Bangkok Tattoo (29 page)

Why do I get the feeling she’s done this before? I note with forensic zeal that as she works her buttocks the two dragons, now in full view thanks to the mirror, are performing a kind of dance, a systole and diastole, clearly a reference to the inhalation and exhalation of the cosmos.

Dao, breathless, slowly eases herself off me. “Look at me, I’m sweating. You got me all worked up, and you haven’t even opened your fly.”

“Sorry, I was sublimating. Just sit on my knee so I can check your belly dragon again. I really would like to have one like that. It’s amazing the way it keeps its integrity even when you’re doubled over.”

“You want me to try to find him?”

“Could you? Do you have anything to go on?”

“The customer went with another girl—someone called Du. She hangs out at the Rose Garden. I heard he made her have a tat from the same guy. That was before me, though—he dumped her because she hit twenty-seven. Those Japs don’t like old ladies.”

“You must at least be able to remember what his tattoos were like.”

“The tattooist? Oh yeah, that’s easy. No tattoos on hands, face, or feet. The rest, well, you know, total body. He was like a walking comic strip, no part of him left uncolored. He liked to work in just a pair of shorts, so I saw everything. Then one day I asked if I could see him naked, so he dropped his pants. I tell you, his body surface was ninety percent ink.”

“His cock, too?”

“Especially that. He told me that when it was hard, you could see some famous Japanese naval battle with the Americans, but I only saw it all small and wrinkled. It wasn’t such a big one. I told him he could have me for two thousand baht if he wanted, and I wouldn’t tell the john, but he said he didn’t like women that way. I just wanted to see the naval battle.”

“He’s gay?”

“He didn’t say that. He just said he didn’t do it with women. You know how weird Japs can be.”

“Anything else?”

“He had this dreadful stutter. At first I thought he couldn’t speak Thai at all, but then I realized he was fluent, except for the stutter. He seemed incredibly shy, like he’d been working in the jungle all his life and didn’t know how to relate to people.”

34

R
ose Garden: the women here are all freelancers. You could say the semiliterate Thai owners of the bar showed the kind of commercial foresight for which business school graduates pray: they decided to allow single women to sit at the bar or at the tables all day and most of the night for the price of a single coffee or an orange juice. The standard travel books duly warned of a small army of impecunious, unscrupulous whores—not all of them young, either—not disciplined by employers or pimps, untraceable and unaccountable should the john wake up in his hotel room in the middle of the night to find both woman and wallet gone. Naturally, the result was a somewhat larger army of curious
farang
men who spent a great deal of money buying themselves and the women drinks in their earnest desire to find out just how unscrupulous these girls really were. Within a couple of years the result was a roaringly successful cooperative enterprise housed in a barnlike compound upon which the owners lavish nothing in the way of decor, although the Buddha shrine is one of the largest in the entertainment industry.

Now here is Salee making her way toward me through the dense fauna of men in the forty-to-infinity age range, squeezing past women spectacularly well turned out in those designer rip-offs your government is so hysterically upset about. (In the karma of crap the fakes are indistinguishable from the originals.) Creedence Clearwater Revival are playing “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” only faintly audible against the great mating chorus all around. As I gaze across this heaving global marketplace, I note that more and more women are streaming in through the doors. Charm is automatically switched to full alert as they make their way through the crowd. Salee, though, has been here for a few hours and has grown a little despondent. She has been a freelancer since my mother sacked her last year for getting outrageously drunk and dancing naked on the bar before passing out on one of the benches. Like all great bar owners, Mum has a puritanical streak.

“How’s business?” I ask with a smile, automatically ordering a double tequila.

Salee makes a face as she downs it in one. “I’m getting old, Sonchai. I’m twenty-nine this month. These younger girls are doing two, three, sometimes four tricks a night. That’s about a hundred and fifty U.S. dollars just for lying down for twenty minutes four times a night. Thing is, they’re not like my generation. They don’t just turn a trick, then go get drunk with their mates in a Thai bar—they come back here again and again, so each girl can account for four johns. They’re not like whores, they’re young businesswomen, and they’re cleaning up. Some of them have web pages, the john sends them e-mails, and they meet him at the airport. They’ve got the whole business sewn up. It doesn’t leave anything for the rest of us. It’s not fair.”

“Want me to ask Nong to take you back? She will if I tell her to.”

I order another double tequila, which she quickly drinks. Shaking her head: “No, frankly she was right to sack me. I’m at that age, you know, when I’m not going to get along with any mamasan or papasan. You really need to be freelance by the time you hit thirty. It’s not just the wrinkles around your eyes or the way your tits start to droop, it’s the whole way you hold yourself. Even the dumbest john gets the message:
This is not a girl, this is a woman.
And they come for girls.”

“How long since you had a customer?”

A sheepish grin. “This afternoon.” Laughing: “But that just proves what I’m saying. I can’t compete with the younger women, so I have to get here around midday, while they’re still asleep.”

“Any Asian men come these days? I don’t see too many.”

She makes a quick scan of my face but decides not to ask: “A few. Koreans come from time to time, and just recently there have been two Vietnamese men—big guys with tons of muscles, I guess they’re half American, from the war. They were here earlier—they took out two of the girls. Maybe they’ll be back.”

“No Japs?”

“Very, very few. They tend to go for the Japanese clubs on Soi 39—but why am I telling you that?”

“I’m looking for an unusual Japanese male, late twenties to mid-thirties—a tattooist.” A shrug. “He has a stutter but speaks Thai. Probably a serious loner.”

Another shrug. “I’m not the best girl to ask. Asian men don’t like me—look, I’m tall for a Thai. You know the golden rule.”

“Always be smaller than the john.”

“Want me to ask Tuk? She’s petite, Asian men love her. I think she does Japs from time to time. I don’t know if she’s with a john or not right now, though.”

Surreptitiously, I pass Salee a hundred-baht note. She squeezes my hand and slips off the barstool. I order another double tequila and let it sit on the counter, waiting for her. There are women sitting on the stools to my left and right, but they are with customers whom they have begun to mesmerize with expert strokes to the crotch—just like Vikorn catching fish.

The crowd is so dense, Salee has disappeared in less than a minute. When she ceases to surface, I assume she has been distracted by a john and start to gaze about for a better contact. Then suddenly two hands are tickling me from behind. Salee is standing grinning with her friend Tuk. I order another tequila for Tuk, who downs it in one in synchronization with Salee.

“A Japanese tattooist,” I explain again, “with a stutter. Maybe one of those Japs who can’t talk to people—a high-tech type?”

Tuk really wants to help. She frowns in concentration. “A tattooist? Does he have tattoos himself?”

“Full body except face, hands, and feet.”

“Including cock?”

“I don’t want to go off the subject,” I explain, and order more tequila.

“I don’t know if it would turn me on or not,” Salee muses. “You’d at least want to make it big, just so you could see the picture. It must be a bit like a video game.”

I finish my beer and order another. The alcohol must have loosened something in my brain, which finally remembers how to be indirect.

“Know a girl called Dao? She’s on the Game.”

“I know about a dozen.”

“She has very unusual tattoos—dragons across her navel and two dragons on her backside.”

Tuk stares at me. “That Dao? Sure, I know her. I used to share a room with her—there were five of us so it was pretty crowded, and I saw her undress every night. Amazing tats. Some of the other girls wanted the same, but she wouldn’t say who did them. She was going with a Japanese john who made her have them. She charged him twice as much afterward—four thousand baht for short time, eight thousand for all night.”

“Did you ever meet the john?”

“No. It was very secret. I think he worked here in Krung Thep, you know, and probably had a wife and kids as well.”

Suddenly Salee breaks into rapid Isaan, the language of the far Northeast, which is closer to Lao than Thai. I’m unable to follow and watch while light dawns on Tuk’s face and both girls begin to giggle. When they stop, they stare at me, then start to giggle again.

“Sorry,” Salee says. “It’s a bit embarrassing. You know the Game, Sonchai, you know how working girls go crazy from time to time—I mean,
crazy
?”

She is being coy, and I’m trying to discern her meaning. “I don’t follow.”

“Sure you do. You must have seen it thousands of times. A girl gets tired of being the sex slave—she wants a sex slave of her own from time to time. Last Christmas, Tuk and I made a lot of money out of some big fat Germans who were pretty domineering and ugly too, so we decided to splash out on a couple of pretty Thai boys from the gay bars off Surawong. It was to compensate and get our own back, you know how it goes.”

Tuk takes up the story. “We went to about five bars before we found a couple of boys we wanted. We took them back to our room and shared them—we smoked some
yaa baa
so we could make them work all night and get our money’s worth, but that’s not what you want to know about. While we were touring the gay bars, we saw an awful lot of tattoos—”

“And in one bar there were a few rich Japanese women, and the weirdest thing was, they seemed to like tattoos as much as male Japanese do. I mean, these are very artistic people, right? Like us, the women were there to hire cocks, but they wanted tattoos—”

“Especially on dicks.”

“So in that one bar they had a kind of tattoo parade.”

“And the winner was a Jap in his mid-thirties. They kept using this word
donburi, donburi,
which we thought was about
buri,
you know, cigarettes, but it turned out
donburi
means ‘total body tattoo’ in Japanese.”

I rub my jaw and stare at her. “It does?”

“Yes, and he won the contest—they were really great tats. But he wouldn’t go with any of the women. He said he wasn’t for hire; he only came to parade his tats.”

35

L
et’s call him Ishy. Never mind how I found him—yes, I visited most of the gay bars off Surawong but uncovered no more than his cold scent, so to speak. It seemed the Jap with the shocking tattoos and still more disturbing stutter was no more than an intermittent extrovert who used the bars as his shop window—he sold no flesh, only his art. Now here he is in a Japanese restaurant on Soi 39. You don’t want a list of every link in the chain—each shopkeeper, whore, bar owner, bouncer, bent cop, mamasan, security guard—that led me here.

You have seen such restaurants in movies about
yakuza
mobsters: underlit, with booths in dark wood, warm sake in tiny stone jars, a secretive, whispered inebriation in which soul brothers share male truths, serving girls in frilly aprons who curtsy (when they probably should be bowing: they’re Thai); it is permissible to pass out from alcohol poisoning but not to talk loudly. He sat alone in a booth in front of a pint bottle of the finest sake from the renowned distillery of Koshino Kagiro. His stutter, though appalling when sober, dissolved into a passionate loquacity when the warm alcohol infused his brain. In accordance with the
yakuza
tradition of honor and initiation, the last segments of the pinkies on both hands had been severed. He merely grunted when I sat opposite him in the booth, as if my arrival were somehow inevitable, and called for a second place setting that I might share his bento boxes of sashimi, yellowtail, bream, and tempura shrimp. He ordered miso soup for me, stared into my eyes with a kind of impersonal hostility, then said: “Put the salmon on the rice, pour some green tea over it with some miso and shredded nori.”

Oddly enough, he is a tall, handsome fellow whose social skills have been irrevocably crippled by his graphic genius. How can a man indulge in small talk when his inner eye sees great epics on the smooth surfaces of his companion’s flesh? When he offered to do a full-size Laughing Buddha on my back for free if I would submit to those foot-long
tebori
needles rather than a Western tattoo gun, I began to understand his speech impediment. When we were both drunk enough, we migrated from the booth to the stools at the bar.

When not full of ink and body art, his conversation debauched into the
yakuza
gangs of Tokyo and Kyoto, stories that to me owned the sadism and gigantism of an alien cosmology. It seemed, quite suddenly, that he was sharing his autobiography. Here too only the
horimono
mattered. How to persuade a thug, a failed sumo wrestler (say) with room temperature IQ, that he really doesn’t want that ugly blue dagger in indigo from knee to crotch on both thighs, but rather a sinuous, elegant rose bush with each petal a masterpiece of detail? The cities of Ishy’s Japan fairly burst with cutthroats swarming out from Underground at dusk (each with at least one pinkie missing), masters of mutilation, intimidation, and murder, of whom he was able to save only a few from the degrading clichés of his trade and then only at the risk of his own life. Nonetheless his fame grew: in Japan even thugs have culture. Senior mobsters called upon his services, he dined and drank at famous and famously discreet men’s clubs where accomplished geishas entertained him and his clients; sometimes he was asked to tattoo the women with something elegant on the lower back or stomach. With enough sake in him he was able to overcome his inhibitions and attempt to bring enlightenment to the dull minds of the
yakuza
godfathers: his art was not an offshoot of graffiti (for which he had an abiding loathing) but part of the great ink-drawing tradition of Hokusai and his predecessors.