Tag: drunk

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?

Fuck you Billy.

——–