THE ITALIAN PLAN - Chapter 2 by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 2

The Garuda 747 landed in Biak, a large island floating on a slate blue sea mirroring the equatorial sky. Males went naked except for a gourd on their penis. They played guitars. I stayed at an old Dutch hotel opposite the airport. I watched the Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson fight in a grass hut on the beach. I bought the natives beer to celebrate the upset. We danced around a bonfire that evening. In the morning I boarded an inter-island liner heading from Ambon. A plane took me from there to Manado followed by a boat ride off the coast of Sulawesi to Poso. A bus ride along the spine of the island to Tana-Torajah. Another plane to Bali. A ferry ride to Java and a train to Jakarta. Jet to Medan. Ferry to Malaysia and a long train ride up the peninsula to Thailand.

I was in heaven.

Snorkeling off coral cliffs, magic spices, smoldering volcanoes, ancient temples, thick rain forests, mountain Edens, exotic dancers, eating pig with headhunters, drinking whiskey with Hindi rickshaw drivers, and swimming at pristine beaches begging you to stay forever. My money was half-gone and I had half the world to see. On the Bangkok-bound train a Frenchman suggested staying at the Malaysia Hotel.

“It’s a funny hotel.” Michael had been living in Asia 10 years. "It was where Charles Sobhraj used to meet some of his victims."

"Who?" The name sounded familiar.

"Charles Sobhraj. He was half-Vietnamese, half-French. He would pretend to be friends to travelers and dosed them with pills, so they'd think they were sick. Supposedly he didn't want to kill any of them, but he was not a doctor."

"And I want to stay at this hotel?"

"It's good fun. Cheap and the restaurant downstairs is where all the go-go girls go after the go-go bars close on Patpong."

"Patpong?" I was lost after hearing so many 'gos'.

"It's the wickedest street in Bangkok. You'll love it." Micheal had a colored stone business and we discussed diamonds. He called Pattaya home. Seeing the ignorance on my face, he wrote down his telephone number.

“Come down and see me some time. It’s Disneyworld for men.”

"More so than Patpong?"

"More so."

We bid farewell at the train station.

Bangkok was my first city since leaving LA. Skyscrapers rose from the wide avenues, which had once been canals or klongs. Upscale tourists stayed at the Oriental Hotel along the Chao Phraya River and backpackers crowded the hovels of Khao San Road. The taxi took me to the Malaysia Hotel. I booked an air-conditioned room overlooking the pool. The price was $20/night. I ignored the cigarette burns in the blankets. This was the Malaysia Hotel and not the Hotel de Biarritz.

Kenny’s Bar up Soi Duplei offered farangs or westerners afternoon assignations with lithe free lancers and the Patpong entertainment district provided nocturnal entertainment at go-go bars, sex shows, discos, and drugs. 99% of the girls hailed from Isaan. It was a poor plateau to the northeast. Selling off girls in times of trouble or need was a family tradition for generations. Each go-go dancer told a story sadder than the previous girl. I bought them drinks and returned to my hotel room alone. Within five days mama-sans from three bars knew my name. They all posed the same question.

“Why you no go with girl?”

“I have a broken heart,” I explained to the mama-san from the Queen’s A Go-Go.

“I fix your broken heart.” A go-go girl weighing 90 pounds swung silken black hair across my chest. A bikini was painted on her flesh. She showed no signs of inhibition.

“Sorry, can’t not fix.” The temptation was great. The last time I had been with a woman was Gabrielle. Too long ago. "Sorry, I have to go."

"You come back. I fix heart. 100%." It was a promise she would keep offering until I said yes, so I left fast for Kenny’s Bar.

His girls were less aggressive. Most were on heroin like the farangs at the bar; old Vietnam vets, dissolute drug addicts, and young adventurers living on $10/day. Their dealer was Fat Pat. He was half-Thai, half-Chinese. A lot of Thais were half-something else.

"You want chase the dragon?" Fat Pat weighed about 300 pounds. His stubby fingers held up a black ball.

"Opium." My cousin Sherri would love Fat Pat. His prices were a fraction of the black tar in LA.

"Make you feel horny." He was gay and winked like sleeping with him was an extra bonus.

"Not tonight."

"Change your mind, you know where I am."

I drank a cold Singha beer and watched the farangs pick up the dope-weary girls.

"Why you not take girl?" Kenny asked from behind the bar.

"I'm not here for sex. Only beer."

"You can lie me but not lie yourself." No one was willing to take 'no' for an answer. "You not like girls. Can have me. I make love all night for free. I like straight men. You straight, yes."

"Yes, but I don't go with men."

"Not go with men. Not go with lady." Kenny shivered as if someone had walked on his grave. "Maybe you look like girls here. I have cousin. Pong."

He shouted to the kitchen. A tall 19 year-old with long hair entered the bar. Sweet smile, smiling eyes. Slender as a boy. She would have stopped traffic in Paris, London, or New York.

"You like?" Kenny already knew the answer.

"I don't want to pay for it." Prostitution was a sin.

"Not have to pay. You give her money for family. Not same pay. You not like not give anything." The going rate was $20. Pong leaned over to whisper in Kenny's ear.

“Pong like you. She say that you are not like other farangs.”

“How so?” She stepped close enough for me to smell her perfume. It offered the promise of flowers.

"Ask her not me."

Pong touched my arm and had me touch hers. Her dark skin was smoother than a baby seal’s belly.

“You not fat. You have all your hair. You not do drugs. You have no tattoo. Have teeth too and wear clean clothes,” her words caressed my ear. "You go with me?"

"Yes." Pong had broken my resistance. We went to the Malaysia. It was less than five minutes away. The desk staff smiled at my surrender and bowed with hands pressed together in a wai. I had been inducted into the ranks of the farangs. Room 203. Our foreplay skipped the usual dating context of the West. Ten minutes later within we were in the shower. Her naked skin was slippery with soap. She washed my back and front, but was shy about my embracing her wet body.

"Wait." She averted her eyes from my groin.

"Wait for what?" I wanted to make love. It had been a long time.

"For you be clean. You clean we go to bed. Boom-boom. Promise." It was no lie.

Pong stayed the night and the next. She laughed at my jokes and poured beer into my glass. We ate spicy food and had sex morning, afternoon, and night. We had a good time and Thais like nothing better than fun, unless it was sleep. Pong watched TV in the hotel room, as my typewriter clattered out pages. She said the typing sounded like monsoon rain on a tin roof. I barely lifted my head from my work. Later she leapt from the balcony into the deep end of the pool to get my attention.

“You love book more than love me,” she cried, climbing from the pool. “It make me crazy. Clack clack clack.”

This wasn’t about the typing.

“Love?” I hadn’t expected this word. I gave Pong money every morning. She seemed happy and I acted like the 500 baht was a tip.

“Khwan-rak. Love.” She stormed up to room 203 and threw herself on the bed.

“Oh, love.” I hadn’t seen a woman this mad, since my ex-girlfriend, Alice, discovered someone had pissed in her raccoon cap at a party. It had been my friend Bill. I never told her that.

"Yes, love same in movie. Same in song."

"I haven't loved a woman in a long time."

"You love men?"

Every Thai seemed convinced that if you didn't love a woman than you had to be gay. There were no other options.

"No, I had a broken heart."

"So this girl now ghost. She make bad magic to stop you love me?"

"Not magic."

"Magic. You not know magic, but she make magic to make you not love me."

"I don't not love you."

I almost placated her fury by saying the l-word, then remembered Bill’s and Sherri’s warnings. They had my best interest at heart. The old veterans at Kenny’s told stories about love gone bad. Each one worse than the other. I had no intention of joining their repertoire of sad endings.

“Pong, I like you a lot.”

“Like?” Her skin bristled with indignation." “Like same dog. Like same pizza. Not love.”

"Like is good."

"I not pizza." She pulled on her jeans and tee-shirt like a hurry. Almost like my warranty had worn out.

“I know you're not pizza.”

"Not sure." Pong went to the door. "I go now."

One sweet word and she would stay. I said nothing. She cursed with the venom of a rabid snake and slammed the door shut. Two minutes later I ran after her. The girl behind the desk said she was very angry.

"Be careful. Thai girls not happy. Bad luck."

"I know." I had lived under an old woman's curse. I hurried down the street to Kenny's Bar.

“Pong not here." Kenny was playing cards with Fat Pat.

"Where she go?"

"Not good idea you see her now." Kenny flipped down the Ace of Spades. "Stay away for one day. Maybe two.”

His regulars had witnessed this scene before. They laughed at my expense. I didn't ybuy any of them drinks. I visited Patpong that night. I thought I saw Pong twice. I couldn’t believe how many beautiful girls with long black hair existed on that one street, but none of them were Pong and the mama-sans repeated their query. “Why you not go with lady?”

Now I had a different reason.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The sheets bore the fragrance of jasmine. I was in danger. The next morning a travel agent booked a train to Chiang Mai.

“Girls in Chiang Mai have white skin.” The ticket agent was 30. She had been a beauty once. Now she had a German boyfriend and could eat as much as she wanted. She was getting fat. “Careful they not make magic.”

“Magic?” I had experienced Mrs. Adorno’s curse and shivered at the threat of another curse. “Magic to make you love.” The plump travel agent smiled without humor. She was serious. “Watch what you drink. Ching-ching.”

“Okay, thanks for the warning.”

Throughout the afternoon I fought off the pull of Kenny’s Bar and I tried to recall Pong ever giving me a glass I hadn’t seen her pour from a bottle. I didn’t have enough fingers to count the times, but I was stronger than Pong. This was not love and I boarded the train for Chiang Mai, as the sun set over Bangkok.

Mekong Whiskey provided a potent dose of oblivion in the rocking dining car. I told jokes to the Thai policemen. They bought another bottle of whiskey. I didn’t remember walking back to my bunk and woke in my second-class sleeper, as the train pulled into Chiang Mai Station. I had a murderous hangover and stepped off the train into steamy heat. Distant mountains rose over the tree line. Not a single skyscraper challenged the horizon. A rooster crowed out the dawn. This was Asia.

I stayed at a cheap bungalow within the city walls. The room cost less than $5/night. The mosquitoes were free. I rented a motor scooter and drove to the temples by day and the bars by night. The lighter-skinned girls of Chiang Mai were a little more money-hungry than the Patpong girls. Their avarice might have been due to their taller height. I doubted it and avoided the beer bars. I had been warned not to fall in love by too many people to falter now.

An Australian motor trekker at Night Market had been living in Chiang Mai since 1981. Jim knew the roads north of the city well. “This time of year the dope fields are dust ankle-deep. Very few people have driven through the tribal villages; Akhas, Yai, Karens, Hmong, KMT refugees growing opium for outlaw warlords. Great stuff and nothing like smoking opium by the fire.”

The prospects of ‘Chasing the Dragon’ sold the trip and I rented a crapped-out dirt bike. 250cc. Chiang Dao was my address for three weeks. I typed over a hundred pages of NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD and then spent three days climbing the steep trail to the craggy peak. The view from atop the limestone peak matched Bill’s description of his movie location. The jungle stretched through the haze to the broken peaks of Burma and Laos. I sent Bill a postcard, thanking him for his suggestion.

Burma lay 50 miles to the north. I plotted out a trip to the Golden Triangle. The bungalow owners said they would watch my stuff while I was gone. My typewriter too and I woke before the dawn, ready for the road

Reaching Mai Ai I stopped for Thai noodles at a riverside restaurant. The tea-colored stream flowed from rugged mountains. Two off-duty policemen drank beers. Their guns rested on the table. They spoke about bandits between this checkpoint and the next town.

“Not ride night.”

“I’m going to Doi Mai Salong.” The mountain town was two hours away. The Australian said that there was a comfortable hotel. I hoped to score some opium. I said nothing about this to the cops and bought the officers a big bottle of beer.

“I’ll keep my eyes open.”

The paved road ended beyond the bridge crossing the Thaton River. Dust spat from the Honda’s rear tire. The hillsides were bald from slash-and-burn farming. The red dirt was dotted with vegetables. Two pick-up trucks sped the other way crammed opium plants.

The sky was cloudless and I opened the throttle. 40 became 50 KPH on the uphill road. I turned my head and gazed at a distant village. No electrical lines connected the settlement to the modern world. No planes were overhead. I smelled the sun-glazed fields and should have been watching where I was, instead of seeing where I was going. A pick-up truck appeared in my lane. A crash was unavoidable and I said in my head “Shit, I’m dead.”

Time shattered into a universe of endless possibilities, until my left wrist broke upon landing on the flatbed. The old lady on a rice bag stared to the sky, as if I had fallen from an airplane. Her son jumped out of the truck, spewing incoherent curses in Thai. He grabbed my wrist and I threw him down the hillside. After all he had almost killed me.

Two policemen arrived on the scene. They were the two from the restaurant. The officers examined the tire tracks and ruled in my favor. The opium farmer sold a pig to cover my medical bill. The hospital at Mai Ai set my arm. The doctor gave me a packet of aspirin and ignored my request for a stronger. I spent the night tossing in bed. The aspirins barely blanketed the pain. The following morning the Australian arrived with a pick-up. Jim estimated the repairs to his bike would cost $100.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get killed.”

“Yeah, I thought I was dead.” I had a suspicion that I had suffered a fatal head injury in a parallel dimension.

“No, I was talking about the Thai. Lucky he didn’t come to your hospital room and shoot you.”

“Oh.” My hospital bill of 5000 baht was almost $200. A fortune for a farmer.

“Happens all the time up here. He’ll get drunk, think about you, and then bang. Thais are very hot-tempered.

Jim drove me to Chiang Dao for my gear. Two hours later he dropped me at The Top of the North Inn in Chiang Mai. I drank five beers, hoping to kill the pain, but by evening the fracture was pulsating with a white pain. I hurried to a pharmacy by the Eastern Gate, praying for relief. Druggists rejected slews of desperate entreaties from string-out junkies. Few had broken wrists and the Chinese pharmacist counted out twenty red pills. “Strong. Stop jep. No drink beer or whiskey, okay?”

I exited the drugstore and washed down a Dilaudid at a nearby bar. I called Kenny’s Bar in Bangkok. He said his niece was leaving for home tomorrow. She would be gone a month. The next Bangkok train was scheduled for the morning. There was no way I could make it in time.

“Tell Pong I’m thinking about her.” Gabrielle was no longer #1 and Elana was out of the # 2 slot.

“Call later. You speak with her.” Kenny hung up before I could tell him to ask Pong to stay.

Several beers washed down two more Dilaudids. They hit fast and my mind wandered through a sweaty calm, until a booming English voice shortened my nod. A Brit was babbling about the Isle of Wight. I recognized the voice and opened my eyes. The speaker was not a narcotic mirage. It was Toby Bonham. He had a hotel on the Isle of Wight. They boiled lobsters at the Osborne House Annex, where I had holidayed one August with a South African model. The tall Englishman was ranting about Goya paintings to an overweight female backpacker. Toby squinted beyond his drunken vision and blurted out my name and then asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Just traveling.” I made no effort to move. The beer and Dilaudids had kidnapped my legs. “Why aren’t you on the Isle of Wight?”

“Gave up the hotel. It was losing money.” He weaved over to my stool and sat down heavily. The girl escaped into the night. Toby ignored my cast and explained his presence far from his wife, child, and family auction house in Chelsea. “I bought a plane. One day I flew to Dieppe for some cheap wine. It was a beautiful day and I kept on going to Istanbul. After that it was strictly flying by compass, until I reached Chiang Mai. I like it here. The mountains, the people passing through, and I met this girl. Lovely girl really. So I sold the plane and bought a guesthouse.”

“You bought land?” Thai law prohibited any farangs from owning property.

“No, I registered the house in my girlfriend’s name.” He unfolded his vision for a Chiang Mai version of the Chelsea Art Society, an art society off the Kings road. “She’s a sweet girl. You have to meet her. This will be the new Shangri-La. Tribal art, travelers from around the world going to Burma, Laos, the Himalayas, cheap beer, good food, beautiful girls. You know this was once the crossroads of the Orient.”

“More like a detour off the Silk Road.”

“Sure, it’s not Times Square, but Times Square isn’t Times Square anymore. If it was, you wouldn’t be here.”

I had loved 42nd street in the 70s.

Go-go bars, porno shops, street thieves, hustlers, whores, and pimps.

I had first seen Sherri on screen there. Nothing like that existed in the States after Reagan came into office. “New York isn’t what it was. Neither was London.

>“Which is why we’re here. This is the New Babylon.”

Chiang Mai was fun and I offered “Glad to hear you’re happy.”

“Couldn’t be any happier than to be with my girlfriend. She is so cool.”

I hadn’t heard anyone describe a Thai girl as cool. Beautiful, sweet, loving usually worked for the honeymoon period. Afterwards the words grew a little harsher. When I expressed my concern, Toby waved off my negativity. “My girlfriend loves me too much to play me for a buffalo.”

A tuk-tuk drove to a secluded lane in the old city. The wooden guesthouse rested in the shadow of a crumbling Buddhist spire. The restaurant was filled with unshaven youths from every corner of the world. They were listening to Bob Marley. We drank more beer. I tried calling Kenny’s. The line was busy. I was jealous of Toby. His girlfriend doted on him. Before I fell asleep in a hammock, I told Toby, “You’re right. This is paradise.”

I woke around noon covered by mosquito bites and my wrist hurt enough for me to want to cut it off. I swallowed another Dilaudid and drank beer with Toby. He accompanied me to the train station. I bought a 2nd Class sleeper berth. He shook my good hand on the platform. “Come next year and you’ll see the miracle.”

“The Chiang Mai Arts Club.” I waved from the last car and the train lurched down the tracks into the mountains. I drank whiskey in the restaurant car. The night air was sultry. The small villages were aglow with life. The Orient didn’t get any better than this.

The train arrived in Bangkok shortly after dawn. The receptionist at the Malaysia gave me the same room as before. I soaked in the bathtub, while reading the Bangkok Post. The rest of the world didn’t seem too important and neither did the sports.

Having breakfast in the hotel coffee shop I wrote a long letter to Sherri and a series of postcards to my family and friends. I mentioned nothing about my accident or Pong. When I visited Kenny’s bar, he looked at my cast.

“Lucky you not die.”

“I have a tough body.”

“No you lucky man not kill you.” Kenny like the Australian understood danger of an irate farmer.

“Can I call Pong?”

“Her house not have phone. She go to help with rice. Maybe stay one month.”

I believed him about the phone, but her hands were too soft to work a rice field.

I let the travel agent arrange my visa to Nepal and didn’t wander far from Soi-Duplei that week. No temples. No river tour. No snake farms. No Patpong ping-pong shows. With a broken hand I couldn’t write the end to NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD, so I mostly read books and drank beer at Kenny’s. Another girl asked me to take her to the hotel. “You wait for Pong. She go Phuket with German. Stupid farang. I show you good time. More than Pong.”

I refused even knowing that she was telling the truth.

“Pong be happy you say no.” Kenny heard my refusal.

He had lied to me about her working. I spotted Pong with a farang at the Malaysia Hotel.

I wasn’t angry. Everyone had to do what they had to do. The travel agent confirmed my flight to Kathmandu and a connecting flight to the world’s highest mountains. Kenny said good-bye at the hotel taxi stand. “See you again.”

“I’m not sure.” This was not America or New York.

“You not know. I can tell you come back. You like Thailand too much.”

“I’ll see you when I see you.” I didn’t turn around as the taxi pulled away from the hotel.

In Kathmandu I broke open the cast to scratch an itch. I trekked through the Himalayas and then flew via New Delhi to Paris. I showed my friends photos of temples, beaches, and mountains. I did the same thing in New York. Richie rehired me within a week.

Life was back to normal. Work, eat, and sleep. New York women sensed I didn’t want them. They were after someone steady and I was already planning another Asian trip. I had finished my novel. My typing was worse than before and my agent told me to take lessons. I didn’t have the time. Bill laughed at my travel stories, especially having survived the motorcycle crash. I told him I still wanted to see those mountains. He wished he could come too, except he was too busy making films. My cousin came to dance at ShowWorld. Sherri wore long gloves to cover her tracks. Seeing Pong’s picture, she said, “You didn’t tell me about her.”

“Pong was a girl I met.”

“Glad to hear she had a name. You going back?” Sherri was much better than before. Her habit was in remission.

“Yes, but not for her.”

“Why not?”

“Six months is a long time for someone to wait.” Especially in Bangkok.

“Someday you’re going to wake up and fall in love again.” Sherri was talking about my recovering from Gabrielle, not a go-go dancer. She understood the difference between love and lust and loneliness.

“I’m through with love.” I had not said her name in over a year.

“Never say never.” Sherri was a hopeless romantic and knew me well.

“Never.” I was still under Mrs. Adorno’s curse.

I could only hope that it didn’t last forever.

THE ITALIAN PLAN by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 3

I saved every dollar from my commissions at Richie’s exchange. The Christmas rush consisted of six weeks of working without a day off. My commission of $6000 combined with my savings amounted to another six months in Asia. When I announced my leaving after New Year’s Eve, Richie said, “Is this how it’s going to be? You working six months and then taking off?”

“I think so.” I could only take so much of being alone in New York.

“We’ll be here when you get back. Good luck.”

This time I flew east from New York. The first stop was London, where I ran into Toby at a Chelsea bar. He was entertaining art dealers from his auction house. I asked “What’s happening with Chiang Mai Arts Center?”

“Sssssh.” Toby brought me to the side. “Six months ago I came here to clear up some banking details. When I returned, the guesthouse had been sold. My girlfriend had run off with the gardener, who was supposedly her brother. End of story. I learned my lesson. Don’t fall in love with a Thai girl.”

“Ever?”

“They have magic in their blood.”

“Magic?”

“Makes you crazy and do crazy things. Things you’d never do with a western girl. I lost everything I had there and still wanted her back. People want to know why, but I can’t even explain it to myself.”

“So no more Thailand.”

“I’m with my wife. It’s a safe love for a man my age.” Toby tightened his tie and rejoined his clients. His story came as no surprise and I vowed to never succumb to such a weakness.

In Bangkok I booked into the Malaysia Hotel and visited Kenny. Not much had changed at the bar, except Pong had gone to Germany. Kenny said, “He a nice man.”

“If she calls, tell her I asked for her.” I was off the hook and called Michael down in Pattaya. He invited me for a holiday in the south. The bus ride was three hours. I had no idea what to expect, but knew that backpackers avoided the beach resort’s wickedness in fear of seeing a fat German sunbathing with two tiny Thai girls. The Frenchman was living with a Thai woman. He was 54. She was 34. Their baby was two. They lived in a townhouse right off Jomtien Beach. The beach was strewn with plastic and the sea murky, but no one came for the water. We drank Cote du Rhone and played backgammon. At the end of the night he said, “Why stay at a hotel when you stay here for free?”

He was right. My room overlooked a field of jungle grass. I wrote in the morning and went to Walking Street at night. The bars were filled with women. Some of them beautiful. One night I brought a girl back. In the morning Michael warned, “This is my home. Not a brothel.”

His admonishment was deserved, considering his wife didn’t approve of having a guest. I should have left, but liked taking care of their daughter. His wife never did. She would disappear for most of the day and miraculously arrive a half-hour before her husband’s arrival.

I thought about telling Michael about his wife’s absences, but it was none of my business.

At dinner Michael discussed rubies and sapphires. I asked him for a job. “Sorry, but I have trouble paying my own salary.”

“No problem, if I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t know.” Life in Thailand was reserved for the few.

After dinner we drink whiskey. His wife watched Thai TV. I went out to Walking Street. The sex emporium was wide open. Drink, drugs, and sex. Go-go girls begged me to take them home, dying for a night off their feet. I tipped them $5 and returned to Michael’s house. I didn’t sleep long.

A man stood at the foot of my bed. A Japanese sword gleamed in his hands. It was Michael. “I’m going to cut off her head.”

“Cut off her head.” Decapitation seemed a drastic measure.

“She’s seeing her ex-husband. A Thai.”

“Why don’t you leave her?”

“She’ll take away by daughter.” Western men have no rights to their children in Thailand.

“If you cut off her head, you’ll go to prison.” The local police didn’t appreciate westerners killing Thai wives in a fit of jealousy.

His daughter came into the bedroom crying. He joined her. The wife didn’t show up that morning or the following day. I couldn’t stick around the showdown. I wanted to go up north. “I have a train to catch. Why don’t you come with me?”

“I’ll be fine.” His eyes told a different story. “I have a business to run.”

I rented a 250cc motorcycle in Chiang Mai. I drove around the North. I avoided opium and pick-up trucks. My hands were numb from the bumpy roads. Only saunas could wash off the dust. I rewrote my novel in a shack along the Mekong River. It took over a month.

When I returned to Jomtien a month later, the next door neighbor said that Michael had returned to France. He had no idea what happened to his wife or daughter. I doubted the guard was telling me everything, but respected his desire to not get involved. It could bring him bad luck. Me too.

I headed up to Bangkok and booked a room at the Malaysia. Kenny’s Bar had the usual collection of drunken farangs and young girls. I told Kenny about Michael and h explained, “All Thai women fall in love with Thai man. Get marry. Maybe no marry. Have baby. Man go to see other women. Get drunk. Leave wife. After girl must take care of baby. Meet man. Same your friend. Same story. I hear all time.”

“Ever hear any happy endings?” I ordered him a drink. He liked gin.

“Happy beginning, yes. Happy middle, yes. Happy ending?” Kenny motioned for the bargirl to bring him a slice of lime. “Everyone die in end. Love too. I hear from Pong. She ask for you.”

“Tell her I said hello.” I was leaving for New York and gave Kenny my gold ring. “Something for you to remember me.”

The ring fit his thumb. He wished me good luck. “You stay safe.”

“No problem in the States.”

My apartment was comfortable. I gave my agent the novel. He sent NORTH NORTH HOLLWYOOD to publishers. He told me to be patient. We heard nothing and I committed myself to work. It was a grind, but Richie introduced a married woman from Richmond. Mrs. Carolina was married to a coutnry doctor. He had land. The blonde 45 year-old wanted someone to love. “I wrote out the ten best things about you and the ten worst. The good outweighed the bad.”

“Only ten bad things?” My list was much longer. She knew nothing about literature. She faked knowledge. I forgave this deceit, because she had a good heart and I had the only women in my life existed as memories fading with every day.

We had an affair. She came to see me every month. We traveled to Wyoming, Guatemala, Death Valley, and the Bahamas. Every six months I went away to Asia. I told her, “To write.”

“And what about women?” Jealousy is a natural trait for women or men, especially if you are the loved as opposed to the lover.

“I look. Not touch.” I steered clear of involvements with Thai women.

Bangkok served as a transit point. Cars, buses, boats, planes, and trains took me to Asia’s ice-sheathed mountains, mossy temples, sugar sandy beaches, islands on a gin-clear sea, and rivers swelling with monsoon rains. I loved the feel of dirt under my boots in a distant mountain pass, however writing required a sedentary life and I sought a location meeting my prerequisites; good food, weather, and people.

The Legong dancers of Bali possessed a gracefulness to be envied by Gods. Emerald forests climbed up the jungle slopes of Sulawesi’s misty mountains. Penang served Indian, Malay, and Chinese cuisines. An orchestra played Naxi music under the Jade Snow Dragon Mountain and the view from the Snowlands Hotel in Lhasa swirled with incense from the Jokhang temple. I knew these places for six months at a time. None of them were home.

I broke up with Mrs. Carolina after the death of my younger brother. Adultery was wrong. We remained friends. Her husband became my friend. I was no longer a threat. I was verging on becoming a life-long bachelor and I questioned whether there was something wrong with me. Other men had women. They seemed happy. I was sad. Mrs. Adorno no longer answered the door, when I knocked on it.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer. On her death bed she admonished my avoidance of Ireland. I had been all over the world, but never to the Emerald Isle “Maybe you can find a nice woman there. Someone like your sisters or aunts.”

“I don’t know.” Her solution sounded too much like incest.

“Promise you’ll go.” A quick trip to Dublin was what I had in mind. My mother knew me well. “I want you to reconnect with your roots and not just with a pint of Guinness.”

She passed away after Christmas. Mrs. Carolina held my hand at her burial. The next summer my father and I toured the Loire Valley. We ate big meals in pleasant cafes and drank wine in caves carved in cliffs. He cried listening to Irish ballads on the car stereo. We missed my mother and spoke about how much she would have loved the chateaus.

In Paris we unexpectedly met my friend, Sam Royalle. He had been a fashion photographer six years ago and was now working as a computer geek. A gang of Brixton yardies had threatened grievous bodily damage, if they weren’t awarded the proceeds of his house sale.

Sam skipped a few details of why he was leaving, but heeded my suggestion to hide out in the Orient. I gave him the address of the Malaysia Hotel. It was a good starting place to disappear. I went to London and cashed a check at his bank. I was a little scared, but no yardies raided the bank, while I wired him the money.

My business in the UK was done and I flew over to Dublin to live out my mother’s death wish. I rented a haunted old schoolhouse on the Connemara coast and wrote a book about prostitution in Hamburg. Most of the story was based on the blonde and her pimp.

A sullen rain was my companion on long walks through the soggy bogs. The cow farmers at the nearest pub shared a nasty word for everyone and wondered why I wasn’t writing my novel in Germany. The girls were either 15 and pregnant or 40 with five kids. Sam called from Bangkok. He was grateful for my advice and offered a ticket to Thailand. My funds were low. I said I would see him next year.

Back in New York I worked with Richie. Mrs. Carolina and I went skiing in Jackson Hole. No one was interested in publishing my books. I wrote a script based on my first novel. NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD was turned down by producers, directors, and an agent said, “It’s sixteen sex scenes chasing a plot.”

I counted the sex scenes. There were five. The rest were foreplay. I was contemplating about giving up. If I worked selling diamonds, I would have everything everyone else had. A car, house, maybe even a wife. 47 wasn’t too late to have kids.

My cousin’s mother wasn’t well. Sherri came to town and stayed with me. She had stopped drugs and porn films. She was going to school to get her degree in psychiatry. It was a miracle she was alive. Even more so that she could laugh about that lost period. I told her about my plan to settle down.

“You can’t do that” You’re a legend.”

“Legend?” I felt more like a rumor.

“Whenever I tell people about you, they say that’s the life they want.”

“Any of them willing to switch?”

“None of them would have the courage. Plus you are too fixed in your ways to be with an American woman. They want someone stable. Someone who isn’t going to threaten their security. Someone more like their father.”

“I can be all those things.”

“Maybe you can, but you wouldn’t be you.” Sherri was majoring in human behavior.

“Before I said you shouldn’t get involved with a Thai woman, but there’s one working at a restaurant near me. She met her husband in Thailand. They are happy. She’s not a domestic person like everyone thinks of Asian woman. She has a mind of her own. She’s not a caricature.”

“Where she meet her husband?” I knew the answer.

“In a bar. Maybe a go-go.” Sherri frowned, as if I disapproved of this starting point. “She did what she had to take care of her family. Plus I can’t throw any stone at her. And neither can you. None of us are saints. Not even the good are. Not until they’re dead.”

“Okay, I’ll re-open my mind.” I hadn’t forgotten Pong. She’d be 27 now. I was only 43. I was going to Thailand in the spring and called Sam. He was living in Pattaya with a teenage girlfriend. “Come on down. I have a place for you to stay.”

In my mind I constructed a palace of possibilities. I’d meet Pong. We’d go to Pattaya. I’d write my book. I called Kenny. He answered the phone. He didn’t recognize my voice at first. When I asked about Pong, he said, “She living in Holland now. Have new husband and a baby. Fat too. When you come? I call my sister. I have many nieces.”

“A big family.” Thais extended kinship to second cousins, friends of aunts, and schoolmates. Everyone was in the family just like the South of France. I told Kenny. “I’ll see you soon.”

Mrs. Carolina asked if she could come on this trip. She had no idea about Mem and I promised to phone from Bangkok. Her eyes misted hearing those words. I couldn’t tell her anything else. We were no longer lovers. Then again I had never been. The 26-hour plane ride to Thailand was lengthened by an unexpected delay in Japan. The hotel at Narita gave the passengers coupons. I used mine on beer. We completed the journey in the morning. I got off the plane. The temperature was in the 90s. It was only 6am. Bangkok could only get hotter.

THE ITALIAN PLAN by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 4

The front desk at the Malaysia remembered my room. I washed up and went to Kenny’s Bar. He was wearing my ring. The girls were older and the beer warm. I stayed a night and in the morning I called Sam. He was down in Pattaya.

“I have your room all ready. Be prepared. It’s Songkran.”

“I forgot that.” The Songkran celebration ushers in the Thai New Year and the rains ending the hot season. The festival is focused on Wan Parg-bpee April 15, when homage is paid to ancestors and elders deserving respect because of age or position.

Young people pour scented water into the palm of an elder so that sins will flow away or they sprinkle water onto the older person who utters wishes of happiness and good luck. It was all quite charming, but the tradition has changed in recent years and how much was revealed by my trip to Pattaya.

The roads into town were packed with traffic. People threw water at each passing motorists. It took the taxi an hour to reach Rob’s high-rise overlooking the Gulf of Siam. His girlfriend was a teenager named Dtum. She was eager to meet her friends.

Rob gave her some money to have a good time and we went to a beer bar on the Beach Road. We threw water at everyone in sight. I soaked a girl. Her name was Vee. She was pretty, despite having one eye.

I invited her to eat at a small restaurant. She said she wanted to go home with me. We spent the week together and she quit working the bar. Rob and Dtum didn’t like her and said she was money hungry. They weren’t wrong, but I knew the score.

Small villages throughout the country had been modernized by bilked fools. I wasn’t planning on being one of them. We went to Koh Samui. The beaches were beautiful and we made love in the warm waters at sunset. I wrote a comedy about the first men having sex in Space. I thought it would make a great movie. After six months my money ran out and Vee asked, “I wait for you.”

“No, I can’t say when I can come back.” I gave her enough money for a month. Vee would be fine. A boyfriend from England was coming around Christmas. There would be no long-distance phone calls. No money transfers. No wins. No losses. Sam later called to say she had moved to the UK. It was better that way.

Sam parlayed his computer expertise into a corporation. He phoned with a job offer in Bangkok. A ticket was waiting at JFK. Richie was getting tired of my ping-ponging between Asia and New York.

“One day you’ll find out you don’t have a job here.”

“That day will come, when I can’t make you money.”

I flew to Bangkok business-class on upgrades. Rob had an office on Wireless Road. His company was building websites for Asian corporations. My job was writing content. Most of his employees were paid a fifth of my salary. I didn’t deserve it and figured this was his thanks for having transferred that money from his wire scam. We went to Bangkok’s trendy clubs and weekended at his beach house in Pattaya. Rob called his plan. “Work in Bangkok. Play in Pattaya.”

Vee wasn’t in Pattaya. She had married the Brit. I was free to do whatever I wanted and Rob’s wife hated us going out even more than before. I never brought anyone home other than her mates. She had plenty of those.

In truth I was getting old. My friends’ children had grown up. My nieces and nephews were attending college. I seemed doomed to spend my life in the last Babylon on Earth. I was not alone in my damnation.

My friend, AJ, flew out from London. We knew each other from the 80s. He was a cameraman and tai-chi teacher. He had told everyone that he was coming to Thailand for a diving certification. Pattaya had plenty of schools for PADI courses and a lot more too. I took the week off.

One evening AJ and I stopped at a bar of Soi 8. A slender Thai girl danced on a platform to a boy band hit. A skinhead farang was obviously her date for the night. She winked over his shoulder with a mercenary mirth.

In 1970 BLIND FAITH issued an album cover featuring a shirtless blonde waif. This girl was her Asian twin and I memorized her hips walking away from the bar. The mischievous backward glance should have warned me to watch my freedom.

AJ and I didn’t go out at night after that. He kept saying he had to get up early for his diving courses. I went to the bar on Soi 8 twice. The girl wasn’t there. The mama-san said she was on holiday with man from England. There were thousands of Brits in Pattaya. AJ was one of them.

After AJ departed for the UK, Rob’s wife banned him from going out with me. She had seen him with a girl at a disco. She blamed me. I moved to the Sabaii Lodge on Soi 3. It had a swimming pool and I didn’t have to hear them fight.

I returned to the Soi 8 bar. The skinny girl wore a band-aid bra over a breastless chest. Long black hair snaked down a bare back. She hopped from the dance platform and sat next to me. She pronounced my name wrong and told me hers. I offered her a drink and Mem said, “I no drink lao, maybe drink coke.”

I expected her to rattle off the list of bargirl questions; “Where are you form? How old are you? You have a wife? How long are you staying?” instead she sobbed out a tale about a man leaving for London. “He a diver for Navy.”

“His name AJ?” Girls in Belize, Manado, and Bali had also heard this tale.

“You know him?” She stifled a sniff.

“The very best of friends.”

“You think he come back?” She bit her lip in anticipation.

AJ was not one to fall in love during a ten-day holiday. “Only Buddha knows.”

Her cascade of tears brought the mama-san over to see what was wrong. I didn’t understand the exchange in Thai and excused myself, “I’m going home.”

“I come with you. Same I stay with AJ?” The tears dried to a smile.

Saying no would have been easy. She wasn’t working the bar for laughs. If I agreed, then I was entering a financial agreement. Girls got 1000 baht or $25 to go with men. Ours wasn’t a match made in heaven, but Ae was very sexy and I had money in my pocket. “You come with me, but I can’t say it will last forever.”

“I happy with one day. One week. One month. Maybe more.” She bid good-night to the mama-san and we drove off to my hotel.

She faked orgasms like a porno star. The lie turned on the old fool in me. Our one evening lasted the weekend. We lay in bed and spoke of our lives.

Ae was 24. She had two kids. Her husband had deserted her for a younger woman. Almost every woman in Pattaya can tell the same story. They left impoverished villages. Friends found the prettiest girls jobs at go-go bars. The mama-san sold them a skimpy bikini and thigh-high boots. A lady-boy painted their faces. An older girl demonstrated the basic moves on the Firepole. As the new girls took the stage, goose bumps rose from their skin. Partially from the air-con’s icy breath, but due to the naked embarrassment caused leering Western men, then slowly these blushing amateurs realized they are in show business as much as any actress in a Thai soap opera.

The farangs buy the girls drinks and pay for their favors. Within a week they are seasoned pros, earning $1000 a month, which goes to clothing, food, gold, old boyfriends, family, police, doctors, and unforeseen expenses running their debt deeper than the day they debuted in the business.

Ae was no different. The go-go dancing supported her children, although the real money came from going with men. She couldn’t tell me how many. She wired money upcountry for her kids’ schooling. The remainder of her allowance fed her father and brother.

This altruistic streak fooled most farangs into thinking they have met a saint without considering that these women have also abandoned the dirt-poor villages to forget their cheating ex-husbands and drunken boyfriends.

Neither side of the equation asks too many questions and neither did I, when Ae announced on a beautiful Monday morning, “I say good-bye to Finland friend. Not boyfriend. Friend. Go see him to airport. He give me 5000 baht. I come stay with you.”

The Pattaya Mail had reported about a westerner marrying a dancing girl. They celebrated their wedding at the Royal Cliffs, the most expensive hotel in Pattaya. The next morning he woke to an empty bed. The hotel staff knew nothing. The police even less. A week later his wife showed up at his house and explained, “Have old boyfriend come see me. He give me 50,000 baht. You not mind?”

Now I was being posed the same question.

I said, ”Sure.”

Saying anything else wouldn’t have changed her decision. Two days passed without a phone call. That Sunday Sam’s British partner reneged on the balloon payment of his investment and our company joined the Internet crash.

The $10,000 in my bank would go fast in Thailand. Katmandu was three hours away by plane. The monsoons weren’t due for another two months. A small guest house in Annapurna’s rain shadow served pancakes in the morning. Life would cost $10/day. Mustang lay to the north. A month’s walk in the sacred Himalayas would erase my year in Babylon. I didn’t make it out the door. Ae stood in the hallway. She looked at my bag. “Where you go?”

“I’m going to Nepal to see the mountains.”

“Mountains?” Her face scrunched up in disbelief. “Why you go see mountain, when you can see me?”

She had a good point and the door remained shut for two days.

We had a holiday on Koh Samui. It was like a honeymoon. We stayed a week longer than planned. She taught me Thai and I learned the words for love, caress, hug, kiss, and jealous. I said “Rak-khun’ more than a man my age should tell a younger woman.

Female western holidaymakers gawked at us as if I were a sex tourist. In some ways they weren’t wrong. Ae and I had sex three times a day.

“It good with you. You not too big. Not too small.” She lay with her thighs clasped to trap me inside her. “I not finish with men from go-go. With you all the time.”

“You say that to all the men.” I didn’t need to hear about these other men, because Sherri had told me how easy it is to fake an orgasm. She had done so in hundreds of films and real life too.

“Yes, say, but not true. With you true.” Her hand caressed my shoulder with a tenderness no one had shown in years. It was something you couldn’t teach and I reciprocated with a gentle embrace.

“When we return to Pattaya, will you live with me a little?”

“Long as you want.” She was telling the truth, but only about that, because the truth in Thailand or anywhere else in the world is an onion with many layers.

We rented a utility apartment. Supposedly for us. Her youngest son joined us. His name was Dtut. Three of us in one room. Our love life suffered, but not as much as when her father moved to town.

He lived on a dirt road on the other side of the train tracks and shared a filthy room with his son and his drug addict girlfriend. She was six months pregnant. They drank heavily and played cards. My donations to Ae improved no one’s lives.

$200 settled a gambling debt. Another $100 to buy off a police loan shark. I rented her brother and father a small restaurant. They transformed the enterprise into a ya bah or Methedrine den. Her children went shoeless. Crooked policemen came to my house for tea money. Loansharks for delinquent loan.

$10,000 lasted eight months.

After this lesson in the futility of foreign aid I withdrew my sponsorship. Everyone was angry and Ae spat, “You not understand Thai life.”

She was right. My old boss, Richie, called from New York. He needed an extra salesman for Christmas season in the Diamond District. Ae said, “Go. You want leave me. Go.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Same you tell Vee.”

“No, I swear I’ll come back.”

I worked forty days in a row and sold 25-carat cabochon Burma sapphire to a well-known interior decorator, who whispered over dinner at a fancy Soho restaurant, “You’re sexy.”

Tony had a Ferrari, a 5th Avenue apartment, and a house overlooking a surfing spot in Montauk. Richie said I should marry him, if only to have him buy a big engagement diamond from his store. I didn’t play for that team and was calling Ae every day. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Sherri and I booked a flight to the Orient. My money was enough for six months. Maybe a little more if I was careful.

Mem met me at the airport and said, “I happy now.”

“I want you.” I was happy too. “No one else.”

“And Dtut?”

“Dtut can live with us.”

“You good man.” We moved into a house surrounded by swamps. Birds sang in the trees. Butterflies danced in the sunlight. She cooked triple fried fish and vegetables. The food was delicious. I drank a beer. The taste was off, but I drained the bottle.

In the morning my limbs ached and my temples pounded with acid hammers. The empty beer bottle smelled funny and I accused Ae of poisoning me.

“Poison?” She didn’t know the meaning in English.

“Yeah, magic potion.” Thais drape talisman around their neck, inscribe their bodies tattoos against evil, and visit fortunetellers and witches, instead of doctors.

Farangs deride the Thais’ belief in creatures eating your intestines or a greedy man doomed to wander eternity with a worm-sized mouth without taking into consideration that 65% of Americans believe in guardian angels. I was not an unbeliever and explained to Ae. “Vee took me to deep Isaan. We drove to a witch’s house.”

“Mae-mod.” Every Thai paid attention to my story about having seen a ghost in Jamaica after too many Planter punches. She had been transparent and spoke French. I had been too drunk to be scared and returned to my drunken slumber. Yet now I knew that not every bump in the night was a thief.

“Yes, they were many old ladies there. They picked a number.” I acted out the scene to help her understand. “One got a 4. She left the house. Vee told me they were going to kill her to make big magic.”

“Red-lum.” Ae's eyes widened, as if to better envision the candle-lit hut.

“Yeah, Red-lum.” Vee had later told me that the set-up was a scam and the same woman loses every night.

“I not do you magic. Only magic is in my heart.”

It was a sweet thing to say and I contracted the monks to exorcise the house, but whatever potion had been in that beer bottle lurked in my belly and its spell was bound to emerge from hibernation at a moment of weakness.

Life settled down after that episode. I woke with the dawn to re-edit my novel on pornography in our air-conditioned bedroom. The tapping on the keyboard rarely disturbed Ae's sleep. Thai bar girls were Olympic sleepers and Pi-Ek, the owner of Hot Tuna on Walking Street theorized that these bargirls preferred the world of dreams rather than a half-translated life with a farang.

“Same you live in a foreign movie and not have subtitles. Jep hoo-a.”

His conjecture was worrisome, since Ae had twice slept for twenty hours. On each occasion she had arisen from these comas demonized by a tigress in heat. Once I rolled off her sweat-drenched body and she murmured, “You love me?”

“Rak khun.” My heart was pumping too much blood to my head and the twenty-four year-old smiled quixotically. “You write book sound like monsoon rain. Why you love me?”

She knew nothing about the Red Sox, the coast of Maine, or CBGBs in the East Village. I had incorporated her breastless body into my novel without explaining my original attraction was based on a supergroup’s album cover. I winged my reply. “Because I feel young with you.”

“You my khun garh.” I was neither the oldest or youngest farang in her life.

“Yes, I’ll always be your old man.” I was somewhere in the middle.

She resumed her sleep of the dead and I read Peter Hopkirk’s THE GREAT GAME. Outside the distant hum of cars mingled with the buzz of mosquitoes beyond the netting. The night air was scented by jasmine. I rested the book on my chest.

Pattaya was so much different than my life in New York. There I worked. Here I wrote. There I slept alone. Here I made love to Ae every day. She would tell me about her lovers. They were many. In some ways it was like listening to Sherri. The two probably shared the same adventures. I was getting to think Pattaya could be home. Mrs. Adorno would never miss me.

The hot weather melted off my winter gut and my daily swims at Jomtien Beach toned up my muscles. A few friends from New York came out for a visit. We toured the go-go bars and discos. They wondered how they could stay here for the rest of their lives. I did too, since I had no money coming in.

In late March my cousin arrived from Boston with a Red Sox cap and a skimpy red dress for Ae. My mother had sworn me to take care of Bish. Ae modeled the skin-tight sheath. “Go out, have fun. I meet you later.”

Bish loved the food, the weather, and the wide-open nightlife. Each night we ate at a seafood restaurant on Beach Road. The hostess greeted us with a shy smile. Only a month in Pattaya Nu didn’t speak a word of English and Bish was impressed with my rudimentary Thai.

“I learned it from a book.”

“Why not from Ae?”

“She likes speaking English better.” No Thai bargirl encouraged her “Sponsor to learn their language in fear of losing the advantage of a communication chasm.

”In the states every woman we know would criticize our going to go-go bars.” Many farangs countered that men always pay to be with a woman. What was happening in Thailand was different, but not that much.

“Anyone of them give money to the ballet?”

“No.”

“Well, then your tipping these girls after a show is more charitable than a donation to the Boston Ballet. These girls come from the end of the road. Their farms grow one rice crop a year. They have big families. Usually a brother kills someone and to avoid going to prison, they pay blood money to the cops by sending the prettiest girl to Pattaya, Bangkok, or Phuket to make money off some drunken beer lout.”

Bernard Trink of the Bangkok Post claimed that bargirls lie, cheat, only care about money, can’t be reformed, and regard their catches as cash cows to be milked for their life’s savings. He had resided here for years and I had witnessed nothing to contradict this opinion. Stephen Leather had written a book about his excesses. They had nearly ruined his life. I had no protective shield. Mem was a ticking time bomb. It was highly unlikely I could walk away from the explosion intact.

“You used to complain about not having served in the Peace Corps after college. Guess you are in the Peace Corps now.”

“Volunteer, head, and donor.” We clinked glasses and after a long tour of the Happy-a-Go-go, we crossed Walking Street to the Marine Disco. The Chicken Farm was loaded with free-lance girls looking for a short-time date. Most of the farangs were drunk enough to think these girls actually considered them handsome. Ae was dancing with Sam’s wife. Bish and I stayed on the other side of the bar. He asked, “Isn’t this spying?”

“That’s exactly what it is.” I only trusted Ae in her sleep.

“No fair, you see me I no see you.” She finally spotted me.

“And I see you don’t have a boyfriend.” The red dress clung to her body like a skinned boa.

“Only have you, khun garh.” She dragged me onto the dance floor. Dtum asked Bish to join her. I became Brad Pitt and Bish was Clint Eastwood. Sam showed up from Bangkok. He had settled with his investor for a few million baht. We celebrated with tequila. The police threw us out at dawn. Standing on Walking Street amidst the flurry of transvestites, off-duty go-go girls, and short-timers, Bish said, “This place is Garden of Eden.”

“More like the farm league for Hell, but I’m not religious.”

“Hell is more like a suburban mall. Lots to buy. None of it will make you happy. Not like here.”

“I’m in no position to argue, counselor.”

When Bish left, tears touched his eyes. He wasn’t looking forward to life in America. No bachelor in his forties deserved to be living in the suburbs, where life revolves around commuting, work, take-out food, and TV. Unfortunately no paradise can withstand the tempest of time. Certainly not one based on lies you believe to prevent your seeing the truth.

Several weeks later Ae's cellphone rang around 3am. Her hand snatched it from the night table with the speed of a cobra attacking a fat rat. She closed the bathroom door. The word tee-lat muffled through the wall. When she returned to bed, Ae read the murder in my eyes and flashed the number on the mobile’s LCD. “Sorry, have friend call me from Italy. He old boyfriend. Now finish.”

>Too little of it was the truth and I was tempted to throw her mobile out the window. “So when is your teelat coming?”

“Not boyfriend. Friend.” She pounded her fists on the pillows and rolled over, revealing spread legs. “You not trust me. I never go with man. Only with you.”

“You expect me to believe that?” I had my suspicions about her good-bye to the Finnish man.

“You are the one I want.” While Ae might possess a grammar school education, she played my emotions with the virtuosity of a concert pianist and we made love with an Armageddon urgency shadowed by the impending disaster. Afterwards I felt a little like Maulwin slipping into the Housatonic River and there was only one way out. I had to come to my own rescue.

Pizza and pasta were banished from the menu. My jealousy painted a portrait of a young Italian with greasy long hair. He wore a Juventus football shirt and chain-smoked between bottles of wine. Anyone speaking a romance language was suspect. The hot weather exacerbated my temper as did the arrival of the Songkran festival in April. It was the crazy time of year.

THE ITALIAN PLAN by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 5

The festival turned uglier faster than the previous year. Street vendors hawked squirt guns of every capacity to hooligans mixing itching powder into gutter water. Industrial drinking fueled the unholy holiday madness. Playful water fights escalated from harmless sanuk or fun into vicious shootings redressing old grudges. Pick-up trucks jerry-rigged with plastic reservoirs recklessly raced through unwary pedestrians and ya bah-demented motorcyclists imitated crackheads fleeing a 7-11 robbery.

The nationwide death toll exceeded five hundred and the walking wounded numbered in the tens of thousands. Most westerners fled the weeklong mayhem. Ae considered any Puritan disapproval as a sacrilege against sanuk. Her other children arrived for the closing day of Songkran, when the police in their tight brown uniforms were open game for a drenching.

Sam Royalle hired a truck. The driver loaded the flatbed with three titanic barrels of iced water and we armed our extended families with multi-liter water nozzles. Overloaded by ten people the pick-up’s tires scrapped the steel chassis, as we cruised Pattaya’s streets with the audacity of Somali tech fighters whacked out on qat.

At Beach Road and Soi 8 the girls from two beer bars deliriously chucked buckets at the passing cars. Sam deluged them into submission with a high-powered hose.

On the corner of Walking Street we unleashed a hurricane on two ranking police officers. This win streak instilled a predatory glee in our Thai friends and Sam’s tattooed wife leapt from the truck to soak several foreigners behind a tree. It was supposed to be fun, but a humorless weightlifter wrenched away Dtum’s water gun.

“Puta.”

Knocking down the teenager might have been an innocent mistake and his misshapen body bore no semblance to my mental image of Ae’s lover, but hearing Italian snapped a fuse and I leapt off the truck with a long PVC tube. The steroid junkie lifted his fists. He was bigger and stronger.

I lashed his wrists with the plastic pipe.

His watch exploded into a shower of tiny gears.

I kicked the inside of his knee and he genuflected in prayer to anguish. Dtum and I jumped onto the truck. She flipped him the finger and the pick-up truck lurched down Beach Road.

“You hit him like napalm.” Sam handed me a Singha beer. “Thanks for saving Dtum.”

“It was nothing. Nothing at all.”

Ae’s face was clouded with embarrassment. My outburst had cost her nah or face. My hands trembled with a fifteen year-old’s adrenaline. “I was lucky.”

“Lucky, my ass. You tapped into a vein of venom.” The Londoner didn’t buy my humility and the Thais bragged about the encounter to everyone they met. I wanted to forget the entire incident. We rode around till sunset and Sam suggested a victory dinner at the Lao BBQ. Dtut yawned on cue. Ae had had enough. She said, “You go. I take Dtut home.”

“I’ve had enough too.” I tapped on the roof of the pick-up and the driver dropped us at our soi. Her two children ran ahead and we walked in silence along the dark alley. She was angry and more so seeing her children re-enact the fight.

Ae barked for them to go inside the house. They wai-ed thanks for a fun day and she brought them upstairs for a bath and bed. I sat in the garden. The bedroom light went out and Ae came downstairs to sit on the other end of a bamboo bench.

She had changed out of her wet clothing into a sarong. Her hair was swirled up into a bun. She had studied traditional dance and could bend her joints at impossible angles. I wished the electricity, the TV, the cars, and fast food could vanish from Thailand and every other farang too.<

“A-rai?” I asked, since the Thais are adept at avoiding confrontation.

“You not hit me same you hit men.”

“I scared you?”

“Chai.”

“I scared me too.” I kissed her gently. “I’ll never hit you.”

“Please do not. My father beat me. I young girl.”

“What you do wrong?”

Nothing wrong. He angry all the time.”

“I won’t hit you. Promise.”

“Sure?” A cautious smile indicated her doubts.

“100%.” I had hit two women in my life. Both had cheated on me. Even betrayal wasn’t a good reason and I vowed never to touch a woman in anger again.

“Thai 100% or farang 100%?”

“Both.” I released her, hoping she would watch the stars with me, instead Ae climbed the stairs. It was 9:30.

A swarm of fireflies floated before the bougainvillea. The bedroom window glowed blue from the TV. Ae was probably enthralled by a sordid Thai movie. Across the fetid creek the karaoke bar cranked up the volume of a Bird McIntyre song. He was Thailand’s #1 pop star.

People were having fun.

It was Songkran. The festival had nothing to do with violence and I touched the raised scar on my upper lip, a gift from a razor-wielding teenage boy from the Smoothie’s Old Colony Projects in 1967. Bash’s father had butterfly-stitched the cut and asked, “What you do?”

“Nothing.” I had been with a girl at a Boston College High School dance. The boys wore suit coats and ties. The girls were strapped into girdles. We danced to the soul music of the G-Clefs. It should have been harmless.

“Nothing?” My uncle was as disbelieving as Ae.

Boston. This afternoon in Pattaya was another story and the cosmos pulsed across the tropical sky. Each star seemed to symbolize one of my brawls, free-for-alls, donnybrooks, one-on-ones, sucker punches, kicks to the balls, black eyes, busted knuckles, broken ribs, and bloody noses.

Some fights had protected the weak and a few could be excused for defense. Most had occurred because of the wrong word said at the right time and I mercilessly damned my violent trespasses as the acts of a forty-eight year-old fool. A red star glowed overhead. I wished for eternal peace and hoped it wasn’t wasted on the Planet Mars.

After the Songkran rains ended, Ae exiled her older daughter to the Isaan plateau for school. Dtut stayed with us. The temperature hit the high 90s. My vow of non-violence remained intact, although Ae acted distant other than when we were having sex.

I discussed her frigid demeanor with Sam Royalle, as we sat at Hot Tuna Bar on Walking Street and the Londoner said, “Most Thais were slaves until Rama V freed in 1905, so they have a weird thing about losing face to people about whom we wouldn’t think twice. Just wait it out.”

Three weeks later I finished my novel about punk rock set in 1976. Ae suggested a holiday on the island of Koh Samet. I needed a break from the computer, which Ae called my mia noi or mistress. She dished off Dtut to her father. “We not have time together. One and one. Not three.”

“Like second honeymoon.”

“Koh Samui holiday. Not honeymoon.” She was always talking about getting married. After a year she had every right.

“Maybe we get married soon.”

“You tell me that before. Now I think not sure.”

“We talk about it after this holiday.”

She packed her bag with the essentials; two bikinis, a sarong, hot pants, and a sexy shirt. “You always say later.”

“One day later will be now.” I promised not knowing the date of now.

Koh Samet is three miles off the coast. The rutted roads effectively banned cars. The sandy beaches were lapped by gin-clear water. The first day we swam in the tepid sea and drove a dirt bike across the spine of the island. At night we ate fresh fish under torchlight and danced beneath the palms to Thai rock. I couldn’t have been happier.

The electricity cut out in the morning. The air was sullen. Ae complained about the heat. At breakfast she listened to the fat farang women whined about the mosquitoes. The men stared at Ae. She looked 16 in a bikini.

On our tour around the island she sulked in the captain’s cabin and drank beer. She was drunk by the time we arrived at our bungalow. She refused to go to dinner and watched Thai TV. “You go look at fat women. Maybe they have sex for free.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“Wrong?” You not know.”

I stormed out of the bungalow. Five beers later it came to me what was wrong. There was no phone service on the island. She wanted to be speaking with someone other than me. I had a good idea who. I drank five more beers and fell asleep on the beach. Mosquitoes had their way with my flesh. I crawled to bed before the dawn.

“You go with woman last night.” She wasn’t pleased by my AWOL status.

“I slept on the beach.”

“Why?”

The answer was that I was a fool. I pretended everything was fine. When I suggested leaving, Ae packed her bag in five minutes. We rode the noon ferry to the mainland and by the afternoon Ae was reunited with her son and TV. We didn’t make love for a month.

I checked Ae’s phone secretively. No numbers began with Italy’s double digit. Paranoia was an old friend. I drank for a cure. Bish visited again. Ae was happy with his gift of lingerie. He brought a medical how-to book. There was no selection for the treatment of jealousy.

My cousin and I went to the go-go bars. He mentioned I was drinking more than normal. He was right. Ae met us at the Marine Disco. She was having fun. I went home alone. She showed up much later, smelling of cigarettes. If she had been with someone, she would have showered and smelled of soap. It was small comfort.

Bish dropped over to my house with a young friend. I mentioned that we should go to the islands. He shook his head. “I didn’t come here to see fat westerners soaking up sun.”

“We can go to Khao Chamao Mountains.” Ae interjected from the house. Her family came from the mountain range north of Rayong. She didn’t want to go too far away either. “Have waterfall and can eat fish at beach. Not far. Three hours. Go one day, back night.”

The five of us drove through the countryside to a long shoulder of mountains. Ae’s family worked at the park. We didn’t have to pay the entrance fee. Bish and I climbed to the summit. Ae, her son, and Bash’s friend lingered by a pool beside a waterfall. Afterwards we visited her original home. Charred stumps stood in a neglected rice field.

“What happened?”

“Boy knock over candle.” Her brother spent most of his youth in jail. I’d never seen him work. Ae gave him money.

“Sounds like negligence to me,” Bish quipped in a South Shore accent. His sisters and he had been in dispute over the sale of the family home on the Cape.

“Tough to sue family. Trust me.”

“The Thais don’t really settle their problems in court.” The Bangkok Post was peppered with cases of corporations and millionaires extra-legally negating a poor man’s attempt to right an inequity with a bullet to the head.

“So I guess I couldn’t set up a law practice here.”

“The last thing you ever want to do is get involved with a dispute between Thais.” A westerner was always wrong. We knew nothing about Thai life. In many ways they were right.

Returning to Pattaya we purchased dried octopus in Ban Phe. Her father was happier with a bottle of Mekong whiskey. Den was a mean drunk and accused Ae of not being his daughter. Between sobs she said she wanted to leave Thailand, “Have too many family here. Have too much trouble. When you take me America?”

“America?” New York meant working at Manny’s, fat people, family, big cars, and expensive shops. “I like living here.”

“You not want me go America.” She pouted and disappeared to her father’s shack. I didn’t chase Ae. She had her own way of handling her father and this was Bish’s last night. He had ordered a taxi to the airport for 2am.

Sitting in the Blackout a Go-Go I asked my cousin, “How long you think Ae would last in New York?”

“Oh, about a week.”

“That long.” Thais hated anything not Thai.

“She loves it here and America would ruin her. It ruined baseball, Mom’s apple pie, and hot dogs.” Every American gets dissatisfied with the country after a few days in Thailand, but I loved the Land of the Free and the Brave, if only in theory. “And what about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

“Been replaced by cars, work, and debt.” He flirted with a passing waitress in a schoolgirl outfit. They were over 18, but looked younger in the black light of the go-go.

“What’s with the uniform fetish?”

“They remind me of the girls at St. Ann’s.” Bish and I had spent our formative years at parochial schools. He tipped the waitress a 100-baht and she giggled off to fetch our beers. “Didn’t you think the Catholic girls looked cute in those uniforms?”

“Of course.” Ae was incredibly sexy in a Thai school skirt and blouse, which was a little unsettling, as the Herald-Tribune had published an expose on Boston Diocese priests systematically abusing young boys.

I had served as an altar boy and attended Catholic school. None of the priest had laid a hand on me, although the nuns were wicked disciplinarians. “You ever have any trouble with the priests?”

“In what way?” He handed me another drink.

“Saying you could tell him anything in the confessional.”

“I confessed about swearing and lying. I was a good Catholic kid.” He beckoned to dancer #34 to join us for a drink. She was the youngest girl on the stage and the prettiest. “Didn’t you almost join the seminary in high school?”

“For a weekend.”

In 1968 my girlfriend, Kyla, and I had attended a religious retreat in contemplation of becoming a nun and priest. Led Zeppelin’s debut album had purged our avocations. “I’m thinking about suing the Church for not abusing me. I mean I was a good-looking kid.”

“I’d keep that lawsuit in the closet along with your pension petition for your anti-war protests, since my sister said you weren’t too pacifistic at those demonstrations.”

He rarely spoke about his estranged sister, who had witnessed my battling the police at Boston City Hall. “I’ve learned to control my temper since then.”

Bish chuckled, “That’s not what Ae said about your Songkran massacre.”

I was stung thinking she was telling everyone about my beating up the muscleman and even more so by my past, present, and possibly future being marred by fights.

Bish had never fought. His mother was my aunt. Bish was a successful lawyer and I was struggling with my novels. I pushed away the hand of a naked go-go girl. “You think I’m a failure?”

“Failure?” His eyes opened wide. “Anytime I mention you to my friends working to pay for a mortgaged house in the suburbs, their eyes glaze over with admiration and the women are jealous of your freedom too.”

>“And you?”

“Me, there is a joke about the saint who wants to see Hell and St. Peter grants him a week’s parole from Heaven. Hell is Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and free beer. A great time for all. In heaven the saint can’t forget his holiday in Hell and asks for another visit. St. Peter warns him this decision is permanent. The saint says he’s had it with worshipping God. Whoosh. He steps foot on Hell and the Devil has at him with pitchforks and brimstone. The saint protests that Hell wasn’t like this last time. The devil smiles and says, “Now you know the difference between a vacation and living someplace.”

“The point of which is?”

“I enjoy my holidays in the sun, but you live in the Last Babylon.” He signaled the mama-san for the check. “Two different things.”

“Heaven and Hell.” Pattaya wasn’t Hell. Neither was our hometown of Boston, although a 1000-baht elected us Mr. Sexy for the mini-skirted bar girls, while $25 in the Land of the Free bought two tickets to the movies, a bucket of popcorn, and a giant coke with two straws.

“The only things I miss about the States are family, friends, and pizza.”

“That all?”

My apartment in the East Village, punk rock at CBGBs, the salt air rifling over the Truro dunes, loons on Watchic Pond, playing cribbage with my father, taco stands in LA, driving fast in Montana, kayaking in the Everglades, and big dinners discussing literature in New York shuffled in my head for importance. “I miss the Quincy Quarries most of all.”

“But they’re buried by the debris from the Big Dig.”

“Gone so suburban drivers in SUV can get to work 10 minutes quicker.” I had swum at the quarries throughout my teenage years. Jumping off those cliffs into the cool spring water had been a forbidden pleasure. There were too few of those left in America.

“Stop already, you’re making me cry.”

“You never swam there.” He lived less than a mile from them.

“My mother wouldn’t let me.” Kids died in the quarries every summer.

“She loved you.”

“You too.” Both of us missed our mothers, but we were Irish bachelors at heart. Bish paid the bill and we headed over to the Carousel a Go-Go. Sam Royalle and his Aussie office manager from Bangkok greeted us with tequila shooters. Bish pushed away his shot away, as naked girls sat on our laps. “Two different worlds.”

Watching the girls on stage soap each other up for a show, I realized that the nuns and priests had not warned us about go-go bars and brothels, mostly because evil had worn more clothes in 1965.

“Heaven and hell.” I clinked glasses with Bish.

I should have been concentrating on the naked girls, instead I pictured Ae at her father’s place, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, and yapping about how she hated farangs. She would sleep on the floor of her father’s place and show up in the afternoon with a pounding headache. We left the bars at 1. The taxi was waiting at the hotel. I accompanied Bish to the airport.<

“Ae have any idea what you do?”

“I told her I was a writer.”

“She know what that means.”

“She says it means we have no money.” Ae had never read a single word of my books. Thai was her language. She needed someone to translate my letters. Probably her other boyfriends’ epistles as well. My own comprehension of the Thai written language was confined to the words for men’s room and Coca-Cola.

“She right about that?” Bish was worried about my future. It was as promising as the past.

“I also act like the Peace Corps for myself.”

“Charity is best served at home.” We were pulling into terminal one. “When are you coming back next?”

“Not for a while yet.”

“When’s your money run out.”

“In about three months.”

“I’ll be back here before then.”

In the departure terminal Bish gazed at the girls saying good-bye to their boyfriends. Others greeting new arrivals.

“Sam thinks we should open a bar here. The HELLO-GOODBYE LOUNGE. Girls saying good-bye to one boyfriend and saying hello to someone new once the other has left.

“Probably make money.”

“Give my best to my father.”

“I’ll tell him you’re fine.”

“Thanks for lying.”

“It comes easy. I’m a lawyer.”

“You’ll be back before you know it.”

“I’ll keep telling myself that.” He disappeared behind the customs barrier and I returned to Pattaya. Dawn was a numb blue on the horizon. Ae sat on the bamboo cot in the garden.

Dtut lay on her lap. She had been crying.

“I think you go away.”

“No, take Bish to the airport.” I was starting to speak English like Ae.

“But you no call me. No come find me. You not care.”

“No, I care too much.” I had given up New York for her.

“Sure?” She lifted Dtut into my arms. He was small. Ae had been as defenseless once. She looked up to me. “I never tell you about my mother.”

“No.” I thought she was dead and suspected that her father had killed her.

“My mother leave me. Leave all of us. She never call. Never see me. One day I am on bus and a woman sit with me. She ask about my children. Ask if I have mother. I tell her everything. I am not thinking, but when she get off bus, I think she my mother. Not know for sure. I want Dtut to have mother.”

“He has you.”

“And I have you.”

“Yes, you do.” I warned myself to nir care too much. She was a Thai. They cared about their own. Never a farang, but we went to bed like a man and wife and that’s was all I was asking from her for the moment. A week later I traveled to the Cambodia border to renew my Thai visa. Ae offered to come for the ride. Taking Dtut on the ten-hour round-trip through the bone-dry rice fields didn’t make any sense. “Stay with your son and we’ll go out tonight.”

My refusal was music to her ears and she kissed me affectionately.

The next morning a van picked up five other westerners. I spoke with Ae twice on my cell phone. She was in bed each time and I envied her sleep. None of the passengers talked during the four hours to Cambodia and no one delayed our departure with a visit to the casinos or short-time farms of Poipet.

I fell asleep and woke at Chonburi turn-off. Pattaya was another forty minutes away and I called Ae. No one answered and my second attempt resulted in a disconnection.

This was not right.

Ae answered her phone at all hours in any situation.

The congestion on Sukhumvit conspired with my paranoia to construct a pyramid of a burning house, her father murdering his neighbor, or her brother having another baby capped by her ex’s arrival. I cursed every red light until my soi.

It was night. The little food stall was serving pad-thai to the day-workers from the tin shack slum across the muddy creek. Frogs croaked in the water. I walked toward my house blanketed with outward calm. My facade was wasted. Ae wasn’t home and an empty box for a washing machine lay on its side in the garden.

We had agreed to discuss any major purchases and my blood sizzled with exasperation. Ae had hocked the washing machine at the jum-jam to cope with an unexpected family crisis. The TV was on the stand in the living room and I was grateful the unexpected crisis hadn’t been required its exile to the pawnshop.

Ae had to be at her father’s shack and I decided against driving up to the slum across the railroad tracks. Any explosion in front of her family was a black mark. I wasn’t fighting any more. Instead I ate at a seafood restaurant on Beach Road. Ae wouldn’t like that, since she suspected I was conducting an affair with the 23-year old hostess.

It was hard to believe we were friends in a city, where sin slept in cheap hotels, but Nu explained that she was offering nothing as long as I lived with Ae. Drinking three beers eased my anger. A plate of curry crab squashed my hunger. The passing of traffic soothed my anxiety. People had normal lives, yet nothing was normal with Ae. She was a problem. Her family a plague. I told Nu about the phone calls from Italy and the missing washing machine. She cut to the chase. “Ao ting khao?”

“Leave her?” I had the answer.

Before I said the words, my cellphone vibrated on the table. Nu frowned and I answered my phone. “Where are you?”

“Ti-ban. You angry?” Tears choked her voice. “Come home. I explain everything.”

Everything must have taken her a good hour to concoct and I apologized to Nu, who shrugged contemptuously, “Law te khun.”

It was up to me.

Staying.

Going.

Leaving.

I did not have to live here like the thousands of farang men had abandoned careers, families, and countries to open bars, export bootleg clothing and fake paintings, sell time-shares and condos or live off pensions in hopes of dying before insolvency necessitated a return to their native lands, which is a fate sometimes too harsh for them to face.

I had an apartment in New York. Mrs. Carolina had moved to Palm Beach. She had extended warm invitations for winter writing stints. Sam Royalle once joked that I had a wife in the States, after which Ae threatened to cut off my penis and feed my severed member to the ducks, who eat anything falling on the ground. I had nothing like that in mind for Ae and raced on my motorcycle to our house. Ae was waiting by the empty box. Her son lay on the bamboo cot, a bandage around his head. Her tear-stained eyes melted my hard heart to a puddle. “Dtut fall and hurt his head. I not have any money. Kor-thot, kor-thot, kor-thot.”

Thais are as allergic to apologies or honesty as they are silence, since they realize you’d much rather than hear a lie to avoid getting hurt. I accepted her excuse and forgave her with a kiss. Later when Dtut bandage fell off, his head was free of any bruises. A brief interrogation rooted out that she had bailed out her ex-husband, who had been arrested for ya bah.

I smashed my fist through a door and ordered Ae to leave the house. She cut her wrists with a broken piece of glass. I bandaged the diagonal slashes. Ae cried and we made love, after which she nuzzled her stone-smooth skin against mine. “I tell old boyfriend not to call anymore. I love you too much. More than pizza.”

“More than cigarettes?” I threw her Marlboro Menthols out the window. Her eyes widened in horror to demarcate her love’s borders. She surrendered this frontier. “More than cigarettes.”

It was a small sacrifice.

One small enough to not matter in the arms of a woman half my age.

THE ITALIAN PLAN by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 6

Cato wrote two thousand years ago that the deadliest trap for a man is the one that a woman weaves with her tears. Every bones in my body said throw her out. Regrettably I was bound by ties much stronger than love to see this relationship to the end, for I was beyond saving myself from the sinking sands swirling around my ankles. I was in danger of becoming a parody of the love-lost farang. Sam Royalle could help me. No one in America could either.

I had only one ally to stave off my self-destruction and slowly devised the Italian Plan. Her Italian would show up one day. He would call Ae. She would say he was a friend. I would let her go see him. The rest of the future was written beyond my sight, but I would be saved from a fool’s fate.

Unfortunately nothing happened. No phone calls. No family crisis for Ae. Nothing. Something wasn’t right and two days before my birthday, Ae announced she was going on holiday to Chiang Mai with her youngest son. She hadn’t ever mentioned any family up north and this sudden departure sounded suspiciously like a discreet rendezvous with the Italian. The morning of my birthday she packed a bag with her best clothes and asked, “You angry?”

Telling the truth gained nothing. “Angry? What for? You go. Have fun.”

“And what will you do?” She stood at the door. Her bag and son was on a motorcycle taxi. The fat driver worked the corner of her father’s soi and had helped Ae leave other men. She would go with him. I would be alone. Life would be simple.

“I think about you.”

“I think you too.”

Mem ran to the motorcycle and two seconds later she was gone. I walked to the house. It was quiet. I put John Coltrane on the stereo. No one complained about the jazz. I packed Ae’s clothing into a big box, swept the floor clean of her hair, dumped the sheets in the trash, stuck her pictures in a drawer, and called Sam Royalle, who suggested a birthday tour of the go-go bars. “You can drown your sorrows in drink.”

“I’m going to have a quiet one. Men after 40 should only celebrate birthdays ending with zero.” I opted for a two-hour rubdown at a legitimate Thai massage parlor. After listening to my tribulations, the masseuse said, “Pattaya have many bad lady. You free. Can be butterfly. Have fun.”

Sanuk remedied any woe for the Thais. Pattaya had go-go bars, beer halls, and discos. Girls went home with you for a smile. Drinks were cheap. I intended to bury myself in fun and I left the massage parlor with my muscles al dente.

Night had fallen. Girls were riding motor-sai taxi to Walking Street. In the nearby karaoke lounge a lone police officer sang a drawn-out Lao love song to a video of dancing girls in a rice paddy. The pi-dogs at the end of my soi snarled their hungry greeting and a plastic fire smoldered across the creek. I always ended up alone. Every woman ran away. This self-pity wasn’t healthy on birthdays or Christmas. Luckily I didn’t own a gun and the most dangerous pill in my medicine cabinet came out of a Lomotil bottle.

Turning the corner onto my soi I saw the balloons hanging from the wall and fairy lights strewn through the trees. A dozen motorcycles were parked in the street and a cloud of smoke rose from a fish barbecue. Twenty Thais, Sam, Mark, and shouted, “Surprise.”

I got off my bike wearing the stupidest grin on the face of the Earth and Ae ran up, laughing. “You not know 100%. Big joke.”

“I’m a big kwaai.” Everyone enjoyed ridiculing the birthday ‘Buffalo’. We ate and went to Marine Disco. I imagined things might work out. Ae had to love me. When I wobbled to our bike, Ae asked, “You think I leave you on your birthday?”

“No.” I wondered whether we ever told each other the truth. “Thank you for the big surprise.”

The party was a success. Ae and I made love that night. She said she wanted life with me alone and sent Dtut to her grandmother’s house. The crisis seemed to have passed and our little house surrounded by the swamp became a Garden of Eden under Ae’s care.

In mid-June my cousin returned for a week’s holiday. Bish brought a book BLACK MASS about the South Boston Mafia, and a Boston Bruins t-shirt. Ae appreciated the bottle of perfume and promised to find him a wife. He waved his hands in the air like an air traffic controller warning off a 747. “I’m not the marrying kind.”

“I think run in family.” Ae wasn’t smiling and I shrugged defenselessly, “We’ll get married when I sell my book.”

“Why you not ask me marry?”

“Now’s not the right time.” Her drunkard father asked to a dowry price of 50,000 baht and was not impressed by my counteroffer of 5000 baht and a bottle of Scotch. “And you get married before.”

Mem stamped her feet on the floor. “Englishman not marry. Say marry. Have monk come. Family too. Have food. Have drink. Englishman not come. UK suck. Man United ki.”

Bish hadn’t come to Thailand to hear a domestic squabble and sought refuge at his hotel. I spent an hour trying to prevent Ae from self-injury. “You go with cousin. Go see lady. Go. Pai ke ki.”

“I don’t want to go with him,” I explained that my mother had asked me to look after Bish. “He’s family.”

“Sure?” Her anger was quelled by this explanation. Family was everything to Thais.

“Sure 100%.” My mother had not mentioned go-go bars.

“You go out with him. I go with friend. Maybe cousin go with she.”

“I’ll see you at the TQ.” We kissed and a sense of invulnerability cloaked any threat to my life in Thailand. An editor would publish my book on punks. Hollywood would turn it into a movie. I would be able to take care of Ae and her family. Everything was going to work out.

I met Bish at the Sabaii Lodge pool. He ate a club sandwich, while I tucked into laab gai, a spicy Isaan dish. After a second beer, I blurted the facts about Ae’s Italian lover.

His smile was identical to his father’s grin upon hearing I had not started the fight at BC High. “You’re going out with an ex-go-go girl with two kids. As your counsel I have to ask for your own good, what are you gaining from this affair? I mean you’re a little old to confuse lust for love, aren’t you?”

This question held merit and I replied, “I know what I”M doing.”

Bash’s deceased mother must have issued similar instructions to watch my back. “So why don’t you ask Ae to get married?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I was afraid she’ll say yes.” I had been waiting for love for too many years. My heart was too suspicious to accept anyone loving me now. Especially if I was following the Italian Plan.

“Me too.”

I shook my head and explained about Ae’s secretive phone calls. “None of my relationship have ended with a good landing.”

As much as Bish enjoyed our nights out with Ae, he saw her for what she was. “You should thank your lucky stars, if some stupid Italian can take her away, plus you haven’t been faithful.”

“What are you talking about?” I hadn’t cheated on Ae in Pattaya.

“You don’t sleep with Mrs. Carolina anymore?” He had me on the witness stand and expected the truth.

“We’re friends.”

“What about Sherri?”

“We’re family.”

“But not blood like you and me.”

“We’re just friends.” He would never accept her as family. He had seen THE ABDUCTION OF CLAUDIA too many times. It was her first movie.

“Isn’t that what Ae said about the Italian?”

“Yes.”

“And that cute hostess, Nu.” Bish arched an eyebrow.

“I haven’t touched her.” No points were awarded for monogamy on the Bight of Siam.

“Not in your mind.” Bish had been taught by the nuns that sins in the mind were as dangerous as those of the flesh.

“It’s not the same thing.” I recognized why he was a successful lawyer in Boston. He was relentless in seeking the truth. In Pattaya the pay-off wasn’t the same.

“Of course not.” He signaled for the bill. The evening sky above the palms was ablaze with stars and Bish said, “You’re my cousin. Having a bad landing doesn’t mean the pilot has to die in the crash.”

“I’ll walk away from the crash.”

“Like that bike crash with the pick-up truck.”

I held up my wrist, which had healed bent. “Only a little battered.”

“Better than dead.”

Mem was waiting at the Tahitian Queen a Go-Go, which dated back to the Vietnam War. She had danced at the TQ as a showgirl after her husband had run off with a karaoke waitress. She had told me she went with up to 3 men a day. “Some gave me 2000 baht for short-time.”

I hated these stories.

Tonight she was wearing pink hot pants, a sheer bra, and high heels. A thick layer of chalky blush heightened her Chinese features and her hair had been teased to a ridiculous height. She looked ready for the prowl and the mama-san asked Ae to dance.

She ignored my scowl and jumped up on the stage. Her body rippled around a fire pole to an insipid Brittany Spears’ hit. Slattern eyes were riveted to her reflection on the mirror. She dropped the straps from her shoulders to expose her breasts. This routine was out of her normal skein of bad behavior and I scanned the object of this deviation. The mama-san handed a note to a skinny young falang with a big nose. His two young friends glared in my direction. The three sported Milan AC football shirts.

I commented on their attention to Bish, who shrugged, “Perhaps they’re old customers.”

“I think it’s the Italian.” Ae had pointed out other “Friends in the past. None had studied her every move so intently and I gripped my beer. Bish was on a vacation and said, “Don’t start anything.”

”I’m not.” Mrs. Carolina had stated that my pluses outweighed the negatives. I tried balancing the pros and cons with Ae. She was 24, had two kids, an ex-husband, a criminal family, no concept of money, no education, and no ambition beyond having sanuk versus her beauty and our sex. The math was simple. I would pass the torch.

“Bish, you said the best option would be let Ae go with the Italian.”

“Save you a lot of trouble in the end and in the middle too.”

“Cut bait and run.” It had worked for Ronald Reagan after the Marine barrack bombing in Beirut.

“At this point you can walk. Later you will have to run.”

Mem bared her breasts to the young man.

“I’m going for the Italian plan.”

“It’s a wise decision.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s why it feels like the wrong thing to do.”

Mem sashayed off the stage at the end of the song with a long strand of hair whipping across her spine, challenging the young Italian to maintain his invisibility.

“I still dance best.”

“Yes, you would win the bar fine prize every night.” I said sarcastically, but she missed my meaning. “Thank you, tee-lat.”

“Let’s go someplace more interesting,” Bishop suggested and we left TQ”S to view Hot and Cold a Go-Go’s midnight live show. He loved the fire show. Ae’s cousin worked the lesbian act and Bish barfined her for the night to balance out the third wheel. I avoided any of the regular farang hangouts. The Italian was at none of the distant bars.

By 2am I was ready for sleep.

Mem was not tired. “Want go dance one hour.”

“One hour?” Thai time was not measure by a clock.

“One hour. Not more.” She had plans with the Italian.

“Have a good time.” This would finish us and I would be a free man. I kissed Ae goodnight and she said, “Go Marine with cousin. Come home soon.”

And I watched TV until 3. The phone hadn’t rung and I called Ae. Her not picking up had a million possibilities. I settled on one and drove my bike to my cousin’s hotel. The desk clerk said that Bish had gone to his room ten minutes ago. Possibly Ae had returned home and I drove to my soi in less than five minutes. It might as well have been ten. The house would have been empty either way.

Pattaya was not a big city. She wasn’t at the Lao coffee shop or the karaoke bar across the creek. No one had seen her at the Marine discos. I rolled up to the biggest disco in the city. The motorcycle attendants asked where my mia was, which meant either she wasn’t here or they were covering up for my ‘wife’. I went inside to discover it was the former and I walked out feeling better, until Ae arrived on the Italian’s motorcycle.

She said, “Don’t talk now.”

Her plea came about an hour too late.

“I take care of you for a year and the second this punk comes into town you go off with him.”

“Why you talk same this?” She slipped off the bike with her eyes clouded with confusion. Her favorite band Loso was playing inside and this boy on the bike was young. “He friend.”

“Who’s this?” the Italian asked in clipped English.

The prospect of two falangs fighting over a dok thong had become a cartoon for the scores of Thais before the nightclub. Their laughter horrified Ae, but she remained by the Italian’s side. His friends bracketed him. It was three against one. My blood ran with lava and Ae saw my fists clenching. “Please don’t.”

The music from CHAO MOTORSAI boomed from the disco and her words ricocheted inside my skull. She had chosen this young man. Her khun gair was out. After leaving New York. After visiting the dirt-poor farm in Khorat. After feeding her family and I said, “You fucking bitch.”

While non-fluent in gutter American, she started crying into her hands. The Italian realized his trespass into an unexpected relationship and apologized, “There are a hundred women in Pattaya. She can go with you.”

“No, you can have her.” I pressed the electric starter and roared out of the parking lot.

This was not Romeo and Juliette.

I had forgotten the warnings, not listened to the tales, and ignored the writing on the wall. I was getting what I deserved and nightmares exhausted me by dawn.

In the morning her brother picked up her clothes. I bought him some beer and he explained that his sister was crazy. He smiled apologetically and drove away without any explanation. Over the next few days I heard the story from a dozen sources.

She was with a younger man. He had offered a trip to Italy. His father had given him $10,000 to process her visa. The Italian intended on marrying the ex-go-go dancer, whereas I was content with living in sin. It was Ae's middle name. Mine was farang. I could have been anyone to Ae, but Ae was Ae to me.

Sin.

Pure and simple.