5

Pussy Business

Loaded with enough baggage to give a Sherpa porter a double hernia, Sullivan and I left Boston on a bleak morning in November 1993 and flew to Bangkok. Our bulging backpacks held clothing, food, sleeping bags, medicine, water-purification equipment, first-aid stores, and three liters of Absolut vodka.

“We’ve gotta be prepared for any old thing,” reasoned Sullivan.

My sidekick had also packed a large plastic jar of orange-flavored, Vitamin C-rich Tang, the logical mixer in our critical daily screwdrivers. The cocktails were the perfect prophylactic against the three Ys: scurvy, dysentery, and sobriety.

Somewhere over the Pacific, Sullivan recounted a cautionary parable. Years before, he had traveled to Central America with Cal Bowden to scout a clandestine Bangkok-to-Boston route. (The pair wanted to be able to smuggle a POW into the United States.) In a Guatemala City bar, Sullivan had blithely ordered a screwdriver on the rocks. The vodka was top-shelf, the orange juice fresh-squeezed. The ice, made from unfiltered water, nearly killed him.

“I thought I was dying,” said Sullivan. “Cal didn’t know what to do with me. The bottom line is: We have to be careful. If one of us goes down, it’s a big problem.”

So we would have to drink Sullivan-style screwdrivers—Tang, filtered water, and Absolut—while inside Burma, served neat, at room temperature. Never, ever, over ice. In addition to our wet bar, we had also packed enough barter to buy Manhattan at current market prices. Flynn had told me that huge, gorgeous rubies could be had dirt-cheap in Burma. Pigeon’s-blood stones for a pair of Levi’s, even a couple of T-shirts. Why, the General even had a 43,000-carat rock the size of a basketball. Asian business protocol also demanded that we present gifts to the Shan functionaries and officials we would meet. Sullivan purchased several Swiss Army knives; I ransacked my closet for neckties. Khun Sa’s henchmen would be smartly outfitted for jungle warfare and for backroom deals.

We had sweated a vexing etiquette problem: What do you bring the world’s biggest druglord, a man with a private fiefdom, a personal army, and a multimillion-dollar fortune? Forget fine wine or liquor, Flynn advised. The General would give it away, thinking it might be poisoned. Flynn suggested a coffee-table book about horses, since the General was especially proud of his thoroughbred stallions, and X-rated videotapes, since he also enjoyed viewing pornography in the privacy of his jungle fortress.

“No Asians,” Flynn said. “The General likes to watch white girls. Blondes.”

I bought a 1994 horse-theme calendar at Barnes & Noble. Sullivan had just the X-rated tape: The Chameleon, a slick classic by porn standards that featured Tori Welles, a brunette, and several surgically enhanced blondes in ceaseless, complicated forms of hard-core coitus.

A profile of Khun Sa in an old issue of Soldier of Fortune noted that the warlord chain-smoked, so during the layover in Narita, Japan, Sullivan bought a duty-free carton of 555 State Express Filter King cigarettes, the cancer stick of choice in Anglophile Burma. As we boarded the connecting flight to Bangkok, Sullivan grinned conspiratorially. He had also purchased another bottle of Absolut. Be prepared for any old thing.

In spite of our exhaustive planning, the detailed pack lists we had checked and rechecked, the day-by-day itineraries, the swelling hogshead of vodka, I could not relax on the final leg to Bangkok. Too much doubt and unease, particularly about our man in Chiang Mai. To check out Flynn, I’d called in a favor with a Boston-area private investigator, Michael Szpuk, asking him to do a thorough workup, including a search of the National Crime Information Center database. No nothing. “I ran this guy every which way,” my P.I. had said. “There are no identifiable records on this guy. He has no felonies in this country. He’s clean up to this point. He could be like fucking Manson. Either he’s clean or he’s very, very slick.”

I hoped for clean—and very, very slick. Given Flynn’s abysmal relationship with Khun Sa’s liaison officer, Khernsai Jaiyen, our stay in Burma would be strained, and might even degenerate into a power struggle. Had we backed the winner? I didn’t want to contemplate the thought of failure. The Boston Herald, although intrigued by the chance for an exclusive interview with Khun Sa, had been unwilling to underwrite the story. To do so would mean covering my airfare and travel expenses, which I had estimated at three thousand dollars, and allowing me at least one month to report and write the stories for a lengthy series. A heavy commitment for a tabloid where long-term planning often went no further than a take-out order from the Chinatown Cafe. The story would also put me in Herald no-man’s land. The news department wanted to take the proposed series, but I worked in features. My section would be short-staffed in my absence.

I considered the trip to the Far East, an interview with Khun Sa, and a chance to spend nearly a week in off-limits Shan State to be a golden opportunity. Dropping this story, particularly over turf distinctions or job-description semantics, was unthinkable. I would go to Burma on my own dime, my own time, I told the editors, then free-lance the story to the Herald. News would be happy. Features would be happy. There would be no interdepartmental problems. I had myself a deal. Now I just had to get the story, or I would be very, very unhappy.

In my last conversation with Flynn, a day before my departure, he had sounded supremely confident about our prospects. “The trip is 100 percent,” he said. “I personally guarantee it.”

He had also mentioned that an armed bodyguard, an ethnic Chinese mercenary by the name of Au Cheng, would ride shotgun on our cross-border foray. It seemed that Au Cheng was conversant in nearly a dozen local dialects and equally fluent with an assortment of automatic weapons.

“He’s a killer,” said Flynn. “When he gets angry, he means it. He’s the only guy I apologize to.”

Now, on the Bangkok-bound flight, Sullivan nudged me, then pointed to a passage from Bo Gritz’s book, A Nation Betrayed. Sullivan had been studying the former Green Beret’s account of his travels into Shan State, hoping to glean further intelligence about Burma. Sullivan hated surprises. “At Mae Hong Son,” Gritz wrote, “we met one of Khun Sa’s lieutenants who is in charge of opium trafficking by the name of Au Cheng, which means ‘The Wall’ in Chinese.”

Terrific. It seemed our one-man security force also swam with drug smugglers. Not exactly the shy, retiring type. Why hadn’t I packed that Kevlar vest? Before leaving for Thailand, I had gone to Empire Loan, a Boston pawnshop owned by a friend, Michael Goldstein, who had offered to let me borrow a bulletproof waistcoat. I had tried on the vest, found it too bulky and too hot. Besides, Goldstein only had one vest. John Wayne protocol dictated that everyone or no one should be armored in Indian country. Now if we got caught in a world of shit entering Shan State, we would have to count on Au Cheng’s fighting spirit and Sullivan’s connections to Saint Jude.

The suitcase also concerned me. Two weeks before my departure, Flynn had landed suddenly in Boston to sell more rubies and, apparently, to do some Christmas shopping. A few days before his return to Chiang Mai, I met him for dinner at the Chao Phraya, a Thai restaurant located in a shopping mall in Brockton, an old shoe-manufacturing town between Boston and New Bedford. In the mall’s parking lot, Flynn handed over a large suitcase that he wanted me to deliver to him in Chiang Mai. Heavy luggage would be an unwieldy liability on his byzantine, illegal, roundabout route into southern Thailand, he explained. I hefted the bag, feeling like a cheap hood in a bad movie.

“Jesus Christ, Barry. This feels like a shot-put collection, not clothing. There wouldn’t be any contraband, would there?”

“Yes,” Flynn said with a chuckle. “I’m the first man to smuggle heroin No. 4 into Shan State.”

I didn’t want to be set up or surprised in Bangkok. I opened the suitcase. Inside was a compact Kmart: three quilted jackets, two new pairs of Levi’s, new belts and socks, children’s sweaters and sweatsuits, Play-Doh, blank videocassette tapes, cold medicine, and a large-scale toy train, a present for the second birthday of Flynn’s son.

“The train’s made out of C4,” Flynn said. We both laughed. In 1986, David Scott Weekly had carried two hundred pounds of C4 plastic explosive aboard a commercial flight from Oklahoma City to Las Vegas, where he was training Afghan mujahedeen with Gritz. Weekly plead guilty and received a five-year prison sentence at Lompoc, California.

Flynn asked another favor: he needed $250 so he could buy a one-way discount air-courier ticket to Singapore. The travel agent wouldn’t accept his maxed-out Thai credit card. He was reluctant to ask his family for money. If he couldn’t get out of New Bedford, how could he take me into Burma? In the face of this eleventh-hour hurdle, I agreed to advance the cash. As collateral, Flynn gave me seven cabochon-cut Burmese rubies. When I arrived in Chiang Mai, he would refund the loan of $250 and take back the rubies. I went to an automatic-teller machine at the Brockton mall and withdrew the money. Now, I thought, I’m smuggling Burmese rubies back into Thailand.

Flynn slipped me the gems, then smiled. “If you forget to bring the rubies to Chiang Mai, you’ll have to explain to Khun Sa where his samples went.”

*   *   *

It all came back, the aromas of Asia run amok, the smells of alluvial Bangkok, the low-tide stench of a shining city built on mud flats and rice paddies—olfactory overload the moment we left Northwest Airlines’ quiet, filtered, air-conditioned comfort and lurched, half-Xanaxed, down the stairway to the oil-slickened tarmac of Don Muang International Airport. Around midnight, nearly 90 enervating degrees Fahrenheit, our lungs gasping thick, humid air laced with the acrid scents of jet fuel and car exhaust, wood smoke and peanut oil, stagnant water and rotting vegetation.

Nearly as soon as an unsmiling Thai immigration official cleared us through passport control, the hotel touts pounced. First time Bangkok? they sang. Here to shop? Where you stay? We ignored the rapacious, jostling mob and pushed through the scrum to grab the first available cab, agreed to the four-hundred-baht price to a cheap downtown hotel without even a half-hearted attempt to negotiate the fare. For sixteen dollars, our driver was only too happy to sit in gridlock. Inside his Toyota sedan, figurines of the Buddha, postcards of beatific monks, and cologne bottles rested on a saffron-colored swatch of shag carpet covering the dashboard. We could curse King Chulalongkorn, whose picture was taped to a window visor, for the abominable traffic. The turn-of-the-century monarch, the great modernizer of Thailand, had built the first paved roads and spawned his country’s great love affair with internal combustion. Even at this late hour, the traffic still crept along Wiphawadirangsit Road, the superhighway from the airport into the city, some fifteen miles to the south.

Then again, traffic crawled at almost every hour of every day in Bangkok, home to 90 percent of Thailand’s motor vehicles. Nearly six million people in the capital, most of them sitting in unmoving, overheated vehicles unequipped with catalytic converters. An astounding assortment of transport—scooters and motorcycles with multiple pillion riders, overcrowded tuk-tuks and song thaews, standing-room only two-baht buses and diesel lorries—jockeyed for position in the cacophony, revving engines, honking horns, farting blue fumes into the fecund night. Helpless policemen marched through the haze, dressed for the plague years: brown uniforms, sunglasses, helmets, and surgical masks. There was no salvation in this innermost ring of traffic hell. From 1984 to 1991, the number of vehicles in Bangkok had more than doubled, from 1.1 million to 2.5 million, yet road surface had increased just 1 percent. During the same period, traffic speed on the city’s main streets had slowed from nine to five miles per hour, barely faster than a slow jog on a sultry day.

Our driver turned down the shrill Thai pop music on his car radio, cranked up the air conditioning, and handed us a large scrapbook. Inside were brochures for hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and massage parlors catering to farang. “You want shopping tomorrow?” he asked. “I know good place for gem.”

No thanks. No shopping. No gems.

“You want crocodile farm? Floating market? Bridge on River Kwai?” He whistled the familiar opening bars of “Colonel Bogey March.”

No crocs. No markets. No bridges.

“You want Thai lady massage?”

No thanks. No Thai lady. The driver pointed to a small flyer taped to a page of his scrapbook. Known in the local trade as a “pussy-tricks” card, the typewritten handouts were brandished by Patpong touts to steer clients toward their bar’s sex show. In broken English, the card promised acts that would make even Tori Welles blush:

Boy & Girl Make Love Show

Girl & Girl Lesbian Show

Pussy Shooting Balloon Show

Pussy Ping-Pong Show

Pussy Smoking Cigarettes Show

Pussy Write Letter Show

Pussy Open the Bottle Show

Pussy Candle Fire Show

Pussy Chop Sticks Show

Pussy Drink Beer Show

Girl & Snake Show

Sexy Dance Show

In his rearview mirror, the driver saw me making notes about the pussy-tricks bill of fare.

“You professor?”

No, I demurred.

“I think you professor, come to Thailand, write article,” he continued. “I had professor last week. He fifty-four. He take two girl. Sandwich! Fifty-four, but strong!”

It was only logical the driver wanted to steer us toward a fuck-show bar or a massage parlor, for which he would receive a small commission. Every year, hundreds of thousands of male tourists, primarily from Japan, Germany, Australia, and the United States, fly to The Land of Smiles—not for the white-sand beaches, not for the jungle trekking, but for the cheap, available sex. Various estimates put the number of male and female sex workers from eight hundred thousand to almost two million, out of a total population of fifty-six million.

Bangkok cemented its fleshpot reputation during the Vietnam War. In 1965, the kingdom allowed the United States to use air bases in the northeast cities of Khorat, Ta Khli, Udon Thani, Nakhon Phanom, and Ubon Ratchathani; two years later, American soldiers stationed in Vietnam were permitted to visit Thailand for R & R, the bleary rest and recreation granted during a one-year tour of duty. In short order, GIs were raving about Thai bars, Thai beer, Thai beaches, but most of all about Thai boom-boom girls: Number One, better than Saigon whores. By 1970, the amount of money spent by U.S. servicemen on R & R (also known as I & I, for Intercourse and Intoxication, or B & B, for booze and broads) approached twenty million dollars.

The sex trade, however, was not a sin foisted by the depraved West upon a chaste Asian nation. Prostitution had flourished in Thailand, entirely legal and completely acceptable, for centuries. British civil engineer Holt S. Hallett, who traveled extensively through northern Thailand in the 1870s to explore possible rail routes to Burma and China, noted that “many of the princes and nobles treat the brothel-keepers, some of whom wear his Majesty’s uniform, as bosom friends and are seen riding in the same carriage with them.” Hallet continued: “The prostitutes are all slaves, having been sold by their nearest relations in order to pay their gambling debts, or to aid their parents who are in the clutches of the law, the parents promising to buy them back as soon as they can. As a rule, they are said to be more modest and particular than the same class of women in Europe.”

Slavery prospered in Thailand until 1905, when it was abolished by King Chulalongkorn. Before the king’s action, prostitutes were acquired at slave markets to work in brothels and even in private homes. The Law of Three Seals, written in 1805, allowed for “slave wives.” The law, now defunct, also codified another spousal role bound to offend Christian morals: the mia noi, or “minor wife.” By his wife, minor wives, and consorts, King Chulalongkorn fathered seventy-six children. Monogamy, in the form of the “parental-consent wife,” did not become the sole legal form of marriage until 1935. There was still no penalty in Thailand for polygamy and many men retained “minor” wives.

Prostitution was legal until 1960, when it was outlawed by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had taken control of the kingdom in 1957 in the time-honored Thai fashion of a bloodless coup d’etat. Although he repudiated whores, Sarit supported more than one hundred mia noi. He could afford to. When he died in 1963, the supremely corrupt prime minister left an estate worth a reported $150 million.

A flourishing cross-border trade now sentenced tens of thousands of rural Burmese women to Thai whorehouses. A 1993 Asia Watch report, A Modern Form of Slavery, painted their short, grim future: debt bondage, illegal confinement, sexual and physical abuse, inevitable HIV infection. The Thai Parliament had yet to ratify the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1949. Thai border guards and police had full knowledge and complicity in the racket—in fact, they were often the brothels’ best customers, receiving complimentary sex for turning a blind eye to the slave trade.

No one, not the prime minister, not the members of parliament, not even revered King Bhumibol, could eliminate a practice ingrained deeply in a gracious culture that was alternately prim and profane. In Thailand, courting was almost puritanical; public displays of affection rarely heated up beyond hand-holding. Yet one Thai study reported that 75 percent of Thai men have had sex with a prostitute and that nearly half (48 percent) had their first sexual experience with a whore. Anthropologist Cleo Odzer, who lived in Thailand for three years to research Patpong Sisters, her 1994 book about sex workers, explained that this whoremongering was not considered adulterous behavior in Thailand; according to Buddhist precepts for laymen, there was no sin in having sex with a woman as long as she was unmarried.

Our disappointed driver was only too happy to dump us at our downtown hotel. A functional place frequented by midlevel Asian businessmen, the Sathorn Inn stood next to a decrepit Chinese Christian cemetery on a quiet lane, or soi, between Sathorn Road, which was dotted with embassies, banks, and hospitals, and Silom Road, where jewelry stores did land-rush business during the day and transient merchants turned bigger profits along the buckled brick sidewalks at night. After checking in and making a few phone calls, we decided to hit the town—a no-brainer decision. We were too keyed up by the time-zone differential, the adventure ahead, and by the news Sullivan had just received when he checked his answering machine. There’d been a message from an old acquaintance, Tim Williams, a Vietnam veteran from St. Cloud, Florida, who had made a half-dozen trips to Southeast Asia looking for POWs.

“You never call me,” Williams had drawled. “I ought to keep you in suspense, but I won’t. Phoumano has a two-hour video of a POW. Call Phoumano as soon as possible.”

“Unbelievable timing!” said Sullivan. “He calls and I’m already heading over to Bangkok. I’ve got to see this video!”

I was dubious, given the quality of Phoumano’s previous “evidence,” his role in the scam surrounding the alleged Carr photo, and his links to Thai military and American intelligence officials. It would be imprudent to tip our hand, I argued, to let Phoumano know we were in-country and heading for Burma. Although Sullivan could barely contain his excitement, he agreed not to contact Phoumano until after our Shan State excursion. But the timing couldn’t be better, Sullivan observed, as we headed out for a few hours on the still lively town. Talk about a daily double: an audience with Khun Sa and a video of a live POW.

We walked east along Silom Road, heading for the Patpong, wending our way through the good citizens of Bangkok who insisted on living every aspect of their lives out of doors on the teeming sidewalks. A woman stood engulfed in the flumes of her steaming wok, stir-frying chicken, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots for the late-night Saturday diners who waited to dine al fresco—or more accurately, al olio—in a Venusian atmosphere dense as grease and reeking of the klongs, the postcard-exotic, sewage-clogged canals. A few feet away, a seamstress stitched a trouser hem with an ancient, pedal-powered Singer machine that rocked on broken pavement mottled with bird droppings. Mongrel bitches, ears shredded and scarred from fights, black teats distended from unending litters, dozed in doorways. Amputees and cripples moved through the crowd, begging for a few baht.

Sullivan knew the terrain. Lucy’s Tiger Den, a crossroads for the knaves, barstool commandos, and true believers involved in the search for POWs, had operated just north of the Patpong district, the three-block wide entertainment strip named for the family that owned the land between Silom and Surawong Roads. This night, as always, bulged with adventures in the skin trade: live-sex shows, no-holds-barred massage parlors, salacious go-go girls, and coy bar boys. The westernmost streets, Patpong 1 and Patpong 2, were connected by two narrow lanes, Soi Superstar and Soi Crazy Horse, and lined with clubs—Butterfly, Queen’s Castle, Rififi—catering to heterosexual men. Patpong 3, or Soi Jaruwan, a parallel, dead-end alley known as Soi Katoey (Transsexual Lane) ran off Silom and was packed with homosexual bars like the Apollo Inn, Genesis, and Rome Discotheque. Thaniya Road, just east of Patpong 3 and lit up like the Ginza, catered exclusively to Japanese sex tourists. During the day, this area was home to legitimate enterprise. At night, however, the Patpong’s storefronts became a souk of the senses, while its streets were jammed with booths selling pirated music cassettes, bogus Louis Vuitton luggage, fake Hermes scarves, imitation Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, laughable knockoffs of Moschino belts. Three tape? For you, one hundred baht. Best quality. Sandals better than Teva, 150 baht. You make offer. One hundred baht? Oh, my Buddha. For you, 140 baht. Best price. Have look-see.

Buttressing this carnival like surreal bookends were two American roadside icons, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s. Occidental tourists could order a Big Mac, fries, and a shake and still have enough money to buy out that red-light special on Patpong 2 for short-time love. A massage-parlor barker approached. Like a waiter presenting a menu, he casually opened a photo album, flipped through pictures of beautiful, sullen women.

“You want Thai lady?”

“Not interested.”

We kept walking through the milling night bazaar crowd of bargain shoppers, appalled package tourists, self-righteous trekkers, drunken punters, and off-duty bar girls. The barker followed, persistent.

“You want Thai boy?”

A Patpong 3 pimp overhead the question, sidled up.

“You look for something special?” he whispered.

How about a titty-bar beer for 25 baht? That would be special. We turned into Patpong 1. The claims grew bolder. Best girl in Bangkok. Best gay in Bangkok. Outside Super Girl, an audacious hand-printed sign: “This bar is so good that it is only bar in Patpong that is mentioned by the Rolling Stone magazine.” Any publicity, even in an article entitled “Death in the Candy Store,” about the looming AIDS problem partly fueled by Bangkok’s bar scene, was judged good for business.

Touts buzzed like horseflies, slapping backs, flashing pussy-tricks cards. Dull, wet thuds floated from Blue Sky Bar where two kickboxers traded bored, balletic blows. The air rippled with the manic energy of a stock-exchange trading pit, the unctuous sleaze of a state-fair midway.

“You like?” asked the tout. He nodded upward. “No cover. No rip-off.”

The sex shows took place in second-floor bars, behind closed doors. This allowed the owners ample warning in the remote case that the Bangkok police decided to raid the premises. It also allowed management to charge hyperinflated prices for drinks, as it was very difficult for fleeced customers to leave without paying the tab. We climbed the stairs to Pussy Galore, where the smoky, cooled air pulsed with the beat of “One Night in Bangkok”—the song from the London musical Chess in heavy rotation at every Patpong club—and what sounded like the honking of a flock of geese. Inside the club, four naked women lay on their backs on a raised, spotlit stage in the center of the bar, flexing powerful diaphragm muscles to force air through plastic horns inserted into their vaginas.

Pussy Blow Horn Show.

According to Cleo Odzer, there is a strict hierarchy among Patpong women; this would-be wind section ranked somewhere in the middle. The lowest employment was in blow-job bars, fellating strangers beneath tables, followed by work in a fuck show. (Rumor had it, however, that one married Thai couple made a lucrative income screwing onstage, a performance they repeated at a half-dozen Patpong clubs a night.) The next rung up the Patpong employment ladder was dancing nude or performing pussy-trick shows in a rip-off bar; the same job in a non–rip-off bar was considered better. A classy act was bikini dancing in a ground-floor bar. The prostitute’s pantheon was occupied by women who wore evening clothes, who sat in dark booths in ground-floor bars and never shed their clothes to dance.

We grabbed stools at the bar and ordered Singhas. In a nearby booth, a thin bar girl dressed in shorts and a kimono with a numbered button pinned to her lapel, for convenient farang identification, was closing a deal. She refilled her sunburned, half-sodden customer’s glass with beer, laughed at his profane gibberish, indulged his furtive groping beneath the folds of her kimono as she massaged his tumescent trousers. Tonight he would buy her out, pay Pussy Galore 350 baht to take her off-premises. He would slap down another 200 baht to rent a short-time room at one of the nearby “love hotels,” such as Patpong’s MMM Apartments, if his own hotel frowned on drunken guests parading garishly costumed prostitutes through the lobby. He would pay her at least a Purple King, the lilac-colored five-hundred-baht note adorned with King Bhumibol’s portrait, worth about twenty dollars. A Purple King was the going farang rate for sex with a second-floor pussy-tricks girl—it looked cheap for a trick to have to make change. He would not think that there was at least a one-in-five chance that the delicate woman was HIV-positive.

A teenaged girl, barely five feet tall, with skin the hue of sesame oil and an ebony waterfall of hair cascading down her bare back, slid up and grabbed my thigh. It was time for Twenty Questions, Patpong style. She smiled, then proferred her magic fingers for that strange farang custom, the handshake.

“Hello whatyourname?” she sang in bar-girl English.

“Franz Kafka.”

“Howlongstay Bangkok?”

“One night in Bangkok.”

“Youmarry?”

“Yes.”

She pouted.

“Youlikeme?”

“Yes, but…”

She beamed.

“Mister Franz, whatyoudo Bangkok?”

“Business.”

Her Buddha eyes danced. Like many of the women in Pussy Galore, on Patpong in general, she was ethnic Lao and hailed from Isan, the poor, rural area of northeast Thailand. Isan bar girls were the dark, exotic fantasy favored by farang men. The “flowers of the north,” the fair-skinned women from Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces, were more prone to work in Thai or Chinese brothels, where the color-conscious clients preferred lighter-complected prostitutes. On stage, the women positioned smoldering Krong Thips.

Pussy Smoking Cigarettes Show.

In the prewar era, street touts often presented male tourists in Bangkok with calling cards, but the ancient come-ons were veiled, seductive as sandalwood incense: “Oh, gentleman, sir, Miss Pretty Girl welcome you Sultan Turkish Bath, gentle polite massage, put you in dreamland with perfume soap. Latest gramophone music. Oh, such service. You come now! Miss Pretty Girl want you, massage you from tippy-toe to head-top, nice, clean, to enter Gates of Heaven.”

Ah, but we lived in diminished times. I drained my Singha.

“Mister Franz, buy me lady drink?”

“Yes.”

She smiled again. A commission. The girl waved for another beer and a fifty-baht glass of sweetened water. When the drinks came, she checked to ensure her bar-girl number was on the receipt, then stuffed the bill into a bamboo cup.

It was time for the farang’s Twenty Questions.

“What’s your name?”

“Bin,” she said.

In Thai, the same word also meant “the bill.” Among the first words a cash-flush visitor learns: bin. I pantomimed signing a receipt. Bin laughed and spoke in Thai to a girlfriend who was grilling and hellowhatyournaming Sullivan without success, aside from cadging a two-dollar lady drink.

“Bin, what do you do in Bangkok?”

“Business.”

I arched my eyebrows, dubious.

“Business, Bin?”

She pouted and wiggled her pert, bare breasts. The stage was a roiling mass of cigarette fumes, high heels, and honey-hued flesh.

“Pussy business, Mister Franz.”

*   *   *

We had reached Interzone, William S. Burroughs’ unbridled bazaar. Entropic Bangkok was the epicenter of Thailand’s hell-bent pursuit of baht. The country was an economic tiger, exploding at 9-percent annual growth. Anything could be plundered, nearly everyone had a price tag: endangered wildlife, tropical hardwood, Isan women, government officials. In Bangkok, even the dead were a commodity. Enterprising private ambulance companies were known to arrive at the scene of fatal accidents, take possession of the bodies, and then ransom the corpses to bereaved relatives of the dearly departed.

Official corruption seemed pandemic. “Squeeze” and “tea money” greased the skids for illegal logging, slapdash construction projects, unsafe working conditions. Profits rolled in, periodically interrupted by the disasters of business rapacity: In early 1989, scores of Thais died in flooding and landslides blamed on the illegal cutting of trees. Just three months before our trip, at least one hundred people were killed in Khorat when the Royal Plaza Hotel, considered the best in town, collapsed under the weight of a poorly built three-story addition. In May, fire had raged through a toy factory in Bangkok; substandard construction and locked emergency-exit doors pushed the death toll to nearly two hundred. After these disasters, there were brief bursts of indignation and outrage, then the inevitable return of chronic, collective amnesia.

And hovering over everything in the blithe, gentle kingdom was the specter of AIDS. In 1992, the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), the largest nongovernmental organization in Thailand, estimated two to four hundred thousand HIV-positive cases nationwide. Although intravenous drug use was the initial culprit in the spread of AIDS, most infections now occurred through heterosexual sex in brothels. Whorehouses were technically illegal but had flourished since the Entertainment Places Act of 1966 had transferred the licensing of nightclubs, bars, and massage parlors to the jurisdiction of local law-enforcement authorities. In short order, licensing and operating arrangements became steeped in tea money. A study by Chulalongkorn University estimated that Bangkok’s one thousand “entertainment” houses paid out six hundred thousand dollars a month in bribes to local police.

While the police and brothel operators profited by the unholy alliance, the virus raged through the Thai populace. By the twenty-first century, predicted the PDA, Thailand would be decimated if nothing was done to halt the spread of AIDS. The gloomy forecast: approximately one hundred and eighty thousand deaths annually, two to four million HIV-positive men and women, a 10- to 20-percent loss in gross domestic product.

The Thai solution? Smile, profess wonderment and doubt, play “One Night in Bangkok” a little louder, utter the all-purpose Thai phrase: Mai pen rai. It was all right, it didn’t matter. AIDS killed farang, not Thai. Any crackdown meant bad publicity, with farang men fleeing Bangkok and Pattaya for the girls and boys of Manila or Colombo, Hong Kong or Macau. Very bad for business.

We stumbled down Patpong 1, fatigue, Singha, and post-Xanax blues sparring with vestigal consciousness and the wary arousal that came from watching a naked woman extract razor blades from her vagina. The street scene resembled the French Quarter of New Orleans in the early, post-bacchanal hours of Ash Wednesday: crumpled plastic bags, discarded food wrappers, last-call drunks. Sweepers scratched straw brooms along the greasy road. Inside Blue Sky Bar, a dozen dateless katoey gathered glumly to watch an American boxing movie, Gladiator, and stare at male passersby. A lithe bar girl drifted out of the shadows, smelling of desperation and night-blooming jasmine.

“Hello, whereyougo?” she purred.

“We go to hotel, go to sleep. Alone.”

The night-bazaar merchants dismantled scaffolding and loaded unsold bootleg goods into wheeled packing cases. Tuktuks lined up three-deep at curbside along Silom Road, hoping for cross-town fares. At 4 a.m., street vendors still hawked high heels, pulp fiction, skewers of sausage. Prepubescent girls walked toward the Patpong balancing food-stall plates of sticky rice and stir-fried vegetables. For whom? Mothers? Sisters? Pimps? Touts? Bangkok policemen stood by an empty paddy wagon, smoking Krong Thips, unimpressed with the illegal counterfeit merchandise, disinterested in the outlawed sex trade. Sullivan chuckled.

“The King has gotta know,” he said. “I mean, look at this. Don’t you think he sits in his castle, shakes his head, and says: This is one corrupt place?”

A warm breeze off the turbid Chao Phraya River caressed the tabebuia and pradu shade trees lining Silom Road. Through the rasping, grit-caked leaves, the gleaming, sinking skyscrapers built on former paddy land seemed to shudder. “The whole country’s on the take,” Sullivan pronounced.