The most beautiful woman in town - Charles Bukowski

I used to read Bukowski - translated into Italian - when I was a college student. Bukowski depicted a world of decadence, problems, poverty, alcohol addiction and free sex that could make my neat and standardized life in the province, at university, in the family, with ordinary people, among conventional ideas, a little less standardized. It was a comparison term, a paradoxical mix of a threat to avoid and a goal to achieve. I found it so fascinating.

Angels my ass - Angeles, Philipines

If you ever happen to land at Angeles, Pampanga province, Luzon island, Philipines, don't let the name mislead you. You might think you've arrived to some garden in Paradise, but it actually is a rat hole full of prostitutes. I got the first hints when, asking about the rooms fares, at every hotel I was asked back: 'one or three hours, Sir?'
Angels my ass...

Italians in Thailand/7: the human sewage keeps flowing down

It looks like sewage but it actually is a stream

And it keeps flowing precisely from here...

Story 3) A third whoremonger was loafing around the dolphin square with a fancy new videocamera. A pretty girl approached him. After a brief conversation the two of them left together. His whore-monging colleagues looked at each other, amazed by what they had just seen. How come such a knockout left with a loser like him? (a personal note: I was not expecting that, but it seems that even to pick up a hooker you need to be cool and attractive) None of them saw him for a whole day. When he didn't show up for another night they suddenly remembered about the videocamera, put together the pieces of that puzzle, got worried and set out to look for him. Finding him was not such a difficult feat: he had been sedated and was still noisily snoring in one of the rooms where they all had been so often, with other women of the same kind. For a few days (!) they took care of him. As he was always half asleep they continuously tried to keep him awake, dragging him to take a breath of fresh air at regular intervals. Neither the victim nor anyone of his wretched friends had (or wanted to spend) money for a hospital. Besides his videocamera that moonlighter (whore and anesthetist) robbed him of all the money he had on him. Without needing to take even her shoes off. We can accuse her of a lot of wickednesses but not of been someone who sells her body for a song.

Story 4) Even S was drugged by a whore once (or maybe more).

Italians in Thailand/6: the escalating squalor

Squalor

As I've already explained you, even though I left Pattaya a few months ago I am not done telling you all the anecdotes I've learned when I was staying there. 

These are the latest stories S told me (we first met S here). I hope they also happen to be the last ones, as the escalation of their squalor doesn't seem to subside.
I jotted them down immediately after I listened to them, careful not to forget anything, using low level tone and terminology, sticking to what I had just heard. I meant to polish them all later on but then I thought that this kind of trash deserves expressive tools of a comparable quality. "Prostitutes" are therefore called "whores", "having a sexual intercourse" is "fucking" and...etcetera etcetera, we don't really need to open a vocabulary section here. If you cannot digest this hodgepodge (content and style) I really am sorry about it, I hope you can find other posts in this blog that you like better than this one. I had to write this one exactly the way I did though. Under certain circumstances you need to have an armored soul even to try to be politically correct. At the time of writing, mine is like a soap bubble that wavers and gets deformed while it glides downwards, bound to explode if it gets hit by just a gust of dusty air.

Story 1)
Mr. Gallina (a made up name that means "Hen" in Italian. Actually it's a different bird, but he's still Italian) got married with a whore and then bought a house where they went to live together.

A minor (and kind of grotesque) version of Pattaya, - Angeles, Philippines

Same as Pattaya, worse than Pattaya

Dingy hotels whose customers get back drunk at night hanging from the boobs of some hooker, short-time rooms smelling like various types of body waste, fake viagra and cialis dealers, mignon beggars, midgets or kids, with hands constantly outstretched, their half-hidden wives or mums watching and poking them, soul-cannibals driving creative taxis, the local version of Walking Street announced by a giant banner at the entrance, bar-beers and bar-ladies (almost all of them single mothers), go-go bars where naked girls with flat, shrunk or operated breast pole-dance on a imitation marble counter, and then a sequence of indefinable places, in an unstable balance on the edge of too many categories, cops who pretend they are keeping order in the middle of absolute chaos, bald whore-mongers, swollen with steroids, wearing leather jackets, chains and tattoos, old disabled guys to whom the prostitutes are more caretakers than sex partners. 
The same humanity adrift, putrescent soul scum along the perimeter of a floating social dump, that same last-stop-before-the-psycho-spiritual-terminal feeling. Even the word "decadence", here, cannot be used as an explanation, but has to be explained itself.

Italians in Thailand/5: a very bizarre prostitution story - Pattaya, Thailand

A picture I saw at a guest house in Hua Hin

I've recently happened to hear a really bizarre prostitution story. Just when I was about to leave Pattaya, the biggest mine of tales of this type, that in the various months spent there has revealed to me so many, so diverse and so colorful an anecdote that I came to think it would be nearly impossible to surprise me again. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I'd never heard a story like this before.

One day the anonymous protagonist of this story, an elderly Italian whoremonger that we'll call AW - the initials of Anonymous Whoremonger - gets out of his hotel to look for what the tourists of the category he belongs to often go out to look for when they are in places like this. It's not a peaceful quest though, as most of us might think. It's not just a matter of setting out for a short walk, bump into the first of the thousands of opportunities offered by the city and getting over with it. Nothing of the sort: AP is tortured by doubts, he's doing his utmost to get a totally satisfying idea. Going to talk with one of the mama-sans that he is acquainted with? Tedious procedures, useless rituals to go through, elaborate supply chain, numerous wheels to grease, negotiations to weave, all of it very expensive and complicated. The Beach Road free-lance hookers? No way, so many creepy stories about them! Too risky. The Soi Honey erotic massage parlors? Hmmm, lousy massages in dingy hovels that end up in hurried intercourses with bored women. That solution won't do either. He needs to do something original He has to improvise, making good use of the current situation and context, adding a bit of imagination and, why not, boldness. A bunny girl pulled out of the magician's hat, so to speak.

Adieu Pattaya!

The luminous sign on the hill overlooking Walking Street

It's time to leave Pattaya. The Italian friend of mine who works here and who often had me as a guest at his place this year has been transferred to the Chinese branch of his company. The relocation activities are almost over, we just have to complete some immigration paperwork for his dog and then we'll be done. He will fly to Shanghai, I will switch back to my beloved semi-nomadic mode. I can foresee lots of traveling, when I won't have to teach my courses. Mostly overland, the only way to enjoy what's in between places A and B, besides A and B themselves.
I cannot complain too much about this city. My friend was very hospitable and his house is fantastic. The pace of life, distances, traffic and even landscape are more on a human scale than, let's say, Bangkok, which is just 2 hours away. The beach and the sea water are not that good, actually they are rather bad but, hey, it's still the sea. The type of tourism and nightlife, invasive prostitution, corruption, rampant materialism and the heavily sleazy atmosphere will soon turn it into an unbearable place though. 
I'm fuckin' outta here. As some guys who are more interested in the model of bandanna or tank top they wear, the visibility of a tattoo or of their pectorals, their dreadlocks or the right tilt of their caps than the quality of the stuff that comes out of their mouths like to say. 
Goodbye Pattaya! Bizarre and often indecent anecdotes...you've told me a lot, and a lover of stories as I am can only be grateful for that. One thing is sure though: I don't think I will miss you, for a while at least.

PS I won't hear any new creepy Pattaya stories for a while, but that doesn't mean that I've already written every one I know. There will be other posts-humous on the subject. 

Passage-brothels in Brickfields - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Photo of a passage-brothel, taken hurriedly and on the sly

Brickfields is a neighborhood close to Kuala Lumpur central station (KL Sentral, yes, with "S"). Unlike other areas of the center it has remained rather untouched by the waves of modernity that altered large parts of the city, even though the imposing lines of skyscrapers and infrastructures besiege it assiduously. The district is home to a picturesque Little India, budget hotels, little multi-ethnic restaurants, street stalls and places of worship, including numerous Christian churches. 
The most bizarre joints, though, are a series of long and narrow passages facing the sidewalks. The entrance half-hidden by a rag used as a curtain, a pale pink light coming out of the clear sides, from which it is possible to peep at a sequence of run-down doors, each one watched over by a scantily-clad lady leaning on a doorpost or seated on a plastic stool. A pimp with the typical attitude of a human-spider (I was about to write spiderman, but I've read comics and watched cartoons and I know what the difference between good and evil is) is sitting or standing just outside. The customers enter and leave the places quite hurriedly, perhaps to comply with their embarrassment. Other people, with countenances ranging from the shady to the cutthroat, loaf around yelling, laughing, jeering at or shoving each other. A summary of urban social dreariness.
Family-run tiny brothels: in some of them you can even catch a glimpse of a kitchen and, in the back, as in every respectable Chinese house, a small and colorful Buddhist shrine. There are dozens of them, shameless, dismal, dirty, undisturbed. 
The pimps invite the passersby to take a look at the offers of the day. I often walk past some of them and am systematically ignored. I might cherish the fond hope that I am different from those other men, that I don't have the whoremonger's demeanor, but I know better than to fool myself like that. The shares of sexy man! and handsome guy! - all of them strictly fake -, that over the years the Thai bar-ladies have yelled at me too, wouldn't allow me to do that. 

Soi Country Club, the right place for adultery - Pattaya, Thailand

The name is misleading: Soi Country Club. Soi in Thai means alley, but this is a road, long and crowded, lined up with shops, restaurants, resorts, a golf and a polo club, a riding school, the Pattaya Utd stadium and a lake - the Mabprachan - where people come for a short trip, sometimes even at night. Yes, at night. Along the southern shore, in fact, there is a line of bars with nice ladies who won't resist like a sieged medieval fort if a man approaches them, and then beer, music, pool tables, even ladyboys, just like the red-light districts downtown. That's the interesting part: who would want to come here, from downtown? Who is going to drive ten kilometers just to enjoy a lousy and limited version of what can be found a few hundred meters from home? 

The answer is not a secret for those who've been living here for years: it's those men, engaged or married, who need a safe place to surrender to the pleasures of adultery without feeling paranoid. The area also offers short-time motels and sauna/massage centers where the hands - and maybe something else - of other obliging ladies will take care of each single spot of their customers' bodies. 

Two kilometers ahead the motorbike noise is partially muffled by the cries of some school children. Not only the bike is slowing down here: progress also downshifts and starts creep driving. It's not so much a matter of technology or fashion, as of details and atmosphere. Red dust, flip-flops, corrugated roofs, slanting bamboo poles, the conflict between those old shacks and the surrounding vegetation that still seems it might end either way. It smells like Cambodia, Laos, maybe even Burma, right here in old Siam!

Then a truck puffs black smoke and raises a cloud of dust. In a matter of seconds the road becomes a swollen torrent of motorbikes, cars, traffic lights, with whirlpools of horns, whistles and concrete, that flows all foamy into the six-lane basin of Sukhumvit, with its megamalls, supermarkets, interchanges, crossroads and service areas. 

We're back to the beginning…it's already the end. 

Italians in Thailand/3: more on the seafront clique - Pattaya

Continued from here

And then there are non sex-related scams as well.

- "What did you say? Your visa is about to expire? No problem at all, we can arrange a return trip to the Cambodian border. It won't take more than two, three days at most. You pay us and we'll take care of everything...great, isn't it?" And then it's all a sequence of inflated prices: transportation, accommodation, immigration procedures, duty free, casino, meals, revelries, imitation Viagra and, if one cannot stay away from them even for a couple of nights, more hookers, just to have a taste of Khmer culture as well, besides the Thai one, because after all you don't get to know the world just by listening to what other people say, looking at it from behind a car window or reading a few pages of a travel guide: you need first hand experience, meeting the locals...that's the secret!

"Give me two more boxes of that generic Viagra then..."

I suppose that the whole trip will cost him no less than 10000 to 15000 baht (about 300-500 USD), but it might be much more depending on the vices the dupe will indulge on. If he only knew that various agencies in town organize visa runs by minivan, leaving at 6am and returning at about 3 pm on the same day, for a total of just 2000 baht (70 USD), including the Cambodian visa. They would only need to know ten English words. Or the help of an honest Italian, of course...

Italians in Thailand/2: the seafront clique - Pattaya

If you haven't done it yet you can read this propaedeutic post before you proceed.

"They are wretches, living hand to mouth. They loaf around the dolphins statue and are often arguing over one baht (equivalent to 1/30 of a dollar, or 3.3 cents, Fabio's note)"

That's how S' story starts. Not because this is the first thing he told me but as this is the most accurate and to the point description that he managed to give me of those scoundrels. Few key words with heavy implications: wretches, hand to mouth, loaf around, arguing, one baht.

Among the waves of the rough sea of faults that I've always tried to fight back, one of the few qualities I know I can count on is that of making people who have a story to tell trust me. Perhaps it's because I have never turned anybody down and people can feel that I don't have any intention to use their words against them: vibrations that reach their hearts, brains, souls - or whatever the element is where these sensors are hidden - and reassure them. Because S has got a whole sack of manure to empty: he has carried it around on his shoulder for too long but he doesn't want to unload it in front of someone who will use it to throw excrement at him. I only intend to take a look at it, maybe a little sniff so that I can tell you about it, but I definitely don't wanna handle it and hurl it at his face. That's why for the whole length of the story S will simply be called S. Which is not the initial of his name but of the word someone, just someone. And I will be very careful not to disclose any information that might lead to his identification, even though he did provide lots of details about himself and his past, some of them rather embarrassing. This post only wants to tell a (nasty) series of stories that in five or six years happened not only to S but to other Italians he met, and who knows to how many other people. And hopefully to forewarn those who might fall into the same traps. That's all. Here are the stories then...

Neglected promenade - Pattaya, Thailand

Pattaya's promenade could really be a nice place. Its wide walkway where one can stroll, jog or sit down and watch the bay, its palm trees and the colorful multi-ethnic turmoil behind. Even the scant depth of the beach, only a few meters, from this point of view can become an enriching element in the composition of the picture: those looking at the sea will enjoy the deceptive impression of a single-phase horizontal plane that, although veined and streaked with ripples and shades, within the macro-element framework (water, sky, headlands and hills) appears pretty much like a uniform body, with hues that depending on the hour and the weather conditions can vary from dirty sleet to rhino armor, passing through the various standard gradations of flask glass and summer alpine sky.

It could be a nice place, indeed. But it turns out to be one of the most decadent (if not even degraded) areas of Pattaya, which in turn is one of the most decadent cities in South East Asia. One should wonder why the authorities have decided to loosen their grip on it to such an extent, to ignore it altogether in a way, when there already are lots of red light districts in town, catering to vice lovers of various kind, and this area could be the perfect haven for the innocent side of the city tourism.

Vulture-like place - Bangkok, Thailand

Photo by adaptorplug (CC)

One can say that every bad place is bad in its own way and when it comes to bad places Bangkok offer is one of the widest worldwide. Take the movie The Hangover part II for instance, which is based here: even though it's filled with unlikely situations it still provides a very realistic - often real - panorama of decadent joints.
Although I have been regularly coming to Bangkok for ten years I still need the assistance of M. - a friend of mine who is just a tourist, an occasional visitor - to find one that can still surprise me. I'ts not only about the bars with the theme dressed up girls, the ping pong show joints, the ladyboy cabarets, the go-go bars, the erotic massage parlors, the disco-pubs and the after-hour clubs with the free lance hookers. Not only Patpong, Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy then...in Bangkok you can also find stuff like this.
As soon as I get in I shudder as one does when coming across something that charms us just as it revolts us. In a way it could fit into the last of the categories listed above, as the girls don't work for the owner of the bar, or maybe they do it but just indirectly, without getting a wage or instructions and orders. However, some of the peculiar features of the place and the dynamics of the social relations suggest to create a dedicated category in order to classify it.
Some details - the table, the movements and the sober appearance of the waiters - remind of some Bavarian taverns. The counter could be the one of a town festival, with a drink list hanging from the wall behind the panting and vaguely improvised bartenders. The widespread use of wood, tiles, neon lights and cheesy pictures of famous sites (the leaning tower of Pisa, the Coleseum, the Arc de Triomphe) bring back to mind some Italian bars of the '60s and the '70s. The ingredient that interrupts this journey of the imagination through comparisons with faraway places is obviously the presence of dozens of women. Some of them have already lived all the days of their splendor but the number of pretty and young ones - according to M. - has increased since the last time he was here.
The air is leaden with a slightly dismal atmosphere, like a cattle market in lean times. "It's a vulture-like place", is M.'s comment, and even if you are not familiar with the expression as soon as you set a foot in here you understand its meaning straight away.
Most of the ladies are arranged in a semicircle, shoulder to shoulder, leaning against the walls or the furniture of the half of the room that faces the entrance. They are wearing office or evening dresses, they have nice hairstyles and are soberly made up, no vulgar or pornographic details, the hottest ones are hot in a rather discreet way. Only few of them sit at the tables scattered around or at the huge counter that curves at the center of the hall. This is where the majority of the customers are, many of them visibly bored, almost disinterested, sipping beer, chatting with friends or looking around, not necessarily at the women.
What a difference between this place and the traditional venues of the Thai sex industry! Decadence here is a matter of design more than of ethics. The indecent element is missing and the libido as well, disappeared with the exaggerated theatricality, the vulgar colors, the blinding lights and the deafening sounds. Now and then an invisible DJ plays some songs but for interminable minutes the only soundtrack of this grotesque movie is the hum, the clincking of glasses, the squeaking of stools, the background noise of a nigthclub at closing time, when the lights are switched on and the last song fades away while the patrons still linger inside.
The ladies keep trying to make eye contact. Most of the time the customers give a hint of a smile and then look away. Or they look away without even the lenitive effect of the faint smile. Probably this is only something that I feel for them though: the girls seem to be already accustomed to this kind of reaction.
Once in a while a man calls one of them. A little startled she - and sometimes also the one that stands next to her - answers: "Who, me?". And then she walks the five or six meters that separate her from what turns out to be more than a customer: he's a firefighter in a building ablaze, a Saint Bernard at the site of an avalanche, a lifeguard in the rough sea. In short, he's some kind of savior. With this pace, though, only 5% of them will be saved: they are too many and too little seems to be the attention they manage to attract. The remaining 95% will have to go back home and hold on to their poor little daily job, if they have one. As we will learn later on through a friend of M.'s, in fact, most of these part-time employees of the sex industry have very common occupations and the younger ones often turn out to be students.
The Japanese customers seem to know something that the others don't: when they call a girl, she comes over and starts to talk their language. A very enterprising approach indeed.
Once we've finished our beers, before leaving we go to the toilet, a filthy hole in the basement in line with the style of the place. A rusty gutter along the tiled wall serves as a urinar. Next to it there are two of those disgusting Asian cubbyholes for the ladies. The customers have to pay five baht per entry but with twenty baht you have unlimited access for the whole night. In order for the investment to be profitable one needs to go to the lavatory more than four times: who can resist in here for so long? Another tip will also disclose the secret that shrouds those couples that instead of walking down to the underworld of the pig pens climb the stairs in the opposite direction: upstairs there is a cheap by-the-hour hotel where more or less obscene transactions are carried out.
We leave the place and as soon as we're outside Bangkok slaps us with a blow of heat, humidity, smells and noise which suddenly delivers us from that weird torpor that had mantled us. It's as if the vulture-like place had narcotized us. Perhaps we were just stunned but it is also possible that it was another spell of a city endowed with mysterious powers.
After all they call it City of Angels: the metaphysic ingredient must be hidden somewhere.

Purgatory road - Bangkok > Pattaya, Thailand

In Siam there is a highway,
just one hundred miles long,
that connects the city of angels
to the land of sin.

Inexorable the Charon-bus
through steamy darkness ferries
damned souls against traffic
down Purgatory road. 
The first cries pierce the air,
flames are flaring high up,
with the angels far behind
we are heading straight to HELL! 

Photo of Pattaya's burning sky by Anaktaro (CC), from flickr

Premature Viagra - Bangkok, Thailand

He grabs the packet, takes out five cigarettes, gives away four of them and lights one for himself. Then he lifts his glass but something is wrong: looking closer at it he can just see the ice cubes. He focuses on the bottles and makes himself one more drink. He laughs, cracks jokes, gets drunk and smokes. He's eying up a girl that he will try to pick up. This European guy is doing an internship in Bangkok. These weeks in Thailand should get him started in finance, but they've dropped him in a muddy land of decadent nights.

On a weekday he will gulp down liters of beer, while on weekends he'll finish off bottles of whiskey. He's often reduced to a pitiful state: he forgets what he's doing and can barely walk. But if he meets a girl and she follows him back home, just to be sure he'll take a pill of Viagra. He's handsome, tall, doing an internship abroad: coming from one of the richest areas in the world he should have a future as a successful man. And yet he gets wasted and takes pills of Viagra. 
He's just twenty four, what is he gonna do when he's old? Whatever happens he won't be alone: I've met many people who are exactly like him.