sky.

In a babble of contradictions Nick had declared through the evening: "I supastar here. Everybody love me. I work here one year. I so cute! I butterfly, I not want hurt you. I want you understand me. Sometime customer like me very much. You good luck for me. I wait you all my life. You tell me go make money and customer tip me 1,000 baht. You good luck for me."  


As Nick bought a bottle of whiskey and shouted his friends drink it was obvious more than 1,000 baht had come his way.

In the muffled density of the damp streets and narrow sois his own spirit vaulted above the buildings stained dark with mold.

They would all be skyscrapers soon enough, and the crowded markets swept away.

Nick caught him admiring one of the waiters at The Balcony.

"You not worry about that," Nick declared with a funny little torrent of expressions. "I looking every day, three four times. But I take care you."

He laughed, if that's what it was. Life took many an odd turn.