Bangkok Hard Time (14 page)

Renewing An Old Friendship

One Sunday, a few months after coming to Lard Yao, a blueshirt came to find me in The Garden. He showed me a note, handwritten in Thai, saying it was from the building chief of Building #1 to the building chief of Building #2 and tried to explain that I was to go to Building #1. Confused at first, I thought maybe I was being moved, till he mentioned the name Sompong. Pretending that I understood what was happening, I followed him.

Building #1 cell block section was referred to as the “soft building”. Inmates with special needs or the intellectually challenged, the infirm, the very old, the very young, the partial transsexuals and other particularly weak prisoners were segregated there to prevent abuse or exploitation by the hard convicts in the other cell blocks. At the gate to greet me was my friend from Bumbat, Sompong.

“I told you that I would send for you later,” he said smiling. Why he was in this section was not at all clear to me since he was far from being classified as a “soft prisoner”. When I asked how it was that he was staying in this building, he only laughed and said, “Let’s go to my house and eat.”

We walked across the prison yard that was laid out almost like the yard of Building #2. The main difference was that this area was populated by a strange sea of various convicts who looked either like girls, kids, old men, weaklings or the mentally defective. All of the prisoners we encountered in the yard stepped aside in deference, neither speaking nor making eye contact, as we made our way to the far corner of the compound.

There, in about the same relative location as the American cabin in the yard of Building #2, was a tiny pond under the shade of a huge tree covered in loofah vines. Set on stilts in the middle of the pond was a small oval-shaped bamboo gazebo with a thatched roof. We passed a young guard and crossed a short bridge until we reached the open-sided hut where half a dozen middle-aged men either sat or lounged on a wide, padded, semi-circular bench that ran around the inside of the structure.

Soft Thai music was playing on a radio as two plain but pleasant-looking “girls” dressed in sarongs served up drinks and bowls of noodle soup to the gentlemen. These were convicts who had outside pull, influence or money and were generally older. Most of them had also been in the prison before. There were no introductions, only smiles and nodding, as we entered. These were veteran prison elders. They were the
gao laaeo.

After I was seated, one of the “ladies” brought me an ice-cold wet wash cloth and asked what I wanted to drink. Jokingly, I ordered Mehkong with Sprite and lemon on ice. “She” apologized, saying, “We only have Scotch or gin”. I tried to hide my surprise, though I was floored. Sompong however, noticed my surprise and told “her” to bring me a gin and tonic, then handed me a joint.

“What about the guard?” I asked, indicating the young uniformed officer standing with his back to us not five meters away on the other side of the bridge.

“He is there to see that no one bothers us,” Sompong replied.

I ignored the “charms” of the “ladies” who were serving us. Preferring a woman without a penis, I was never a big fan of ladyboys anyway. My admittedly homophobic concerns about what was really going on here were allayed when Sompong explained that the quasi-females were only there for the purpose of helping to create an ambience. The whole event was set up to look and feel as if one was at an outside restaurant, not actually in a prison. It was expected to not have any meaningful contact and simply treat them as if they were serving girls. Not an everyday occurrence in Building #1, this was a party that only took place on weekends when the right combination of corrupt, substitute guards were on duty.

After enjoying half my joint and half my drink, I began to see the advantage Sompong and the other elders found from living in Building #1. Every few months they were able to arrange this event and, if only for a short while, it felt like living in the free Thai world. In the meantime, there were much less of the inmate politics and power struggles to contend with here, unlike that found in the other cell block sections. Well worth the expense if you could afford it and knew how to arrange it.

As I sat there in the gazebo enjoying
kwitdeo
noodle soup, a young boy who looked to be borderline Downs Syndrome entered and stood in the middle of the hut holding a chicken egg. Then, with a small, beautifully angelic voice, he began singing into it like it was a microphone. The strongest sense of deja vu swept over me. I realized he was singing the same tune that I had heard that evening long ago on the roof of the Grace Hotel the first time that I had ever smoked pot. I was immediately carried away to a time and place deep in my past.

I was sitting in the heart of a Thai prison with the truly
gao laaeo,
half stoned, half drunk, eating noodle soup served by comely imitation females and listening to a kid singing a long ago familiar, melancholy Thai love song into an egg. Even today, it remains the most profoundly surreal experience of my life. Over the following years, I would be invited to Building #1 a few more times to enjoy the atmosphere of Sompong’s illusion of freedom that he had created there. But I was never sure why he sought my friendship. Thinking that if someone wanted to be your friend, they must have ulterior motives was a normal prison response. That, anyway, is what I kept reminding myself.

However, Sompong had never asked for or required anything from me. I think now that my wariness of his friendship was an example of my own insecurity and thus more of a character flaw on my part.

Still Doing Time

Eventually, we got a new US embassy para-consul, named Marcia, coming to visit and check on us. I was stoked, not just because she was lovely and had a genuine interest in us beyond what her job required, but because she was also an Arkansas girl. Her husband was the embassy doctor. Together, they arranged for the American inmates to be tested for HIV. The prison warden allowed her to come inside and deliver the results in person to each individual. Of the almost twenty inmates meeting with her in the vice warden’s freezing air-conditioned office, about a third of them got bad news.

The fact is, many of the foreigners came into the prison unhealthy to begin with. Junkies are rarely health conscious. It seems no surprise that once introduced into a crowded space filled with a Pandora’s box of strange maladies, a disproportionate number of them got sick and died from opportunistic diseases like TB or Toxoplasmosis encephalitis. When you added HIV into that mix, the results were catastrophic.

The Royal Department of Corrections moved immediately to test every prisoner in the system for HIV and for drug use. All who showed positive for HIV were directly segregated to an area between Building #1 and #3, which came to be eerily known as the AIDS Garden.

For those who showed positive for heroin use, it was simply recorded in their files. I was found negative on both tests. Bob tested negative for both tests also. The fact that he was using heroin daily made me suspect that he may have made monetary arrangements to alter the test results. A Petition for Royal Pardon could be denied if the petitioner was found to be dirty.

Months later, the foreigners who had tested positive for HIV started getting relatively rushed Royal Pardons for humanitarian medical reasons. The Thai don’t like
farangs
dying in their prisons and see it as very bad form. But for one American inmate, the system did not move fast enough. He was a GI who had gone AWOL twenty years earlier while in Bangkok on R&R from Vietnam and had been living in Thailand ever since. For three memorable years though, he had been a guest of the Thai prison system for a possession of heroin conviction. They proved to be his final three years: when his HIV had rapidly turned into full blown AIDS, he was dead within weeks.

Another sad case was Chip. Chip was a Californian kid who got sucked into carrying half a million dollars worth of heroin hidden in a false-bottom suitcase to the airport for his mom’s boyfriend who had promised him ten thousand dollars and a used pickup truck for his work. When busted, the Thai cops told him that he would get a death sentence for sure. However, the American DEA officials in Bangkok told him that if he flipped and testified against his co-conspirators, they would transfer him to the US and would not charge him. He was a trusting soul. They had, of course, all lied to him.

He ended up in a Thai prison with a twenty-five-year-plus sentence. When eventually moved to Lard Yao from Bang Kwan, this young guy became an investor for the American house in The Garden. Somewhere along the line, he had contracted HIV from sharing infected needles.

A tall, gangly, handsome, blonde-haired and sensitive young man when he first came to prison, Chip was quite changed by the time he left. He contracted a case of herpes zoster that horribly deformed his face and he painfully suffered this for months until the prison hospital treatment finally worked. In the meantime, it was discovered he was HIV positive and he felt he had indeed received a Thai death sentence after all. Less than a year later, The King sent him home on a Royal Pardon for compassionate medical reasons. In a total transformation that took less than six years, Chip left Bangkok as a scarfaced, prison-hardened mature man unsure about how much future was even left for him. Most men would have been bitter, but he still seemed like the lighthearted kid I had first met. He had honorably accepted the harsh consequences of his own karma.

Chip’s cell mate, Paul Hayward, who had transferred from Bang Kwan prison with him, was also found to be HIV positive. Paul was an Australian world-class rugby player for the Newtown Jets and had been chosen to represent Australia in the ’76 Olympics as a middleweight boxer. However, he was disqualified from the Olympics when he turned pro because he needed the money to support his daughters. Later, his brother-in-law had enticed him, with the help of the now famous Warren Fellows, to go to Thailand and smuggle out eight kilos of heroin.

Paul was not the most intelligent man I had met in Lard Yao, but he nonetheless had more common sense than all the others. He knew what the consequences of his caper would be if he was not successful, but had committed the crime anyway and blamed no one but himself when he failed.

He once confided to me that separation from his baby girls was the ultimate punishment. Having become a junkie while in Bang Kwan, he had one night passed out while sitting on his leg folded beneath him. When he awoke hours later, his leg had virtually died from lack of blood flow. Paul spent the rest of his life hobbling around with one leg almost half the size of the other. However, the size of his heart was never diminished. Even though he was the hardest man, among the
farangs,
to walk the prison yard, it was never apparent from his easy-going humble demeanor.

One prime example: Albert, a large black man from the mean streets of Detroit, often tried pushing Paul to box with him on the frequent Saturdays that the building chief would allow prisoners to put on the gloves for fun or to sometimes settle disputes. Albert thought it was funny to mess with Paul. When he could stand no more taunting, Paul agreed to box. Most of the foreigners gathered to observe. Many of the Thai prisoners came to watch also. They either seemed to enjoy seeing
farangs
beat each other up or loved to bet on the outcome.

Standing on his one good leg, Paul let the larger man strike him a few times with his greater reach. Then, pretending to be hurt, he drew Albert within his own reach and ended the fight with one blow. I can’t remember how many cartons of cigarettes I collected from the Thais on that winning bet.

I had met Paul’s case partner, Warren Fellows, once before and perceived him as a manipulative bullshit artist. Having been one myself, I easily recognized the various character traits. Warren would eventually be pardoned by The King and return to Australia. Profiting from writing a whiny, mendacious account of Thai prison life, in which he claimed to have been beaten by guards and forced to eat cockroaches and rats in order to survive, Warren had not changed.

Paul, though, had a true heart. He was pardoned by The King after doing almost twelve years of his initial thirty-three-year sentence and would die from a heroin overdose after about two years in freedom.

In the years following, there was a flurry of Royal Pardons passed down – but almost exclusively for Western inmates. While I was there, no pardon was ever granted for any of the Hong Kong Chinese prisoners. Worse, most Burmese and Chinese drug smugglers who had received the death sentence were shot, while all Western drug smugglers with death sentences received a Royal Commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment. In fact, no Westerner has ever been executed in Thailand in the last 100 years. I never completely understood the reasons behind this inequality of treatment, but then again, it was really none of my business. This was Thailand, and we were living by Thai rules and, indeed, at their discretion. It did, however, make peaceful co-existence with the Chinese in The Garden more difficult to maintain because they resented this and other glaring inequities.

A Change Of Cast And Caste

Bob was finally pardoned. On the morning of the day he walked out, he was quick to remind me that I still owed him 300 baht (about $12 US) on a gambling debt. I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and said to call it even. It was funny how he was cheap about the small things and generous when it came to the big things. For instance, he said that I could have the house and that he had, in fact, already told the building chief that he had sold the American hut to me. He could easily have sold the American house, which he considered his legacy, to someone else for thousands, but he would rather give it away to an American than sell it to one of the other nationalities. He was very ethnocentric in this regard.

“Hey, Rock, don’t forget to grease the wheels of the BC from time to time,” he advised. With those words of wisdom, he was gone and for a measly eight dollars, I now owned one of the finest pieces of real estate in Lard Yao, perhaps second only to Sompong’s hut in Building #1.I never saw Bob again.

Bob, like most of the other
farangs,
had always complained about the few guards who were greedy though I had learned from Sompong that those were the type of guards you should prefer.

A year after Bob’s departure, the last American prisoner who had been there upon my arrival was freed by His Majesty. For his sake, I was happy to see him released. After a total of eight years in various Bangkok prisons, he was tired. His name was Fuller, but he preferred the monikers “Wonder” or “Legend”. He claimed he could not remember how he had earned either of those appellations. I always called him Fill. His father had been with the US State Department. He had graduated from The International School in New Delhi, India. As a fellow overseas brat, we shared a special understanding and affinity.

Fill was, on one hand, the most intelligent of
the farang
inmates I knew, but, on the other hand, also the biggest junkie I have ever met. He could crush you in chess or scrabble while nodding out. It was agreed that cheating in these games was allowed as long as you did not get caught, in which case the game was forfeited by the cheater. I confess there had been times, during his brief periods of semi-consciousness, when I took the opportunity to cheat. However, I only caught him cheating once at chess.

There was a Hong Kong prisoner whom we called Crab Boy because he had an unusually mutated thumb that was split down the middle and which looked like a crab claw. Once during a chess game, Fill started yelling at someone behind me. When I turned to look, I saw something I wish I had never seen. Crab Boy was standing on the other side of the canal urinating into the water while holding his tiny penis with his crab claw. Repulsed, I picked up a small broken piece of the cracking concrete floor and launched it in his general direction. Somehow, the projectile flew unerringly to its dinky target, striking and bloodying his small-scale genitalia. I am sure that my celebrated rat-slaying incident must have crossed his mind. He never complained of his injury to me. When I turned back to address the chess game, I strongly suspected that one of the pawns had been moved. I couldn’t prove it, but Fill was smiling suspiciously.

Fuller never got along well with Bob for reasons I never knew. When I first met him, he had walked into the American hut at dinner time. “Wow, that smells good,” he announced. “I wonder how it tastes.” Bob looked up and before he could say anything, Fill said, “No thanks, I ate yesterday” and then walked out, saying over his shoulder, “Besides I don’t want to ruin my appetite.” When he left prison, I knew I would miss his legendary wonderful humor.

When foreigners are released from a Thai prison, they are taken to the original police station where they were first held after arrest. One week later, they are transferred to the Immigration jail for another week or so while undergoing the extradition process. By what seemed like pure serendipity, Fuller and Bob’s wife Sherry were released on the same day and spent a week together at the Don Muang police station where, during the day, the cells are opened and the communal area is occupied by both sexes. Fill wrote me a number of letters describing what transpired there and, later, of what to expect at the Immigration jail while waiting for the deportation process to be completed.

For a few months, I was the only American in Building #2 and I occupied the American hut alone. It was a welcome respite when my Canadian friend George, the accomplished chef whom I knew from Bumbat, was temporarily transferred, because of a gall bladder complaint. The transfer took him from Bang Kwan prison in order to access services of the more adequate facilities of Klong Prem’s prison hospital. I had the building chief put him in my cell. My French cell mates, not happy about it even though it was only a transitory situation, were nonetheless cordial as usual. For a few short weeks, I enjoyed the culinary talents of this witty gentleman between his visits to the hospital.

On one occasion, I went with him to the hospital. He went for some tests and I went to see Dr John to arrange a prescription for some tranquilizers and sleeping pills. While in the open-air waiting lounge with many others likewise biding their time before seeing a doctor, I had a defining experience: the swarm of inmates there suddenly parted as a dozen
farang
female inmates from the adjoining women’s prison were escorted in by their female guards. Among them was heart-melting Irish girl with long, wavy, dark red hair whose name was Leah.

Seeing what I took to be an invitation in her eyes, I felt a strong need to speak to the lady. Against my better judgment, I crossed the lounge in her direction. The look in her eyes quickly changed from invitation to apprehension when a large, chubby, clip-haired, mean-faced female guard accosted me, cursing in Thai and warning me away. I presented the palm of my hand to halt her approach. This commotion brought a male guard running in our direction. Before I could speak a word to the green-eyed girl, both guards were upon me.

The female guard raised her hand to slap me, but it was caught at the wrist by the male guard, who sharply advised her against it. The commodore then calmly invited me to return to my seat. I smiled and gratefully obliged. The salient point here was that a Thai prison guard had undertaken physical contact with another Thai prison guard in order to prevent the use of violence against a
farang.
Had I been a Thai prisoner, the probability is high that they both would have beaten me unmercifully and without hesitation.

The treatment of foreign prisoners at the women’s prison was said to be more stringent than at the men’s facility. Big Bob’s wife Sherry had described to him in letters that even though the conditions and food were better, the women were subjected to much stricter oversight, almost like in a nunnery. There were no drugs to speak of and even tobacco was a banned substance. The female guards were ever vigilant for the slightest infraction of the rules.

During all my time of incarceration in Thailand, I had never seen or heard of a foreign inmate being beaten or even struck by a guard unless the prisoner was actively assaulting a guard and calling it upon himself. True, from time to time, a blueshirt would strike
a farang,
but it was always to his own detriment. On the very rare occasion that a Thai prisoner assaulted or fought with a foreign prisoner, there was hell to pay for the unfortunate Thai.

On the other hand, any prisoner who committed a chargeable violent offense against another was remanded to confinement in Building #7 while awaiting possible new charges. These offenders spent their days squatting and cutting the grass with hedge clippers. Their efforts were one of the reasons that the entire prison was immaculately manicured.

Putting the chained violent criminals together with hedge clippers, squatting in the pouring rain or the oppressive heat of a sunny day gave the prison an opportunity to reduce the population of sociopaths. It was not unusual to see one of them being carted away with a pair of hedge clippers still sticking out of their chests through their orange shirts, the result of an altercation with one of the other, similarly armed prisoners.

Back then, my thinking was that this policy was perhaps a product of ancient Thai wisdom, an intentional way of thinning out the ranks of the most violent inmates. I think that just the threat of being sent to join them in Building#7 had a deterrent affect on all.

Sometimes the chief of central control would conduct an early morning inspection raid of the foreign prisoners’ cells. With a few guards and his platoon of trustee blueshirts, they would find very little if anything to confiscate since the process of opening all the cell doors was such a noisy, time-consuming process and we often had a warning of the upcoming event from some of the Thai trustees

One morning, Yusef, the devout Nigerian Muslim, was engaged in his dawn prayers, no doubt asking Allah for his release to come soon. The door to his cell (which was next to mine) was opened as the keyboy went down the line unlocking the doors heralding another loud predawn surprise check by the blueshirts. When four nightstick-toting trustees burst into his cell, Yusef clutched his Koran to his huge chest. One of the blueshirts snatched the Holy Book out of his hand and, after finding no contraband concealed within it, foolishly tossed it into the toilet area of the cell.

By this time, my own cell door had been opened and my French cell mates and I pulled out in time to witness the ensuing beat-down. Yusef was throwing blueshirts around off the walls of his cell. One would strike him with their club and be rewarded with a bounce off the wall of the cell. When he finally exited with his toilet-doused and blood-covered Koran once again grasped to his chest, the gathering platoon of blueshirts began beating him again with their batons.

At this point, my cell mates and I waded into the midst of the fray. When I covered Yusef’s head with my hands to protect him from any more blows from the nightsticks and speaking in Thai begging them to stop, the altercation was over. By that time, the guards and other foreign inmates were also interceding to calm the situation. Some weeks later, we saw all of the offending blue-shirted trustees squatting in the prison yards cutting the grass with hedge clippers. It was said that their offense against the Muslim prisoner’s Koran was as serious as the misuse of violence that they had committed against him. The outfits they were wearing was no longer blue, but burnt orange.

When a foreign prisoner fought with another foreigner, the Thai officers were slow to respond, if at all. They usually seemed to wait and see if the altercation would simply and naturally resolve itself. Possibly some of them vicariously enjoyed watching foreign inmates beat each other. I never saw a blueshirt get physically involved in any conflict between
farangs.
If Thai prisoners fought amongst themselves, then all participants were often summarily beaten on the spot by the guards and/or the blueshirts. Amazingly, the Thai prisoners generally seemed to accept the inequality of treatment as a normal situation without any obvious resentment against
farangs.
This was a very repetitive observation.

Also, as previously mentioned, following Fuller’s release, I was for a time the sole American in The Garden. But soon, there was an influx of many new American prisoners. Two of them were Californians being held on major marijuana smuggling convictions. Ollie was an educated and wealthy expat from San Francisco who had been busted with a shipment of two tons of Thai stick he was arranging for his smuggling group.

Ollie, too, was
gao laaeo,
and I admired his style. He had lived in Thailand on and off for many years and prison in Bangkok was not a culture shock for him. He spoke passable Thai and was also semi-fluent in Spanish and French as well as having a working knowledge of half a dozen other languages.

Ollie personally shunned drug use though he allowed that smoking pot was OK. It always exasperated him whenever I maintained that marijuana was a gateway drug. Holding himself aloof from the others, he knew well how to the work the system and did. Eventually Ollie became a blueshirt and despite the inherent distrust it created among some of the other
farang
prisoners, I always personally trusted him implicitly. I called him “Uncle Ollie” just for fun, because I knew it irritated him. Either constantly exercising or reading, he appeared to have no obvious vices other than his addiction to Thai girls, a rather understandable obsession.

The second new Californian was from the region of Marin County, Some fellow inmates called him Hollywood, but I called him Bubba even though he preferred Butch. He had been busted on a boat seventy kilometers offshore in the Gulf of Siam with twenty tons of high grade Thai reefer. An oversized man with a brooding, sometimes dark sense of humor, he had reportedly gone to court and pled guilty to actually owning only one ounce of the marijuana and claiming that the rest of the load belonged to an unnamed other person.

Also among the newly arriving American prisoners were Steve and David two pedophiles being held for extradition to the USA, accused of operating an international sex tour ring. One was a California native, president and CEO of both California-based and Thailand-based tour companies, as well as former executive in the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club. He was also the current president of the Bangkok Travel Incentive Group and was a real piece of work.

His case partner operated an orphanage for boys in Bangkok. Together, they ran a disgusting business providing fellow American homosexual pedophiles with unfettered access to the male children at the orphanage as part of their tour. I had no problem with them being gay but abusing children was a different matter altogether.

At first thinking they were both just another couple of hapless, heroin-smuggling junkies, I made their acquaintance on the day they arrived. As a requirement of my flower-factory foreman job, it was my duty to explain what their work obligations would be. In the course of introductions, one of them asked how it was that I spoke Thai. Upon hearing that I had lived in Bangkok on and off since high school, the other mentioned that one of his business acquaintances was also an ISB graduate. “Do you know Sandy?” he asked.