Rendez-vous

A man and a woman enter a bar.
What made them a pair is no longer there,
yet something remains, or is born anew
out of the ashes of that vanished bond.
They sit at the counter, the barman draws near,
he doesn't know who, only what and how.
He breaks the ice twice, it's ice of two types:
one needs a tool, the other a joke.

The TV car - Bangkok, Thailand

The usual crowd sits in two rows:
football, curries and cheap beer
flood with good mood the atmosphere
and help all conversation flows.
A sudden force engulfs the scene
and in seconds every movement stops,
spoons are hanging in mid air,
all the faces turn as one.

At the alcoholics'/3 - Bangkok, Thailand

Foto di Olgierd Pstrykotwórca

The whole series "At the alcoholics" is dedicated to Jack London, author of "John Barleycorn".

Continued from here.

The following scenes happened on different days and are reported here in random order.

S. keeps on depriving us of the pitiful shows that we had got accustomed to and only orders soft drinks and fruit juices. It must be the advice that the doctor gave him after diagnosing cirrhosis.

One of the few saloon-like characters who don't drink alcohol here is a fat man with a red nose, dull eyes and boozer gait, who orders his bottles of Coke and Fanta with whispers, as if it was an illegal or outrageous act. Which, in a place like this and with a face like his, come to think about it, could also make sense.

Finally, after almost a week spent drinking sweet stuff for kids, S. threw off the mask and resumed his close conversations (sometimes even literally) with his best friend: an American gentleman with dark complexion, a black suit with white embroidery, a cascade of crystal jewels, a small tight hat and spiced fragrances: Mr. Jack Daniels.

We hear a heavy thud, S. is gone. We stand up and search for him. He collapsed, he's lying under the table now, the chair next to him, upside down. Someone asks him to stand up, he is probably trying hard in his mind, but his body doesn't budge. He is not injured: he's just wasted. They help him to his feet but it's not an easy task: it seems that they are hauling a trailer truck out of a river bed by use of powerful windlasses. When he sits in his chair he's got bubble-like eyes, a blank stare, lost in the whirl of lights and shapes that he can see in front of him, and his hands shaking on the plastic table.

When he returns to the globe of distorted reality that is surrounding him he tries to stand up, then walks like a baby gorilla toward the center of the street, does a 360 degree turnaround, sways, brushes against a taxi that stopped in order not to run him over and continues to stagger until a tourist helps him to get back to his seat. A few minutes later he will go through the same procedure all over again.

The constantly drunk woman is sitting at a table, she dozes off, wakes up, mutters, yells at some person unknown even though nobody pays attention to her, then she continues to move her lips without uttering any sound, for various minutes. Finally, defeated and exhausted, she gets back to snore.

Continued...

At the alcoholics'/2 - Bangkok, Thailand

Photo by Adam Foster (CC)

The whole series "At the alcoholics" is dedicated to Jack London, author of "John Barleycorn".

Continued from here.

The following scenes happened on different days and are reported here in random order.

There is a group of Spaniards sitting at a table. They don't seem to be alcoholics but they fall in with the atmosphere of the place by ordering one bottle of beer after another since the early afternoon.

Apparently they have just met here and they decide to take a picture to remember the event. They ask the constantly drunk lady to take the photo. Unfortunately it will be a bad surprise, for them of course, not for me or anybody else who has already been here. She grabs the camera and for the Spaniards this will be the last good piece of news they receive. She looks at it as if it was a pulsing fragment of a mysterious asteroid. A gray veil, a confused expression descends on the faces of the tourists, who try to dispel their embarrassment offering random advice. "That button over there!" "This angle!" "That background!" Finally she gets out of her trance and decides to give it a try. After numerous attempts, failed amid awkward maneuvers and swaying, she is ready to click. It's raining as usual and the umbrella that shelters the table has a hole through which a thick and continuous cylinder of water is falling, right in front of the camera. She doesn't see it, as she doesn't see any other detail that is not included in the set of the movie that she is watching in her mind. The Spaniards are gesticulating frantically, suggesting her to move a little to the side, pointing at the water. She misunderstands, thinking that there is something wrong with the camera, then looks at it from all sides, extremely puzzled, as if she couldn't remember how the hell it ended up there, wasting all the work that she has done so far. Fortunately a sober - well, almost - colleague of her arrives, takes the camera from her hands and in a matter of thirty seconds the picture is taken. The positive side of this permanent state of drunkenness is that it spares the subject humiliations and rancor: when the flash goes off, in fact, she has already crouched down on her chair, oblivious of everything.

The same table where the Spaniards were sitting is normally used as a meeting point by the most picturesque clients of the bar: a rabble of western drunkards who wouldn't have done badly in the most sordid saloons of the Old West. In the early afternoon the table is already full of empty bottles of whiskey and beer, and a few hours later the most pathetic and unforgettable shows are staged.

One of them is S., a North European who has been hanging around here for about ten years. S. has just got back to Bangkok, bringing with him a bag full of clothes and other presents. He's welcome with giggles, yells and greetings. The sincere and disinterested version of local enthusiasms (there are also some more or less devious ones). He repays the courtesies with fantastic, totally toothless smiles. When he has finished to hand out his gifts he sits down and orders a Schweppes. A Schweppes! This is surprising news for those who have seen some of his performances with bottle and glass, and we'll have a chance to talk about those ones as well. Probably he has just got out of the plane and he doesn't feel quite well: I cannot find any other explanation for such an unusual behavior. 

A foreigner with a tattoo as big as his back stands up from his chair, only with his body though, as his soul doesn't seem to be willing to follow him. He stands still on the spot, swaying, then gets hold of the back of a plastic chair that dangerously bends under his weight. When he manages to move he leans against the body of a friend, slightly less drunk than him. He stays like that, clinging to him, for a few minutes, apparently unconscious, then he recovers, wholeheartedly hugs his friend and finally kisses him. They finally leave, connected like Siamese brothers (as in the medical-scientific meaning of the expression, not as in "Thais", i.e. from here).

Continued

Bangkok's every night show - Bangkok, Thailand

Only Bangkok can stage shows like this everyday. While the first light of dawn turns the world greasy and gray, the last tipsy customers sway out of the club, dragging their feet as well as their tongues. They linger on the road, skirting taxis and touts. The groups are dynamic, with a fluid sort of quality: one loses a member, then gets two new ones, while another large party, bit after bit, dwindles to a couple and then to a last drunk, who will finally drift without too much noise.

The veranda of this restaurant is a perfect spot to dominate undisturbed the entire set. Lorenzo sips a refreshing fruit shake. Without facing each other, we sit side by side, watching the numbers unfolding in front. Behind a fortification of bottles of beer there hides a face of complicated make. The synthetic touch, the mud-gray hue, the distorted lines of mouth, nose and eyes, must be the result of a hard-lived night. The four or five liters of Singha beer, whose evidence lays empty and wet on the table, are likely to end a long chain of events, which probably started in a hotel room, and swerved through a streak of dodgy and dark dives.

The guy doesn't move and stares right ahead, though what he sees might be nowhere in sight. Then, very slowly, his left arm moves, while the rest of the body remains icy still. He's reaching for a tray placed next to him, but a waitress springs and arrives there first. She grabs a fresh bottle and refills his glass. He lifts it and shakily brings it to his mouth, finding the target after a couple of tries. Between two lengthy swigs of beer, he puts out a cigarette on a filthy ashtray. He places the stub on top of the mound that has been raised with zeal in three hours at least.

It's not easy to tell how old he is. Although he looks somewhere between fifty and the grave, part of that figure might be due to these nights. The waitress is guarding him from behind, and refills his glass any time he needs. The last bunch of people are now leaving the street and walking to a bar squeezed somewhere upstairs.

In Bangkok the clubs should be closed by three, but there is always some place which will open all night. All they need to do is convince the police, and the agreement normally consists in a bribe. Still, when some top brass is in a bad mood, the place might be asked to close anytime. This also happens if a new bidder shows up, and he is bringing along a richer gift.

This is the way things often work down here. But one should remember that a country and its culture need to be understood and criticized as a whole. Corruption, instability and a bit of filth, are counterbalanced by a happy and relaxed atmosphere.

I've been to some clockwork-like places before: it's true that I could hardly spot a cockroach, but I've often ended up flying off dead-bored.