There’s a truth about this sort of writing. It is destined for the bargain bin of Amazon self-publishing. Back before we all got injected with 200 ccs of pop psychology, we didn’t know that folks like Bukowski were outliers. Back then, we called ‘em lucky bastards. I guess it’s all a bit same-same but different. After all, luck can rub off on anyone. But in the cold light of statistics, you’re most likely fucked. And by you, I mean me.
One guy, just one, got to drunkenly deliver packages and lay pipe before making it in the second act of his life. His life was given the greatest gift of all: A story arc. But he’s gone, and he took his world, and most of his audience, with him. Teenagers unboxing junk from China will make more money from YouTube in a day than I’ll make from a lifetime of words. Granted, he’s a million times the writer I’ll ever be. But still. Bukowski didn’t have to compete with Pornhub.
Publishers no longer want prose as purple as a drunk polack’s dick. NO one wants to take any risks. Everything has been work-shopped to death. It’s write by numbers now. It makes sense. The pie is shrinking and someone’s gotta pay the rent. Keep the lights on. Keep the darkness out. This thankless gig is merely an ends to a Hollywood option. Literature nothing more than a self-indulgent sales pitch. And I couldn’t sell viagra at a Bangkok whorehouse if my life depended on it.
Those are the shakes. I don’t know why I’m still trying. I guess it’s a way of keeping my own cold light of day at bay until I make it until the end of the night.
This curse of being. Trying to be. Be anything. When the universe very clearly is dead set on us being nothing at all.
The German philosopher Philipp Mainländer once theorized that God realized his existence was a mistake but was too much a coward for out and out suicide, so blew himself up to die out one conscious ember at a time. And here we are, the white hot spangles of dying forever, sublimating all of our fear into Facebook rage.
Mainländer was a pessimist with a big heart. He likely would have burned Bangkok to the ground, seeing only suffering, and not pleasure in the flesh. For him, sublimity could only be found in death. He likely wouldn’t have read Bukowski. Something tells me his drunken countryman likely had little time for him.
Better Brahms, Barbera wine and a big wet pussy in his face than embracing the end that was coming anyways.
I once thought I’d tell my own stories of the down and out Bangkok night. The problem is, I just don’t want to write them. I don’t want to touch all that is gone. Especially since so much of what is gone never was. So much of what was to be was just a dream I failed to will to be.
It’s hard to write something knowing it’s all for nothing. No audience. No connection. No cash. Who knows. Maybe this year just got to me. Watching my own life make like Mainländer’s God and explode.
Not long ago, by which I mean a lifetime ago, I was at a cheap Soi 19 hotel. As my friend’s ex bar girl beau read Buddhist tracts inside their room, we headed to the roof for a modest-view Bacchanal.
Hours later, a lady I then barely knew but would soon grow to love beckoned me over. A motorbike ride over on the other side of midnight and she let me know just what goes on behind closed doors.
She left for work the next morning without waking me, as I slept the sleep of drunks. I finally rose long after the sun in a strange place. It was one of those oddly blissful hangovers, where the aches of the body were salved by the sublime.
Opening the blinds, I took in the view of Rama IV from high up above. For the first time in a while, I really smiled.
I had a decent job. I had better friends. I was falling in love. Covid was a known-quantity but had yet to blight the world. I was easy like Sunday morning on Saturday still. There was hope for the future and joy for the moment. Like every day before and after, I had my whole life ahead of me. Little did I know my vista was looking out on a mirage. Thank God. Nothing wrong with a sandcastle for a day when seaman’s silence is our fate.
And that’s the one gift of writing, immortalizing that which is fleeting, somehow making the agony make sense. Suddenly the tragedy of the dead beats takes on a comedic quality. All peccadillos pass without slight. Mortal sins are plot devices.
Terrible people become great characters. Irascible losers enslaved to the author’s hand our closest friends. All is forgiven. Even ourselves, especially those parts of our selves we see in them.
I never really dreamed of being a real writer. In fact, I would have been happy to make it into the bargain bin. I wanted enough for cheap Hawaiian shirts and inexpensive beer. I wanted cruise ship crooners belting it out in Bangkok basements in the dead of night. I wanted to create a world where I could be my pretend idea of me. Free from the trailer-littered side of the road to nowhere that shaped my destiny.
And once upon a Saturday morning or two I got to be that man. I got to be my own ersatz version of Bukowski of make believe.
I got to live in the world I’m not living in today. The one where I am hopelessly, tragically me.
There’s something about this pandemic that’s lit my well-worn limbic system up like a Christmas tree. Too much time watching the blue-checked kings and queens getting high on bad news, high on putting the bastards in place, high on imagined ideas of themselves
With age comes a series of realizations about the horrors of being. Perhaps having spent so much time in states of delusion, an ever-expanding consciousness trained on an ever-shrinking ego makes one realize how many years were spent in reverie — one of Inception level iterations. For so many times in waking up, we are still stuck in a dream within a dream.
The Thais have an expression for those who know nothing and yet think they see — frog under a coconut shell. Mistaking all of reality for that hollowed out ghost-head that made 17th century Iberian seafarers shit themselves on Pacific Island shores, one day the hemispherical skull was lifted, and my God did the world come rushing in.
In previous days, an aging pretend journalist in a mausoleum city, I thought I knew what bad was, drinking my days away in a basement without heat. I came back to America thinking there was a life to be made, words to be read, friendships to be rekindled, love to be lit. And then the grind of stone without spark got me. So I started counting down the steps in the death march.
Books and backyard cigars, four bittered roses stirred in an old-fashioned way, at least summer time offered oblivion on Freya’s day.
A chaos cavalcade — be it five o’clock boys or police-protected ‘Oh My God Beckies!” — regularly careened down H street as my teeth rattled on the other side of a weathered picket fence. The gentleman of leisure who always frequented the end of the alley bantered like hype men as they relieved themselves on the chain-link fence. Piss and herb wafted down the dumpster gallery. I stared at the pipe running up my red and white row-house until it intersected with blue. Then night came and the Autozone security light portended alien abductions and fire in the sky.
In that hemmed in patch of grass, four steps down to a falling apart rocking chair, escape came with the first snap of the beer cap or final stir of the whisky stone. You cannot really call the dimming of the connective light happiness. But for a lack of a better word, it would have to do, until the morning brought the aftershocks of shame and headache pain. And even at its worst, it was always worth it. For these was always a time in the booze blind when it all made sense. And in its own way, that time is endless. A time when I could just stare up at the faint stars and not the mobile abyss, scrolling through the ghosts of yesteryear who don’t even have to wait for the next life to forget that I exist.
Then winter began to rear its ugly head on the backside of autumnal ardor. And as the cold began to set in, I saw the dying of the light in my own escape plan. How would I make it? Another half-year of two mile slogs up and down the snowy slopes of Capitol Hill, onto the brutalist wasteland of the L’Enfant Promenade. By December my basement icebox would take the warm out of jerking off into a sock. And then there were the rats looking to come in from the cold. And then the wintry still of daily dying alone.
And then an opportunity to return to Bangkok came. The same one that had been snatched several months prior. It was a fly-by-night news agency that operated in the shadows while promising to give light to the voiceless.
It was run by an affable conman who’d tried to rob the rightful owner of the domain name several months prior.
It was career suicide.
To my mind, that was better than the other kind.
So I returned to the Big Mango to devour the wet sugar pile with the other ants under the sun. It was me living my best life, another drunk mediocrity aping Bukowski and waxing anti-natalist, while secretly mourning a God I couldn’t resurrect.
The city was made for those in pursuit of the three Bs, whose music was far more puerile than Bach, Beethoven, or Berlioz.
Bladerunner motorbike rides by night, street food, and red lights — or in my case, hedonistic praxis tamed by ex-post puritanical plight.
And being just another mediocre white man without much to give and a complete inability to let go, my last dream of being a writer buried months before the year’s first snow, all I had left was to appropriate the sartorial stylings of colonial fashionistas, suck the light out of the last Mekong sunset and cry out “Hasta la vista!”
And so the twilight of my own soon-to-be middle-aged life started off just fine. The money more or less made its way down the wire, though the work permit never did. And then the new-found coronal king came rushing in, and I found myself without my plague mask in the city of sin.
There’s something about this pandemic that’s lit my well-worn limbic system up like a Christmas tree. Too much time watching the blue-checked kings and queens getting high on bad news, high on putting the bastards in place, high on imagined ideas of themselves.
We are now all addicts hooked up to the morphine drip of social-media sanctimony and shit-post leveling. Its a pitched battle between Nelsonian knowledge grifters and the know-it- all shapeshifters —nihilists signal jamming the Pecksniffian radio kings.
I’m so tired of it all for all is war. War against the other. War against one’s own shadow. The crusader complexed sending out their cavalry to slaughter narcissistic hyper-vigilance. So many crying frog faces and resistance lotus eaters taking pot shots from opposite sides of the same coin.
Yes, show me your packed trains pushing hoi polloi to their deaths in the age of pandemic. Show me your overfed Brexiters pushing aside medical staff to stock up at Tesco. Turn your dead family into social media content to get that dopamine rush and pretend you are doing anything other than displacing your own feelings of dyspraxia.
Tell me how all the things you did for yourself you really did for others just so you can go go viral. Never lose an opportunity to attack even in the veil of praise. It’s elevate ego at the expense of the other in a zero sum game. And when that constant battle at social climbing leaves you scraping the bottom of that well of self, take the opportunity to preach to others about the importance of mental health.
Better yet, tell me it’s all a hoax — FAKE NEWS! — the libtards are trying to suicide the economy to take down Trump!
Is it not better to scorch a snowflake while granny drowns in buckets of her oozing shit than to think beyond the prism of partisan paroxysm? In those parts from which I came, the bread and circus was always above human life. Bored. So fucking bored. A content leech on the ass of modernity near the end of the Netflix night and getting far too close to understanding the waste of one’s own life.
“I want March madness God dammit — ides be damned. Just fucking get on with it by Easter bucko! Bring out our dead and let their ashes rise from the alter of the neoliberal death cult. Rip the Greatest Generation from their ventilators and rend their still beating hearts before Huitzilopochtli. Kill! Kill! Kill! Just don’t make me feel anything real!”
For it’s not a matter of message when there is really just one messenger — the same god-damned monster yelling “me me me!” into the abyss.
It’s a culture that idolizes otherwise inactive nodes while denying the dependent arising that gives all life its spark. We do not want to be emerging waves that only ebb and flow in the space between each other. We’re fish yanking ourselves out of the ocean in asphyxiation to pull off a Jesus Christ pose — a beacon-less light house leaving ships to wreck at sea just so that we might be seen.
And who the fuck am I, you rightfully ask? Who the fuck cares about some self-righteous rant form some drunken jackass?
And you ain’t wrong. But whatever you think of despicable me, just know my bilious balderdash isn’t trained on actual tragedy.
Rather, it’s a wrecking ball swing at scaffolding propping up grifters in a society of spectacle sans shame.
It’s taking aim at the precession of simulacra — a Baudrillardian kick to the balls for allowing the dopamine rise and fall from blue check mark infamy to precede the blood and flesh person you sacrificed on the alter of semiotics and “ME”.
For on my own melting sugar hill under the sun, millions lost their jobs overnight in an emergency decree as buses to broke lands were packed like sardines. Doctors are collapsing from exhaustion after Sisyphean shifts. Hundreds of thousands are calling hellfire inhalation and sucking phlegm until wide-eyed death. And let’s not forget the actual fake news: Tony never said goodbye to Birdie before she downed her last demitasse of dragon’s breath. And the tens are still feeding thousands on troubled streets without the thoughts of tweets upon retweets. And gods among men are working on a vaccine as we get rich livestreaming our patho-adolescent screams.
This whole damn thing will keep keeping on because of them, and not because of you, nor me. And even our hell of quarantine is beyond a Filipino prisoner’s dream.
And I know I’m shit, and I don’t feel good about it. I’ve been shifting through my own muck for far too long it’s true. And lucky you for the shade of that coconut shell Michelle, for you are yet to see the burning bag around you ma belle, as the doorbell on God’s door ditch rings eternal in a dying world.
Pla was playing pool. She was 40 with bleached blond hair and a more serious demeanor than most bartenders at foreigner-heavy haunts. She shared a love of 80s metal. She wanted to rock out to Ratt like Cassidy from the Wrestler. But Billy was no Ram. He was just broken. So many people in this place were broken.
Luke, the 50-something Belgian owner of the bar, was an abusive drunk with a heavy drinker’s paunch, a fake smile, a perennially partially buttoned shirt, two wives in two countries and a lady in Thailand who on paper ran the bar. Her name was Rung. She was in her mid 30s and equipped with the gutter snipe’s gift of manipulation honed by years of abuse.
Her previous Thai husband had held a knife to her throat in a typical northeastern fit of jealously. Pressed against the front door thinking she was going to die, neighbors heard the commotion and came a knocking. Somewhere in the confusion, she got out. Rung did everything for her daughter, or so she said as she rattled her plastic tip jar in front of me.
But in Thailand, if the bar industry is anything to go by, the opposite seems to be true: Children are forced to do anything for their parents. Parents, who, so often, are just like Rung and her abusive beau. The pain life inflicted on them becomes the wrench with which they lash out at a broken world. So many of our tools get trained on tragedy.
Rung once told me how Luke used to make her sit outside while she listened to him fuck bargirls in short time hotels. Despite her fits of jealously, she almost seemed to respect him for that solitary act of truth telling. He was lecherous and sadistic but he didn’t hide it. And Rung was poorly educated, co-dependent and ill-equipped to make it on her own. Or so she believed. Or so she made others believe. Whether latching onto a man like Luke was her best option is a question that only Rung could really answer.
Her self-esteem, it must be said, was not high.
Another corpulent patron would sometimes grab her by the ass and squeeze with creeping ivy fingers.
Rung wrote it off with a laugh: He no help himself. He just love ass!”
Ok can then Rung, ok…
But one night Luke smacked Rung up good in front of customers. Maybe it was small potatoes for a woman whose previous lover had almost killed her, but it was too much even for drunks, hustlers and otherwise indecent folk to bear. Bad vibes descended on the bar thereafter.
A lot of people seemed to stop stopping by. Or that’s what I heard. I’d since stopped stopping by some time before. What was once new had grown old. Bangkok was never short on new options and old haunts falling by the wayside.
I first stumbled upon Tigra Belgian Vintage Café in my smoking days. As a converted shop house that opened out onto the world when the shutter rose, it seemed like a perfect people watching spot to drink San Miguel Lights and let the cavalcade of skinny girls straddling motorbikes ride by.
Soi Pridi 2 cut between Sukhumvit 71 and the Chalong Rat Expressway. It was a heavily trafficked short cut where street racers and street carts put side-walk-less pedestrians at constant risk.
The neighborhood was still heavily Thai, with low-rent massage parlors and family-run restaurants lining both sides of the street. Bug cart pushers crept along the streets selling crispy critters at night. Skewers of meat were always on the brazier. Chillies were always being crushed under the pestle. Sacks of Some Tam tied off with rubber bands were slung by deft hands to street walkers and ladies of the night alike.
But with W District nearby and foreign-centric condos popping up like mushrooms after the rain, the area was increasingly attracting Westerners. There was always the odd Russian model chasing lower rents parading down the street. But then the hostel opened and the backpackers came, cutting a sharp contrast to the gargantuan Europeans whose sense of a good life had never evolved past cigarettes, sex and booze.
Maybe there is no evolving in that sense.
But the bar did attract its share of characters. I remember hanging out with a fairly well-known film director I’ll call Tommy, whose heroin chic physique and Pig Pen Marlboro musk belied his frenetic conversational clip and high octane approach to life. He was a dad pushing 50 but had somehow defied the beigest blight of aging.
His candle was burning at both ends. The end seemed neigh.
More than a few times I saw Tommy walking through the neighborhood with Russian girls half his age. It was funny because sitting in a café with my Belarussian friend, she saw the director walk by and said: “Now there’s a man who looks unhealthy. He looks like a drug addict.”
Some of her CIS sisters clearly disagreed.
Tommy wasn’t the only man of note to hit the bar. On the night Billy got iced, some fairly well-known expat director type talked my ear off about something or the other.
He smelled like rotting onions and sexual desperation. That’s all I can remember about him: the pungent stench of violation. Something told me he’d violated more than a few boys in his day. But maybe Bangkok simply makes you imagine the worst in people, because the worst in people is all around you, all of the time.
Yes, Tigra attracted so much detritus washed away from foreign shores. Drunks. Paillards. Hustlers. Hacks. Unconfessed killers of others. Convicted killers of self.
There was the seemingly octogenarian army vet who had clearly lost his mind, always stopping by in an agitated sweat, trying to crush the hand of every man he met, hurling invective at all who tired of his shit. It was hard to tell if he used his age as pugilistic prophylaxis.
It had, after all, saved him from a number of well-deserved beatings. Once, a group of 20-something English lads all 6 feet tall (and taller) abandoned the pool table to ask my table of randoms if Sarge were with us. He’d apparently called the tall blond kid a faggot after trying to crush his hand and challenging him to a game of pool. The kid was half-ready to beat the retired drill sergeant to death but first looked to see if he had a younger companion who could perhaps take the beating instead. Everyone at my table insisted that we didn’t roll in Colonel Kurtz’s platoon. We all agreed that mad man Kurtz was a cunt.
The bar then refused Sarge service, so he ambled off screaming profanities on the way. I won’t forget his agitated demeanor, sweaty sheen and wild blue eyes. The madness I say … the madness.
Perhaps Sarge was the apotheosis of Bangok batshit – the end result of being an ageing lost boy who finally loses it. Why else would you go to a strange land to die? Why after so many decades of life you have no one to connect with but girls a quarter your age who are waiting for you to become mulch? Is this how it all ends?
And Billy, well, Billy was one of those guys.
The first time he yelled across the bar at me, he seemed ok. Overweight with peppered black hair, blue eyes and a scraggly beard, he had a slight lisp that gave him an unearned air of affability. He appreciated Pla and her rock and roll aesthetic. Pla was blue jeans and peroxide rock in a world of mind-numbing EDM. She wouldn’t last much longer. She would tell Luke that Rung and her brother had been skimming off the top for some time. Luke responded by firing the messenger. What choice did he have? The bar was in Rung’s name. And he had probably figured her theft into the abacus of gratuitous blue collar fleecing. Steal twice a day’s wage and you end up with half an honest day of pay. Such was the Bangkok way.
But Pla seemed honest. With a cool hand and easy demeanor she did her best to teach me pool on the side. I’d later bring a similarly tempered girl named Ice to rack ‘em up, only to quickly get shut down. I sucked at pool. Still do. But the effort still got me laid that night.
And Pla, well she held a candle for a dying SE Asia sensibility. May her Finnish flame keep her warm in those colder environs she was spirited away to…
One day, Rung invited me to a birthday party she was having on a Thursday. I took a motorbike over from work. I started hitting the beer hard. Northeast food and poorly made sushi weaponized to a mass extinction event lined the counter. The place was packed. The drinks and drunks flowed.
My Scandinavian friend, let’s call him Søren, stopped by to celebrate with me that night. He was a digital nomad stuck in a relationship with a street bar cart owner and part time pimp. They lived in a Thai-style apartment off behind the bar. The lady had her hooks deep in Søren. Søren had a good heart but took to change like ocean liners at night headed for icebergs.
Which made him a lot more like me than I like to admit.
Tigra that night was filled with the regular cast of characters. The skinny 20-something backwards-capped Brit and his wife — a gorgeous, tattooed lady with unblinking bar girl, bedroom eyes. They were always playing pool. They were both sharks, at least on the table. Sarge stopped by to introduce himself and tried to crush skinny Brit’s hand. Skinny Brit took it in stride.
Far too many drinks in, I would later get trapped talking to the director/producer of onion aroma acclaim. But it’s hard to take in words when all you’re trying to do is escape the stench. At some point Søren sensibly retreated. I had already set up a Friday of hangover pain.
And then Billy started chatting with me. Billy the ice agent I would learn.
Billy, 56, was angry that he hadn’t gotten his government cheese as some sort of settlement. Settlement for what, I never learned. Probably threw out his back raping migrants in the desert. Billy was the exact type of man who ended up gaming the Thai immigration system by staying permanently on tourist visas. Which is to say, he was a hypocrite. Thailand is full of them, the sleepwalking denizens of chud nation, riding hard for Trump and Brexit.
God bless the wrathful, abandoning ship to spread their seed among the trailer-less tragedies littering pay-for-play perdition. But the rage never leaves them because they contradictions are never resolved.
So much fucking among the accidental antinatalists of Generation Narcissist.
These libertarian libertines are so often a big bundle of contradictions: well drink bottom feeders angry that time, genetics and personal choice had kept them from sipping off the top shelf of sexual selection.
You can buy everything else you see? Why not other people? So these boomers and tailcoat straddlers came to Bangkok looking to drink and fuck their way out of the existential chasm. Hedonism does work for a time. And it takes time to lay down the daily routines that start to tighten like a noose. But then novelty goes with your libido. The void widens. The darkness calls.
Then your dick goes limp as smoke-choked veins collapse and the hangover headache becomes a permanent feature of your life. Suddenly the party is killing you. Suddenly, the only solution consumerism ever taught you ends up being the poison and not the cure.
And Billy, well Billy was one of those guys. Angry at the world, entitled and looking to pour buckets of shit which sprang from his deep well of rage. And I told Billy as such. I told him he was a real fucking bummer. I told him standing there and listening to him vent his shit was exhausting. I told him I was tired of listening to him project all of his problems onto all and sundry.
He said he didn’t like my “new speak.”
I think that was his word for words he didn’t understand.
Talk about new speak.
I admit I said too much. I was far too drunk to say less. Billy did not take kindly to it. I really wound him up and then I walked off. Yes, I pulled the grenade pin and left others to endure granite shrapnel shot.
With decades of resentment triggered and then marinated in a steady stream of booze, Billy started popping off at the mouth like a pop-rocked pelican who took the Pepsi challenge.
“Fuck you!” to every man who made eye contact. “Fuck off whore!” to every woman who didn’t.
The local mafia guy and his friends got tired of Billy’s shit. So as he made his way out the bar, Billy got glassed. That overhead smash opened up a nasty gash, blood dripping in the shape of an arrowhead.
And when the police and the paramedics came to tend to the fat man in blue dazed and confused, a bar full of locals swore they saw the damndest thing: A drunk foreigner bash a bottle upside his own head.
Billy’s soon to be ex-girlfriend undoubtedly failed to translate Billy’s own interpretation of events. Needless to say, no arrests were made that night.
One thing I forgot to mention: Billy had Parkinsons. And for that bit of misfortune I did pity him. Nothing like complicating a nervous system disorder with alcoholism and head trauma.
Maybe the same thing happened to Sarge 30 years prior. Maybe Thailand is the coward man’s version of suicide by cop. Cop a feel, cop a buzz, cop out of life.
“Me, Me Me, Me, Me I, I … I’m so fucking important. I’m so fucking important … right?
Drowning Tones & Death Notes 