Bangkok Hard Time (4 page)

A Frequent Pee Lek Trek

Over the next year, I visited Bahn Pee Lek more often. From ISB, it was only a three-minute
tuk tuk
ride and a short walk down Soi 18 to Lek’s shack. I had learned to speak some basic Thai and soon was able to have actual conversations with Lek, who never showed interest in speaking English.

Sometimes when he would greet me saying “Django, I dink whiskey, sir?”, instead of straight Mehkong rum, he would offer a small shot glass of his prized opium-soaked whiskey that he kept on top of his cabinet in the large glass apothecary jar.

It was usually on those occasions that he would regale me with stories of when he was in the army and of his drunken motorcycle accident which had left him crippled. I understood much less than a tenth of what he said, but upon each retelling of the same story I picked up more and more until I caught the basic gist of the entire saga. Before long, I began to butt in and tell the next part of his story, which always delighted him. One night, after I had returned my girlfriend Bobbie to her apartment, I stopped by Lek’s on the way back home.

Two Chinese business types were just leaving and all the opium paraphernalia was still laid out. I implored him to let me sample some since I had enjoyed the opium whiskey on previous occasions. A man of some morals and specks of scruples, Lek had tried to draw the line at letting the few
farang
kids that came to his tiny abode smoke opium. He restricted them to reefer and, for some, the occasional small cup of opium whiskey.

Nevertheless, on this particular late evening he prepared a bowl for me, warning “Today OK. Tomorrow no OK, understand?” Though actually I did not understand what he meant, I agreed, and the pipe was lit. Sometime later down the years, it would become agonizingly apparent exactly what he had meant by that admonition.

As he lit the pipe, he began telling me a new story. The story was of being arrested for the motorcycle accident, which was his fault because he was drunk. The accident had not only crippled him, but had killed his long-time friend, who was his passenger that evening. He had been sent to prison with a three-year sentence for negligent homicide. He spoke at length how sad he had been, not just that he had killed his friend and crippled himself, but also because he was apart from his wife and daughter for that three-year stretch. He talked of missing his tiny hovel of a home. He told how the prison cell he shared with three others was nicer and larger than his little room in the shack on Soi 18. Even the food was better than that which his wife prepared for him, adding that his wife was a certified lousy cook. Nonetheless, he had missed her meals.

Whenever she brought something to eat, Lek would sit up straight and say, “I eat this food just to survive.” Then they would both start laughing. I did not understand the meaning of this inside joke until many years later.

“I was a guest of The King,” he said in the same grandiose manner as my father had once used. When I laughed at that, he realized I did not understand and I did not; at least, not at that time.

He continued trying to explain, which confused me even more. With my limited knowledge of the language, I did not yet know that the Thai word for “free” is “
thai
”. So what came out in my mistranslation was “Only your heart/mind and The King can make me a Thai.” In his opium-induced stupor, Pee Lek had actually said, “Only your heart/mind and The King can make you free.”

Lek divulged that he had been released under a Royal General Amnesty which was granted in celebration of The Kings 36
^th
birthday in 1963 and effectively reduced the sentences of most prisoners by up to one half.

On subsequent visits to Bahn Pee Lek, the conversations had often included a huge variety of anecdotal prison stories which invariably concluded with a spaced-out silence. He would have the same look, called “the thousand-yard stare” that we often saw on the faces of the young GIs on R&R from Vietnam who we met at Lek’s whenever they got very high and began to speak of the war. It was an extremely eerie facial expression that could best be described as a haunting gaze. Even when directed at you, there was no actual eye-to-eye contact and the focus of the stare was as if on something far beyond just over the top of your head. It seemed like they were not even aware of either your existence or theirs.

On many occasions, we met those soldiers who had learned of Lek from other GIs stationed in Bangkok. They would usually just drop in to buy some Falling Rain and then split. But some would sit around for a while and shoot the bull. Usually they spoke of their life back in the “World” as they used to refer to the United States. I always felt sorry for them because they were close to our own age and involved in a war on the other side of the world without really knowing why. While we would leave Lek’s place to go to the safety of our family home and then to school the next day, they would leave and go back to a hotel across town and in the next few days return to the war.

The resilient people of Thailand seemed to take the whole American military presence during the Vietnam War era in stride, catering to their requirements from billeting to feeding to entertaining. Keep in mind that a lot of American money was flowing into Thai coffers. Petchburi Road was lined with more or less a mile of innumerable bars, discos, restaurants and massage parlors with Western names that provided thousands of young American boys who had only a few days before been on a battlefield with the opportunity to let loose. Their letting loose was often to the chagrin of their hosts.

The average Thai citizen seemed to be almost always amiable, but perhaps like most people, could only take so much. This was demonstrated one night outside Thermaes bar/massage parlor/ coffee shop located between Soi 13 and Soi 15 Sukumvit Road where some of the ISB kids hung out. A few of us on the way to Thermaes coffee shop after an afternoon of water pipes at Lek’s witnessed a prime example of a GI pushing a Thai too far.

When we piled out of a
tuk tuk
in front of the coffee shop, we noticed an incredibly huge American GI who was as drunk as he was huge. What followed was like a comic David versus Goliath scene. From what I could gather, the giant thought a tiny taxi driver had shortchanged him some small amount for his cab fare. The over-sized soldier, standing on the passenger side, was livid and bellowing at the cab driver who, sitting behind the wheel of his taxi smiling nervously, appeared to be offering money, perhaps the amount in dispute. But it had now become a matter of principle to the monstrous drunk.

A few other Thais, including our
tuk tuk
driver, gathered on the driver’s side of the cab and were telling the cab driver to “
Djai yen yen ”
(“make cool heart”). It was moments later that the roaring GI raised his giant arm and brought his fist down like a hammer creating a deep depression in the taxi’s roof. Even as the others continued to cry out “
Djai yen yen, djai yen yen ”
, the diminutive taxi driver scrambled over the top of his damaged cab roof and introduced his small foot to the giant’s chin. The little Thai was squatting on the roof even before his adversary hit the sidewalk unconscious. There the unconscious man remained until the MPs showed up a few minutes later from the US military Chavalit Hotel next door and hauled him off to the 5th Field Army Hospital.

The cab driver waited much longer until the Bangkok police showed up to investigate the event. The entire time, as he waited, the driver’s compatriots admonished him saying, “We told you to
djai yen yen.”
And, unbelievably, he was apologizing to them!

Although only a single incident, this is perhaps an extreme example of a special quality of forbearance most of these people seemed to have concerning a guest to their country. That lout of a soldier had been tolerated in spite of his provocation – but only up to a point. I am pretty sure that the giant GI had not been listening during the first sergeant’s orientation speech at the airport upon his arrival.

Young And Foolishly Wild

Pattaya Beach was the most popular seaside retreat for the
farangs
living in Thailand. Many of the kids from ISB took every opportunity to visit either with or without their family. The town had only a few hotels and other amenities at that time. The largest compound, beautifully situated at water’s edge complete with bar and snack shop and numerous bungalows, was operated by the US military for the use of its higher echelon. The beaches were pristine.

Enter Mike S, a fellow Bahn Pee Lek habitué and the definition of “hell on wheels”. He was the youngest of the IFAT boys, but perhaps the wildest because he always seemed to have something to prove, even when it was unnecessary to prove anything. On a particular evening in Pattaya, a number of kids from ISB were imbibing at Barbos, one of the few beachfront bars in those days. It was a popular watering hole for many of the locals as well. At an adjoining table, a group of young Thai hoods were trying their best to impress the
farang
girls.

Mike and alcohol were never a good mix. When the opportunity to stir the shit up with the Thai boys presented itself, he was already primed for confrontation. Fortunately for me, I had only moments before left to escort my new girlfriend Bobbie back up the beach to her family’s bungalow and was engaged in that pleasant endeavor when the action heated up.

Back at Barbos, the shit had hit the fan when Mike’s mouth had finally overloaded his ass and offended the Thai boys beyond acceptable norms. As the
farang
boys and girls beat a hasty retreat from the premises, Mike remained behind as if he was mounting some sort of rearguard action. A short time later, he was spending the rest of the night in an emergency room.

Broken ribs or worse is almost always the result when pushing some of your Thai hosts past their breaking point. The fate of the local boys involved in the altercation was no doubt much harsher, since they were arrested and given a Thai-style correction by their own people. The Thai police are not noted for their tender treatment of those in custody.

Mike turned up at Barbos the next night with his ribs wrapped up and full of life as ever. The staff at Barbos was happy to see us. Assholes that we were, everyone took turns at trying to make Mike laugh because it hurt him to do so. He nonetheless seemed to enjoy it. That was Mike.

In general, the American kids could go anywhere, anytime and do pretty much as they wanted with impunity and without fear. On the rare occasion that a minor infraction was committed and a Bangkok cop became involved, the incident was typically resolved by paying a “fine” on the spot to make the infraction go away.

For instance, I was stopped once at a traffic check roadblock while riding a rented motorbike. I had no driver’s license, the tag on the bike was reported as stolen and I had a pocket full of ganja. The presentation of my rental agreement papers and five dollars had me cruising away on the stolen bike with my bag of reefer duly returned and in my pocket. That evening when I brought the Honda back to the rental shop, the policeman from the roadblock was there waiting to take the shop owner into custody. A clever Thai cop had gotten his arrest, avoided the hassle of dealing with
a farang
kid, and made five dollars to boot.

The supervision of the kids who attended ISB was very lax and seemed quite permissive. On campus, there was a separate outdoor, roofed, open-air lounge provided for seniors where smoking was allowed. At the end of the year, an outing called Senior Skip Day was sponsored by the school. On that day, all final-year students whose parents had given them permission, boarded buses bound for Pattaya Beach. I am sure that there must have been some adult chaperones, but if there were, they were so unobtrusive that I cannot now recall seeing them. Aboard the bus there was a lot of reefer smoking and beer drinking.

Upon arrival at the idyllic beach town of Pattaya, we boarded multiple wooden fishing boats and were carried to an island about a dozen kilometers offshore in the Gulf of Siam where the leeside shore was lined with unoccupied bamboo huts. A short hike to the hilltop center of the island rewarded the trekkers with a fantastic view of the southern coast from the mouth of a huge cave and an uncanny tale to tell of walking through tall stands of marijuana growing on the hillside while largely unseen eyes watched us from the depths of the undergrowth. These careful observers were the Thai sea gypsies who actually grew the illicit crop we were enjoying during our stay in the Kingdom.

Senior prom night was soon upon us. Only weeks before that event, Mike had managed to talk his dad into letting him borrow the family car for a double date. This was an extremely rare privilege for any of the American dependents, since few of us had a Thai driver’s license. On that evening, I caught a cab to Mike’s house and we were soon headed off down the Bangkok thoroughfares in his father’s Chevy Corvair, totally convinced that we were really hot stuff.

He eventually brought the car to a sliding halt in front of Pee Lek’s. After a few rounds on the bong and a few sips of Lek’s opium whiskey, I was ready to go, but Mike was preoccupied in a conversation with an extremely stoned GI who was talking about Vietnam. I used the opportunity granted by the soldier’s slip into silence to suggest to Mike that we should go pick up our dates. As we left, I noticed the thousand-yard stare on that young soldier’s face.

Mike said, “Hey, did you see that guys face?”

Lek called after us, saying in Thai, “Don’t think too much.”

Not too much off schedule, we gathered our dates: Mike’s Meredith and my Bobbie. We headed for a much too fancy restaurant located atop a tall, newly built hotel which afforded an even better view than that from the roof of the Grace Hotel. The girls were as excited to be on an actual “car date” in Bangkok as we were. However, throughout the dinner, I could not get the image of the lost look on the face of the young GI back at Lek’s out of my mind. After dinner, we drove to a pre-graduation party some few blocks away at another ISB student’s home.

Shortly after we arrived, Mike decided that we did not have enough beer and invited me to join him on his quest to purchase some more. Maybe it was his excuse to drive the car without the obligation of being responsible for the females, but I think he was headed back to Lek’s to continue his conversation with that GI on R&R from Nam. I’m still not sure, because the next thing I knew we were crashing into the pole of a street light. I flew into the windshield.

Earlier that evening it had rained. When I awoke, I found Mike on the sidewalk in a rain puddle semi-conscious, vomiting and bleeding profusely from somewhere on his head. I removed my shirt and wrapped it around his bloody cranium.

Some other ISB kids riding in a taxi pulled over to see what was going on. The Thai police were on the scene almost immediately and summoned the MPs, who arrived directly. One of the MPs exclaimed that the curdled vomit in the bloody puddle was Mike’s brain matter. He was really freaked out when Mike woke and, thinking he was getting arrested, tried to punch the MP. A US Army ambulance carried us both to the 5
^th
Field Army Hospital. On the way, one of the medics asked us what unit we were with. Mike turned to me and said excitedly, “Hey man, they think we are GIs.”

Senior Prom night the following month was an overblown, neo-colonial affair as one might expect as the grand finale of our final year’s social events at the International School Bangkok. A Thai rock band called The Settlers filled the air of the expansive ballroom of a luxury hotel with all the right sounds as other locals catered to us as usual. Bobbie looked like a movie starlet. Hell, everybody looked beautiful and felt specially entitled.

In the next few months, most of those present at this gala would leave Thailand, scatter across the globe and never see each other again. Things would never be the same. The following morning, the dawn of a wet Bangkok rainy season, found three dudes dressed in damp tuxedos stumbling into Lek’s tiny shack. Two of them were Mike and me. Lek and a GI who was already there laughed at us.

Lek was happy to see us because the young soldier could speak no Thai. Lek, who understood little English and spoke even less, welcomed the minimal translation service we could provide. The GI had been dropped off at Lek’s by one of the rear-echelon soldiers stationed in Bangkok that he had met in a bar earlier that evening. He and Lek were obviously having trouble reaching any level of communication.

The GI, only two years older that us, was burning up his last week of R&R before going back to the hostilities. Mike kept asking him questions about the war. It was disclosed that his platoon from the 23
^rd
Infantry Division, the Americal, had recently participated in the Battle of Kham Duc and had gotten its ass kicked. The remainder of his squad had been granted R&R in Bangkok. After explaining all this to us, he sat there silently with the thousand-yard stare on his stoned face. Eventually he asked us what in the hell we GIs were doing visiting an opium den at the crack of dawn dressed in formal wear.

Our explanation of why we were wearing tuxedos and that we were really high school students was received with a distinct hint of melancholy on his part. He responded as if he was talking about an event that had occurred in another faraway lifetime saying, “I can remember my senior prom.” At that moment, the sky opened up with another brief torrent of rain, as if in cosmic sympathy with his sense of lost youth.

Soon after graduating that year, Mike himself would be in Vietnam with a rifle in his hands. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. As it happened, in an unbelievable coincidence, fate arranged for our paths to cross again some years later.

My school years in Bangkok went by much too fast. As the summer of 1968 drew to a close, I found myself going to the American Teen Club with my trophy girlfriend Bobbie for the last time.

Bobbie was a tall, pretty blonde brick house and every teenage boy’s dream date. What she ever saw in me, I still don’t know. She was very straight and had disdain for my trips to Bahn Pee Lek. Nonetheless, it came down to a matter of priorities for me that evening, and Pee Lek was more important. On that last night in Bangkok, I grabbed a friend named David, leaving Bobbie at the Teen Club for an hour or so while he and I hopped a
tuk tuk.
I took him to meet Pee Lek. David, a guy two years younger than me who lived in the same building as Bobbie, became my part-time replacement at Bahn Pee Lek over the next few years.

That last hour with Lek was very touching, strange as it may seem. I had learned to speak most of the common Thai language that I could pick up and learned much about the common people of Thailand from him. He had taught me something about life in Thai prison as well. All these things which I had learned from this most unlikely of gurus was to serve me well years later in an even more surreal environment. I left that night promising to return someday.

Lek advised me “Don’t think too much.” Under my arm as I left were two cartons of special Falling Rain cigarettes.

Some twelve years later, I would indeed return, but I would never see Pee Lek again.