My Big Dorky Life

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

It's always tempting to place silly words into the mouths of babies (and make terrible movies out of it). But the face of my nephew Conor defies the imagination. I have no doubt that what he's thinking is much more interesting than any words I could put in his mouth.

Thursday night I went with the Japanese girl who lives down the hall to the old Atlanta Hotel for dinner. It was nothing romantic, but she got to practice her English and I got to practice my Japanese. The hotel is one of my favorite places here. Aside from its history of housing famous writers like Somerset Maugham and a lot of bad writers who write trashy novels based in the overblown Bangkok sex scene, it's a really great old chunk of Thai art deco. It's faithfully restored and still in operation. It's being run by the same family who opened it about 100 years ago, and they've even kept the old color scheme. It's like being able to finally see what all the colors were in those black and white Humphrey Bogart movies.

It has Thailand's first outdoor swimming pool. Which makes it a really old swimming pool and I'm not in a hurry to wallow in 100 year's worth of germs and flakes of human skin, however famous. The restaurant is very good and very cheap and they play jazz from the '40s when there isn't a live performance of traditional Thai music.

Speaking of traditional Thai music, I bought an instrument called (appropriately, in my hands) a Saw and I'm trying to learn how to make good noise with it. It's like a violin in that it's bowed. It's about the same length as a viola, but the shape is different. It consists of a mug-sized drum covered in snake skin. From this protrudes a long stick that holds the two strings, tuned to G and D. It basically sounds like I'm killing a cat in horrible ways. I shut myself in my room to spare the neighbors. I love experimental punk rock and even I can't stand to hear myself for more than 20 minutes at a sitting.

There's a big sex industry in Thailand and if a girl chooses that kind of work out of her extremely limited options I can understand. In a country where the average wage is (optimistically) 7000 Baht a month, 1-2000 Baht a night sounds pretty good. It's more than I make and it can go a long way towards supporting your family farm.

My street is sheltered from it, but I live fairly close to Sukhumvit Soi 4, a hub for those seeking that sort of lifestyle. So if I'm walking down Sukhumvit road on a Saturday night and one of a dozen girls blocking the sidewalk grabs my crotch and makes a proposition, I'm not too surprised. Not even if that girl is a man. A really stacked man.

However, I was taken off guard when on Monday morning I was walking to work along the narrow sidewalk in front of a hospital and a woman in army fatigues let out a whoop and gave me a big swat on the ass.

I highly recommend that all wolf-whistling construction workers and lecherous office managers be sent here for a month to see what it feels like on the other end. They'd probably like it for the first couple of weeks but after that it just gets weird.

Lastly, I have been getting pretty good at pool. I was already fair, due in no small part to the tutelage of Tan Tran, my kung-fu teacher many years ago. One of the wonderful things about Bangkok is that everyone seems to be into pool or billiards. In any given bar there are scores of pretty girls who can easily kick your ass and are happy to do it. I admire anyone who can kick my ass so if I lose it's just fine with me. Though the accepted rules here suck. If you accidentally sink one of your own balls, it counts and you get another shot. If you accidentally hit the opponent's ball first, or sink it, your opponent gets TWO shots. And if you sink the cue ball while shooting for the 8, you don't lose and the game continues. It typifies the relaxed Thai attitude about rules, but every time I get to shoot again after I accidentally sink one of my own balls I have a creepy feeling that I'm cheating. Luck plays a much larger role in Thai pool games.

The other night I was at a nearby open-air bar and for no reason I could see, I just couldn't miss a shot. I cleaned the felt with all comers and it seemed like I had the table for hours. At one point two Libyan guys came to play. The one named Amal was good but I beat each of them over and over again. I felt kind of bad about it but I tried as much as possible to de-emphasize my victories and cheer their more brilliant shots. This went over well with them and Amal's friend said he liked my style. We inevitably got to talking about the hostile American presence in Iraq. I hastily told them that I in no way supported my idiot president's crusade and just as hastily they showed their backing for it. I was kind of surprised but I think the message was that we should forget our cultural differences for the sake of a fun time over a pool table and beers. Finally, thank god, Amal and I were down to the 8-ball and he sunk it clean on a beautiful bank-shot. I stepped away from the table for the remainder of the evening. We exchanged sincere hopes of meeting again in the future as we parted later. Let it be known that at a certain open-air bar in Bangkok there is an informal peace accord between the Western and Muslim worlds.

This is the first of hopefully many weeks of news and entertainment on this page. Eventually there will be archives to access but for now this is it. If you want to send comments or questions, click the email link at left. If you do not want those excerpted to appear in this column, please let me know. In any case I won't use your name if I do print it on my site.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.