Chapter 1: Cue Music
I.
At four o'clock in the morning Bangkok is an exhausted prizefighter, slumped in its corner, waiting to be told who it has to hit next.
I've been here before. That's the first thing you should know about me. Not once, not twice, but twenty-three years of Decembers, give or take, stepping through those sliding doors into air that doesn't slide but clings. Two or three trips a year, every year, since Reagan's second term. Which makes me either the most dedicated silver dealer in the Pacific Rim or the most deluded sex tourist in coach class. At the moment I am neither. At the moment I am a man standing in the immigration queue at Suvarnabhumi with a carry-on full of jeweler's loupes and two empty Pelican cases still riding a belt somewhere behind me, and the only thing I am is awake.
The humidity hits first. Always does. Not a wall, that implies you can lean against it. This is the space between two loaves of warm bread, and you're the filling, and the bread is breathing. Within sixty seconds your shirt is a second skin. Within ninety your underwear has begun renegotiating its relationship with your body. The tourists behind me, a family from Melbourne, all zinc and Tilley hats, are already wilting, their luggage trolley listing leftward, a ship taking on water. The father keeps wiping his glasses. The mother keeps saying Jesus under her breath, quietly enough to pass for prayer. I give them twelve hours before they're at the hotel pool, lobster-pink and begging the bartender for ice.
The heat and I settled this argument decades ago. My pores opened somewhere over the Bay of Bengal and will not close again until I'm back in the condo, photographing a tray of Kho San silver under fluorescent tubes, the thermostat set to a temperature that would make a corpse uncomfortable. For now, the sweat is liturgical: a sacrament of return, the body's way of saying yes, this again, this place where we are real.
Immigration is a formality. The officer doesn't look up. He doesn't need to. I am a single American male, pushing fifty, flying in from the West Coast. He has seen a thousand of me. The man who tells his accountant this is a buying trip and tells his friends nothing at all. The stamp hits the passport with a decisive, shift-ending thwack.
Then the belt, then the cases, then the green channel, where nobody has ever once asked why a man flies into this country with two empty cases. They are looking for weight. Empty has never had to explain itself.
Through the arrivals hall, past the currency exchange board with its column of numbers I will check again in the taxi anyway, past the sad parade of private drivers holding misspelled signs, past the cluster of taxi touts whose opening gambit hasn't changed since the days of Don Muang. "You want hotel? You want girl? You want young girl?" The last one, always the last one, delivered with a smile so wide it hugs your body while the proposition itself should warrant an arrest. No, I do not want a girl. No, I do not want a young girl. What I want is a metered taxi driven by someone whose relationship with the brake pedal is more than theoretical.
I find one. Or rather, one finds me. A skinny man with a crewcut and a shirt unbuttoned to the navel, he materializes at my elbow like a ghost made entirely of nicotine and goodwill. He takes one Pelican case without asking and starts walking. I follow. This is the protocol. In Bangkok, the first person who touches your luggage owns you for the next forty minutes. You can negotiate the route. You cannot negotiate the relationship.
The taxi is a Toyota that has outlived its warranty by at least two presidential administrations. The meter clicks on. The AC wheezes, producing something between cool air and the dying breath of a small animal. We lurch onto the expressway.
Bangkok at four in the morning: sodium lights painting the overpass a venom-yellow that turns everything beneath it into a crime scene. The few cars still moving swerve along near-empty avenues with the loose confidence of drunks who've been told the cops are sleeping. Stray dogs cross where they please. Temple spires catch the first blue of the coming dawn, their gold leaf winking like a promise made by someone who hasn't decided yet if they'll keep it.
The driver doesn't talk. This is unusual. Normally they start with the girl question and escalate to commentary about the weather, the traffic, the government, the uselessness of the previous government, the likely uselessness of the next one. This one just drives, his cigarette burning down between fingers that seem to be operating the steering wheel by memory. I watch Bangkok unspool through the window and do what I do at this hour, checking the exchange rate on my phone.
34.82.
I've been doing this calculation since the baht was at 25 and again when it cratered to 43 during the crisis in '97, which was the year I bought fourteen kilos of silver chain at a temple fair outside Chiang Rai and paid for the whole lot with what would barely cover a decent dinner in Santa Monica. Those were the days. The baht has opinions now. The baht has self-respect. At 34.82 my margins are thin enough to cut yourself on, but margins are not the point. They never have been. They are the story I tell the dealer in me, the one who needs a reason to be sitting in a Toyota with no shocks on the airport expressway for the twenty-third consecutive year.
The real reason is outside the window, and it smells like diesel fumes laid over plumeria laid over the hot-fat sizzle of a street vendor's wok already firing at this hour, and beneath all of it something dead, something organic and unidentifiable that lives in the seam between the sidewalk and the gutter and has been there since the Ayutthaya period. The real reason is the way the city grabs you by the throat, gently, like a lover, but with intent, and says I know why you're here. You know why you're here. We don't have to talk about it.
And we don't.
The hotel is off Sukhumvit, near a BTS station, because I am not an idiot. Upper mid-range. Marble lobby, functional elevator, a registration clerk whose expression suggests he has been dead for some time but doesn't wish to make a fuss. He processes my passport, assigns a room, and delivers the hotel's primary legal disclosure flatly, like a man reading out the terms of service for a microwave.
"Overnight guest, joiner fee seven hundred baht."
There it is. The tax. Every hotel in this city that caters to the trade has the line, the small bureaucratic acknowledgment that whoever you bring upstairs after midnight is not your wife and the house would like its cut. Seven hundred is mid-range, like the hotel.
"Understood," I say.
He hands me the keycard. I am home.
The room is the room. They are all the room. Air conditioning that hums a half-tone flat. A mattress carrying the compressed sins and spent fluids of a hundred occupants who came before me, and came often. The bathroom is tile, white, relentlessly hygienic in the way that makes you suspect the hygiene is recent and aggressive, like a reformed alcoholic's sobriety.
I shower. Tepid water, low pressure, and I have to crouch to wet my head. It washes off the plane and the airport and the taxi and the twelve time zones between who I am in California and who I am in Bangkok, and I step out as the latter.
From the window, fourteen floors up: the city waking. The sky taking on the look of an old bruise: yellows and purples sliding into each other across an expanse borrowed from a Bosch canvas. Below, the first motorbikes, the first vendor carts, the first monks in saffron making their morning rounds with alms bowls held at the hip. Somewhere a rooster. There's always a rooster, even in downtown Bangkok, some defiant bantam on a rooftop asserting jurisdiction over the dawn. And the geckos. Three of them on my ceiling already, flesh-colored, chirping their territorial claims, dropping their miniature turds onto surfaces that housekeeping will deal with or won't.
I should sleep. I will not sleep. Not yet. The body wants to, but the body doesn't get a vote. It forfeited that right somewhere over the Pacific. The mind is already unpacking, which is the only unpacking that will happen tonight. Two Pelican cases, empty, to be filled with product over the next twelve days. Jeweler's loupes, digital scale, a roll of soft cloth for wrapping. Findings, chain by the meter, hill-tribe pieces if the market at Chatuchak has anything that isn't tourist garbage this year. This is the legitimate work, and it is real. It pays. It has a business license and a bank account and an eBay store with a feedback score of 99.8 percent and one customer in Des Moines who dinged me over shipping time and has lived rent-free in my head ever since.
The silver is real, always.
What the silver doesn't explain is why my pulse quickened when the wheels touched tarmac. Why, when the taxi turned onto Sukhumvit and the neon started: not just the signs but the idea of the signs, the collective neural hum of a city whose nighttime vocabulary consists of six words, all of them obscene. I felt the part of myself that has no business license, no eBay store, no feedback score, sit up and pay attention.
There is a soi south of Silom that is not on the hotel map and does not need to be. There is a world underneath the silver, underneath the exchange rate, underneath the story I tell at Thanksgiving when someone asks about the trips. And I will visit that world tomorrow night, or the night after, because I always do, because the decades that separate the man I was from the man I am have taught me exactly one thing about Bangkok.
It is not the city that seduces you. It is the permission the city grants. To stop pretending. To want what you want in the open air, under the sodium lights, in a country where your desires have a going rate and the boys who fulfill them will smile at you: really smile, not the performative rictus of American customer service but the Thai smile, the one that says I see you, I know what you need, we are both here for the same reason, and the reason is not shameful.
This year the permission has a face on it, and the face has a scar through the left eyebrow. Number 14 at Lucky Boys, who was on that stage in March, who told me his name twice and lost me both times, the first because I wasn't listening and the second because I was too embarrassed to admit I hadn't listened. His photograph is on my phone, two down from a screenshot of the rate. I sent him a message in August. He didn't answer it. He may have changed his number or his bar or his mind, or he may be a young man with a phone full of farangs who send messages in August. Nine months is a long time to carry a face, and I have carried it, and that is the part I would not say out loud to Dave or to my accountant or to the woman who cuts my hair. I have been thinking about that eyebrow since the gate at LAX.
For now, though, the bed. The thin mattress. The chemical-stiff sheets. The gecko on the ceiling directly above my head, watching me with a gaze that has outlasted any hotel, any tourist, any love affair conducted in two-week increments.
I close my eyes. The city breathes around me, hot and wet and patient. Bangkok doesn't care if I sleep. It will be here when I wake, the way it is always here.
II.
I slept until two in the afternoon and woke up hungry in the wrong direction, which is what jet lag is. Then I lay there another forty minutes doing nothing, which isn't. The nothing had a scar through its left eyebrow.
So much for tomorrow night, or the night after.
The trick to Soi Twilight is knowing that it doesn't want to be found.
You come off the BTS at Saladang, down the concrete stairs into the sodium-yellow murk of Silom Road, and you merge with the crowd: the tourists heading for the night market, the office workers heading home, the ladyboys heading to work, all of them flowing along the pavement like tributaries of a river whose mouth you can't yet see. The pavement gives the day's heat back up through your shoes. By the corner your shirt has chosen its spot on your back and committed to it. Patpong is the landmark, or supposed to be: the night market that used to be a red-light district that used to be a rice paddy that is now a corridor of counterfeit handbags and "DVD! Sexy movie for you!" shouted at a volume that suggests the vendor believes deafness is a prerequisite for pornography.
You push through a gauntlet of plastic sheeting with charcoal braziers under it and the smoke at face height the whole way, sweet and scorched over the drain smell that lives under everything on Silom.
Then you look for the turn. Every internet guide says the same thing: find the Family Mart. This is Bangkok. There are fourteen Family Marts between here and the river. The relevant one sits at the mouth of a gap between buildings that, if you squint, might be a street, and if you don't, looks like the kind of alley where stray cats go to settle old debts.
I do not squint, and I have not used that entrance since the nineties. I've been walking my own way in since the soi's name was a rumor and its bars numbered three. Two decades of muscle memory carry my feet past the Burger King and the Subway (little imported slices of American life that serve only to remind you that you are no longer in America), down the side street past the luggage vendors, through the dark stretch where the speed bumps catch more tourists than tuk tuks. The sweat has reached my belt by the second bump. Then into the light.
Blue light. The air in the soi runs five degrees above the air on Silom, because sixty air conditioners are exhausting into the same forty feet of street and nobody has ever proposed an alternative. Blue Christmas-tree lights strung between the buildings like a canopy, casting an insipid glow over the faces below: some brown, some white, all of them turned upward and inward simultaneously, the expression of having found what they were looking for and not being entirely sure they wanted to find it. "Show now! Show now!" The barkers in their tuxedo vests, flashing white smiles that have closed more deals than any real estate agent in the Western Hemisphere. Dream Boys. Hot Male. Lucky Boys. X-Size, missing two Xs and, considering the local average, an L. Fresh Beach Boys, which promises freshness but guarantees nothing. The names stack up along the soi like a menu at a restaurant where every item is the special and the special is you, specifically your wallet, and secondarily whatever is attached to it.
I ignore the barkers. They know me. The ones who've been here long enough see my face and pull their hands back and redirect the pitch to the foursome behind me. The new ones grab my arm and I give them the look, and they let go.
I pass Dick's Café (still there, still staffed by waiters whose primary skill is a Zen master's ability to ignore you). Lucky Boys is four doors further along and I keep my eyes off the doorway, because Lucky Boys is for the birthday, three nights out, and because a man who goes looking for a particular eyebrow on his first night in town has admitted something to himself he'd rather admit later. Then Hot Male, which was the Twilight bar before it was Hot Male and had a Roman numeral after it before that. I head for Tawan, which I have been walking into since the Clinton administration.
III.
The interior of a Bangkok gogo bar at nine-fifteen on a Friday night: imagine a nightclub designed by someone who has heard music described but never actually listened to any. The bass hits your molars before your eyes adjust. The air conditioning fights the body heat of sixty men and loses, and what it manages instead is to chill the wet shirt against your back so that you sit down colder and damper than you stood up. The stage, a raised platform running the length of the room, is lit in rotating washes of red, blue, purple, the colors cycling on a metronomic pulse that belongs to no one and everyone.
On the stage: eight boys. Nine. Ten. I'm still counting because my eyes are doing what they always do in the first thirty seconds, which is inventory. Numbers pinned to the waistbands of underwear so abbreviated it functions less as clothing and more as a suggestion. Bodies ranging from slender to sculpted, the musculature of men whose gym time is both vanity and vocational necessity. They dance. Dance is generous. They sway, they flex, they rotate their hips with practiced, mechanical disinterest, performing a task they've done a thousand times and will do a thousand more. Their eyes are on the mirrors behind the audience, not on the audience itself. They are watching themselves being watched. It is the most honest thing that happens in this room.
A mamasan materializes. She is five feet tall, stevedore-built, and wearing an expression of such focused professional warmth that you'd think I'd just arrived at the Ritz. "Sawasdee ka! Long time!" She remembers me. They all remember the regulars. It is the first and most important trick of the trade: remembering who has money and who will spend it. She steers me to a seat, second row, center, the good real estate, and a drink appears before I've finished sitting down. Singha. She didn't ask. She didn't need to. I tip her two hundred baht for the welcome and she touches her palms together and disappears into the dark like a diplomat who has just brokered a peace accord.
The Singha costs what a meal costs on the street outside. The boy's drink will cost two. Nobody says any of this and nobody is going to, because asking what a thing costs announces that your wallet has a condition, and the room responds to that the way water responds to a blood trail that stops: it loses interest and goes elsewhere.
I don't make a fuss. I drink. I watch.
IV.
The show changes every fifteen minutes or so: a new rotation, a new set of boys taking the stage while the previous batch filters down to work the floor. The boys who come off stage and aren't immediately beckoned by a customer find a spot along the wall, pull out their phones, and scroll with absolute focus, having just discovered a technology more interesting than the one that pays their rent. They will sit there until called, or until the mamasan taps one on the shoulder and steers him toward a customer who looks like he is on the fence.
A boy sits down beside me. He is twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, with a middleweight boxer's build and a smile that has been calibrated to suggest both innocence and availability. He says "Hi" and then nothing else, and lets the nothing sit there and do the work.
I buy him a drink. We talk. His English is functional: "Where you from?" "How long you stay?" "First time?" My Thai is worse, but in the right places: "Arai na?" when I don't understand, "Sanuk dee" when I want him to know I'm enjoying myself, "Lor" when I look at his body, which is often. He touches my leg. This is standard. The touch-the-leg is the opening move in a chess game where both players know the endgame and the only variable is how many drinks it takes to get there. His hand is warm and slightly damp and stays where he put it, high, above the knee, thumb moving in a small arc he is not thinking about. His fingers are calloused. Deadlifts, pull-ups. There is baby oil still on his shoulders from the stage and it has picked up the room, cigarettes and talc, and up close he smells of that and underneath it of a young man who has been working. When he leans in to hear me over the bass his chest comes off the banquette and I can see the pulse going in his neck, still fast from the number, and I want to put two fingers on it and do not.
He tells me his name.
I will not tell you his name. Not to protect him. He is in no danger from you. I will not tell you because by Thursday I will have to stop and think before I can produce it, and by the flight home I will not be able to produce it at all, and setting it down here would give it a permanence the evening does not have and that I did not pay for.
V.
The lights drop. The music shifts: a thunderous swell of bass, something cinematic, the kind of score that accompanies the arrival of spaceships or the fall of empires. A single spot hits the stage.
Four boys emerge. They are carrying candles, actual lit candles, the flames casting warm light across torsos that have been oiled to a shine suggesting either divine intervention or a bulk order from the nearest pharmacy. They are naked except for a gossamer drape across the hips, a sheer fabric that accents rather than conceals, so that the hard outline of each cock is visible beneath the cloth like a dare.
They are sweating before they start. Everyone in this room is sweating, and on them it has been arranged for. They move. Slowly at first, a serpentine glide, muscles in their legs rippling, the high tight curve of each ass flexing and releasing with a rhythm that has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the understanding that the men in this room came here for one thing, and it was not the playlist. The candles tilt. Hot wax spills, splattering onto chests, cascading over hardening nipples, pooling in the creases of abdomens that could double as washboards if anyone in this country still washed clothes by hand. The second one from the left takes it on the sternum and his stomach goes hard for a quarter of a second, which is not in the number. Beside me the boy makes a small sound through his nose, not for me, and then remembers me and turns it into a smile. One by one the drapes fall away. One by one the cocks are displayed: erect, pointing north, each one a statement of fact that requires no annotation.
"What you drink?" A voice beside me, grating, its gender indeterminate. The waiter. Or the mamasan. Or a ghost. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the question has shattered the liturgy, broken the spell, reminded me that I am sitting in a bar, not a temple, and that the boys on stage are not gods but employees, and that the candle wax will be wiped off their chests in the break room with the same damp cloth used to wipe the tables.
"Singha," I say, letting the second syllable die. As is the custom.
I look back at the stage. The boys are finishing: the wax number is always the opener, the warmup act before the main show, which tonight will include the Big Cock Show (exactly what it sounds like, though "big" is relative and "show" is generous) and the jack-off finale (ditto). The boy beside me puts his hand back on my leg. He has been patient. He has been professional. He has watched me watch other men's bodies and has not displayed jealousy or insecurity or anything at all except that one sound, which I have already decided was about the wax.
VI.
The mamasan reappears. "You like him?" She tilts her head toward the boy. The boy tilts his head too, an echo, a mirror of the mamasan's gesture, and for a half-second I see the mechanism: the mamasan's nod is the cue, the boy's tilt is the response, the whole interaction choreographed with the seamless efficiency of a Broadway production where the only audience member who doesn't know the show is scripted is the one paying for the ticket.
"How much the off?" I ask. Not because I don't know. Because asking is part of the script too.
"Six hundred."
I nod. To the boy: "You want to go?"
He smiles. He doesn't say yes. He says "Up to you," which is the Thai phrase that means yes and which also means I am placing the responsibility for this transaction entirely in your hands so that neither of us has to acknowledge what it is. It is elegant, commercial rhetoric doing the work of intimacy without ever risking the cost of it.
I pay the bill: don't look at the total, never look at the total, looking at the total is the first step toward calculating the cost-per-orgasm of a holiday, and there is a version of me who does that arithmetic, and he does not get to come into this room.
The off fee goes to the mamasan. She takes it without counting it in front of me, which is its own courtesy and costs her nothing, because she counted it with her eyes on the way over. The boy stands up. He is already heading for the stairs to change into his street clothes: jeans, a T-shirt, flip-flops, the costume change from fantasy to something resembling reality, though "reality" on Soi Twilight is a concept that bends under even moderate scrutiny.
It takes him eleven minutes. I sit there with a paid bill and a warm inch of Singha and nothing at all to do, which is the only part of the evening the money does not cover, and the boys on the stage rotate twice while I do it, and the second rotation has a number 14 in it who is somebody else entirely.
Twice in the eleven minutes he comes to the top of the stairs and looks into the room until he finds me, and goes back down. Men leave. A boy learns to check. That is the reading. I have never found another one, and I have looked.
We step outside. The blue light, the barkers, the crush of bodies: it all recedes as we turn the corner onto Surawong and hail a cab. In the back seat, he sits close. His thigh touches mine, warm skin smelling of soap and the faint chemical residue of stage lighting. He pulls out his phone and starts texting.
I don't ask who he's texting. I don't need to know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow I will come back to the soi and sit in a different bar or the same bar and it will go the way it goes, because this is what I do. This is what I've always done. The arithmetic is simple: a hundred and fifty boys, give or take, some memorable, most not, all of them filed under the same heading, a line item, closed out and carried forward.
The taxi turns onto Sukhumvit. The city scrolls past on both sides at once, too much of it and all of it at the same volume, and somewhere in the back seat of this clown car with no shocks and a meter that clicks like a metronome counting down the cost of everything I've ever wanted, I allow myself the one luxury that all the practice has not been able to deny me.
I am happy.
Three nights from now it is the birthday, and I will walk into Lucky Boys with the wallet loaded and buy the room a drink, which is the tradition, and somewhere in the middle of the tradition I will check the stage left to right for a scar through a left eyebrow.
I have not decided what I will do if it is there. I have decided several times what I will do if it isn't.
From the Blog, posted the following week
First Timer's Guide to Bangkok's Gay Gogo Bars
Part I: You Will Be Fine, You Will Be Broke, and You Will Come Back
Okay so I get this email about twice a month, always the same email, always some guy who has already booked the flight and is now lying awake at 3 AM in Ohio or Manchester or wherever googling "soi twilight safe?" and what he wants is not information, what he wants is permission, so: permission granted, go, and here is the rest of it, which nobody will tell you because everybody who knows it is busy pretending they worked it out on their own.
Nobody asks for directions to Soi Twilight. You either know or you pretend you don't and the pretending lasts about forty-five minutes after Suvarnabhumi before the diesel and the jasmine gang up on you and there you are at eleven at night wondering why you bothered to unpack. [see photo above. no I am not telling you which soi. yes you will find it.]
I'm not going to walk you through the mechanics. You'll have all of them inside an hour and by Thursday you'll think you worked them out yourself. The part worth warning you about is smaller than that. It's the moment he asks where you're from and you tell him and he says "Oh! America!" like you personally invented democracy and indoor plumbing, and something warm happens in the middle of your chest, and you should understand that the warm thing IS the product. Not him. That. He can do it forty times a night without breaking stride and you will get it once and think about it on the plane.
Do not fall in love. I'm serious. I'll put it in bold next time. The boy smiling at you off that stage is not your future husband, he's a craftsman working a trade that was here before you and will be here after you, and his whole skill is making you feel like the only man in the room, and he is spectacularly good at it, and you will fly home believing you shared something. And you DID. That's the part nobody says out loud. You did share something. It was a transaction performed so well it felt like a connection and the fact that you can't tell the difference isn't a bug in his technique, it IS the technique, and if you're sitting there right now going yeah yeah but MY guy is different, then congratulations, you're the man I'm writing this for, and I'd know, because I'm also that man, I'm just further along the road and I regret to report the road does not improve.
Standard is 1,500 to 2,500 baht for a long-time, at which price you'd expect a receipt and maybe a comment card, and you will get neither. The first boy I ever offed I tipped five thousand because I didn't know any better, and he told his friends, and I had the six most popular days of my entire life. Farang tax is real and you are paying it and you will keep paying it and honestly there are nights when not knowing any better was worth every baht of it.
What you get, if you're lucky and if you've earned it, which you probably haven't, is about eleven hours in which nothing at all is required of you and somebody is glad to see you, and somewhere in the middle of them a thought so dangerous it ought to be declared at customs.
What if I came back?
Yeah. That one. We'll do that one in Part III, when I've had a drink.
For now: find the Family Mart. Turn left. Follow the blue lights. Bring cash.
I went to Lucky Boys on my birthday and bought the room a drink, same as every year. What happened after that is not a first-timer's problem, and I am not ready to write it down yet.
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Chosen Last (Power Exchange, Interracial, Dubcon). Jesse watches his friends get claimed by their Masters one by one, and waits the longest. A dark romance about needing to be the one who is wanted.
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