A Star Is Born
I.
It was my birthday, which in Bangkok means the same thing it means everywhere else, a man of a certain age performing the ritual of pretending the number doesn't matter while spending money in ways designed to prove it doesn't. The difference is venue. In California, birthday means a steak dinner with Dave, who will insist on splitting the check and then refuse to split the check and then get into an argument about the check that devolves into a meditation on the nature of generosity between men who are too proud to receive it. In Bangkok, birthday means loading the wallet with cash, picking a bar, and buying rounds for everyone within arm's reach until the mamasan starts treating you like visiting royalty and the boys start massaging parts of your body you didn't ask to have massaged and didn't know needed massaging and can't honestly say you want them to stop.
I chose Lucky Boys. Mid-tier bar, decent talent, less competition for the built guys than you'd get at Tawan or Hot Male. December: peak season, the soi packed, every bar running at capacity. I walked in around ten. The door let out a breath of refrigerated air that died four steps in, beaten back by the body heat of a full house, and after that the room was only warm and getting warmer, and it smelled of talc and liniment and cigarettes and the sweet-sour ghost of last week's Singha soaked into the carpet. Black light over the stage. It turned every white waistband and every numbered tag a chemical violet and made their teeth glow when they smiled, which they were already doing, because the mamasan had clocked me at the door and the word travels faster than she does. I sat down, let her know the evening was on me, and proceeded to make friends with every boy and mamasan in the establishment. This is the annual tradition. Once a year, at Christmas or the birthday or New Year's, which usually fall in the same trip, I play Santa Claus in a muscle bar and let the invisible hand of the market work its magic on half a dozen young men who suddenly find themselves interested in the well-being of a middle-aged farang with an open tab.
It's actually quite fun. By eleven there were six of them on me: one kneeling up on the banquette behind my head with both thumbs in my shoulders, two on the floor with a calf apiece in their laps, one on either side of me pressed hip to hip, and one whose function I never established beyond occupying the last four inches of bench and laughing at everything. Their hands were damp. Everybody's hands were damp. The boys came off that stage cooked by the lights and did not stop to towel down, so what accumulated on my shirt over the course of the evening was their sweat and my sweat and a film of the baby oil they shine themselves with before a number, and the smell that came off all of it was coconut and salt. Somebody's elbow kept finding my kidney. There is no American equivalent for this experience. Strip clubs don't count. At a strip club you're a spectator. Here you're the center of gravity, and the boys orbit you with the frank, unselfconscious physicality of men for whom the body is both workplace and currency. They lean in. They touch. They laugh at jokes that aren't funny in either language. And for a few hours, on one night a year, I let myself pretend that any of this is about anything other than the wallet in my pocket.
Number 14 was not on the stage. I checked the row twice for the scar through the left eyebrow and it wasn't in the row. Nobody I asked knew which bar he'd gone to, and one of them made the small hand gesture that covers everything from Pattaya to prison to a girlfriend in Udon, and that was that. Nine months of thinking about a face, closed out in under a minute by a shrug.
I'd spotted Gop early. Not by name. I didn't know his name yet. By body. He was impossible not to spot: built, toned, defined, the musculature of a man who put in daily work at the gym and whose genetics had rewarded the effort with the kind of physique that draws the eye the way a lit match draws a moth. He had come off the stage a few minutes earlier and hadn't dried off, and under those lights the sweat across his shoulders and the flat of his chest didn't read as exertion. It read as finish. The last step in a process, the shine you put on a piece before you photograph it. He had his weight on one leg and his thumb hooked in the waistband, and the number pinned to it had been pinned crooked, and he had not noticed or had not cared, and it was the only crooked thing on him.
But I wrote him off. He was too much. Too aware of it. His body language said I know what I look like and his eyes said I know you know what I look like and the slight tilt of his chin as he moved through the bar said and I will let you look for free but the touching will cost you. I'm a top. I figured a body like that came with a personality to match: all display, no compromise, and if I wanted to get him to smoke, much less anything else, I'd be negotiating harder than I do at a silver market. Plus there were six other guys already massaging my legs, my arms, my neck, and the situation was favorable. Why risk a dud when the odds were already in my favor?
So I drank. The Singha arrived faster than I could finish it and went warm faster than that, and the ice bucket sweated a ring into the table that nobody was ever going to wipe. I tipped. I held court. And I ignored the most beautiful boy in the room, which, in retrospect, was probably the smartest tactical decision I made that night, because the one thing a boy who knows he's beautiful cannot tolerate is a man who doesn't seem to notice.
II.
It was late in the evening, midnight or later, the timeline gone soft now that the Singha count exceeded the finger count. The playlist had come back around to the top for the fourth time. My beer was warm and tasted of the tin tray it had been carried on. He came over. Not summoned. Not steered by the mamasan. On his own. He sat down beside me, but not next to me: lower, crouching on his heels so he had to look up, a position that in any other context would read as submissive but here read as tactical, calculated to make me feel tall.
He looked up. The eyes. Christ, the eyes: dark, liquid, framed by lashes that would make a Maybelline executive weep, and behind them, unexpectedly, warmth. I have no idea what it was worth. Crouched that close he smelled of soap and talc with the gym still underneath it. He smiled.
"Hi," he said.
One syllable. The most dangerous syllable in the Thai sex trade. Because "Hi" from a bar boy is not a greeting: it is an opening bid, a declaration of intent, a hook thrown with the practiced ease of a hundred repetitions, aimed precisely at the moment between Hi and your response, the moment where the money is made or lost. I know this. I have known this since the first Bush administration. I should have nodded, smiled, and turned back to the six-man massage currently being administered to everything of mine within reach.
I smiled back.
"Hi," I said.
"What you do?" He meant what I did for work. Or what I wanted to do with him. Or both. The ambiguity was structural, baked into the three-word sentence like sugar into a Thai dessert: you couldn't separate the ingredients, and the whole point was that you weren't supposed to try.
"I do everything," I told him, stealing his line before he could deliver it. He laughed: a short bark that got away from him before he could shape it. Nobody steals the bar boy's line. That's not how this works.
"No," he said, grinning. "I do everything."
And there it was. The declaration. The résumé and the promise, both packed into four words delivered with a confidence that dared you to test it. I've heard "I do everything" from a hundred boys and it's almost always a lie: a generous overstatement of abilities that, in practice, usually boils down to I will smoke you with middling enthusiasm, fall asleep approximately seven minutes after you finish, and be gone before the sun comes up. But Gop announced it. Loud, delighted, pitched to carry past me down the bench, and one of the boys on it said something in Thai that made him throw his head back and slap the table. He wasn't bragging so much as enjoying himself enormously, and the enjoyment was the argument.
I bought him a drink. He came up off his heels to take it, said something over his shoulder, and the boy who had been occupying the last four inches of bench got up and went to find somewhere else to be. Gop sat in the gap, close enough that I had to turn my head. He put a third of it away in one go and then talked at me for twenty minutes. His English was passable, better than most, worse than Dave's, and he spent it the way he appeared to spend everything, fast and with no evident anxiety about the reserves. Isaan. The northeast. He said the name of his province twice because I hadn't caught it and a third time because he liked saying it. Family there, counted off on his fingers, the count abandoned somewhere around the cousins. Gym every day, no excuses, and he pulled his shirt up to show me the week's evidence and then reached over and took the boy on the end of the bench by the wrist to show me his, and delivered a verdict on it that the boy accepted with the resignation of a younger brother, and then bought that boy a drink on my tab without breaking eye contact with me. Bodybuilding. He wanted to compete, and the word came out of him carrying the weight American kids put on drafted. He called the bar work "bidness," a word he pronounced the way other men say multinational arbitrage, and the bidness was the kind of work where his body was both the tool and the product, which, for a man this devoted to his own body, made a certain economic sense I could appreciate, being myself in the business of buying and selling beautiful things for a living.
I asked if he wanted to come back to the hotel. He didn't say yes. He said "up to you," which out of any other mouth would have been a deflection but in his sounded like a challenge: it's up to you, old man, if you've got the nerve.
I paid the off. Six hundred baht to the bar. The mamasan counted, nodded, touched her palms. The boys who'd been massaging me all evening scattered without resentment: they'd been tipped well, the night had been generous, and the fact that I was leaving with the one I'd ignored all evening was a professional outcome they understood at a cellular level. The beautiful ones always get chosen. That's the physics of the soi.
We went out through the doors and the heavy curtain behind them into what Bangkok calls the cool season and everywhere else would call a bad afternoon in July, into the smell of grilled squid and drain and two-stroke exhaust hanging in the dead air of the soi, and the barkers had the professional sense to say nothing at all to a man leaving with a boy.
III.
Back at the hotel there was the seven-hundred-baht joiner fee, the clerk's dead gaze, the elevator ride in which neither of us spoke because the elevator was the size of a coffin and smelled faintly of disinfectant and the ghosts of a thousand identical transactions.
In the room, something shifted.
It was not a dramatic shift. No music swelled, no angels descended, no sudden realization arrived and knocked the air out of me. Something quieter settled in instead. He was not in a hurry. That was the first thing. Every bar boy I'd offed in twenty-three years, and I'd stopped counting somewhere in the triple digits, had operated on a shared understanding: the sooner this is over, the sooner the night is over, the sooner the tip is pocketed, the sooner the next night begins. It was an assembly line. It was efficient. It was, if I'm honest, exactly what I'd always preferred, because efficiency protects you from the dangerous alternative, which is tenderness.
Gop was not efficient.
He showered first, which was standard. He came out in a towel, which was standard. He sat on the edge of the bed, which was standard. And then he reached for my hand, which was not. He held it. He held it the way you hold a hand when there is nothing scheduled after the hand.
We talked. Lying on the bed, him in the towel, me still in the shirt I'd worn to the bar with somebody else's talc on the shoulder of it, his hand on my chest, my hand on his shoulder. He asked about the silver trade. I told him about the markets at Chatuchak, the temple fairs in the north, the hill-tribe artisans whose work I'd been buying for fifteen years, the meticulous process of photographing each piece under fluorescent light for the eBay store. He listened. He asked what a loupe was. He asked what the worst thing I had ever bought was, and laughed in the right place, and then asked how much I had lost on it.
Then he kissed me.
He kissed me like he meant it, or like he'd decided to mean it, which in Thailand is the same thing. His mouth was warm. He tasted like the Singha we'd been drinking, with an undertone of toothpaste that somehow made the whole thing more intimate, as though the fact that he'd brushed his teeth before kissing me was a form of preparation that acknowledged what was happening as something more than routine.
We had sex. I'll be specific, because specificity is the point.
I am a top. I had been half hard since the elevator and had been managing it the way you manage a thing you have already paid for. He got my belt open. He got my shirt off me, which took some doing, since I was no help at all. The towel came loose somewhere in there and he let it go and knelt up on the mattress naked, and he was already hard, and had been, I think, since the kissing, and possibly since the elevator. Uncut, though you would have to be told: the head sat clear of the foreskin, dark and dry, and the whole of it stood flat against his stomach with the vertical insistence of a man in his twenties who has never once in his life had to think about it. He never once touched it, and never once drew my eye to it. It stood there like weather occurring nearby.
Then he went down on me, before I had finished working out how to ask, which saved us both something.
His mouth was hot. That is the fact I had somehow left out of two decades of describing this to myself, that the first half second is heat and everything after it is technique, and that heat is not a technique. He took me most of the way down on the second pass and stayed there until the room went quiet in my ears. Then slow. Unhurried to the point of rudeness, given the joiner fee, given the hour, given that this was the portion of the evening I had priced. His tongue worked the underside on the way up and he came off me wet and grinning about it, and went back down before I could get a word out.
I put my hand on the back of his head. His hair was still damp from the shower. He pushed up into the weight of my palm and made a sound around me that I have never since been able to decide about.
So I pressed. Not much. An ounce, to see.
He took it and made the sound again, lower down and further in, and I felt that one somewhere behind my knees, and my hand went from resting to holding without either of us stopping to discuss the change.
At some point in there my free hand went exploring territory his mouth had made me curious about, and he came off me and said, "I no like."
He stayed up there a second with his hand still around me, close enough that I could feel him breathing on the wet of it, waiting to see what a man does when the thing he has paid for declines him. Then he went back down.
I took the hand back and put it with the other one. I do everything. A hundred boys have said that to me and every one of them was overselling. This one had just named his one exception, out loud, in the middle of the act, and gone straight back to work on all the rest of it, and I had filed the boast as a lie two hours earlier without troubling to check. It is the closest thing to no that Thai will supply, and it left a door open that neither of us was going to walk through tonight.
I have paid for this ten thousand times. I know what it costs by the hour and by the act and I know the difference in price between the two, and somewhere in there I lost the number. Not forgot it. Lost the ability to run it. The part of me that converts, that has converted every single thing put in front of it since before this boy was born, put its pen down and would not pick it back up, and what was left was a middle-aged man holding a stranger's head with both hands now and a noise coming out of him that he had not authorized.
He did not slow down for it. He went faster, which was not what a man does when he is working through a portion of an evening. He went faster and he kept the sound going, and when it went it went hard enough to take my heels off the mattress, and he stayed down and took all of it and did not lift his mouth off me until there was nothing left to take, and then stayed there longer than he had to, his forehead against my hip, breathing, while the air conditioner hummed its half-tone flat and my hand stayed where it was because I could not think of the instruction that would move it.
Six hundred baht to the bar. Two thousand on the nightstand in the morning. That is the whole invoice and I have written it out here and it does not add up to what happened, and it did not add up then, and I ran it again anyway, because arithmetic is what I do when I am frightened.
I did not push the other thing. I have offered that to myself since as evidence of character. What it is, is that a man who does not push gets asked back, and I have known that about myself for longer than I have known it about anybody else.
After, we cleaned up. I expected the standard sequence: shower, dress, leave. The tip sits on the nightstand. The transaction concludes with a sawasdee kap and the sound of the door closing. Instead: Gop emerged from the bathroom naked, climbed back into bed, wrapped his body around mine, and fell asleep.
His skin against my skin. His breathing slowing. The weight of his arm across my chest, heavy and warm and where he had put it. I lay there, a forty-nine-year-old American silver dealer in a mid-range hotel off Sukhumvit, in bed with a twenty-something Thai bar boy whose name I'd learned three hours ago, and I did not move my shoulder, which had started to go numb, for a long time.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face. This is a detail I am reporting accurately and without embellishment, because it is relevant to what happens later, which is everything.
IV.
We woke up tangled. Morning light through the curtains: Bangkok's dawn, hazy, golden, polluted into beauty. He was already awake, lying on his side, watching me, curious, like he was deciding something and hadn't finished yet.
"Good morning," I said.
"Morn-ning," he said, stretching the word into two syllables. Then he smiled, and the smile was so sudden and unguarded that it caught me off-balance, the way a wave catches you when you're looking at the horizon instead of the water.
Downstairs he ate four eggs, rice, and most of a papaya, methodically, the way you fuel a thing you are running. I paid. He let me. Neither of us said anything about it, because saying anything about it would have meant saying all of it.
He stayed a second night, and a third. On the third, which was my last (I was leaving for Penang in the morning, a side trip that had stopped looking like a plan and started looking like an inconvenience), he took me to the night market. Not Patpong, the tourist one. The one at the far end of Silom where the stalls sold things locals actually bought: phone cases, knockoff sneakers, hair clips, ceramic figurines of cats wearing expressions of existential despair. He grabbed my hand. Grabbed it, publicly, in the street, which in Thailand is a statement that ranges from I like you to I am claiming you to I want everyone to see that this farang is mine, and pulled me through the crowd to a stall near the end.
He bought two gifts. Small things, three dollars the pair. One for me. One for my mother.
My mother.
Three days. That was the whole of it. A bar boy I had known three days bought a gift for my mother. There is a reading of that where it is the cheapest and most efficient three dollars anybody ever spent on me. I have never managed to make that reading stick and I have never managed to get rid of it either. What I did at the time was stand in the middle of the aisle holding a ceramic cat and try very hard not to let my face do whatever it was doing.
We said goodbye the next morning. Kisses and hugs: plural, repeated, a goodbye that stretched across the threshold like taffy. He waved from the elevator. The doors closed. I stood in the hallway of a mid-range hotel off Sukhumvit holding a small bag from a night market stall and told myself that I'd had a nice time with a nice boy and that variety was the spice of life and that I was a butterfly, a free agent, twenty-three years in and proof against exactly this, and that the feeling currently doing something complicated to my rib cage was indigestion, or jet lag, or the natural consequence of too many Singhas on a birthday.
I went to Penang. I sold silver. I checked the exchange rate.
V.
Six months later the rains had started and Bangkok was emptying out, June, shoulder season, tourists retreating to places where the humidity didn't require a survival strategy. I flew in with no intention of offing Gop again. Variety. Spice. Life. I hit the soi, visited bars, sampled the merchandise. The butterfly flitted.
And then I walked into Lucky Boys on the second night. Gop was on stage, mid-dance, number pinned to his waistband, eyes on the mirror. He saw me.
What happened next is the reason this story exists.
He let out a sound, not a word: a raw yelp of recognition, sudden and unguarded, so loud that every head in the bar turned. He launched himself off the stage: off it, not down the stairs, off the edge, a gymnast's dismount executed with more enthusiasm than technique, and crossed the room at a speed that suggested he'd been waiting for this moment for six months, or six years, or his entire life. He collided with me. His arms went around my neck. His body pressed against mine, shirtless, sweating, the hard topography of his chest against my shirt, his heartbeat coming through both our skins, too fast to be casual.
"You come back!" he said, and the words were not a question but an announcement, a declaration shouted to the bar, to the mamasan, to the boys on stage who had stopped dancing and were watching this scene with expressions earned from years in this bar, expressions that had seen many things but not this particular thing, not a boy exploding off the stage into the arms of a returning customer with the abandon of someone who has forgotten, or never learned, that this is not how the transaction works.
He hadn't forgotten. Two hundred baht is the fine for leaving the stage without permission, and it is typed in Thai on a sheet of paper taped by the changing room door, under the fine for going up late and the fine for talking on the floor. Two hundred baht is a plate of rice and pork, a bottle of water, and the motorbike home. Dancers on this soi do not step off stages. The mamasan had her book open before he reached me and she wrote in it without any change of expression whatsoever, and every boy still up there under the lights watched her write, because they were running the arithmetic. I was not running the arithmetic. I was standing in the middle of it with his arms around my neck doing the only thing I know how to do with a number, which is convert it. Two hundred baht. Six dollars. I'd have covered it out of the drinks budget and never seen the line item.
The room applauded. A few of the boys. The mamasan. A couple of customers at the bar who probably thought they were watching a performance, because in a gogo bar everything looks like a performance. What I had was the heat of his skin and the tremor in his breathing and his fingers gripping my shoulders like I might leave again and he was not going to let me. That is all I had. It has never been enough to tell me which it was.
I offed him that night. And the next night. And the night after that.
The second night he stopped the taxi two sois early, bought grilled pork on a stick from a cart, paid for it himself, handed me one, and would not take the twenty baht when I got it out. Twenty baht. Sixty cents. I stood on Sukhumvit at two in the morning eating pork I had not paid for and could not work out what to do with my face.
Each night: the hotel, the joiner fee, the elevator, the room. Each night: slow, personal, nothing like the assembly line I'd perfected over twenty years. And each night he was still there in the morning.
And on the last night, lying in the dark with his pulse still ticking down against my ribs and the gecko on the ceiling watching us with the impartial gaze of something that has survived everything, I did not think about the exchange rate. I did not think about the silver in my Pelican cases. I did not think about the price of a Singha or the cost of a long-time off or the joiner fee or the taxi fare or any of the numbers that had organized my trips to this city for twenty-three years.
I thought: I will add him to the short list of guys I off every trip.
That's all.
That's all.
From the Blog, posted the previous December, a week later, from Penang
I Fell In Love With A Bar Boy
Part I: In Which I Attempt to Explain How a Twenty-Five-Year Veteran of the Thai Bar Scene Got Ambushed by a Twenty-Something With Abs and a Smile
I have been coming here since before most of you had the disposable income or the sexual confidence to board a plane in that direction, a quarter century of it, three hundred and something flights if you count the connections through Hong Kong and Seoul, and in all of that I have been scammed and charmed and robbed and lied to with genuine creativity and once told the truth so bluntly I had to sit down for a minute. I knew the rules. I wrote some of the rules. There is a whole category on this blog for the rules. And then last week I broke the only one that matters and I have spent four days trying to write this post in a way that doesn't make me sound exactly like the men I make fun of. Failed. Posting it anyway.
I fell in love with a bar boy.
Not on purpose, I want that on the record. I went looking for what I always go looking for, a warm body and a cold beer and a transaction where both parties understand the exchange rate, the financial one and the other one. Feelings are for first-timers. Feelings are for the guy in the Hawaiian shirt at Telephone leaning in close to explain to a twenty-year-old that he is not like the other farangs. I have been making fun of that guy since the first Bush administration.
Anyway. He bought a present for my mother. Three dollars, a ceramic cat, a face on it like it has seen the accounts. He is never going to meet her. It is in my luggage right now and I have moved it twice to keep it from getting crushed.
Facts, for the people who will email me asking for facts. His name is Gop. He is straight, or whatever straight means in a trade where the definition flexes to fit the economics. He called the bar work "bidness" and pronounced it the way a man says multinational arbitrage, which is a considerable trick when you are standing in your underwear under a disco ball. He wants to compete. Bodybuilding, the real thing, judges with clipboards, and he told me that before he told me his province, which he then had to tell me three times because I kept not catching it and a fourth time because he liked saying it. He has a cock that could anchor a boat and a grin that could capsize one. [no photo. don't ask.]
That's the résumé. The story is something else and I do not have it yet. Three days is not a story. Three days is a symptom.
Stay tuned.
If this story hit right, leave a rating. It helps others find it.
If this one worked for you:
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 what it costs to need to be the one who is chosen.
Roman's Collateral (Cerebral, Blackmail, Master & Slave). A young scout buys a collared boy for a price he thinks he understands, then finds out what the boy's father sold to put him there.
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