Below is a completely fictional account of a travel odyssey by three young American businessmen.  Although vivid in detail, what you are about to read never happened.  There was no need to change any names because no one was innocent.  In fact, I have never been to that part of the world.  So, in short.  We didn't do it; you can't prove a thing, even if you have seen the pictures, that as far as you know don't exist, we weren't there.  Honest.



Where can I buy a Thai? (Life in a Fellini Movie!) Part 2
By Dave Schwartz  davybass@dabelly.com 

The Plaza

Standing in the middle of Nana Plaza was a unique experience in itself. The plaza is a courtyard surrounded on three sides by bars.  Three stories up and three sides around of cheap alcohol and cheap women. Some may argue that this courtyard offers the cheapest "rental property" in the world, but like most things, there is always a price. As we stumbled from bar to bar, our mission was clear-- it was going to be tough to beat the show last night, but I had faith that this land offered much more than any of us were ready to admit.

And so, the odyssey continued.  We roamed from bar to bar ordering beers and drinking in the environment. Several of the clubs did offer shows and, as we began noting the times, we prioritized our schedule while continuing to maintain an appropriate level of alcohol in our bloodstreams.  As luck would have it, the next club we entered featured a floor show that was about to begin.

With each and every bar that we entered, we found that there was always something unique.  There would be no exception here. As we pulled up a seat, our waitress greeted us. I guess that's perfectly normal until you consider that she was certainly under 15-years-old and more likely in the area of 12.  This isn't exactly what we considered normal.  As we looked around the room, many of the girls seemed young, but there certainly wasn't anyway to prove their ages.

As I had experienced in the Philippines, it was perfectly normal for women who wanted to work in the bars to go downtown and bribe the social worker at their equivalent to the hall of records.  For a mere $5 a girl could become any age she wished.  Nope, no point in asking for credentials here.  If we thought they were young, they simply were.

What was particularly unnerving was that after serving us, the young girl continued to stand near our table.  It wasn't long before she had made eye contact with each of us and had begun flirting for our attention.

As we drank our beer and considered the dude/non-dude ratio of the resident girls on stage, we witnessed our first transaction of the night.  We were certain that there had been other transactions the night before, but our attention had been diverted by other forms of entertainment.  One of the more elderly gentlemen across the bar had selected something for his amusement.  Shockingly she appeared to be the youngest girl up on that stage.  Were we feeling uncomfortable? The short answer was yes, but long ago I learned not to impress my own American moralities on a "foreign" situation.  Buying under-aged girls is not my idea of entertainment nor is it my place to challenge the social mores of a country we are only visiting.  As we finished our beers, we continued to watch the transaction.  One thing was abundantly obvious-- the young girl was excited!  She jumped up and down like he was taking her to the circus.  We all laughed in discomfort as the gentleman took home his evening prize.

Soon the lights had dimmed and the first floor show of the evening had begun.  This club featured a three-tiered carousel in the middle of the dance floor. While it was normally inhabited with a multitude of lovely young ladies, this floorshow was going to be something a bit more exclusive. Two young ladies took over the carousel and something much more erotic was definitely about to take place. Soft music, a light show and eventually a shower of raindrops completed their performance.  It was exotic, erotic and done in such a way that few would have been offended.

When the show ended so did our stay.  We eventually found our way up to the third floor balcony.  Looking down, the courtyard was filled with people milling around and looking for a destination for the evening.

When we had walked the length of the third floor, we turned and retraced our tracks.  Once again the girls encouraged us to stop in for a beer. Eventually we picked an establishment and headed in.  We walked through the front door where the girls directed us immediately right and up the stairs.  An indoor balcony! This would certainly allow us the best view of the club.  As we ordered beers, several young ladies quickly approached.  Not Young and Not Benny had enough liquid courage in them to finally address the women directly.  I politely declined my girl in favor of a cold beer and what I considered to be much better entertainment sitting right next to me.

It wasn't long before the girls were on my comrade's laps and doing their best to communicate in broken English and occasionally Chinese. The one with Not Benny seemed completely occupied with his boyish charm and look of absolute terror.  For the most part, she made sure that she was Not Benny's center of attention. And then there was Not Young. He was uncertain with this situation from the start and although he enjoyed the prospects of having a barely clothed woman sitting on his lap, he continued to question his good fortune.

 I drank my beer and watched both the floor show and the show right next to me and Not Young would occasionally lean over to ask the odd question. He was clearly uncertain with his newfound friend and was looking for a little guidance. To be honest, the girl didn't take this very well at all.  After the first couple of questions, she began objecting to our conversation.  It was obvious that she could not understand, much less hear, most of what we were saying  and this only served to infuriate her even more.  It wasn't long before she had established that I was little better than Satan and that I was trying to break up her 20-minute romance.

She began making faces and yelling at me in Thai. Naturally this all lead Not Young to wonder what he had gotten himself into and then a funny thought occurred to him.

"Hey, how come you don't have any girls over hitting on you?" he asked.

I smiled and replied that that was an interesting question.  This evasive answer only made him think more. Finally he leaned over again and said, "Hey, I think we need to get out of here."

We began considering our options for escape.  As the minutes ticked by, the girls were beginning to get more and more strange.  And then, like the angels had heard our prayers, the girls announced that it was their turn to dance.  As they both stood up, they asked Not Young and Not Benny to promise that they wouldn't leave until they returned.  With that they headed down the stairs and to the stage where they promptly stripped off their clothes and began to dance.  This led to a moment of hesitation on our part.  I mean it was the perfect opportunity to get a good look at what was bouncing on Not Young's lap for the last half hour and the perfect moment for escape.

"Hey, what the hell is going on?" Not Benny asked.

"I don't know," Not Young replied.  "This girl's getting a little crazy. She wants me to take her home."

"Mine hasn't said too much," Not Benny said.  "She doesn't speak much English and I've tried Chinese too. She seems normal enough though."

Not Young turned his attention toward me, "And what the hell's up with you?  How come that girl hates you? How come none of the other girls are hitting on you?"

As I tried to explain that the girls see me ruining their fun for the night, our attention was once again diverted toward the dance floor.

Torn between common sense and being a guy, uncertain how long the girls would be performing, we stayed long enough to indulge our curiosity. Not Young's girl was in rare form, aside from dancing, she alternated between miming sexual acts at Not Young and making faces and hand gestures at me.  It was sexual and surreal and completely entertaining, but our luck was running out.  We had made our decision.  We quickly finished our beers and then, almost without notice, the song began to end.  We made our break.  Across the balcony, down the stairs and.


ESCAPE

One could argue the foolishness that abounds in a man when doused with alcohol.  But who was I to debate the obvious?  We had our chance.  We were given the grand opportunity to make a clean escape.  But we hesitated, fixated on a woman and, of course, the last swallow of beer. Oh, we made it across the upstairs balcony and even down the steps, but suddenly the song was ending.  As we hit the landing and made our abrupt turn left out the door and to freedom, we were nabbed.  Don't ask me how they made it off that stage so fast.  Something deep inside tells me that they had been down the road before; that they had successfully thwarted many attempted dashes for freedom and certainly we were only the latest to be trapped in this web.

I was the first through the door.  As I made my way past the girls standing outside, I didn't even slow down. When I made it about ten yards down the way, I started to laugh and turned to celebrate with my friends, but I was horrified to learn I was alone.  Not Benny was right behind me as we exited the club, but Not Young didn't make it.  And as I turned to see what had happened to the others, I was shocked.  Not Benny did make it out the door with me, but Not Young was stopped by his girl.  He struggled to somehow make it out of the club, dragging the naked girl with him.  This caught Not Benny's attention who turned to rescue him.

As I turned around, there stood Not Young and his naked, crying, screaming woman.  She had him by the arm and was screaming something in broken English that amounted to Not Young promising to take her home.  I could tell by the look on his face that he was terrified.  As Not Benny was attempting to rescue Not Young, his girl also confronted him.  As I walked up, Not Benny's girl tried to slap him.  But after the hours of Thai boxing in the hotel, Not Benny was ready.  He immediately fell back into this best Thai boxing stance and in a mock Ebonics accent said, "Come on bitch, I've been waiting for this all night!"  His joke fell on deaf ears since his girl didn't understand English.  Not Benny began dancing back and forth in his stance taunting the girl.  She was so utterly amazed by his performance that she just turned and walked away. That was one down, but Not Young was still in peril.

All this commotion served to draw quite the crowd.  Bar girls from the club next door had begun filing out onto the balcony in an effort to see all the excitement.  Not Benny and I approached Not Young who was continuing to struggle for his freedom.

Suddenly the bar girls from next door were confronting us. "Come inside with me, come inside," they begged. "We are not like them." Initially I struggled away from the girls, but then it hit me.  I turned to the bar girls and said, "If you can get my friend free, then we can come inside your bar." With that the bar girls ran to Not Young's aid.  They began pulling on him and the half-naked girl. The girl had already begun trying to get dressed and eventually she released his arm to finish putting on her top. With the release, Not Young began moving away.  As she finished pulling her top over her head, I came into full view.  She had lost her man and it was absolutely clear whose fault it was.  She ran at me screaming a laundry list of Thai obscenities that only served to make everyone laugh.  It was time to make our escape.

As we began heading for the stairs, suddenly we were confronted again. To save Not Young I had made a promise. Clearly these girls in the bar next door wanted to collect on our promise.

"You come inside now, she is gone!" they yelled.

"No, we need to get out of here," we countered.

"But we helped your friend!" they replied.

It was an undeniable truth that the girls did help Not Young to escape the clutches of a psycho.  So we cut a deal. "We will come back," I said. "We will come here tomorrow, but we can't stay here now." The girls eventually accepted our offer and we were free.

As we headed for the stairs, the crazy girl watched.  Down to the ground level and out into the courtyard, she still watched.  We even pretended to leave Nana Plaza all together, but when we returned five minutes later, she was there, waiting.  All the while she continued to taunt me for stealing the man she wanted.  Eventually we accepted that she would be there all night and we picked a new club to go have a beer.

Forty-five minutes and a couple of beers later, we were still laughing about that crazy girl.  We wondered just how long she would stand in front of her club.  Finally we decided to have a look.  To our surprise, she was gone. Was it her time to dance again?  Did she find another prospect?  Who could tell?  And as we stood in the courtyard laughing, Not Benny had an idea.

"You know we promised those other girls that we would go to their club" he started.

"What? Are you losing your mind?" I asked.  "If that girl catches us back up there she will have someone by the balls!"

"I think we should go back up there." he continued.  Motioning to Not Young he asked, "What do you think?"

As Not Young smiled, it was clear that I was out-voted and just drunk enough to agree. Off we went, back up the stairs, back over to that area, all the while carefully watching to be sure that the crazy woman didn't see us.  With a little luck, and a great deal of stealth, we made it into the club next door.  As we entered the club, our saviors greeted us.  Needless to say they were surprised with our return.

With excitement the girls announced, "We thought you would come back tomorrow!"

We just smiled and ordered a round of beers.  One beer became five as we spent the next several hours laughing at ourselves and the situation that we had been in.  The crazy girl would occasionally come into the bar looking for us. Each time, our friends would turn her away.  Through the night, the girls took their turns on the stage and several times Not Young joined them, climbing up and dancing with the women.  And as we all became a bit more comfortable, one of the girls finally asked the question that had been also bothering me.

"What did you tell that other girl?" she asked Not Young.

"Nothing, I didn't say anything to her," he replied.

"But she thinks you promised to take her home tonight," she said.

And then the words that burned that moment in our minds for eternity were said.  The words that changed everything.  The words that couldn't be true.

"You know that girl is a Katoy?" she asked.

I nearly choked on my beer. The look on Not Young's face was priceless. Not Benny and I could hardly stop laughing.

"But, but we saw her on stage.  She was naked!" Not Young shouted.  "But that was a girl!  I saw her!"

 Not Young was in shock. And as we continued to laugh, Not Young offered his best rebuttal, "Yeah, well you can just eat me!"

It was the period on the end of the sentence. After being so paranoid about mistakenly meeting a Katoy; after spending the first night pointing at every girl on stage and designating them a "dude," it had actually happened.  Naked, she had looked every inch a woman, but biologically "she" was a man.

It wasn't long before we made our way back to the hotel.  It was late and it had been a night to remember. The liberal amount of alcohol we had consumed managed to numb the pain for the moment, but the light of day would certainly bring as many questions as one-liners.

Stumbling down Sukumvit road at 2 a.m. Not Young turned to us and asked, "We're not going to tell anyone about what happened, right?"

Not Benny and I stared at him for a second and then we both began laughing.

"But we looked under the hood!  Come on, it's not like I did anything! I didn't touch her.  I didn't promise her anything, I didn't even buy her any drink.  Come on, let's keep this between us!"  But all we could do was laugh.


Oh, My Head

The morning came as the previous.  Rude in its insistence to host a new day that none of us were willing to deal with.  I laid in bed a bit longer that morning as I tried to recover from a night that I wasn't really sure happened.  I heard rustling across the room.  It was Not Young struggling to climb out of bed and find his way the bathroom.  As he returned to the safety of a large pillow over his head, I started laughing.

"Shut up, what the hell you laughing at?"  He stabbed.

This just brought on more laughter and soon Not Benny joined me.

"Why don't you shut the fuck up and go back to sleep?" he continued.

But the laughter continued.  As Not Young climbed into bed and pulled the pillow over his head he had the final word, "You both can just eat me!"

My head hurt, but there was little cause to stay in bed.  I got up for the morning ritual of aspirin and a shower. After dressing, I figured that I had some time to kill since Not Young's and Not Benny's morning ritual always included at least an hour of Thai Boxing in the morning. So I stumbled across the street to the Internet Café. It had been a day or so since we had first checked in on the world and I wanted to be certain it was still there.

E-mail from family, e-mail from friends, hey there's a pile of mail here from Taiwan and our home office in California.  It didn't take long to read the words that I least wanted to read:

"System failure, request the return of  Not Young and Dave immediately."

Suddenly we were in a world of hurt.  It was 9 a.m.  I ran back to the hotel room just as Not Young and Not Benny were about to begin pounding each other.

"Not Young, we're being extracted," I shouted.  All games immediately ended as I explained to the situation. I called to confirm flight availability and Not Young headed for the shower.  The only flight available left in two hours.  We weren't sure if we could make it. I booked our seats and began packing.  Two hours to pack, travel to the other side of the city and make our flight.  This was going to be tight.

I finished packing my clothes and Not Benny took care of Not Young's bags.  I made arrangements for a Mercedes to be waiting for us at the lobby in 30 minutes.  The tough part was saying good bye.  Not Young and Not Benny hadn't seen each other in several years and, under the circumstances, I had also bonded with him.  We were only together for two and a half days, but we had put some miles on each other.  At the lobby entrance we said our good byes.  Not Benny had made the decision to stay behind.  We threw a handful of  bot at him to cover our room for the remaining days and our suits over at Mr. Roon's.  We said our last good byes and climbed into the car for our trip to the airport.

As we drove down the freeway toward the airport Not Young and I reflected on our trip.

"You know, I'm not done here yet.  I'm not ready to leave," he confided.

I could only agree.  We came here to discover and we had hardly touched the surface.  During a lull in conversation, our driver turned to us and smiled and said, "You need to get to the airport fast?"  He motioned toward his speedometer.  It read 185 kph.  We were doing nearly 120 mph!  "You just keep your eyes on the road," I replied.  We made it to the airport and customs went amazingly quickly.  We found ourselves in the terminal with time to spare.

I said at the beginning, it was now 11 a.m. and the plane was lifting off.  During the flight I sat and watched Not Young sleep.  Weeks earlier I had hardly known this man.  Now he was one of my best friends. He made me laugh in a time when I thought I had forgotten how.  It's funny how extreme situations bond people for life.  It's also funny how perspectives can often alter the understanding of a situation.

In a couple hours we would be back in Taiwan.  Back to the 16 hour days and midnight runs to the Hard Rock to regain our sanity.  Back to flirting with Whinny and guessing the bra sizes of the other waitresses.  Back to a reality that certainly wasn't what most would consider normal.  All that's left is a fuzzy memory of those 2 ½ days. But sometimes 2 ½ days really is life in a Fellini movie!

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